The young Marine sniper lays motionless in a shallow bed of sand and broken rock on the mountainside in Afghanistan. The sun blazes down, and he's sweating. He's spent the morning scanning a valley for Taliban fighters who keep a low profile in their maze of spider holes.

After a while, another Marine - the spotter - says, "I've got him. Just next to the tree, to the left of that stone house."

The sniper stares down through the optics of his rifle. Yes, indeed. The image is perfect from over 1,000 meters away. There's a very shallow footprint in the dirt, and next to it is a telltale cigarette butt. This Taliban has just smoked his last one. Hey, they're called coffin nails for more than one reason.

The sniper turns a small knob on the gun sight. The image holds steady. There's no vibration at all. Clear view. Eyeballs on target. Confirmed bad guy. Fire at will. Squeeze the trigger, and... Wham! Round traveling downrange. Kill shot.

Later that day, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flies over the site of the morning's activities. The pilot is faraway, in a "cockpit" in Nevada, USA, where he's linked by satellite communications to the battlefield.

In a routine maneuver, the pilot sets the UAV in a circling pattern. The aircraft is so high up that no one on the ground even knows that it's there. The pilot slews a camera on the bottom of the UAV, down toward that stone house. The image is crystal clear. It's like the pilot is looking out of a plate glass window next door.

Down below, the pilot sees about a dozen Taliban assembling and wiring bombs. He wonders to himself, "Why are they still there, next to that house? Didn't they learn anything when their buddy got shot this morning? Oh, well. Those bombs they're building will soon find their way to sites along roads in the nearby valley. We need to do something, and do it now."

The UAV pilot - assisted by a backup team of observers in Nevada and Afghanistan - quickly alerts the chain of command. There's a well- drilled procedure in this circumstance. Signals flash between orbiting satellites, linking people in Nevada with a command center near Kandahar.

Numerous sets of eyeballs review the imagery. There's no doubt on this one. Heck, you can positively identify some of the Taliban men based on facial features. There's simply no vibration in the camera on the UAV. It's a positive ID - enough to satisfy even the staff of flinty lawyers who look over every shoulder these days.

"Take them out," comes the order. "Authorization granted. Weapons clear."

The pilot in Nevada has by now positioned the UAV into a firing position. He makes his attack run. With numerous witnesses in attendance, the UAV pilot hits a red button on the control stick. He feels nothing, but half a world away, a rocket motor ignites inside a Hellfire missile. The weapon slides effortlessly off a lightweight rail, accelerates like greased lightning and moves down out of the sky, toward the aim point.

The missile moves so fast, in fact, that it strikes the ground before its sound reaches the eardrums of any of the Taliban fighters. When it hits, there's a sudden flash and a blast wave moving at over 25,000 feet per second engulfs the area. Within a few thousandths of a second, several of the bombs that the Taliban were building cook off as secondary explosions.

The operational commander requests that a nearby Navy aircraft, an F/A- 18F Super Hornet, fly over the site. She needs an independent battle damage assessment to determine if a follow-up strike is necessary.

Within a few moments, there's the crackling sound of powerful jet engines above the mountains. A haze-gray aircraft takes its vector from the air controllers and moves toward the target scene. The flight officer in the back seat of the Super Hornet slews a camera that's part of an imagery pod hanging from one of the wings.

The gimbal system of the imagery pod tracks down to the exact global position on the ground where the missile hit. There's no vibration in the camera, none at all. Again, a crystal-clear image transmits from the aircraft and bounces off a series of satellites and back to command centers across Afghanistan, to ships at sea and to Nevada.

The imagery indicates that the first strike by the Hellfire missile did the job, with the secondary explosions delivering any necessary coup de grace. The next decision for the battlefield commander is whether or not to send in a team of Special Forces to pick up the pieces... And so it goes.

The fictional story I just recounted is based on the facts of modern warfare. These kinds of things happen out on the modern battlefield.

How is it that things work so well in a complex battle space? Why doesn't that gun sight vibrate? Why do those UAV cameras work so nicely? Why does that missile rail shoot so straight? And what about those satellite systems that bounce the signals between Afghanistan and Nevada?

The short answer is .. :)