I think it should have been read as suggestion, as in search for "slaughterbots". IIRC then a short (a few minutes long) video emerges, in which a swarm of small drones is airlaunched from a container mounted onto one of the weapon pylons under the wing of a plane, glides down, swarms out over a city, engaging pattern/face recognition. One drone (smaller than a human hand) enters a building, where some people are assembled in a hall, locks onto his target and kills it by a small shaped charge to the head.

Mission accomplished.

This is then followed by (or was embedded in?) a recorded presentation on stage with showroom dummies, where every single necessary step to achieve this goal is shown to be possible with COTS (commercial of the shelf) components today.

That was new then, a few years ago...