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Unmanned (But Armed) Aircraft Experiments In 2001
John Warden, architect of the Gulf war air campaign, believes that by 2025
90% of combat aircraft will be unmanned. Next spring, the first armed
aircraft without pilot,
the X-45A UCAV will make its maiden flight. Replacing the pilot
by a ground controller cuts the price of each unit by two-thirds, and makes it
easier to transport.
The Economist has more, and states 'the decision to fire weapons should be
made by a human, to reduce the risk of "friendly fire."' This is not logical:
Since the planes can be networked and thus know each other's relative positions,
preventing friendly fire is a much simpler problem than the visual recognition
required to determine what to shoot at, unless you don't mind hitting
non-military targets. I wonder what Asimov would think.
wow.. can we say robocop.. just found this over at navy.mil.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Alrighty, i've seen some presentations on these kinds of things. The basic problem in current aircraft design is that aircraft can handle multiple times the acceleration the human body can. The F-16 can already take g-loads that would have its pilot's brain squishing out his/her ears. And thats still a 4th generation fighter mind you, not the 5th generation like the F-22 which probably can outperform the pilot even worse...
Once you remove the pilot a lot of interesting ideas become possible since you just ditched about 25% of the aircraft's weight and a majority of the physical requirements. Entirely new designs become possible because you don't need a cockpit etc...
This is a great idea then except for one thing. The Air Force is expecting the next generation of air combat to be quieter than the previous generation. The F22 can fly in passive mode and at least locate (if not target) enemy aircraft from the noise they put out (like their active radar, radio chatter etc). Things like IFF are ariel bulls-eyes in these cases. Also a continous transmission like the UCAV would put out isn't going to be much better. There is a great benefit to having a self contained fighting aircraft in this case which is something a UCAV is not and most likely never will be. AI is nowhere near where it needs to be for these things to be fully autonomous instead of simply unmanned.
As for men pulling triggers being unneccessary, dream on. One of the most important parts of combat is making sure the enemy doesn't know where you are. Would it be wise to create a remotely accessible database (which could conceivably be hacked) showing where all your aircraft are at any given time? It would be a target list if the enemy got a hand on it and could exploit it. Think security here.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
It is very hackable, thats why we dont use it during attack missions.
Sanchi
"They said we couldn't do it [Athlon]... but we built it, we shipped it... and we didn't have to recall it." Rich Heye
Am I alone here in thinking that the contemporary cartoon show "Gundam Wing" is an interesting critique of mechanized warfare which is valid today, though marketed to children?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Plus remember, even if the force the gun is pointed at is an enemy, the decision to pull the trigger is often political as well, based on rules of engagement which are formulated before engagement takes place. Combine this with the possibility of the enemy capturing a robot plane and using it as a "robot shield" to trick out the sensors, and you have a potential problem.
was that the 72nd or 73rd episode?
This reminds me of a story I heard out of The Gulf War. I'm not sure, but I think the general was Colin Powell. Maybe somebody else knows for sure.
Anyhow, this reporter asks the general "what are your plans for the enemy". He responds: "we're going to find them and kill them." The reporter was shocked. Surely he meant "neutralize", "terminate", "subdue" or some other euphemism. When pressed again the general reiterated: "we're going to find them and kill them. That's what war is all about."
To me, this was almost as funny as that bit on Saturday Night Live where they were making fun of the reporters during that war, who were essentially asking the generals to reveal their battle plans before action. If the aforementioned incident really occured, it was an excellent way for the general to answer the reporter's question without revealing any secrets.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
>IFF is not very useful. Do you perhaps remember a few years back when the air force shot down two army helicopters in the Iraq northern no-fly zone? They misidentified them.
Yeah, AND THEY HAD THEIR IFF TURNED OFF.
Later
Erik Z
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Please, learn something before you spew your nonsence. First some background on me. I work on the computer program that runs on AWACS. I have seen what the system can do. The F-22 will not run any active systems when on an attack run. All of the detection is left up to us (awacs). and the radar system on it sucks, its only an plainer two pass (hard to explain).
And IFF is used by every single airplane in the air, not just NATO.
Sanchi
"They said we couldn't do it [Athlon]... but we built it, we shipped it... and we didn't have to recall it." Rich Heye
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
From what I've read about modern military history, the goal of war is not to kill people, it is to destroy the combat effectiveness of the enemy's forces.
This kind of thinking is the reason why the U.S. military can't beat a truly committed enemy. It doesn't help that their idea of "combat effectiveness" is hopelessly self-referential (combat effectiveness is the ability to reduce combat effectiveness of an enemy).
The goal of war is to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women. Even uneducated barbarians know that.
All kidding aside, war is a means, not a goal. Was is the way you get something you want when nothing else will work. Principles like "we should avoid civilian casualties" and "a tank is worth more than a handgun" are not absolute.
The U.S. military works from several basic assumptions that hamstring them in many situations (and are forced on them by the "CNN factor"): they are trying to help the civilians in the area, their enemy is an evil dictator whose people hate him, and they want the area to be peaceful. These assumptions often conflict with, and even contradict, the only possible logical purposes of their attacks, leading to confusion and apparent incompetence.
It is very dangerous to have such sweeping absolutes out in the open for all your enemies to see and exploit. People in more than one area that has not profited from their interaction with the U.S. have compared the American military, with their submarines, stealth planes, and nightfighting gear, to vampires. The analogy is a very appropriate one, not only because their strange-seeming motivations and their terrifying night-attack tactics, but because they are invulnerable to the normal, direct methods of attack and must be fought according to bizarre and seemingly arbitrary rules that make them curiously easy for most to ward off, if not kill.
However, with no chance of a seriously damaging defeat near home ground, the American military will doubtless remain complacently ignorant of how they are perceived, and in particular, how well their limitations are understood.
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Am I the only one that sees this as a piece of SkyNet, of the Terminator movies?
If you think about this device, and what its mission is, it isn't very far off from a cruise missle, except that it doesn't blow itself up when it completes its mission. It comes back to fight another day. Cruise missles suffer from the same vulnerabilites, they've got multiple navigation sources (GPS, inertial, landmarks), and sat. communications, where they can be re-targeted if needed.
The first such mission envisioned is the suppression of enemy air defenses.
