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X-45 Makes Debut Flight
jonerik writes "The Associated Press (by way of MSNBC) reports the debut flight on Wednesday of Boeing's X-45A, the first unmanned aircraft designed from the start to carry weapons. According to the article, the X-45 - one of two being tested - flew for 14 minutes and will be able to carry 3,000 pounds of guided bombs. If eventually purchased by the Pentagon, expect to see it in service sometime between 2007 and 2010. The plane's relatively cheap cost ($10-15 million per aircraft), ease of maintenance, and lack of an onboard pilot will likely make it a staple of future U.S. war plans."
First the encryption the military uses is way advanced of anything in PGP or the civilian sector. Second this will most likely use frequency hopping radio technology. The US Army has had frequency hopping radios with encryption since the 80's. Any crypto the military uses first has to be approved by the NSA. And I haven't heard of anyone hacking into the NSA's classified systems yet.
"this is the closest thing we have to a hunter-killer"
"We?" Is that the human race perchance? If so why would we need such a thing?
and things'll get scary
Are "things" not scary enough already?
You've got to think about the scale involved here. W/the high stall speeds and size of a manned fighter- recovery is incredibly difficult. I bet these little guys have no trouble. Their target - relatively speaking is huge. There are acres of flight deck. If they can slow down real well - and this X-45 is subsonic - it would be no problem. Carriers have had automated landing systems for some time. They would work w/this fine. You don't need to worry about actually trapping on one of the arresting gear engines. The angle should be long enough for the aircraft to stop on its own.
I promise you I am not just talking out the side of my head. Launch and Recovery was my life for some time.
Ron Peck
ABE, V-2 Div.
USS Carl Vinson CVN-70
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Those numbers have been discredited a long time ago. See the section on civilian casualties at the end of this article for details.
More importantly, this is beside the point. In Afghanistan, we are doing our utmost to avoid civilian casualties by putting brave men in harms way, on the ground, to pinpoint targets to be hit. In contrast, the September 11 terrorists did their utmost to maximize the number of civilians killed. You don't see a difference?
The navy has flown UAVs off vessels in the past, although retrieving them has been messy. It is funny to watch videos, put up a big net and flew the UAV right into it to catch it. There has been a vertical take-off and landing UAV tested on a frigate by a Canadian company many years ago, but it never went into production. It was quite a humorous looking UAV, it looked something like a peanut with opposite rotating propellers in the middle of it. The Navy currently has a vertical take-off and landing UAV being produced by Northrop Grumman in test right now (first flight was last weekend). It is essentially an unmanned helicopter. Within a year, the Navy will put out a request for proposal for a carrier version of an unmanned combat aircraft.
Your suggestions on how we get these "better people" are welcome.
In the meantime, we have to have the better weapons in order to survive. If we don't survive, then all of our other sentiments, no matter how lofty, are useless.
You had better believe that those who currently enslave their own populations, those who do not share our values of freedom of thought and association are working toward having the best weapons possible. We need to get there first.
Admittedly, we have to also make sure not to lose sight of the fact that our goal is to protect freedoms, not just defeat enemies.
Actually, it is a lot. The UCAV is being designed to carry a new generation of miniature cruise missle designed by Boeing, which has a 100 pound warhead that is the equivalent of a 500 pound conventional explosive bomb. The small cruise missle has about a 40 mile range, so even the UCAV can stay out of harm's way.
No one has made this particularly clear, but semi-automomous for this vehicle is an huge understatement. The aircraft have the ability to self-deploy from bases far from the conflict site and will include a computer generated voice radio to communicate with traditional air traffic controllers as it proceeds through controlled air space to its mission area.
Multiple UCAVs will have the ability to share target info amongst themselves and can strike each others' targets if one becomes disabled.
Most importantly, unlike other unmanned vehicles to date, nobody flys the UCAV with a joystick. Its flight control system accepts inputs in the form of waypoints and actions to perform. All of the necessary control inputs required to reach the desired target are generated and executed by the UCAVs own computers. This is also true for threat avoidance and evasive manuevers.
