In a report carried by New Scientist, the technology is said to allow a commander to redirect a missile that appears to be heading for the wrong target, as a result of malfunction, or because the target moved or was wrongly identified in the first place.

This happens all too often. During the Kosovo conflict of the late 1990s, a radar-homing missile intended for a radar site in Serbia strayed 50 kilometres into neighbouring Bulgaria. And in August 1998, US cruise missiles missed Al-Qaida targets and landed on Pakistan instead. If the troops who fired the rogue missiles had been able to intercept and redirect them, they could have avoided risking damage and "friendly fire" casualties.

"Increasingly in the West we want to fight from out of harm's way," says Andrew Brookes, at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. That means launching missiles increasingly far away from the target. But as the distance to the target increases, so do the chances of the target's situation changing.

The new system, confusingly known as automatic target acquisition (ATA), allows a human to intervene if the missile appears to be going astray. It is already being fitted to the US Navy's SLAMER missiles, which in many respects work like a smaller version of a cruise missile.

SLAMERs are normally fired from planes outside enemy lines, and then fly in close to the ground, finding their own target using GPS satellite positioning signals and terrain recognition. ATA marks a sea change in this attitude of using "fire and forget" weapons, says Brookes.

ATA-equipped SLAMERs carry an infrared video camera that sends pictures back to the plane that launched the missile. The pilot will see if the missile is heading for the wrong target and redirect it.

But the missiles don't always need the pilot: they can select their own targets if communication with the aircraft is lost. By comparing the images from an onboard infrared camera with images provided by mission planners they can locate small targets in a cluttered environment.

"We don't tout it to be an autonomous capability because we need the pilots to be the man in the loop," says Carl Reiber, who manages the ATA programme at the Naval Air Station in Patuxent River, Maryland. That's because in autonomous flight, the missile is back to "fire and forget" mode that the ATA system is trying to get away from.

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