I think that this means the ground based, anti-aircraft installations (guns, missles, radar) The airframe is a pretty stealthy design, which is right for going against that sort of target. That type of mission is the most dangerous for a human pilot. I'm sure Congress likes it, since if one of them goes down in combat, they don't have to tell their constituents that they are sending their children to death in some far off country.
I would think air-air combat is a much harder problem, but it would be very good to take the human out of the loop- The plane could then do continuous hi-G turns, both positive and negative, stuff that would knock out a human in seconds.
If you watched both movies, the terminators were assasins disguised as humans to aid in infiltration.
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If you're interested in the Electronic Warfare systems involved during the Gulf War, this source is excellent.
Granted, the USAF might do a better job at AI's then a gaming company, the basic problems are the same:
There simply are no automated solutions to a chaotic scenario! Freaking mathematically impossible!
A fully automated fighter will obey certain simple rules (fire at most threating target first, do evasive manouvers if fired upon)
A human will learn those rules, and make sure that "the most threating target" is actually a decoy and that the robofighter is under a constant haul of cheap, quite harmless missiles that will distract it.
Suppose the robofighter can determine friend/foe with 100% accuracy. That was the *easy* part. Now the question is "should I fire or not?"
Again, see to the gaming situation. Don't you just love how those AI controlled opponents take impossible long distance shots at you, giving you a chance to duck and return accurate fire from a better position? Or how 20 bots scramble to meet a single opponent, while the rest are sneaking in from the back?
Humans make mistakes, machines make mistakes. THe difference is that machines make their mistakes systematically.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Have we forgotten about one thing?
Light speed is 299792458 m/s. I'm working the numbers and after the transmission time, reception time, some fudge factor for signal decoding, latency, etc. and then the time to actually make the move, you are talking about a 1000-2000 mile radius between you and the plane.
Earth curvature is even worse. If you are prepared to really take a hit on the service radius, you can use a satelite, but then you have to use a satelite in geosynch orbit (which is not a nice low 100-200 mile orbit like the shuttle flies in. 22,000 miles is more like it)
Of course, there's always an airliner loaded with relays flying near the target radius.
But the pilots won't be able to sit in their couches in some comfy home hooked up to a modified playstation and make war. You are going to have to ship the pilots and the planes out to a base near the target, so your enemy is going to be gunning for that location. All it takes is one good-sized balistic missile to make it through the defenses and all of your planes just fall out of the sky because you just killed a bunch of pilots.
So it's not a technology that can make war like a game. Not unless the government knows something we don't about faster than light communication.
You have done a real bang-up job on the software design, but would you mind posting the implementation?
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IFF is not very useful. Do you perhaps remember a few years back when the air force shot down two army helicopters in the Iraq northern no-fly zone? They misidentified them.
Remember the USS Vincennes that shot down the Iran airliner?
IFF has been aorund since WWII (55+ years) and has never been so reliable that pilots actually trusted it. No doubt current versions are better than older stuff, but it's hardly perfect, or even good enough.
If IFF were so good, why do they spend billions on radar which can identify the airplane type from radar returns?
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Infuriate left and right
I work with people doing AI research, so I can tell you that we're not yet there. "There" meaning: unmanned autonomous aircraft. That being said, I really believe that in a not so distant future we will be "there"...
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
we spend millions on military because it is the most socially meaningful research that there is! Measure the fall of communism or the end of Hitler's terror against some tree-huggin scientist developing a new hairspray that doesn't need to be tested on cute bunnies. A**holes like Saddam are out there - we spend millions on military to keep them out of our universities so scientists can have the leisure time to develop socially meaningful things like nutra sweet
whether you can force it down to zero is irrelevent... let's say you can force it down to 1 kbits/s. Text transmissions: no problem. Voice transmission: there's a problem but it can still get through. Video transmission: no way!
...). There's no way you can get all that through when you're being jammed... Also, if you have 100 planes in the same area, your bandwidth (using spread-spectrum) is divided by 100. That's not much available...
The problem is that to remotely pilot an aircraft travelling at Mach 2 (even much below Mach 1), you need a lot of data, and that data needs to be updated rapidly. Think about it. You need a video feed from the cockpit, all the radar info, all the instruments (attitude, altitude, speed,
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I would be nervous about flying civilian aircraft in its vicinity (or indeed future variations of this concept that are more autonomous) in case it took a dislike to my plane. But- if I was expecting attacks from anything from enemy aircraft to helicopters to missiles, I'd want to have some of these little suckers loose in the sky. It'd be "all civilian aircraft out of the sky NOW! OK- anything left is toast". I think the defensive capabilities of such a design, particularly as autonomous robots, could be really formidable. This is not exclusively an offensive weapon. It could be a hell of a defense against almost any air attack.
hmm.. now if you have very good surveillance of the battle field (can we say satelight, ground camera's, radar, etc, etc) you could fly a bomber with no one way commands. Hell, if you can make a cruise missile that has a remote detonator, why can't you have an automated plane to do dogfights. Personally I'd just like to see a war plane controlled by a pilot on the ground in a simulator. Although I think a more interesting idea is a Battle Droid controlled with a halflife like interface from a remote location. Now that is war.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You're right, we should continue to risk the lives of men and women in battle!
Hey, if you're going to make it easier to kill other men and women under the guise of war, you should be willing to risk your own life.
Perhaps one only realizes the value of all life when one's own has been put in danger, or sacrificed.
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Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Okay, the whole thing goes:
Terminator: In 3 years Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterward, they fly with a perfect operational record.
Sarah: Uh huh, great. Then those fat fucks in Washington figure, what the hell, let a computer run the whole show, right?
Terminator: Basically. The Skynet funding bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn, at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. eastern time, August 29. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Sarah: And Skynet fights back.
CowboyNeal for president!
"Hit any user to continue."
I don't think that the world knowing the limitations of the US military is a bad thing. Yes, the US military is easy to ward off. Don't perform genetic cleansing, don't attack innocent countries, and keep a semblance of democracy. We don't need to fight direct wars with countries if they can change their behavior to ward us off from using our "vampire" tactics.
Ther is a big difference between a remtoe manned vehicle and an autonomous one. Saying things like "the first step towards robots fighting our wars for us" is like saying the 25 cent crane-game machien is the first step towards robots doing our manual labor for us.
All they did is take the pilot out of the plane and put him on the ground folks. Those "operators" are air force pilots (the friend of an in-law of mine was oen of the test pilots.)
I would expect this sort of "machines are gonna kill us" nonsense from the unwashed masses, but I thought Slashdot was supposed to be a techno-literate group.
