"As of today, signals from the brain can be used to command and control… not just one aircraft but three simultaneous types of aircraft," Justin Sanchez, director of DARPA's biological technology office, said Thursday at the agency's D60 Symposium in National Harbor, Maryland.

"The signals from those aircraft can be delivered directly back to the brain so that the brain of that user [or pilot] can also perceive the environment," Sanchez said at the symposium, which celebrated DARPA's 60th birthday. "It's taken a number of years to try and figure this out."

"We've scaled it to three [aircraft], and have full sensory [signals] coming back. So, you can have those other planes out in the environment and then be detecting something and send that signal back into the brain," he said, according to Defense One.

Eoin Treacy's view

The Reaper drones of today are the face of modern warfare. They have inspired the retail drone market but the final objective of these experiments is to eventually remove pilots from the flight equation entirely.

If pilots no longer need to sit in the plane to pilot it, they can go faster, have greater manoeuvrability and have a smaller radar signature. It also means that the wars of the future will be modelled on the ability of countries to field large numbers of drones and the importance of cyber security and the integrity of communication lines will be more important than ever.

The ETFNG Prime Cyber Security ETF remains in a consistent medium-term uptrend and a sustained move below the trend mean would be required to question medium-term scope for continued upside.

The iShares US Aerospace & Defense ETF spent much of this year consolidating but broke successful out its range in August. A short-term overbought condition is currently evident but a sustained move below the trend mean would be required to question the integrity of the uptrend.