Israel's air force on Sunday introduced a fleet of huge pilotless planes that can remain in the air for a full day and could fly as far as the Persian Gulf, putting rival Iran within its range.

Israel's air force on Sunday introduced a fleet of huge pilotless planes that can remain in the air for a full day and could fly as far as the Persian Gulf, putting rival Iran within its range.

Israel is developing an army of robotic fighting machines that offers a window onto the potential future of warfare.

When armies clash in the not-too-distant future, remotely-operated robotic weapons will fight the enemy on land, in the air and at sea, without a human soldier anywhere on the battlefield. The first robotic systems are already being used by the Israel Defense Forces and other armies across the world, and only budgetary constraints seem to be keeping science fiction from becoming reality.

Israel has spent a decade preparing offensive cyberwarfare tools that independent experts see as the likely new vanguard of their efforts to foil the nuclear ambitions of its arch-foe Iran.

An interview with Brigadier General Haim Eshed, the former director of the Israeli military space program, on his concerns that "without the necessary funding Israel will lose its qualitative edge in space to other countries in the Middle East - such as Iran - that are aggressively pursuing space-based capabilities."

The Israeli military is working on "a high-fly­ing, long-endurance unmanned in­frared sensor" that can tell the difference between nuclear war­heads amid doz­ens of decoys sent to confound na­tional missile defenses and would mark the first use of an unmanned platform for nuclear warhead hunting.

Western intelligence experts believe that Iran's nuclear facilities are so deep underground that it would be difficult for Israel to wipe them out, or even significantly damage them, with a quick airstrike.

The United States has agreed to boost nuclear safety cooperation with Israel, an Israeli official said on Monday, despite the Jewish state's refusal to sign a nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Israeli military leaders have begun early planning for a new, robotic defense system, armed with enough artificial intelligence that it "could take over completely" from flesh-and-blood operators in the event of an all-out nuclear attack.