If you want to undrestand why they are going this direction, go rent an epsiode of Nova called "The Biology Barrier." For awhile now the limiting factor on fighter plane performance has not been what the plane could do, but what the human body inside the plane could stand. Taking the pilot out of the cockpit frees the plane up to perform at maximum.
better yet.. why not just fight the war in software. A world wide simulator with tanks, planes and infintry. Then at the end of each week we can send out a list of the people who were killed in battle.
Attention Citizen. Your avatar was killed in active duty on the 21st of June, 2026. Please report for decintergration at your nearest recycling plant.
"Damn it.."
How we know is more important than what we know.
See the now defunct DARPA Unmanned COmbat Vehicles Project.
It was aimed directly at making intelligent autonomous tanks, ala Kieth Laumer's bolo books.
A lot of the neural network stuff we see in practice now and the vestiges of neural network reserach still going on got started under that project.
Besides, why is it that every time someone brings up an even remotely autonomous robot, someone brings up Terminator? Why would an AI be interested in the earth at all? Oxygen's hard on the 'bots and living at the bottom of a gravity well would require you to waste much more resources in the construction of your autonomous units. First thing I'd do as a rogue AI would be to move to the asteroid field.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Would these planes be vulnerable to EMP pulses over lasers that have been discussed here on /. before?
I ask this because the planes will be remote controlled which would require some type of radio link. That implies and antennae. Is it possible to harden an antennae against EMP and still recieve a low power signal from many miles away? (assumption: the remote control tranmitter would have to be portable which would limit it to a few hundred watts?)
Would it be possible to control the plane with a laser communication system using a high altitude AWACs in order to keep line of sight.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
There are a ton of misconceptions in this discussion, so I'll just try to address them here.
1) There is no AI running the UCAV. There is AI running in the aircraft, but it is there to help the pilot of the aircraft. It is an unmanned air vehicle (UAV), but there is a ground station that the pilot sits at. From this station, the pilot controls the aircraft, as well as designates and determines targets. The ground station has a screen that is a sensor view from the UCAV (both FLIR and DTV (I think it has DTV anyway)) that is used to identify the target before the PERSON pulls the trigger. (One person controls a flight of four UCAVs).
2) Maneuverability. Sure, losing the human inside the aircraft would lessen the restrictions on aircraft agility, but the UCAV isn't designed for that. It is designed for deep attack missions, where the threat is too high for humans to risk their lives. It is designed for stealth. They don't want the UCAV to be seen at all. If its seen, it has very little in the way of surviving (which is why they are so cheap). They are designed to fly a long way, destroy the SAM sites (very easy to ID) and other high-priority targets (such as command and control structures).
3) IFF. Modern land vehicles don't have the CPU power or bandwidth to answer all the IFF queries that would be going on on the modern battlefield. That is the main reason that they don't have IFF. It is still up to the person to decide if a target is a threat.
-- toolie
or
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
All the talk in this thread about air-to-air combat, identification issues, communications latency, jamming, hacking etc. is quite interesting in principle. Looking at the specific mission the Boeing aircraft is designed for, however, a lot of the issues become irrelevant. The goal is to get a platform for Supression of Enemy Air Defences (SEAD) which is safer than the current manned airplanes, which have to fly right into the envelopes of the systems they are tasked to attack.
The Boeing UAV, I imagine, would perform its mission by flying over a given area, maybe around an enemy airfield, which is the target for a later attack by manned strike aircraft. The UAV package, say four UAVs, cruises in, sensing for air defense radar emissions and looking with EO sensors and radar. Possible targets could be identified and cataloged by the on-board computer, and transmitted to the control station. Most of this part of the mission could be run quite autonomously, with human controllers only supervising. If the UAVs are engaged by enemy systems, they could perform automatic evasion maneuvers, or the controllers could intervene, ordering the endangered UAV to, for example, "fly into this valley and hide", and redirect it back sometime later.
If the mission of the day is an attack on the air defense systems, this could be pre-planned in a very short amount of time by the controllers and the overall mission commander, based on the requirements of the follow-on strike package: "Let's take out these two missile batteries here first, they are on the ingress and egress routes for the strike, and then proceed to attack these gun batteries at the field - they may endanger our low-level strike planes". Targets can be designated, a time-on-target specified, and the UAV system would fly the UAVs in a manner consistent with these plans.
The actual attack, then, would be a more hands-on effort on the controller's part. Weapons release would be ordered by them, but the technicalities would be handled by the computers - just as in manned aircraft.
Afterwards, the surviving UAVs would withdraw or, possibly, stay on station to attack sudden threats when the manned strike aircraft are over the target.
In light of the requirements of this mission, consider this:
-- H. Wilker
However, I can see being concerned about interaction between computer-controlled aircraft and, say, ground troops. Human soldiers do not act in ways that are easily predictable by computers. Calling in a gunship for air cover might be a little risky if the "gunners" can't tell who's on whose side.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
Asimov? Didn't Tesla predict drone aircraft way before that?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
One of these suckers, known as the Global Hawk, is flying across the Pacific to Australia in April next year. It's landing at an as-yet unnamed airfield that is being extensively surveyed so the bot knows the lie of the land, so to speak. Release is here&l t;/a>.
At the risk of bringing in Trek, There was an episode (with the war fought by computers) where they pointed out that war is SUPPOSED to be messy and bloody. That's why it's to be avoided.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
And the Tomahawk has delivered such payloads. During the Monica Lewinsky scandal Clinton launched dozens of Tomahawk missiles at targets that were apparently controlled by Osama bin Laden. Included in the barrage of explosives were a number of anti-personal warheads that on impact explode thousands of spiked cow pods. Automated massacre.
How we know is more important than what we know.
-The number of g's that a plane can pull is not just limited by the pilot. At 9g the power needed to maintain a turn is extrodinary. Even the f-16 whose thrust is greater than its weight can only maintain this for short periods. After this the speed and thus energy, have dropped to a point where the plane has lost any advantage it may have gained while turning.
-PIO was a problem on early designs of unstable aircraft. The newer revisions are much better at corrections than the older ones, most of the resistance to this was by pilots who got used to the lag. Try flying any plane at a low speed, and lag become a huge problem.
-These new systems will be far heavier them current systems, and still require armor and such.
You comment on human percetion however is the best agrument against this, and in the end will be the failing of unmanned aircraft.
