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To: max americana
WTF! Spying but NO fighting??

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.

11 posted on 06/02/2008 3:40:03 PM PDT by Tallguy (Tagline is offline till something better comes along...)
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To: Tallguy
Part of the problem here is that the Navy is just flat-out late to the party. They were late with Stealth...

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.

15 posted on 06/02/2008 3:54:32 PM PDT by Paul Ross (Ronald Reagan-1987:"We are always willing to be trade partners but never trade patsies.")
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To: Tallguy

That made sense, thanks. Hopefully, the people who say “why don;t we ARM this sucker.” will be around at the final phase.


19 posted on 06/02/2008 8:14:04 PM PDT by max americana
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To: Tallguy

“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.


20 posted on 06/02/2008 10:26:52 PM PDT by Francis McClobber
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