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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."
Perfect for today's nintendo generation of twitch-reflex script kiddies.
Well, an unmanned plane MUST have some method of self-repair! According to Lucas' mythos, ONLY a robot can do so! R2-D2... the way to the future.
(What's that you say? Reagan's "Star Wars" was a space defense system, not the basis for our planes of the future? Bah!)
The Pentagon announced their new "Skynet" project.
is the x45 a flying version of the x10 camera?
I can see it now. Other countries are going to start screaming about how unfair it is that we don't have to risk pilots to bomb stuff. It would be nice, however, if the pilots actually had a cockpit wherever they were stationed to control the drone. Controlling a drone with a small joystick and a few flight controls in front of a B&W television is just annoying. Besides, it would take the fun out of warfare.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
...where's Isamu Dyson when you need him?
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
This seems to be a lot better than that Predator thing that carries a whopping one Hellfire missile. I like the reconfigurable control station, since not everyone likes their controls in the same spots, having played MANY flight sims. But best of all, having no pilot means it can be manuvered much more, even subjected to maybe 10, 11, 12 G's without the controller blacking out. MiG-29? Bring it on!
"I just hope it runs open source, otherwise you won't know if you or the plane crashed."
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you."
-- Military school Commandant's graduation address, "The Secret War of Lisa Simpson"
crazy dynamite monkey
Since there is no cockpit maybe they should paint one on the tail end to confuse our enemies' pilots. It works for fish with "eyes" on their tails.
we need a new, free game from the airforce to go along with the game from the army. next up, run your own nuclear aircraft carrier remotely from the navy!
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
If it has any stealth features? Or if "partially autonomous" means automatic fire avoidance or flying map of the earth? Hopefully that's all it is. If, on the other hand, that means that it can pick it's own targets if it needs to, it had better not run on windows... that would be a blue screen to remember.
The holy grail! Now we will be able to rain down death on our opponents without risking the neck of even one of our own! Glorious glorious day!
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
Hey with these things they will be able to continue to nuke the planet after everyone is dead.
Unlike the crewed planes it may replace, the X-45 would be partially autonomous. Its pilot ? who may fly several planes at once ? would remain on the ground, out of harm?s way.
I wonder what is to stop someone from cracking the communications protocol and effectivly hijacking the plane. It seems like similar less advanced spy planes are already being used in Afghanistan but if these become standard I could very well see an enemy putting a significant amount of resources into cracking the encryption. Does anyone know enough about the system to know whether there is a significant risk of a 3rd party taking over one of these planes during a flight?
I stole this Sig
Not really funny if you think that 50 cents of your last tax payment may have gone to an actual, honest-to-goodness kill "in the field".
Extremely not funny if you think of any "accidents" that might happen.
What's that line about swords into ploughshares again?
All I can say is, I'm sure glad those things are on our side. Imagine that we'll be able to mass produce these things and launch whole fleets of them with no risk of losing a single human life from the attack (on our side). Hopefully our leaders will respect the power that gives them.
Ah, the bravery of being out of range.
Nevertheless, I can't imagine real pilots having the same positive impression of these devices. Human judgement counts for something.
Will these things end up making less of these "mistaken target bombings" or is that all just garbage-in-garbage-out intelligence snafus?
An unmanned plane with weapons. Call me paranoid, but I'm not sure I trust it. Anybody who has worked with computers and electronics knows how crazy the machines can go with little action taken. Processors can have rounding errors that cost countless civilian lives. With smartbombs as screwey as they are, should we trust these things?
Give me a human pilot, with proper training they can make error judgement calls better and can use instinct and other senses to make better decisions. Plus you can yell at them and get results, yell at autopilot and it won't do a damn thing.
While that may sound like a lot, it's really not, considering an F-16 can carry up to 14,000 lbs. of ordinance, an F-18 can carry almost 18,000, and an F-15 can carry up to 23,000 lbs.
I suppose these craft are being developed for a more supplementary role, because pilotless aircraft with all the capabilities of today's fighter/attack jets are still quite a ways off.
It will be interesting to see, though, because pilotless planes should be able to outperform planes with pilots in them, (in theory at least) due to the human pilot not being able to deal with very high G-forces for extended periods, and other similar limitations of the human body.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
i will concede the point that because of this drone our bombings will increase. i am however happy with this trend of "advancement" that the military seems to be going through.
erichj
Right now it seems to be an Air Force only thing, but once the tech is developed I wonder if we could see alot of these being by the Navy, launched off of carriers.
I'm sure we could fit a whole lot more of these on Carriers than we could our current strike aircraft.
So, you're saying the reason the US doesn't bomb everything in sight is because they would "have to risk a pilot or an expensive plane" to do so?
Inevitably brings to mind the words of Roger Waters, from The Bravery of Being Out of Range, off of Amused to Death:
You hit the target
And win the game
From bars 3,000 miles away
By making the trigger farther and farther away from the victim, you dehumanize people even further.
How long before John Conner starts sending Terminator robots back to destroy things?
Along similar lines, Northrop Grumman is working on a naval uninhabitted combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) of their own. Take a look at their 'Pegasus' here.
The idea is that these things could be placed in storage and then pulled out only for when combat is imminent: pilots would be unable to tell the difference between simulator and real combat. Obviously, some random testing of the equipment is needed, but expensive training gets a whole lot easier and cheaper.
Finally, keep in mind, at this point they are going to be used for SEAD (supression of enemy air defenses) and precision strike, not air-to-air combat. That will be another 20 years off. Bandwidth is a killer in that application.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Basically these are cruise missles that return the returnable parts instead of destroying them. Think of these things as the space shuttle vs just big rockets.
(only of course for the analogy to hold, you'd need to make the space shuttle carry 10x what it currently can)
All we need is one general with a weird obsession about pure water and the unmanned bombers will go out causing mass destruction and risking world war three unless we can guess his recall code.
Then again, if it is unmanned who will be there to manually unstick and release the bomb and ride it down? Maybe this is a good idea for real-life afterall, just not very exciting for a movie end sequence.
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
Assuming the communications link to the aircraft would be heavily encrypted and completely undecipherable, would the enemy still be able to saturate the airwaves with noise, so as to make it impossible for ground/space stations to communicate with the aircraft. I'd imagine the AI would be quite similar to the Tomahawk cruise missiles, since they manage to work pretty much autonomously, however it seems their design includes a remote pilot. If you bring down the communications link, that plan would probably become nothing more than a $14 million cruise missile.
- Tempestdata
It could make dog fighting more interesting: this thing could potentially pull more Gs and for longer than current planes as there is no need to worry about the pilot blacking/redding out.
While I believe that the costs will be cheaper than conventional warcraft, lines like this, from the X-45 page, get me:
Because of their small size, lack of pilot interfaces and training requirements, reusability and long-term storage capability, UCAVs are projected to cost up to 65 percent less to produce than future manned fighter aircraft, and up to 75 percent less to operate and maintain than current systems.
