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Posted on 06/02/2008 2:41:16 PM PDT by Paul Ross
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WTF! Spying but NO fighting??
Who neutered the US Navy?
I think it is an inside job.
The only difference would be training drone operators as pilots.. even maybe operating the drones from another flying platform.. for recon or attack.. OR a mix of BOTH platforms.. Consider a couple of pilots(in f-35s and several drones(f-18s or something like that) as an air wing..
Lots ansd lots of options here.. Including mini attack drones.. for the battlefield.. Even LIMPET MINE drones to attach to enemy fighter airceaft.. to be blown up when the enemy pllot LANDS his aircraft or disattachs "later" for an other target......
Joystick Actuators Union doesn’t want to relegate live pilots to truck and bus driving?
40 automated drones can do a much better job of locating and pinning the enemy down for a potential kill than relying on satelitte observation that will be shot down early in the next global war and a single manned pilot.
Won’t that drone be recieving its commands from that satelitte also?
The UAVs are not jets...so no spiffy high-g manuevers... and with their slow speed are not close to being dogfighter weapons.
They could, eventually, be a supplement to our piloted fighters....by being just dumb trucks to unleash a barrage of smart AMRAAM-NCADE's that will provide the major Air-to-Air capability of drones for the forseeable future.
Dogfights with a drone would be a turkey shoot. The piloted plane would be easily able to get inside the drones perception/decision loop...and always be several steps ahead of it.
Part of the problem here is that the Navy is just flat-out late to the party. They were late with Stealth, and to a certain extent, PGM's. Once the navy gets a reliable, re-useable, ship-borne drone they will very quickly arm the thing. This is what happened with the early Predator drone. First it was a Recon bird only. Then somebody at CIA figured out that you could very easily hang a couple of Hellfire missiles on the thing and -- presto -- you had the Predator-B!
If the Navy had a working ship-borne UCAV, they'd be regularly on station over Afghanistan right now. The Navy's counter-arguments about mission (close air support) are fine, but as you go down the scale of conflict you end up basically as an airborne patrol, and a UCAV on hand is better than an F/A-18 that is 15 minutes away or sitting on deck.
Yeah but what if the drone(f-18) was BAIT... for a f-35 fishing expedition...
Automated how? No operator?
... can do a much better job of locating and pinning the enemy down for a potential kill than relying on satelitte observation that will be shot down early in the next global war and a single manned pilot.
Actually the UAVs are as much if not more dependent on our GPS/NAVSATs than our manned aircraft. And the cost ratio is not 40 to one. Not even close to that cheap. E.g., Global Hawk is one of 25 military systems whose unit cost increased by more than 50 percent from their original estimate. Each plane is $15 million. And they come in units of four. An F-22 can currently be bought for about $120 million flyaway unit cost.
And if we get serious about procurement...we can realize real savings.
Indeed it would.
Hey, they did want the Navalized F-22...which would have been an appropriate F-14 replacement. But Cheney and then Clinton shot it down.
Remember the Avenger? The stealthy replacement for the A-6 Intruder? Killed because it was too expensive. Navalized airframes are both expensive and few -- a formula for fantastically expensive. Kicking a project down the road won't make it any cheaper.
I was thinking more that they would have some kind of stealthy hoverong drone at 80K feet to use as a router.
However, a drone would be useful in sub hunting and could carry a couple of missiles.
That made sense, thanks. Hopefully, the people who say “why don;t we ARM this sucker.” will be around at the final phase.
“somebody at CIA figured out that you could very easily hang a couple of Hellfire missiles on the thing and — presto — you had the Predator-B!”
This is a little nit picky, but the Predator B is a completely different aircraft than the Predator A that was first armed. Where the A model can carry two hellfires, the B model is designed to carry up to 16 hellfires, or 2 500 lb JDAM bombs.
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