This is just adding some kill AI as well.
Much easier said than done.
Remember, if you fsck up while writing the AI, PEOPLE DIE. And not the enemy.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The US Government has avoided or gotten pressured out of a lot of wars because American Soldiers were dying. Each technology designed to fight a battle without putting men on the field or in the sky will help move a political impediment to war.
Most people would consider this a bad thing.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
This sounds like a great new hacking project/field if it ever catches on. It's risky, but think of the payoff. A whole air force at your command. MUHUHAHA.
Also, these new aircraft would presumably have to have contact with the ground. Wouldn't it be easy to jam/disable this contact and send them spiraling to their demise? Just a thought.
Trying is the first step toward failure. - Homer Simpson
Did anyone else think of Dale Brown's book "Hammerheads"? An anti-drug unit starts using the tilt-rotor V-22 Osprey with great success. They add on smaller remote-controlled versions for patrolling. Some operators drop candy on parachutes to recreational boaters (good public relations) which were being examined, while supervisors would prefer the public not realize that those oversized toys carry lethal weapons.
Attention Citizen. Your avatar was killed in active duty on the 21st of June, 2026. Please report for decintergration at your nearest recycling plant.
Trek did this one back in '66 or '67. The episode was called "A Taste of Armageddon".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
[Quoted from Economist article]
/that's/ the real motivator. Nothing to do with engineering prowess, or protecting pilots, just good old-fashioned greenbacks. :-/
America's air force spends around $2m training each pilot, and $1 billion a year keeping its 2,000 F-16 pilots in peak
....
From simulations, Boeing has worked out that operators should be able to handle four UCAVs efficiently from a single workstation.
[/Quoted]
So, if you can quarter the number of pilots you need, that's a cost reduction of US$750m pa in ongoing training costs. Not to mention direct labour cost. Oh, and if you're spending US$2m on each pilot, that can be quartered as well.
And given that military outfits spend more time sitting around at peace than in conflict, this is a real ongoing saving.... And I'd bet that
Thank you. But allow me to put it shorter and sweeter by using what I told my daughter when she asked about the Holocaust...
Evil Exists.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
ObMacross Plus: Don't they know that if they start testing unmanned fighters, they run the risk of having them taken over by insane virturoid idol singers?
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
But then, you're vulnerable to stealth giant flying scisors!
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Sorry... The ships were not unmanned. There were human crews connected by the ansibles. Makes Ender's end strategy all that more poignent.
SPOILER
Now Ender did not know that it was not a training simulation, and the crews would not be returning to the homes they left (relativistic time dilation).
It would be pretty hard to distinguish a simulation from a real battle then, wouldn't it? I won't ruin the ending for people who haven't read the book, but this brought to memory Orson Scott Card's book, a boy named Ender, and his training at battle school.
Yay! Rah-Rah Rangers! They killed over a thousand Somalis with a 50:1 kill ratio!
Only... They aborted the mission.
the US military has a long track record of beating hell out of truly committed enemies.
On the contrary, the US military has a long track record of inflicting terrible losses on 3rd world countries without actually managing to do what they set out to do: the defence of South Vietnam, the abduction of a Somali warlord, humanitarian protection of Yugoslav civilians, just a few examples of the many complete and utter failures with high "collateral damage".
With one gruesome stunt, the Somalis stopped the immense American war machine cold. Now that is a successful operation.
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I think you said what I was trying to better than I could have myself. Thanks!
Visit the
No, it was when Ooog the caveman ordered his little brother, Ooogoo, to go kill the cavemen across the valley with a stone axe.
The ethical dilemma lies with the person giving the orders, not with the mindless machine that follows them.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
In this (slightly heavy handed) story, the superpowers' computers battle each other, with fully automated weapons. Humans have become reliant on computers to do simple maths; why bother learning it when everyone has a computer?
But the military want a way to beat the enemy's computer weapons; it's too costly to put larger and larger computers in the weapons. So, they re-invent the idea of doing maths on paper (a shocking concept to those assembled, and they name it 'graphitics'), and with it the 'manned missile'.
Full story can be found at this site.
The concern with friendly fire isn't about allied aircraft -- you're correct that we alrady have decent friend-or-foe identification beacons on friendly aircraft to prevent us accidentally downing an allied plane.
The primary concern in frind-or-foe is in ground forces that have no such beacons, nor do they really have any way of carrying such.
The reason we lost so many forces to friendly fire during the Gulf War is that our ground forces were moving so quickly that they were frequently AHEAD of the official friend/foe demarcation. They were pushing so aggresively into Iraqi territory that they were mistaken by allied aircraft as thus being Iraqui forces and fired upon.
In almost every case the mistake was recongnized immediately, but of course once the Hellfire is launched it does little good to realize it was a friendly tank.
As much as we trust in technology the truth remains that we really have no 100% effective way of knowing exactly where friendly and enemy troops are int he heat of battle -- which is why, ultimately, we HAVE to rely on humans to make the call. if an aircraft's IFF is damaged that doesn't excuse our shooting it down, and the same goes for tanks.
Some of the fault belongs in the fact that our armed forces (like moth other government agencies) are decentralized -- the Army doesn't necessarily know exactly what the Air Force is doing, and vice versa. Of course they cooperate, and they are getting much better, but even within the Army you had most of the friendly fire due to simple inability to notify the Army air units that the Army ground units were progressing as quickly as they were. Picking individual tanks out of a skirmish would be an exercise in futility if there was not a human to make the call.
That said, the real advantage to unmanned craft is that they no longer have to keep within the physical constraints of safety for the pilot -- they can pull 15-G turns without a problem, and don't have to be designed to incorporate safety equipment or a feild of view for human eyes. They can be designed to be essentially disposable, perfectly aerodynamic, lighter, highly maneuverable, and with a minimal radar signature...
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
BTW, I saw that movie again on Scifi a few weeks ago, and couldn't believe the resemblance of the Colossus logo and the AOL logo.
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It'll be interesting to see how the program will develop as they run through the prototype airframes/AI... since they're saying they're just initially targeting SEAD as a program goal, it seems that Boeing doesn't feel their air-to-air capabilities are viable in a dogfight yet (which translates to human fighter escorts for the strike wing).
Also, with the pilot removed, the UCAV can perform very high-g maneuvers (probably just for evasion of SAMs/AAMs and what not)... does anyone know if the current generation of unmanned reconnaisance aircraft have complex evasion routines, or are they oblivious to air defenses?