I believe there will most certainly still be training costs - someone still has to fly the planes, regardless of where the person is in reference to the plane. Granted, it will be cheaper to train, since the person can do more in a simulator and does not have to worry about airtime, but training costs are still definitely there.
The other thing is transmitters and the actual "cockpit" (where the "pilot" would be stationed). Moving all of the controls of numerous planes to an off-plane location will require incredible amounts of technology and construction. That is also a recurring cost, as more and more remote controls would have to be built.
I also wonder if they include things like replacement parts and ground crews in their figure that it will cost "75 percent less to operate and maintain." I think that parts and labor are going to be constant, event with new planes. Pilots are obviously an expensive part of military aircraft, but I have to wonder if simply moving the pilot to the ground is going to save 75%.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
...can someone say attack of the clones?
Droid attackers controlled from a control center?
I saw the name and thought it was a flying version of the x-10 wireless camera...
Now I'd pay for that!
I'd even probably look at the pop-up ads.
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
Will they be hooking these planes up to video games for kids, and will Robin Williams be able to save us in time?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I'm glad it's a plane from Boeing. When I first saw the title "X-45", I thought it's x10.com's latest innovation since the pop under ad - the pop inbetween ad, or the pop inside your ass ad.
I'm amazed at the people suggesting that there's something wrong with this because we're removing ourselves to far from actual hands-on killing.
War is about winning. Glory and bravery are bizarre side-effects.
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Perhaps the pilot will control the lead plane and the others will automatically fall-in in formation?
The military technology has greatly surpassed that of the rest of the world! A thought to ponder though. If servers on the web, including government agencies, can get hacked. Who's to say these smart RC aircrafts are not prone to the same vulnerability? Just a thought!
It's to make the other guy die for his.
It's not as if autonomous weapons are something new. And this is a heck of a lot better than the cruise missle's "Go to the following GPS coordinates and explode" technique. Or the ICBM's "burn your engines on this trajectory, and then when you get close to the ground again, blow up".
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
Yeah you named off some heavy hitters, but what about the apache still considered a heavy hitter with much less than a 3000 lb capacity (more like 2000 if i remember right). or we could go with the OH-58D with its massive 300lb ordinance load. or the current preditor with its 120lb load. 300 *is* a lot of fire power in a machine that weighs in at about 10000 lbs total.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Yes.
UAVs are already operating from carriers. Predators were launched from the USS Carl Vinson during the whole Bosnia deal.
They are so small, light and have short enough take-off/landing requirements that this is pretty easy to do.
To my knowledge all branches of the military have UAV programs in full swing.
.
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?
Was a tongue-in-cheek parody of a typical slashdot comment. When in Rome... The first two questions I really was curious about. But seriously, any armed pilotless plane had better have all the bugs worked out before it goes up, no matter what it runs on (and yes, I know it will be custom and proprietary; most military stuff is. Have you ever seen one of the diskless, two hundred pound armored dumb terminals painted olive drab they used to use?)
The days of the intrepid dog fighting pilot have been over for some time anyway... I suppose this is just a natural extension of that.
Kindly name a country that can field a force capable of taking on either the Air Force or the Navy. heck, we can limit it to just one Navy carrier group.
(If that country's on the UN Security Council, put it down and try again.)
When we started using cruise missles, we were called cowards. When we started using tanks, we were called cowards. When we started using machine guns, regular guns, pike squares, and siege warfare, we were called cowards. When we started using arrows for war or just plain throwing sticks, we were called cowards.
"Coward" is a word that should be limited to people who refuse to take risk and fail--not those that refuse to take a risk they can find a way around, and win.
The only reason our enemies call us cowards is because, if we were to fight them on their own terf, they'd have slightly better than a snowball's chance in hell against us.
Geesh. It's been years since the last real innovation in aviation history and eventually something new comes along.
And what is it all about? About killing people with less personal attachment and more anonymously than it already is.
Methinks you americans should spend such vast amounts of money rather on different things than warfare. Such as education, social welfare and finally for real science with real use.
-1, Flamebait. But had to be said.
&& aemula C. ab stirpe interiit
The Anime that ran on Cartoon Network a year or two ago called Gundam Wing delt with the implications for war when you use unmanned machines to do all the fighting for you. While you may or may not see taking lessons away from cartoons with giant city smashing robots, its still an interesting perspective on the matter. It basically makes the claim that any war that isn't fought between people is meaningless. While many political leaders feel war serves on the purpose of getting them what they want, soldiers often have a very different perspective of what they're doing and why.
This kind of link has been required for a long time w/many systems already in use that need to share information on the battlefield.
STARS is something that does a lot of this already. (My sister in law works for Boeing and Apaches are able to share incredible amounts of data w/a wide variety of) systems.
That site should give some good info and be a good launch pad for further digging if you are really interested in military data links.
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?
I just love how we can use the "neat new technology" line to hype instruments of death. _Popular mechanics_ is notorious for this. Now Slashdot.
Go ahead, mod me down. This makes me sick.
Are you saying it's better to put our (U.S.) soldiers at risk when it's not necessary in order to promote "diplomatic solutions"?
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On the one hand, a pilotless bomber is a great idea - why risk a human life if a machine can do the job? On the other hand it's more than a little scary - when your wars are fought by machines, human beings are in the way.
For nearly all of history, some people have thought they have a license or right to kill other people. Its one of the primary activities of humans - kill other humans. To become more efficient at this, we keep making human-killing technology better and better. Now we're talking about giving that license to machines.
The biggest difference between the movie Blade Runner (which I love) and PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep on which the movie was based (which I also love, for different reasons) is that in Dick's world androids have no compassion, no caritas. They have no inate regard for human life, or any life for that matter.
The Nuremburg trials established that "I was following orders" is not a valid excuse for committing atrocities during wartime. That only works for humans, though, since machines have no moral compass. We're talking about giving a license to kill humans to a machine with no soul, no regard for life, and no accountability. All in the name of efficiency.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
While a nifty idea, it's probably not coming Anytime Soon Now.
Launching from a carrier is a generally simply affair - engines up, hold on, up stick. Cake
Landings are where the problem lies - it'd take (IMO) a WHOLE LOT of work to make a plane that could not only land, but land on a platform that is pitching, rolling, and moving, at the same time. And when your mistakes cost millions, it's not exactly like you can just say "Oops, forgot to compensate for input from gyro 3 - recompile bring out another one!"
Someday, though, I'm sure. Someday.
Brandon
I wonder how effective jamming would be if they took advantage of ultra wide-band/spread spectrum techniques, along with satellite linkages. Seems as though it would be hard to jam that stuff.. all the plane needs to do is look up and use a few gHz of frequencies, and you'd be hard pressed to block that.
Depends on how much effort you're willing to put in the jamming.
Jamming is just sending enough radio noise at the target to make the noise in the desired part of signal space louder than the signal.
