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.
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.
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.