:wq
In that story, a young computer hacker and excellent gamer is sent to army training, controlling unmanned combat space vehicles in a war with an alien race. He won the war in a very unexpected way. I don't want to spoil the ending for those who haven't read it, but you should!
G-forces. At this day and age, the true limit of a fighter's performance isn't engine power or structural integrity: it's how many Gs the pilot can stand. Even with the best pressure suits, a UCAV has an obvious advantage.
PIO (Pilot Induced Oscillation): if you're gonna pull any tricky aerodynamics like the X-45 does (inverted swept wing, stealth profile) you need dynamically unstable aircraft. The problem with unstable designs in fighters is usually that the pilot overcompensates flight corrections --i.e., the resolution of the human is much lower than the resolution that the flight corrections must be made; in essence, the pilot is correcting the aircraft at a lag. Modern control systems of course correct for this already --by trying to determine what the pilot *wants* to do, rather than what he's putting in the stick-- but with higher Gs (and thus higher speeds) the human is the weak link.
Weight, of course. If I remember my Design courses correctly, the extra systems for the pilot account for about 20%-25% of a fighter's Take Off Gross Weight: armor plating, cockpit controls, air conditioning, etc. Weight is an aircraft's Number 1 limiting design factor.
OTOH there is one huge disadvantage to a UCAV: in a dog-fight, or whenever human perception is needed to reduce the decision tree to something manageable, they will always (well, for the next few decades anyway) be outmanned. Pun intended.
I imagine that "The Economist" was referring to the American habit of shooting up its allies on the ground, rather than the marginally less frequent shooting own aircraft, flying through cable railways, crashing Harriers with no reason at all, but as usual, irony flies over the American head.
The original Doctor Dark.
The US is going to protect its interests. War for oil? Certainly. The Gulf War was about protecting allied, and thus US, interests. Liberating a small State overan by its aggresive neighbor? It makes good press.
That's not to say the US won't take action on a moral basis. We have the reach to be able to react to any event in the world. But these situations get considerably more complex and have to potential to change drastically from the inital intent. Somalia is a prime example (and has sparked frantic study in urban warfare by the US Army). But just because we can... does that mean we should?
The US military can't solve every problem in the world. We will fail if we try. With any luck, the US leadership will wisely choose those situations where US involvement can help.
But the more the US gets involved in world affairs, the more we'll be scorned by fearfull governments for interfering with other sovergn nations. How ironic that some of these same critics would complain that we don't involve ourselves with every world hotspot.
Of course, the fear of some of the greatest critics will be that the next "hot spot" will be their own backyard.
And thus, our critics will seek ways to level the playing field. They'll use our morality (wish to avoid civilian casualties) to gain the high ground - its part of what makes urban warfare so difficult. And they'll seek out cheap forms of "weapons of mass destruction" to include biological and chemical agents. Oddly enough, this kind of threat will only increase the likelyhood that the US will take active interest in these governments.--
Um, is there anyway of teaming Unmanned and Manned craft? Like a single human fighter with, say, 5 unmanned subordinates?
I don't know about you, but when I play Homeworld, I usually watch my squadrons closely (while not leaving it to a blip on the screen for them to find/kill). If "I" think that what they find is/isn't worth it, "I" decide if they should go for it/retreat/find something else.
The machines can dip their fingers in blood while a human can play eye in the sky (e.g. "Heh, look, a SCUD base" or "Nope, those are our guys").
Personally it seems like a solution that maximizes all of their strengths while minimizing their weaknesses.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Only... They aborted the mission.
Absolutely false. The mission objective was achieved despite overwhelming resistance.
Put in boldface for a reason. The mission objective was the snatch-and-grab of one of Aidid's lieutenants, and they successfully achieved their objective.
Further missions were scrubbed by White House order. The theater commanders disagreed vehemently with the President's abandonment of the Somalia operation; they had Aidid's entire gang on the ropes after that battle in downtown Mogadishu, and Task Force Ranger wanted to finish the job--with sufficient force and vehemence to send a strong message that you don't desecrate the bodies of American troopers.
The theater commanders were overridden by the President.
The failure of the US military to achieve its objectives in the Somalia operation is really a failure of the US political system. The military did everything we asked them to, and more. But, as is usual, US politicians lost their will to fight long before the military did.
In this case, I'm not talking about the expense of the loss of a highly-trained pilot, or the simple human factor of pilots dying. I'm talking about what happens when an aircraft is downed over enemy territory.
Do you remember what happened during the Gulf War when Hussein got his hands on Allied pilots? They were tortured, paraded in front of television cameras, and used as instruments of psychological warfare and propaganda. Let's look at each of these eventualities as dispassionately as such a subject will allow:
- Western nations' aircrews know a great deal about what's going on. A downed pilot is almost always a high-ranking officer, and will know things that the enemy would dearly love to find out: base locations, upcoming missions, the numbers and dispositions of military units on their own side, what military intelligence (no canned cliches here, please) knows, etc... and this information will be forcibly extracted. "Interrogation" is an ancient science, and has been developed to horrific effectiveness. The desired information
- will be extracted.
Remove the pilot from the possibility of capture, and you deny the enemy (whoever that might be at the moment... these things tend to change) a source of accurate military intelligence and a psychological warfare tool.I can't speak for other nations, but I do know that modern Americans have no stomach for military casualties, no matter what the cause. One of the best ways to get the US out of a local war is to rack up the body count and prisoner count... you don't need many. Just a few widely-televised images, and the "bring our boys home" protests begin (note: I am not taking a side on whether we should be involved in any specific military action; I don't have the dependable information to judge, and neither do you. What, you trust CNN? Pentagon spokesmen? Iraqi spokesmen?). A downed pilot is a very effective weapon against the will of Americans to fight.
Plus, people like me whose fathers are combat pilots can be a bit more certain Dad will be home for Christmas.
Recall the "conflict" (it wasn't formally a "war") in the Persian Gulf and the lavish media coverage fawning over the tricked-out American arsenal of depleted uranium, ship-launched cruise missiles and so-called "smart bombs."
I was in high school at the time, and remember well the glossy graphics in the corporate press extolling the efficiency of "fire-and-forget" rockets.
Later came a few insightful (but quickly forgotten) editorials criticizing America's "video game mentality" of combat.