For a kid's walkie-talkie, that means dumping noise into a narrow region of spectrum. For frequency-hopping radio, that means dumping noise into many regions of spectrum at once (unless your spies have retrieved the hopping algorithm). For impulse-based UWB, you dump a lot of randomly-timed impulses out (easier if your spies or observations give you approximate timings). For scrambled spread-spectrum radio, you either dump an ungodly amount of noise into the band used to raise the noise floor enough that even coding and correlation don't save you (do-able), or you get your spies to find the family of scrambling codes used and pattern your noise into that band of signal space.
In summary, jamming will always work, either through espionage or through brute force and ignorance.
We're one step closer to the 'dog and pilot' flight crew:
A pilot in case of an emergency and a dog to bite the pilot if he touches the controls.
The cool thing about these remote controlled planes is that they are not subject to the g-force limitations of a pilot in the cockpit. In a dogfight, it would be no contest as an automated aircraft could out maneuver any manned fighter.
Technology has come a long way; we have not. We build better weapons to kill people with more efficiency. We focus on winning the conflict, but not preventing it.
No doubt, it is a very cool piece of technology. I can't imaging the engineering that went into it. I wish this energy went into exploring other planets, instead of "fighting for peace".
Once upon a time, you had to look into someone's eyes to kill them. Then you could do the job from 20 yards away, 100 yards away, from 2 miles in the air, from another nation, another continent.
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.
We use space-age technology to accomplish cave-man goals. We don't need better weapons, we somehow need better people.
=brian
In the past, non-nuclear EMP weaponry has been a fantasy, but there are some valid ideas on how to implement such a weapon.
Who thinks that developments such as these unmanned drones are going to lead to an increase in efforts to develop a non-nuclear EMP weapon?
In the end, could it result in warfare going backwards? (EMP renders electronic warfare and computer-controlled weaponry much more difficult to use, resulting in a return to more old-fashioned technologies?)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Jamming a signal is simple, compared to intercepting it. And as the US military becomes increasingly reliant on its advanced communication network to wage war, it will become a simple way of levelling the playing field for the bad guys.
I was thinking about jamming too, but the real furball usually starts with knocking out the SAM sites -- the guys still flying F-4's with HARM missles. Turn on your radar/jammer, eat a missle. Things quite down after a bit of hunting with those. Unmanned patrol craft set to paste anyone who tries to target it with a SAM... or even tries to see what is flying about with the radar...
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Hmm, brings a new concept to the Blue Screen of Death when the computer crashes, and so does the plane (loaded with bombs). In this case I certainly would not want to be some poor shmoe in the field, even if the planes were on *my* side.
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?
OK, first one to hack into these babies and have them looping-the-loop on demand officially has the best kung-fu.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
and how is it a massive improvement over missiles except that it comes back? actually today's missiles travel faster than planes so what's the point? bomb someone with these and wait for missiles to rain back, only they'll come much faster! (i think they are much cheaper too)
We already have plenty of technology in the battle field, such as electronic beacons etc. The only Allied casualties in the Gulf War were when the Americans blew up and killed British troops. So called "friendly fire". The only Allied casualties so far in the Afghan war was when the Americans bombed and killed Canadian troops. More so called "friendly fire". And now you want to put American firepower under the finger of someone even *further* removed from the responsibility of his actions? Sorry but the American military has a lot of trust to regain before we let the US military bring new toys to the party.
Phillip.
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Great, so those X-10 webcams featured in those annoying pop-up ads can fly now? Is there no end to the invasion of our privacy?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Looks as if it is going to be a while before any Military can totally remove people from the air battlefield, or for that matter rely solely one one form of weapon in order to carry out appropriate duties.
It really does not make sence to go into a battle with every armed with these planes, because there are certain things that these unmanned bombers cannot do.
The whole emphasis on developing these devices is that they can be easly sacrificed when there is a problem and there is a need to carry out a complex bombing mission with a high risk. It is not as if every single operation that is going to take part in a war/battle is going to be based around these things. They are going to be used with a conjunction of other methods as well. Any military command would have to be totally insance to fight a war based purely on machinery such as this. It might happen in the future, but we are still talking a number of years off.
However from the perspective of loosing one of these things in enemy territory, then you would have to make sure that it is throughly destroyed. Remember during "Desert Storm" when the US was using a lot of cruise missiles, and occasionaly the things would be shot down. The US Military then bombed the location of the crashed cruise missile as quickly as possible to ensure that "other states" would not get their hands on the technology.
I don't think bandwidth is going to be more important in air-to-air operations than in ground ops. I suspect it's backwards, even... in ground ops distinguishing the target from the environment is going to be a lot harder than in air ops, and that's a tough task for computers to do autonomously.
I think they'll really be nasty in air-to-air operations. Without a human pilot, these suckers are not going to be limited to a mere 6 or 8 gees. Once the engineers figure out how to maintain control at higher accelerations, I expect they'll be designing UCAVs to pull 12 gees or more. Add to that enough brains to fly some autonomous evasion rules, and these things are going to be very survivable.
A scenario: Fly your unmanned swarm into the opposing manned formation, and let them all (autonomously) fly for position. They won't all get good position on the enemy; they won't even all survive necessarily. But your battle manager can see when one does get good position, and assign a pilot to take telepresence control of it. He jumps in and flies it until he gets a shot or loses position. When it's no longer in good position, the pilot flits to another UCAV in a better spot, while the machine reverts to autonomous operation to work for position again. Done right, you can probably have three or four drones per pilot.
Of course, there's nothing preventing the other guys from doing this, too...
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
The US no longer uses F-4's, except as target drones. The F-16 now carries HARMs for the Wild Weasel mission.
The really worrying thing about the way that technology has advanced at an ever-increasing pace is the fact that it now places some similar powerful offensive capabilities well within the grasp of terrorists and smaller countries.
UAVs, RPVs and cruise missiles are a perfect example of a technology that is well within the reach of such foes of the USA.
The ready availability of low-cost GPS units with computer interfaces, small and efficient low cost high powered computers, advanced composites such as kevlar and carbon-fiber, solid-state gyros, high-power servos and cheap but powerful jet engines (such as this or maybe this) has lowered the barrier to entry significantly.
Up until now the might and technical superiority of the US defense arsenal has proved a mighty deterrent and (when used) a mighty effective tool in battle.
The only response that terrorists and small factions have had to the US's superiority has been to offer suicide bombings and attacks such as those of September 11.
However, now that just about anyone (or group) with access to some readily available knowledge and equipment can produce their own cruise missile , RPV or AUV, things could begin to change -- for the worse.
Imagine the effect that such a craft would have if it were programmed to fly over NYC and dispense a payload of anthrax or other bio-agent over a wide area as it went?
Such a remotely piloted or autonomous vehicle could be built for as little as US$10,000 and could be launched from the roof of a van or SUV at a location which might be several hundred miles from the intended target.
The use of a fairly small airframe built from composites would mean a low radar profile and the onboard computer operating in concert with an onboard GPS receiver and small radar distancing system would allow a low-altitude pre-programmed flight path to be followed with relative ease.