I've actually had the opportunity to operate the UCAV flight console in a simulator environment and it's actually quite boring from the operator's perspective. There's a moving map display with friend/foe data on it, several windows containing vehicle stats, and a mouse and keyboard for command input. I was able to target downtown Las Vegas with one mouse click (and contextual menu choice) and fire a stand-off missle without any additional input. The UCAV took off, flew the mission, struck the target, and returned to the base with only that info as input. It also sent back multiple side-scan radar images of the target area prior to launching its attack so it could receive confirmation from a human before completing the attack.
Given that 5 or 6 of these things can be loaded on a C-17 and deployed to any commercial or military airport within 700-800 miles of a hot spot, the bad guys should be very afraid of these aircraft. They're stealthy, small, cheap, and can outmanuever any manned aircraft. They also don't require expensively trained pilots to operate. Just hope we don't sell them to our "friends"...
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
There are "more than a few nations out there whose number one priority is to exterminate us"? Give me a break. Like who for instance? Iraq? North Korea? China?
Why is China having a problem getting Taiwan back?
Why is North Korea's economy not so hot?
Why does Sadaam Hussein have to resort to terrorism to get what he wants now? (He used to have the 4th largest army in the world.)
What do the answers to these questions all have in common?
If memory serves me correctly, the US attacked Iraq not the other way around.
Aren't you forgetting something?
And no, Osama bin Laden and friends aren't a nation.
It wasn't too long ago that Osama bin Laden and friends were a nation.
With all due respect to your military service, I think you're wrong about UCAVs increasing undesired casualties.
1. Having soldiers on the ground do not mitigate the problem of dealing with an enemy that blends into the civilian population. Such enemies tend to dress and act like civilians, so that they are hard to identify even for a soldier within visual range. This has been a common complaint in Vietnam and other places where an army has tried to deal with guerrilla war. The advantage of having a soldier on the ground is that a soldier can walk a 3 miles and hour, go into places cameras can't see, and be shot at. In the future, small squad level UAVs will be able to do the same thing.
2. UCAVs in their current incarnation are designed for dangerous 1st day of war duties. Their targets, SAM sites, radar installations, command bunkers, government offices, power plants, are likely to be well known, high value fixed targets that are unlikely to be confused with civilian buildings.
3. Human operators will make the shoot/don't shoot decision for UCAV's. Being physically away from the combat environment, the human operator will have a lower stress level and be more careful in verifying the target than a pilot in a dangerous combat environment.
4. Modern pilots fly most bombing missions from high altitude out of concern for ground fire. As a result, the closest to a visual inspection that he'll do is watch the target through a camera attached to his aircraft from 10000 feet. This is no different than what a UCAV operator will do excpet for the fact that UCAV's will be able to fly lower and closer to their targets, bringing the camera closer and giving the UCAV operator a better view than the pilot.
First the encryption the military uses is way advanced of anything in PGP or the civilian sector.
I'd be very suprised if that was true. Would the military trust something that hadn't been reviewed by the academic sector, published in journals, etc? Trying to keep the algorithm secret simply doesn't stand up to modern cryptanalysis, if that algorithm isn't rock-solid to start with. You can download the source code and documentation to the new AES, which is the Federal standard for data encryption.
If the NSA are keeping anything secret, it will be that they have algorithmic attacks on popular techniques (and/or computing techniques and power to brute-force them), not new techniques of their own.
Doesn't something change when you take human conscience out of the equation? The dot on the screen is a village with many homes, families, adults and children. We can unleash hell without ever seeing our victims. To them, we are a faceless empire, worse than Rome's wildest dreams.
It's a little late to worry about that now. 18th Century artillerymen (with a 3-mile range) could drop shells over a hill and kill people they couldn't see. By 1914, most artillery shells were fired at unseen targets, and more casualties were inflicted by artillery than with any other weapon. By 1942, bomber fleets could destroy an entire city from 25,000 feet, never seeing anything as small as a human being below. By the early 60's, two men in a Minuteman silo in North Dakota could turn their keys and vaporize a million people on another continent... A remote control airplane flying low enough for the camera to actually see people and firing off one precision weapon at a time is a welcome step back from the remote-killing capabilities we already have.
But finally, even when killing someone meant getting up close with sword or axe and getting splashed with their blood, armies could still slaughter entire civilian populations. It just took more work and some training to kill.