The Pilotless Plane That Only Looks Like Child’s Play

IF you're the type of shopper who spends billions of dollars on lethal military gadgets, and you're ever invited to visit General Atomics Aeronautical Systems - the small, privately held San Diego company that has quickly become one of the military industry's most celebrated businesses - take a bit of advice: accept a ride on the corporate jet.

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General Atomics’ planes can rain down bombs while a “pilot” sits at the controls thousands of miles away.

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Thomas J. Cassidy Jr., left, president of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, prepares for takeoff. He was commander of the Navy station that housed the “Top Gun” school. He even had a bit part in the movie.

The plane isn't fancy. The cabin is cramped and the seats a little threadbare. (Want a beverage? Open the cooler, help yourself and quit whining about the heat.) Still, such bare-bones accoutrements haven't stopped a parade of top military officials and politicians from clamoring for their own seats on General Atomics flights.

If you're lucky, after the jet lands at the company's airstrip in the high desert east of Los Angeles, you'll tour one of the room-sized shipping containers clustered near the runway. Inside is a video-game addict's idea of a cockpit, with joysticks, gauges and high-tech screens sprouting everywhere and a cushy chair that has improbably become one of the sexiest seats in the military. From that perch you can guide an unmanned airplane, known as the Predator, that is potentially thousands of miles away and can hover over suspected enemies for dozens of hours before raining down missiles.

For years, such planes - known as U.A.V.'s, for unmanned aerial vehicles - were pariahs within the military industry, scorned by commanders who saw them as threats to the status quo. But during the last several years, U.A.V.'s have amassed unusual political firepower. "For a long time, the only thing most generals could agree on was that they didn't want any unmanned vehicles," says Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "Now everyone wants as many as they can get."

In fact, only a decade ago, crucial Air Force commanders were lobbying to prevent battlefield deployment of U.A.V.'s, according to Congressional staff members. By 2005, however, John P. Jumper, then the Air Force chief of staff, had sufficiently about-faced to tell Congress that "we're going to tell General Atomics to build every Predator they can possibly build."

This transformation is, in many ways, a reflection of how the military's priorities and goals have changed over the last decade. It is also a testament to how much clout General Atomics has amassed in a short period of time.

All of which raises another bit of advice if you're visiting General Atomics: Don't be late.

More than one official has learned the hard way that when the pilot of the General Atomics corporate jet says he's flying back at noon, he means it. And that pilot is likely to be Thomas J. Cassidy Jr., a 34-year Navy veteran, former rear admiral, onetime commander of the station where the "Top Gun" flight school is based and now the president of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. Mr. Cassidy's belly may hang a bit over his belt now, but he's so authentic that when the producers of the film "Top Gun" needed someone for a bit part who oozed power, they cast him.

Which is only fitting, for while General Atomics boasts elaborate technological gizmos and martial splendor, its authority also derives from its political savvy. In the last decade, the company has outgunned some of the nation's biggest corporate heavyweights in the battle for prized military contracts. Soon, analysts say, Americans may rely on a host of General Atomics military devices, including magnetic cannons that use pulses of electricity to drop ammunition on distant targets, radar systems that can see through even the densest clouds and guns that shoot laser beams.

"Everyone talks about how the world has changed," Mr. Cassidy says. "We're building the technology for where it's going."

NO single moment marks the ascent of General Atomics. But to understand its rise and what that says about changes in military contracting, it helps to go way back, to a point before a pair of wealthy, intensely private brothers bought it, before General Dynamics spun it off, and before it even existed - to the 1930s and a group of angry German commanders plotting revenge.

After World War I, while France and other Allies were building military defenses modeled on trench warfare, German commanders were shaping a nimble fighting force. Using new technologies - like radio and fast-moving armored vehicles - they created the blitzkrieg, or "lightning war," a strategy that allowed them to end-run their enemies' trenches by using panzerdivizions - small, sprightly forces that revolutionized how battles were fought. In 1940, Germany toppled France in 20 days and the panzerdivizion symbolized war's shift from drawn-out conflicts using massive fortifications to rapid-fire engagements built around manned, motorized armor.

Nearly 70 years later, the Predator and General Atomics reflect the military's transformation from conflicts built around manned armor to strategies organized around surveillance. U.A.V.'s embody the potential for quick, relatively effortless wars fought by drones controlled from great distances, and thus have become lightning rods for battles over the military's direction.

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