That good numbers of these machines could be built using "off the shelf" materials and components that would not ring any bells in the way that the training of Al Qaeda pilots did, is worrying.
Imagine the effect of 20 or 30 of these missiles being launched simultaneously at NYC or LA on a warm summer's day when plenty of people are outdoors enjoying the sun.
Just as the X-45, Tomahawk and other remotely piloted or automomous weapons can impersonalize a war for the USA, we should be aware that the same may now be true for the USA's foes. Suicide bombing may become redundant real soon now.
How soon until they start monitoring and weeding out young children, and put them in front of this new 'video game'?
:)
Now it's only a matter of time before our enemies hear the dreaded words of our ace 10 year old pilots. "U sux u friggin n00b!" or perhaps upon a stinging defeat "ARG!! My ping suckz0rs@%&)@%"
If it comes to actual dogfighting, false cues like that take a split second off the enemy's reaction time. Recent fighter designs have vectoring egine nozzles, and there were concepts with canard (in the front) wings in addition to the regular wings. One interesting side affect of the combination was that the control surfaces (ailerons, elevators, rudders) were no longer as good an indication of what the plane was going to do next -- roll, turn, climb, dive. One of the tricks in dogfighting is to watch those controls to know what the enemy will do next. The plane could actually fly level but with a slightly nose down attitude. Not only was it good for strafing ground targets, it was very upsetting to another pilot trying to follow it aorund the sky. The false cues were confusing enough to give a solid edge in dogfighting.
Whether dogfighting itself is still of much use is a good question, since there aren't many airforces willing to battle the USA in the air. But the experts have been predicting the end of dogfighting since the 1950s.
Infuriate left and right
These robot planes give an old soldier like me cold chills. Soon we will be able to wreak havoc on other nations and peoples with nary a scratch on our own people. That will be wonderful until our enemies start using them on us. Then we'll be right back where we started. Throwing rocks then running back into the cave...
These automated planes are nothing but the forerunnners of the fearsome tentacled war robots in the Matrix. Loathesome...!
We use space-age technology to accomplish cave-man goals. We don't need better weapons, we somehow need better people
No, we need a global gaming treaty.
Let's face it, although some argue that computer war games are becoming increasingly realistic the real truth is that real war is becoming increasingly computer game-like.
Let's hope that eventually everyone will wake up and realize that instead of wasting billions of dollars on *real* weapons, nations can resolve their problems far more cheaply by simply firing up their PS4 and shooting at each other that way.
After all -- is there really any difference?
In both cases (UAVs/RPVs and computer games) nobody gets hurt.
In both cases the outcome is based on pressing buttons and strategic actions/reactions.
In both cases the outcome is a winner and a loser.
If we simply moved all these conflicts onto the Playstation then war could actually become fashionable -- a recreation that the whole family could enjoy.
Who would have guessed that computer games might become the planet's last hope for global peace?
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.
Googling "ucav x-45" brought up the usual tons of hits. One of the more interesting was from the Federation of American Scientists' Miliraty Analysis Network.
An interesting feature, besides all of the usual high-tech stuff people talk about here, is the storage aspect. This is mentioned in several articles, but what this means is that the planes do not have to be designed with the same mission life that manned aircraft do. This is because about 80% of a military aircraft's life is training missions. The UCAV doesn't have this- the training is done in simulators, that aren't really any different from real life.
This is a big step toward reducing the costs.
Jason
In case you didn't read the article, here's the essential quote:
In a typical mission scenario, multiple UCAVs will be equipped with preprogrammed objectives and preliminary targeting information from ground-based mission planners. Operations can then be carried out autonomously, but can also be managed interactively or revised en route by UCAV controllers should new objectives or targeting information dictate.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Note the word AUTONOMOUS.
This thing won't require a pilot for every little detail of its flight. If you change your mind about something, you tell the computer, LAND AT HOME BASE. Push the "Commit" button. Wait half an hour, and the thing lands and parks itself at the ramp.
If you think this is a pipe dream, they've already done it - repeatably, and reliably, with the Global Hawk - which has seen combat in Afghanistan. The plane is preprogrammed (by an engineer, NOT a pilot), and taxis out, takes off, flies its mission, returns to base, and taxis back to the ramp - without a single additional real-time command. (GPS is a wonderful thing...)
The only difference here is that this thing will be also able to drop bombs.
So, YES, it will save pilot training costs. Hugely. One person would be able to command many of these things - even at the same time. If the computer cannot handle the problem by itself, it probably cannot be handled by a real-time pilot either.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Now soldiers can sit back in a Laz-e-boy and wipe out civilians anywhere in the world. I hope the evil bastards building these rotten things are proud of themselves.
Since this plane is autonomous, and flies a preprogrammed mission based on intelligence and satellite data, the chances are actually much lower of a real-time mistake. Most of the friendly fire deaths in recent combat have been caused by a pilot error in the heat of combat - "Gee, that looks like an Iraqi tank." Forget it - this won't happen in a preprogrammed mission.
Sure, you will always have bad targeting, but you're largely reducing the ability of ONE person's incorrect decision to make someone's day really, really bad. Instead, you've got quite a few eyes looking at the targeting data, along with plenty of direct access to information about where your troops actually are.
So in my opinion, this thing will end up killing FEWER friendly troops than ever before.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
call things 'prudent' and 'effective' that amateurs and romantics call 'cowardly' If you come at a professional with a knife, he wants to shoot you with a gun, at a distance; if you have a gun, he wants a morter. If you have a morter, he wants artillery; if you have artillery, he wants air support. It's about making some other dumb son of a bitch die for his country. A misaimed UAV isn't much worse than a short round from a 155mm gun. Stop hand wringing-- once you decide to be in a shooting war, it's ugly. The stick and rudder guys in the pointy planes may not like UAVs, but they understand the motivations. They probably don't want to be flying a lot of the missions that they are (or will be) assigned to perform. When I was in school, a teacher once said to the class, "if we're at war, I want killers on my side." That's the job, if it comes to that. The military people I know don't want to fight, but they'll do it for us when required. It's nearly memorial day. Go hug a serviceman, servicewoman, or vetern you know. -dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
...through conventional means, then the rest of the world must play dirty.
Increasing automation of weaponry, and now, total remote control has led and will lead to fewer and fewer deaths of American servicemen and women. This, in turn, removes the single biggest reason for the American political establishment to hold back from launching into war; if there are no body bags flying home, who is going to bother voting these politicians out of office? If a victory can be gained quickly and the opposing side forced to follow the American Way, generating a tidy profit in the process for those American companies that will help them see the light, it is entirely good political karma. Where once a diplomatic solution would have been applied, politicans will be all too keen to apply military solutions instead. No risk, all gain.
America cannot expect those in the world who do not share her views to sit idly by whilst this happens. When people are fighting for what they believe to be their country or their way of life, they will continue to fight back no matter what the military imbalance may be against them. This can be seen, for instance, in the current Israel/Palestine conflict, where despite being massively outgunned and confined to very limited areas, the Palestinians continue to get back up off the floor and keep fighting.
