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In civil aviation as well, computers do most of the flying. The latest generation of Airbus airliners, for instance, is equipped with a navigation system that could take over the controls from the pilot during an emergency. Airbuses and the new Boeing 777's can land themselves and could probably fly from New York to London without anyone in the cockpit. Northrop Grumman's high-altitude surveillance drone, the Global Hawk, did just that recently, piloting itself from Australia to the Middle East and landing less than five feet from the center of the runway.

Northrop Grumman, Boeing's chief competitor, decided to build its own UCAV, the X-47A, which is designed to land on aircraft carriers (especially difficult even for a machine, given the slim margin for error and the fact that the carriers are moving at 20 knots). Christened Pegasus, the X-47A is a sleek kite-shaped craft with internal weapon bays for stealth and curved air intakes like the gills of a stingray. It is as much as anything a triumph of software programming -- just getting the X-47A to roll five feet down the runway took 140,000 lines of code.

One significant advantage of UCAV's is that they do not require the same level of redundancies and fail-safe requirements as manned fighters because there is no human pilot at risk. That makes them a lot cheaper to produce. Though the prototypes for Boeing's X-45A run into the hundreds of millions of dollars per plane, they are expected to cost $15 million to $20 million once full production kicks in, which is one-half to one-third the price of the newest combat aircraft, like the F/A-22, or the benchmark Joint Strike Fighter. Maintenance is another important factor in the UCAV's favor. The robot planes are designed to sit in special climate-controlled containers for up to 20 years (hence the nickname ''bomber in a box''). While in storage, the planes are hooked up to internal diagnostic systems that automatically run function checks. That means far fewer mechanics and spare parts. And, naturally, no pilots, who even during peacetime are constantly training and flying practice missions, running up enormous bills. With the UCAV, a single operator will be able to control up to four craft simultaneously, practically a one-man Air Force.

Had they been ready to fly in Iraq, UCAV's could have been used to take out air-defense installations. They could have also offered close air support to ground forces, a role currently played by the A-10 Warthog and the Apache helicopter, both of which took considerable enemy fire. And if the enemy is hidden in wait, as several divisions of the Republican Guard were, the UCAV's are designed to loiter in one spot and try to flush them out, using their spying technology and target-recognition software. A manned aircraft would almost never hover over enemy positions. The risk of being shot down is simply too great. But if a UCAV goes down, all you've lost is an easily replaceable machine.

Even under the strong-willed, top-down leadership of Rumsfeld, it was clear from the recent conflict that the military is not a monolith. During war, everyone has to get a piece of the action. If the Air Force gets too much credit, the Army will be outraged. If Special Ops grabs all the glory -- as it did in Afghanistan -- the Navy will feel left out. For the Joint Chiefs of Staff, campaign planning is as much about balancing competing interests as it is about strategic thrusts.

In this environment, a program like the UCAV is deeply unsettling. Age-old tensions between the grunts and the nerds come directly to the surface.

Many of the top leadership positions are held by people Rumsfeld appointed, and that makes them supporters of futuristic war gizmos, whether they actually feel that way or not. At the Air Force, supposed advocates include Gen. John Jumper, the powerful chief of staff, and Maj. Gen. Joseph Stein, who leads aerospace operations at Air Combat Command. Navy boosters include Adm. Vernon Clark, the chief of Naval Operations.

But within the ranks, there are enormous pockets of resistance. In large measure, this is because officers build their careers by believing in the technology they have seen perform in battle. They are suspicious of new things being foisted on them by procurement officials, and there is historical basis for this distrust. The Patriot missile, to choose a recent example, proved almost completely ineffective in 1991 in large part because it was rushed into battle. ''People are making all these promises, and they really haven't a clue if they can deliver,'' says Chuck Spinney, who has worked at the Pentagon for 26 years.

Unmanned technologies are an even graver concern. Part of the problem, Spinney explains, is that in war, soldiers are trained to focus on their enemy: ''Technology like the UCAV distracts us into focusing on the interface of man and machine. That can be very dangerous.'' Further, Spinney says, UCAV technology relies heavily on computer modeling and pattern recognition to identify and anticipate enemy movements. ''What that presumes,'' he says, ''is that the enemy has no creativity.''