"A bigger concern would be an enemy cracking the encryption for the command channel. Suddenly, his hackers make all your bombers, THEIR bombers."
Besides being unlikely, it would merely allow two different sets of commands to go to the craft (i.e. the U.S. and the enemy's commands). That would be a far cry from making the bomber all "theirs."
And on mission runs like today's...where the UCAV was pre-programmed on the ground for its strike, there doesn't have to even be a command line open.
Exactly. These are really just sophisticated cruise missiles - it looks like they even have "evolved versions of the same turbofans engines. Most likely they have a combination of non GPS prgrmmogramed flight (like cruise missiles,) GPS aware programmed flight, some sort of rudimentary autonomous flight and inertial guidance (at least in their payloads. I imagine that the designers and developers have at least some of the sophistication in weapon design as do readers of FR.
It would be interesting to see results of the IF signature reduction engineering work done here.
Incidentally, if this was coupled with the space borne SAR that the AF is thinking about putting up it make for a platform with very interesting features.
Now about those small, low yield nukes...