Notice how the Palestinians fight back. They do not have a conventional army, so they must choose other means. Currently, their method of choice seems to be the suicide bomb, and they are called terrorists by the Israelis. The Palestinians, of course, who believe that they are fighting to regain their homeland, call them martyrs.
This is what lies in store for America should she choose to go down this path. Without fear of being voted out of office thanks to the technology, American politicians will throw the country into many wars, and no doubt she will win them in spectacular fashion. However, the opposition will fight back, not through conventional means but through 'terrorism'. It is easy to infiltrate a country as proud of its freedoms as America. What lies in store then? Suicide bombs? Information warfare? Or worse?
We have already seen this scenario once, with September 11th. I am firmly of the belief that the key driving force behind Bin Laden is that he feels his homeland, Saudi Arabia, is being 'occupied' by American forces stationed there since the Gulf War. Of course there is much more to it than that, but it is all too convenient that his anti-American rage became prominent only in the years following the Gulf War.
When this starts to happen, how do you stop it? The obvious way is to restrict those very freedoms that allow the enemy to infiltrate and perpetrate this 'terrorism'. Then what happened to the 'American Way', the very thing that the war was meant to be protecting in the first place?
It's time we started thinking about some of the consequences of the great superiority in American military technology, before those consequences come back to haunt us.
I'll say this though: one way some terrorist could potentially render a UCAV useless is to detonate what's known as an electro-magnetic pulse bomb (a bomb that spreads a big cloud of energized carbon filaments). Such a bomb could render all electronics virtually useless since electromagnetic field caused by such an explosion will render all electronics useless in a very localized version of a EMP effects from a nuclear detonation.
Mind you, I'm sure the designers of UCAV's have built the plane so they are not affected by EMP blasts caused by such a device.
..it is sure to not have happened. Only tin foil crackpots could suspect that NSA would be secretive about such a thing!
People have too much faith in cryptography. History has shown us that every major encryption algorithm has been broken. The simple Vernham cipher (aka One-time-pad) is the _only_ cryptosystem that can be proven mathematically to be secure beyond all doubt.
Considering the radio link can be jammed, or DDOS'ed, the best case scenario is that these planes will be turned into stupid, expensive missles. The worst case scenario is probably unthinkable.
The Germans lost WWII because of their belief in the infallibility of Enigma.
In my opinion winning a conflict _is_ preventing conflict, In the longer term sense at least. War is an unfortunate part of life, why not because as some would say it is our instinct to fight, but progress is a battle. Back to my original point, the United States has developed a good position to prevent war, its quite simple, if you wage war then you die. This in no way prevents all wars, of course not, if the US wants to wage war against someone then, nobodys going to stop them.
The real issue you made, is not the battles we fight now, its the battles we _are_ slowly winning. Your comment "we somehow need better people." is correct but, I would state that we are working on it. Of course despite the fact that we are all so impaitent and short lived, these changes take time. Lots of time. Over the past 100 years we have evolved as people to a very very different world, with a much more significant proportion of maybe lets call them; "Good willed, free loving" people. In my opinion we need at minimum another hundred years, maybe more, but it is not a question of how can we, or when will we, but a question of simply how much more pain we will have to endure in the mean time.
Conflict or war is a part of evolution, my reference being evolution of society. Largly gone are the days when wars were simply fought over land, not that it still doesnt happen, but i dont see Australia invading New Zealand, or simiar. That maybe an extremem over-simplification, yes India is seriously thinking about invading Pakistan right now, Isreal still occupies Palistine, etc, etc. But it comes back to my previous point, politically western nations (in general) have put in the past such disputes, the few remaining ones are purley idological.
Slowly these idological battles will be resolved, and with time eventually all peoples and nations, will realise there is a better way. One day..
This article (Google cache of MSNBC) was posted a ways back, about the "bandwidth crunch" that the military has experienced in Afganistan. As I understood the technology, though, most of the signal is directed up, to the sattelites, so jamming in and of itself might not be that big of an issue.
In related news, the Romafeller Foundation announced their interest in the X-45, saying it would make "a useful companion technology" to an undisclosed project of their own. This comes amidst rumors of divided upper management.
And you probably call Americans stupid.
Frankly, if we were willing to lose some ground-hugging robots with stun guns, we could probably win a war without actually killing any of the enemy, just imprisoning them for a little while ;)
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
Something like this will completely change the dynamics of war. The future of warfare is robotic infantry and special forces enfused with nanomachine armor. I think its a mostly great thing. It seems to me, that the closest thing to peace is a war without casualties. War is an inevitability and if modern technology can provide a way for soldiers to sit in a safe location and control their mechanical counterparts and defend our country I think that's great. But we do run the risk of turning warfare into nothing more than a giant video game. Politicians may be too quick to act without that barrier of the enormous casualties that modern warfare brings with it. What worries me even more is that I think it can be empirically proven that the younger the people the better they are at video games. Faster hand/eye coordination, etc. Is it such a large mental jump to think that special drafts might be instituted to get the best of these new soldiers from the ranks of under-18 year olds? Perhaps this thought doesn't hold up, but it seems like a logical progression to me.
Go watch some R/C glider pilots sometime. It is absolutely amazing to watch a pilot single-handedly bring his bird in from fifty feet away five feet off the ground, fly it directly towards himself, and get the timing on the flare so perfect that it stalls in his other hand.
If a bunch of hobbyists can do that even with wind gusts (gusts + hills seem to attract R/C glider pilots), there's no reason someone couldn't cleanly land something remotely on a carrier that usually carries aircraft seven times as heavy.
This machine doesn't make decisions, it's still told what to do, when to release and what targets to destroy. Think RC war plane, not autonomous fighter.
An unmanned jet could use 360 degree viewing, updated thousands of times a second, with the aid of satellite data beemed in every second, to gain a complete view of the sky that would give it a huge advantage over any crew, even two man crews.
No, unmanned fighters won't stop terrorists. Thats obvious. But unmanned surveillance drones that will collect massive amounts of data and never need to come back for a pee break, just might.
Peace is won through strength. Somehow that simple fact escaped you in history class, but your bashful pleas for peace love and happiness are completely out of line with what we know about human nature and human history. If you value your culture, you defend it.
Obviously UCAV's won't be replacing real pilots for anything but specific missions anytime soon.
I can see some interesting possibilities with this though. You could give a whole new meaning to the EWO (Electronics Warfare Officer / Copilot) on planes like the F-14 and such. One fighter/bomber with a real pilot and EWO, and three or four UCAVS under his control... Each with specific capabilities loaded on.
You'd have to get the controls away from the "truck sized" stage and probably into a virtual display but this would be a big force multiplier.
"I'm about to drop the hammer and dispense some indiscriminate justice!"
Does anyone remember that Star Trek The Next Generation episode where Captin Picard and Dr. Crusher become stranded on the planet whose population was destroyed by those flying robotic solders?