Perhaps automated weapon systems are more efficient than those manned by humans. Maybe they'll even cut down on "friendly" casualties, and, in the long run, shave some dollars off of our bloated defense budget.
What really concerns me ain't efficiency, or cost savings. It's accountability. I think many fail to realize that war -- whether conducted with knives or napalm, whether hand-to-hand or computerized -- is about killing. Smart bombs and fire-and-forget missiles abstract killing to a small blip on a phosphorescent screen far removed from the actual event.
Unmanned flying gunships, I'm afraid, are a step in the wrong direction.
Sincerely,
Vergil
Insects and Grafitti Photos
I didn't really know anything about the Somalia operation, I was going by what you said, which was that they aborted the mission. Now I've looked up a few concise histories of it, so I can work with facts other than the ones you mentioned.
It changes little. While they accomplished their narrowly defined objective (abducting a single man), they failed in their implied objective of retaining their capability to continue to act in the area, and the root objective of making it possible for the food shipments to be fairly distributed.
Let's not forget that this was in the context of a humanitarian mission, and killing Somali soldiers was something that they were supposed to keep to a minimum. Those high kill counts do not speak in their favor. Americans cause an amazingly high number of casualties during "humanitarian" missions.
All this aside from the inherent incompetence of ordering the abduction. If the military high command had adequately predicted the casualties that the operation would cost for the politicians, the order would surely not have been given.
They won the battle in such a way that it lost them the war. Claiming success is like applauding a chess player who says "I set out to capture his pawn and I did" when he is mated on the next move. The US also won many battles in Vietnam, and their kill ratios were very impressive despite low morale and drafted troops. Whenever they set a short-term objective, they accomplished it. They still lost the war, because they didn't know what the hell their objectives really were.
I don't blame the soldiers involved. They followed orders successfully. However, I do not agree with your seperation of the US military and the US political system. The US political system is the top-level command of the US military. I'm not disputing that the US military is very competent at certain, well-specified tasks, but rather pointing out that they rarely achieve a useful result. Because they lack clear, consistent motivation throughout the command structure, one level is always manufacturing disaster for another level.
The top-level command, the politicians, saw the "snatch and grab" as a disaster, while the ranked military officers saw it as a success (sure, we told you it would be easy, but we did it! Don't blame us!). How much more screwed up could that be?
Worst of all, at the very heart of the problem is that the situation in Somalia was partly caused by the US. Just as the US supported Saddam Hussein's rise to power, they supported one Somali warlord or another during the cold war to prevent the rise of communism in favor of violent anarchy. The politics that lead to the famine (Somalia being agriculturally self-sufficient to the point where it would normally have weathered the drought) were a direct result of earlier US (to the tune of nearly, if not more than, a billion dollars in aid to certain warlords) and Russian intervention. Furthermore, early in the relief efforts, the US military treated Aidid and other warlords as legitimate local authorities. They created the situation they meant to end, and ultimately defeated themselves.
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'You can bomb it, shell it, gas it, irradiate it, and make it inhabitable for humans, but it's not *yours* untill a seventeen year old with a rifle is standing on it." Even the new Land Warrior system OICW has a bayonet lug....
they failed in ... retaining their capability to continue to act in the area
Again false. Task Force Ranger was good to go within minutes after the original force returned home. Not all of Task Force Ranger ventured out that day; a lot of guys were still fresh and ready to fight.
If the military high command had adequately predicted the casualties that the operation would cost for the politicians, the order would surely not have been given.
In fact, casualties were predicted. The order was given anyway.
They still lost the war, because they didn't know what the hell their objectives really were.
US soldiers didn't lose Vietnam. US politicians lost Vietnam. But, given that "I do not agree with your separation of the US military and the US political system", I'll grant that.
The distinction between the two really is fundamental, BTW. The President of the United States may be Commander-in-Chief, but he's a civilian--were he to be a military officer, he'd have had to face a court-martial over Monica Lewinsky. The President is an elected official, answerable to the people; the military is answerable only to the government.
I agree with you heartily regarding the failure of US politics in the region. However, since the politicians failed, that's where the blame ought to go--not on the military, which did its job admirably and without complaint, despite impossible resistance.
It's all a matter of definition, but wasn't the V-1 in some sense the first example of this? It was radio-controlled in real-time, and carried a warhead.
No the ranging on a V1 was by use of a propeller on the front, which would measure distance. There was an idea of fitting some missiles with radio tracking, but the German high command felt that the intelligence reports they were getting were accurate.
No commercial airplane will ever fly without pilots in any of our lifetime.
While we may have the technology to do it, it's not mature enough yet. And I'm not even sure that it would be possible. No airplane has the capability to do a autopilot takeoff, and while many have the capability to do an autolanding, it's possible at maybe 10 or 15 runways in the US. (By autolanding, I mean a full autolanding, flying an ILS approach to standard minimums and requiring the pilots to take over the approach and hand-fly it from there obviously doesn't count.) I can guarantee you that the FAA would not certificate and aircraft airworthy without pilots. That is a good thing in my opinion. The FAA does not even allow pilots to use GPS as their sole means of navigation flying IFR -- they must have a VOR tuned in and set to the proper course.
So, in short, while it's possible for an airplane to reduce the pilot's workload by 90%, that last 10% will never disappear. At least not in our lifetime for commercial (ie people-carrying) aircraft.
A convincing and overwhelming threat of force can prevent wars from starting or avert human rights abuses.
As in "I am Lex Luthor and I can destroy Metropolis unless you dye your hair blue"?
a nation that wants to secure a good and peaceful tomorrow had best be investing in these technologies today.
A nation that want to secure a good and peaceful tomorrow had best be investing a bit less in economical development, democracy, human rights and the environment both at home and abroad.
Investing in these technologies is for those who want world domination and a healthy military-industrial complex.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
This will lead to unmanned tanks, and other tools of destruction. Soon, wars will be settled by [unmanned] tournaments of Roshambo.
Video game arcades with flight simulations?
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
Well, it seems we're indeed just arguing because of a difference of semantics (and, indeed, yours are more standard; I've been deliberately using the term "military" very broadly to try and make people think about it from another direction).
But I think that this belief in the seperation of military and government is a huge part of the problem. That idea is at the heart of my original post.
The politicians were not entirely to blame for the failure in Vietnam.
Outsiders can't just step into a civil war and "win" it.
