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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.
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?
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.
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.