Get the guys from Junkyard Wars (aka Scrapheap Challenge for those in the UK) to "bodge" together a motorcycle engine, a propellor, 100kg of C4, a GPS receiver and some control circuitry. Brand new and in quantity these could probably go for about $10,000.
Let's see... for the price of one of these drones (assume $20 million for the drone), we could launch 2000 of our expendable smart bombs.
Now, now, I know theirs will probably be supersonic, but let's face it: most of the enemies can't hit the broad side of a barn, and if we send 5 or 6 of these things on target at least one will get through.
That's the big problem with the US military: too much money spent on big showpiece weapons. They've forgotten what won WWII. It was massive industrial output. We no longer have the ability to flood the battlefield with thousands of cheap weapons. God forbid somebody gets lucky and shoots down a B-2. That's what... a billion dollars? Yikes!
Yeah, I know, we're doing great now, but when it comes to military stuff "now" is yesterday. The future won't look all that bright if we keep buying our weapons from Gucci.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
So many posts have lamented the dehumanizing effects of remote-control warfare. Well, guess what - unless you're currently out on the front lines, you're already engaged in the ultimate form of remote-control warfare. Has there ever been another place or time when a government launches a massive military campaign, and all it asks of its civilian population is more consumer spending and travel? Has that dehumanized the opponents in your eyes? Are you willing to give up our push-button military and put yourself into the battle?
"Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest that I am hard to turn" -- A Scots-Irish prayer
>The military is always claiming that Force Protection is one of the most important things they do.
I never knew the U.S. military was using The Force. But that would explain their fascination with hokey religions and ancient weapons.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
"while low ring the overall cost of combat operations"
I've been working under a high ring freeze for the last year, is that similar?
Time for a rant:
One of the defining strategies of the American armed forces since the Gulf War is a near pathelogical reluctance to accept friendly casulties.
Now there's nothing wrong with wanting to keep your own guys alive, but this obsession with not accepting casulties is subordinating other aspects of the military mission. There is a deliberate movement to reduce the effectiveness of weapon systems if it means less risk for American troops.
Don't confuse "effectiveness" with "lethality" - weapons systems are only getting MORE lethal with time. What I am talking about is identifying and killing military targets AND ONLY military targets.
The most effective means of knowing for sure if what you are shooting at is a legitimate target is to be in actual contact with it - that normally means troops on the ground. If you think there's baddies in that building, you go send some soldiers to have a look.
But that exposes those soldiers to risk, and risk isn't allowed in the American battle manual any more. Instead, the new modus operendi is to drop a bomb - preferably many bombs - on anything you figure may have a target in it. Then you take satellite pictures of the crater to see what you hit.
The side effect is to inflict a much higher percentage of civillian and friendly casulties than would be otherwise done. Yes, you hit the bad guys, but you also hit hospitals, orphanages, and other non-legitimate targets LIKE YOUR OWN PEOPLE.
But as bad as this is, at least in a modern fighter/bomber you have a set of eyeballs attached to a decision-making process that can choose not to attack if they actually clue in that the target is non-legitimate. The record of those eyeballs is not great - witness the British Warriors taken out in the Gulf by American A10s, and the latest moron National Guardsman who saw fit to bomb a Canadian training exercise - but at least they were there. They were given the opportunity to not screw up.
With a remotely-piloted plane, no matter how good the sensors are on the user interface, they will not be as good as the current eyeballs in the plane are. If eyeballs in a plane have a crappy record, then the record of the RPVs is going to be even worse.
Less risk to the guys behind the weapon systems, but MORE risk for the guys on the ground - enemy, friendly, and neutral!
Somebody needs to get a grip on the guys in charge of the American Air Force. They need to be reminded that they cannot win battles on their own, that their ultimate mission is support of the troops on the ground, and that the risk of loss of life to those troops is part of the tradeoff for doing the job right. Indiscriminate bombing is NOT acceptable.
And for the kiddies who may think that you can videogame your way through everything, I have 10 years experience in the Army as a Armoured Recce soldier, so I actually DO know what I am talking about. Nothing in the Real World is as hated and feared as the American Air Force, because they are just as likely to bomb you or a crowd of civillians as they are the bad guys.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Chinese hackers have already learned to reverse engineer the spread spectrum control and flight patterns to re-deploy those 3k of bombs right back on the air field.
meh
We, as human beings, are pretty good at making stuff that will really, really hurt some jerk we don't like. In the past, our technology required us to get up close and personal with the jerk we don't like. Now that we have all become fat, lazy, high advanced, couch potatoes, we have modified our form of killing other humans so we can do it from the luxury of a climate controlled bunker, thousands of miles away from the jerk we don't like. Ain't progress grand?!?!?!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Send a daisy-cutter towards your jammer, and all the sacrificial targets, plus the real one, will go down in one shot :)
But let's play a thought experiment for a moment. Suppose the controller were 1000 miles away and the jammer were 100 miles away; we'll assume free-space propogation, because everything goes up. That gives a 20dB advantage to the jammer. We'll get it back for the good guys by going to a 20dB directional antenna, plus we'll put out 100 chips per bit (not even UWB, == 20dB processing gain). Combine that with a 100W transmitter, and the jammer has to do 1kW to do a reasonable job jamming (-10dB SNR).
Agents stealing the radio codes isn't that easy. Suppose each UAV has a tamperproof module that speaks some key exchange protocol. Controller and UAV exchange nonces, run keyexchange, hash nonces and key exchange results for a session key, and communicate using that as an encryption key, chipping code, etc. Basically then the only person who can steal the codes is the operator him/herself, or someone who can compromise both the UAV and the controller, which makes a physical attack better than a jamming attack (eg disable the rudder or whatever).
...Three different women named Sarah Connor have been found brutally murdered in their homes. Police have yet to name any suspects.
I once shot a man in Reno 'cause they cancelled Firefly.
That list of 'evil' countries gets longer every month. Watch out when it gets to you.
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
Now this is exactly what Jack Ripper needed in Dr Strangelove. No problems with having to set up secret codes, closing down bases etc.
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
The AirForce test their aircraft for vulnerabilities to EMP. I never worked on an aircraft that was extremely dependent on avionics (I was a UH-1H mech at one time) but I've heard stories from members of the airforce about hardening aircraft against EMP. I know the Army has experimented with it on Tanks. Funny thing, the Russians use radios and electrics in their tanks that still run on vacumme tubes. However vacumme tubes are no vulnerable to EMP.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
... the Taleban can make aeroplane strikes without sacrificing their own men. They just hack up few X45's. This is gonna save so many lives!
Once this thing goes into production or gets fielded, it will need a nickname. And just like the A-10 is named "Thunderbolt", but more appropriately nicknamed "Warthog" to match its appearance, the X-45 should be nicknamed the "Mola mola", or just "Mola".