Sure, the US military could have gone in and wiped out all military forces that opposed them at any one time. There would have been massive civilian casualties, resulting in greater support for communism. The people of North Vietnam believed in communism, as did many in South Vietnam. If you think the P.R. problems were bad back home, think of what they were in Vietnam.
There was no way to win. This type of situation is like a hydra, where cutting off one head causes two more to grow. The best outcome a military solution could achieve would be a police-state under US martial law.
Even worse was the fact that the real enemies weren't in Vietnam. Fighting them indirectly was hopeless, each side could pour weapons in indefinitely. Fighting them directly was impossible, as nuclear devastation would result.
Sure, the politicians made mistakes, but it was an utterly hopeless situation. The military could destroy any target given to them, but nothing was to be gained by such destruction.
Again false. Task Force Ranger was good to go within minutes after the original force returned home.
More confusion in the discussion. I meant within the larger context, they lost political support for future action.
In fact, casualties were predicted.
Yes, but they were underestimated. But I think perhaps that the estimates were based on support that they didn't have. They wanted, and should have had, close air support and tanks on standby.
Furthermore, an earlier plan involving the use of Delta Force resulted in the evaluation that they could just go in and pick up whoever they wanted off the streets. They later changed their minds, but that bold statement probably stuck in the politicians' mind. If that initial evaluation had been less optimistic, the abduction strategy would probably never have been considered.
It reminds me faintly of Dieppe (it's a Canadian thing, you might not recognize the reference, but it's an interesting example of a world-class fuckup), in the way that planned-on support was stripped away a bit at a time (though the results were very different).
At least one Ranger bled to death while their commander took 6 hours to beg in non-US UN armor, and another 6 for them to get there. Successful or not, there were some major screwups.
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send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
Wars wouldn't be such a bad thing any more.
Unless you are a civilian. And from WW I to Ruanda, civilians are making more and more of the victims of war.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Hopefully the system won't be running Windows. Imagine the surprise of the world if the new planes suddently take a break from fighting against other countries in war and suddenly engage in a tactical attack on Netscape Navigator's home base. =-)
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
Make all your aircrafts unmanned and the next thing you know, your communications are being jammed and all your planes are suddenly down! You can make a communication system more robust to jamming (by using spread-spectrum, and other redunduncy), but you cannot make it totally jamming-proof.
Another problem with such an aircraft is that in order to be guided, the plane needs to emit (so the ground controller can see the data). This has two side effects:
1) The plane cannot be made stealth.
2) It would be all too easy to guide a missile based on those emissions.
I think the future of unmanned aircrafts will depend on AI. Of course, we're not yet there...
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Given there is no human occupant to protect, the planes can be made more aerodynamic, and more maneouverable.. and deal with forces much greater than our conventional fighters can.
(most, if not all, modern planes can handle forces and manouvers that would easily kill their occupants)
The thing that you have either missed or chose to miss is that UCAV is not a ROBOT vehicle, it is merely unmanned.
UCAV is controlled by humans in remote locations, presumably out of harms way. UCAV does have some automated functionality, but nothing more complicated than cruise control.
Sheesh. You replace the pilot with a camera and suddenly everyone starts talking talking Asimov and Heinlein.
Hey, I've got an idea, while we watch the UCAV demo, lets put on our flying backpacks and eat some Soylent Green for lunch.
The moral of this story is that things are usually not as much as they appear to be, be it nifty, insidious, nefarious, exciting, whatever.
This space for rent.
All this talk about intercepting or spoofing control signals is ridiculous.
If electronic infiltration were even a remote possibility with computer pilots it would be almost as doable with real ones, since a human pilot gets targetting info, terrain maps, base and target locations, and mission objectives from ground or satellite locations already.
Of course there is the human element of trust in calling the enemy "charlie" or naming different jets with various adjective/animal/number triplets, but that is just another type of encryption, really. It can't always be cracked by computers (as long as they're still failing the turing test) but enemy humans can crack it pretty well.
A human pilot could of course just use visual imput to complete the mission and get home if he had some reason to doubt ground or satellite info. But so could a computer pilot! If the checksums or codewords or protocols are a bit fishy, of if it sees one ally attacking another, the computer plane can go manual override and just do its own thing. Of course this creates the possibility for a Dr. Strangelove scenario, but the movie shows that humans don't do much good against that.
Personally I plan on getting on the robots' good side now so they'll let me live to do their menial chores once they take over.
Since the first generation of craft would be "wild weasles" going after enemy air defences their is no danger of them shooting at each other, thus them knowing each others positions is meaningless, they aren't looking for air targets. The freindly fire danger I see would be in one of these buggers getting lost and homing in on freindly air defences, either from their own bases or some other allied position. If the craft is damaged and "forgets" where the good guys are supposed to be the potential for it to destroy the first anti-aircraft radar it finds is kinda scary. I'd feel better knowing that humans and humans only can make the decision to fire.
IFF and other ident systems are mostly reliable, automated target recognition via radar profile is faster and more accurate by far than what humans can do, but radar signatures can be spoofed, IFF signals can be faked etc... It may be hard or near impossible today but it won't be impossible for ever.
Asides from the technical problems of completly automated combat systems there is of course the ethical dilema of allowing machines to make the decision to kill human beings. Humans, even the enemy, deserve the thought and consideration of another human before being killed, we owe each other that small dignity even in war. Modern warfare is already remote and cold enough as it is, removing any more of the humanity and allowing our weapons to do our killing for us makes the prospect of war all too simple a thing, all too bloodless an affair, and I fear that the decision to attack or not will be taken too lightly in such a case. Not to mention the very real (in say 50+ years) of our own AI's turning on us, and making the decision to kill all humans. If they've never been allowed to decide on their own to kill humans they would (hopefully) be less likely to see it as an option if they do turn on us.
Not that this story is giving me fears of SkyNet or anything, just some things to think about when considering the concept of allowing computers to do our killing for us.
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
Close air support is where the risk is the pilots and the friendly fire deaths. Aircraft already have friend-or-foe beacons in place to minimize friendly fire incidents involving aircraft. Also, bombers and other "strategic" air missions are already carried out from quite high altitude.
.50 caliber gun with a camera and a jet engine attached might be interesting. Need close air support? Slip on the VR headset, grab the joystick and a fresh disposable gets dropped out of a high-altitude B-52.