Of course _you_ probably don't get it, because although you are a nerd, _you_ are not _me_. But Google will let you in on the fun. Click links until you find pictures. I especially like the pix I found at http://www.earthwindow.com/mola2.html. To quote a line from a Marx Brothers' movie (_Horsefeathers_?): "I give you a hint. It's the name of a fish!"
wow as a tax payer i am glad those planes are kind of cheap.
Imean with such a low initial estimate by the time the contract is signed and Boeing does its usual trick on the US government those planes will probably cost us no more than $50 mil each!!!
Hmmm.... I wonder what sort of impact this is going to have on the military's bandwidth shortage?
Americans like to wage war without the natural justice of having casualties.
look at their reliance on air superiority, It's gotten to the stage that their mountain troops don't even do mountains
& look at their reliance on gadgets, no wonder they couldn't cope with peasents in pyjamas in the jungle with nothing but Kalashnikovs & RPGs, & had to resort to defolients.
Hence its no wonder how pissed they are at UBL et alle - they were able to take out more than 3000 Americans & many billions in American real estate simply through the use of Stanley knives & by putting their own lives on the line.
Something that US Special forces wouldn't pull off without millions in high tech gadgets etc & would probably fuck up.
-
Smash enemy air defenses.
-
Bomb enemy into rubble with repeated missions by bombers that can't defend themselves against
a serious air defense.
Part 1 is the risky part, the one in which most pilots and aircraft are lost. The X45 is built for that. It's a stealthy aircraft, which is a big help in phase 1, but isn't needed in phase 2.After all, America's biggest conventional bomb is delivered by shoving it out the back of a trash-hauler.
Terminator, Robocop, Matrix? They all have one thing in common, human independent firepower.
Just like all those "lone crazy officer"s in the ICBM silos who shot their colleagues and turned their launch keys. Ever hear of a magical thing called Two Person Integrity (TPI)? In ICBM silos, there are two key slots 14 feet apart that have to be turned within a fraction of a second (the exact value escapes me at the moment), thus assuring that two people must independently agree to launch a nuke. A similar system would work for the UCAV -- just ensure that no single person can fire up the X-45's OS or begin preflight.
NB: TPI in ICBM silos can be defeated, one of my Security Forces friends (who actually guarded silos) assures me. According to him, he had a conversation once with a missileer LT who had worked out how to do it using his bootlaces and dog tags, the bootlaces and dog tags of his dead counterpart, and the spork from his "box nasty" (USAF dining facility box lunch). So no system's perfect. But I'd kinda get a kick out of watching some rogue butterbar put 3000 lbs. of munitions into a civilian city. Just as long as it's not mine. :)
They that would sacrifice their
Gender ratio close enough to 50-50 that I'd have to take a census to find out what it actually was. And there was an agreeable fashion consensus to present breasts with various push-up contraptions, much like a platter of hors d'oevres.
There are female geeks. They may not be playing Magic, but they are out there!
Second, U.S. troops are not particulary in harm's way. I back that statement up by the incredibly short casualty list. You're not really in harm's way when you've got night vision goggles and the Command, Control, and Communications infrastructure to call in air strikes on some guy launching mortars and broadcasting in the clear on a walkie-talkie.
I don't agree we designate targets to civilian deaths to a minimum; even if we did, what is that acceptable minimum? Are the at least 500 civilians killed in Yugoslavia acceptable? Like the time bombed the TV station? Or used cluster bombs in cities? References here and here. What about the thousands of civilian deaths in Afghanistan?
Do you think that the attacks on the World Trade Center were designed to maximize civilian casualties? I would argue that the World Trade Centers are a "dual use" target. Indeed bin Laden did want to kill Americans, but why not kill more by crashing a few big jets into sports stadiums? No, the WTC was also an icon of the West, and as such was an incredibly valuable target symbolically. Same for the Pentagon (not too many civilian deaths there) and the White House.
Don't like my "dual use" analogy? Then try reading the famous Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilites from the Defense Intelligence Agency. It very technically explains how, if their water treatment facilities are destroyed in the Gulf War (which we did), and UN sanctions kept in place,
- "IRAQ WILL SUFFER INCREASING SHORTAGES OF PURIFIED
Casualties from that one eclipse 9-11, though it might not seem in since they occur over a generation, not in a single day.WATER BECAUSE OF THE LACK OF REOUIRED CHEMICALS AND
DESALINIZATION MEMBRANES. INCIDENCES OF DISEASE, INCLUDING
POSSIBLE EPIDEMICS,WILL BECOME PROBABLE..."
So, you see, it's not all so cut-and-dry as The Evil One vs. Mom and Apple Pie.
My beef is people like you, who are ignorant about the fact that we have killed more of their civilians than they did on Sep. 11. Rationalize it all you want, civilians die in wars. We don't have any claim to the moral high ground just because we lost 3,000 civilians last year. Remember Dresden? Reference: Go read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
How does all this relate to the X-45? Well, a couple times now a CIA "pilot" of a Predator fired off a Hellfire missile at someone he thought was an Al Qaeda rock star. Well, they missed . Now, with the X-45, when they miss, their misses will have far greater collateral damage. And what is the CIA doing pulling the trigger in the first place? They're not part of the Armed Forces. Who is going to fly these X-45s? Where is the accountability? When U.S. Marines accidentally bombed Canadian troops [link has summary of friendly-fire deaths too] there's a pilot we can hold accountable. Accountability will be a rarer commodity when X-45s hit the wrong targets.
Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Morir
Attention Slashdot editors:
Enough with the advertorials or whatever you call them. I aint buying one!
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
Cost is never cheap, things are. Cost is low.
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.
I increasingly wonder with all this reliance on high tech weaponry when someone or country will develop an easy to use EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse) device. It is a factor with nuclear weapons that the explosion releases an EMP and that this is extremely destructive to circuitry and most things digital, unless they are very well shielded in some type of Faraday cage.
If an EMP device, without the nuclear explosion bit, were to be developed and were easy to deploy, it would make most modern high tech weapons helpless and costly white elephants. It would, I think, take most nations back to a world war I or II level and make for some interesting adjustments in international balance of power.
Am I seeing this wrong? Are most modern planes etc shielded against the effects of EMP?
1. Creating a more effective military.
2. Wise foreign policy.
Both are important issues. However, having a better military does not necessarily lead to imprudent foreign policy decisions.
What is needed to ensure the first goes hand in hand with the second are people who device and advocate balanced approachs to achieving the strategic interests of the US. Currently, there are think tanks that try to fulfill this role. What is missing are grass roots groups that advocate pragmatic non-military solutions that can be alternatives to or work in concert with military action. Today, no grass roots peace movement offers pragmatic solutions. Instead, their birdbrained dependence on useless idealisms has made them utterly ineffective.
There needs to be, IMHO, grass roots movements and political action committees that employ, contribute to and cooperate with policy think tanks such as the Rand Corporation and Stratfor.
From the point of view of peace movements, these ties will serve two functions:
1. Through the exchange of views, personnel, and money, peace momvements will be able to influence Pentagon thinking by influencing think tanks that help shape defense policy.