Where life gets hairy and where lives get lost is close air support missions -- attacking ground targets to support infantry in the field. I've seen numerous Vietnam documentaries where US troops literally called in air strikes _on their own positions_ because they were getting overrun or nearly so. You need to get in really close to make sure that the group of guys in green you're about to roast with a load of napalm aren't your own people. When you get in "low and slow" you lose the ability to maneuver and you become really vulnerable to AA and shoulder-fired munitions not to mention enemy fighters from above.
I really don't see a robot plane doing much for close air support. Tactical bombing missions, maybe, but those are relatively low risk right now and the high-risk, high-accuracy stuff they can do with Tomahawks.
If they could ever get the fly-by-wire experience down right, it might be interesting to see "disposable" close-air support planes that could be flown at the company or batallion level by people on the ground. A single-use plane consisting of a few claymores, a 20mm cannon and a
The V-1 was NOT radio-controlled. They set a direction and a distance, and it flew that direction and distance as best it could. Once it reached the distance, the engine cut out and it dove. If it undershot or overshot, they changed the distance setting for the next one. However, the only evidence they had for where it landed was news reports and spies, and the British used the BBC and turned (double agent) spies in order to make the Germans think they were overshooting when they were undershooting.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
I don't think the story was trying to imply that humans wouldn't be involved in the control of the plane. Just that humans wouldn't be INSIDE the plane to control it.
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It's all a matter of definition, but wasn't the V-1 in some sense the first example of this? It was radio-controlled in real-time, and carried a warhead.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The HARM can be used in different ways. You can fire it off a platform such as the F-4G Wild Weasel. In this case, the EWO (Electronics Warfare Officer) selects a threat, hands that threat to the HARM, and sends the HARM on its way.
But the HARM also carries its own threat table and can be sent after a target with little direction. In this case, a threat is identified in a general area and the HARM is fired. The HARM then looks for threats, identifies the highest priority threat according to its internal table, and then goes after that threat.
These kinds of abilities allow a HARM to be used with platforms not otherwise especially equiped for Wild Weasel missions. It also allows for more creative functions. A pilot can "pickle over the horizon" and send a HARM after a known target without coming in range themselves. And by extending a HARM's fuel capacity, it can "hunt" for an extended period of time awaiting threat radars to power up after hiding from the Wild Weasel aircraft.
Vicous stuff.
The sobering part comes from a few rare reports during the Gulf War. There were reports of "near misses" with HARM missles by friendly surface forces. The theory is that the HARMs mis-identified friendly radar or communications systems as a threat in its internal threat table.
How would that be any different? Would you fly on the equivalent of a RC aircraft?
Cruse missles are already computer controled, computers will only be able to replace humans in most missions when thye can adapt and make complex judgement calls.
As for using a network to keep track of them, I think that's a bad idea. Some commanders have been known to blanket jam a battlefield after preparing their troops and letting the small units slug it out without guidince from on high, assuming their troops will be better able to handle it
First, the original reply was a joke, but its still an interesting topic... An auto takeoff would be even easier than an autolanding. Whereas landing requires getting the plane into a small specific area and then flying an approach, along a very narrowly defined corridor in a very specific amount of time (so you don't end up on the top of someone taking or taxiing), takeoffs consist of little more than open the throttles up, then setting a climb--both pretty easy for a pilot or an aircraft. I think the only reason they haven't been implemented yet is that there is a fairly elaborate system of clearances at most major airports leading up to that point, and once you're there, the actual takeoff is trivial. The main reason full ILS for autolandings is only available at a few airports is the cost of installing the ridiculously precise radio beacons that were needed up until recently... With the removal of selective availiblity of GPS, this is now an option, and there is a distinct possibility that even more accurate satellite systems will become a reality. The FAA is probably one of the most cautious organizations in existance, and they have a long history of waiting until technology is proven before allowing its use. State of the art aircraft today essentially display the ultimate in technology that was available ten years ago, when the FAA began reviewing it.
/* This post not warrantied for mission critical applications. */
There's also the fact that jammers are really easy targets to find and hit.
not when it's an A-6.
Which leads me to another interesting question. If a massive first-assualt type of strike is used, generally, we lead-off with EW, jamming, etc. Blind the enemy first.
But with jamming going on, how could these vehicles participate in the strike?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The M-16 was not designed to maim, as you say. Rather, it grew out of the armed services' dissatisfaction with the M-14 rifle. The main problem with the M-14 was its weight; it's a big pig of a weapon and ammunition for it weighs a ton.
By moving from 7.62mm ammunition to 5.56mm ammunition, the weight of the ammo was reduced by a factor of almost a third. The heavy use of plastics and minimized use of heavy metal components cut several pounds off the M-16, when compared to its predecessor.
The smaller bullet possesses less lethality, correct. However, it's not a tumbler round and it wasn't meant to maim people. In Mogadishu, Somali gang members were shot at point-blank range with M-16 fire and weren't incapacitated; the bullet tended to penetrate clean through, without causing significant wound trauma. If the 5.56mm cartridge was designed to maim, then it was pretty badly designed, because it doesn't incapacitate reliably. (The Israelis and British have reported similar problems with the 5.56mm round. The Soviets have the same problem with their 5.45mm AK-74s in Chechnya; the 5.45mm round is so inadequate that the Sovs have started fielding a 9mm assault rifle with their troops, just to get some stopping power again.)
To recap: the reason for moving to 5.56mm was to minimize weight, so that soldiers could carry more ammunition and fight longer engagements. A soldier already goes into combat lugging around over 100 pounds in his pack; every ounce of saved weight helps.
"67% of all statistics are made up."
83% of slashdot.org readers already knew that.
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That's in fact the main reason for the move from remotely piloted vehicles to unmanned aerial vehicles. The Israelis pioneered this concept, with a trailer-launched reconnissance UAV around 1980.
There's also the fact that jammers are really easy targets to find and hit.
That's the idea. Read the article, especially re: secure line-of-sight and satellite-relay control systems.
It's just like the existing 'smart bombs' are able to be guided by secure channels, watching the video returning from the craft and aiming it with a joystick.
One pilot in a secure bunker can launch ten birds from different airports. She can punch in their waypoints to meet near the objective, and fine-tune one or two into their attacks at a time. Let those birds revert to autopilot while another two go in for attacks. Repeat. When done, land them one at a time by the same joystick. Let the airport jockeys put the planes away, while the pilot sips her tea.
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