2. Through dealing with people who grapple with practical political, military, and economic issues, peace movements will be able to find pragmatic and effective policy positions which they can then publicize, popularize, and politicize through grass-roots campaigns and lobbying of politicians.
Without doing the above, blind opposition to military development unaccompanied by real alternatives born of concern for and careful and rational consideration of America's strategic interests will continue to be rightfully ignored.
Cool. The yanks can now bomb the allies with no danger to their own pilots!
-- The future's bright. The future's lemon.
If you can stop ranting on and on about Americans causing friendly casualties long enough to pull your head out of your ass, then you'll realize that without American planes in the air, there would have been 10 time (very conservatively speaking) as many casualties, 90% of which would be from enemy fire.
The Innev. word has been bandied about a lot of late, but the X-45 really did/does have to come into use.
Not because I want it, given a choice I'd ban everything more powerful than spitwads. The X-45 is the equivalent of Richard the first's circumvention of Pope Innocent's ban on the crossbow.
X-45 is a way around the UAV known as the cruise missile. The cruise is one way throw away and gives a commander an out by saying that 'errors' cannot be avoided.
The X-45 get a little closer to having a way to pull the bullet back after it has left the barrel of the gun.
With the cruise being a 1-way device and the X-45 being a return platform with more of the 'smarts' held in the transport rather than being destroyed with the payload it should help bring cost down and decrease the oops factor.
I'd like to see the delivery date moved to first quarter 2004.
what will people's reaction be when these things start coming back in bodybags?
If I'm not mistaken this is exactly what Gundam Wing was preaching against. Robots doing the fighting for men. Men no long saw war for the bloody engagements war is. War became no more then pushing a few button to get their way.
Art imitating life or life imitating art? I love anime.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Kindly name a country that can field a force capable of taking on either the Air Force or the Navy. heck, we can limit it to just one Navy carrier group.
During a 1999 exercise in the Negev Desert, the Israeli Air Force (flying F-16s) pummelled an American force made up of US Navy F/A-18s and F-14s. You can find a short write-up on the exercise here.
I can't help thinking of the movie TOYS. The autonimus weapons are easily distracted by 'the enemy' and eventually turn on their creator.
I guess it is never to soon to start stockpiling ammo.
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
But they don't. Creating a viable weapon means integrating off the shelf technologies into a viable weapons platform that can navigate by itself accross hundreds of miles of complex terrain while performing complex obstacle avoidance manuveurs. In reality, just making the software to keep the missle stable in flight would be very challenging. Terrorists certainly do not have the capability to do this. Not without a lot of money, a lot of time, and large testing facilities that will be difficult to conceal.
The US Army begins developing computer games to encourage (ahem, train) young children (ahem, cadets) to consider the army as a career.
Now, they begin to build fighters that can be controlled by a computer interface.
Wow, if all things work out. The world of the general in "Toys"{c} will begin. Young children playing computer games to train to fight with robotic fighting planes and machines. We now just need Robin Williams...
(As always, this is IMHO)
~ kjrose
What's the point use a cruise missile.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." --Unknown
As I mentioned before, I was in Armoured Recce.
A large part of my job was constant training on Armoured Vehicle Recognition (AFV) - being able to see a small portion of a vehicle, determine what it is, and then make judgements about if it was friendly or enemy.
I would typically spend an hour or so A DAY studying Jane's. We'd have unit contests where small portions of models were briefly exposed and the observer would have to determine what the vehicle was.
At my level, we also had to study Soviet tactics, as a good portion of our mission involved determining where the main axis of advance of an opposing MRR was so that the Divisional commander could come up with the appropriate response. I can still draw out the order of march of a Soviet Motor Rifle Regiment, listing the equipment carried down to the last pistol, right off the top of my head.
This was typical of a Recce troop leader, and most of my subordinates were capable of the same thing. In fact, I had a corporal in Charlie patrol who was an AFV God, much better at it than I was. I'm pretty sure he could write out Jane's from memory.
I am reasonably confident that I or any one of my comrades could tell the difference between an M113, a Warrior, and a BMP. I am equally confident that they would not open fire on a M113 or Warrior, even if some yahoo was screaming over the radio to open fire.
The Americans don't approach anything near this level of training for their soldiers. They choose instead to go for the technological solutions, dumbing down their soldiers in favour of machines. Tears inevitiably result.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
I'd like to respond to some of your points, since plenty of what you're reporting is flat out wrong (and the mods should probably take note of that):
The Russians have done this since air warfare started.
By the way, for more on how Saddam Hussein is diverting international aid to build palaces while his people starve, see this article from The New Republic (hardly a mainstream or conservative publication, by the way).
It didn't really happen.
1. Perhaps we should define the term "carpet bombing." My first link included this RealVideo clip where Mr Pentagon Spokesman makes the following statement: "If the targets are large or widedespread, then it would seem logical that we might find largbe bombers with large loads are capable of attacking it just as effectively s a number of smaller tactical jets." That sounds like carpet bombing to me. What do you think carpet bombing means?
2. A B-52 would almost never be called upon to drop a single bomb within a 10-meter circle. If they are so accurate, then why did we invent cruise missiles? And even if we can, consitently and reliably, drop a single bomb within a 10-meter circle from altitude, a B-52 carries 30 tons of bombs, which, when all released over target, tend to product the "carpet" effect.
3. Did I complain that U.S. troops are too well equipped? No, I simply pointed out the disparaty. I suppose by your definition, I'm In Harm's Way when I drive to work because my little japanese car could potentially be crushed by that big truck. It rarely happens, though. Similarly, U.S. casualties rarely happen, last I checked there's more friendly fire deaths in combat than enemy fire deaths. Hmm, maybe you're right, anytime troops are deployed, they are In Harm's Way because you never know when some renegade National Guard pilot is going to ignore orders twice and decide to bomb the Canadians anyway.
If you're looking for someone who is complaining that U.S. troops are too well-equipped, that would be NATO.
4. Fine, we haven't caused 4,000 or 11,000 civilian deaths in Afghanistan. The numbers you provide are between 600 and 5,000. So, let me repeat my question? What about the civilian deaths in Afghanistan (and Yugoslavia?) Is 600 to 5,000 civilian deaths in Afghanistan accetpable? That'a a lot of bombs that missed the 10-meter circle if you ask me. What about use of cluster bombs in cities in Yugoslavia? Was that planned to minimize civilian casualties? Your non-response is that since my number was off (and who will ever know the exact number) then my argument is invalid. Unless you actually believe that air wars produce NO civilian casualties, in which case I would refer you to back to Dresden.
5. You are absolutely correct that WTC attacks were attacks on a civilian population. I was trying to make the point that it wasn't *just* an attack on a civilian population. It had deep symbolic significance. It was an attack on civilians, but also an attack on the perceived Excesses of the West.
6. I'm saying that the "dual use" standard knowingly puts civilians at risk. The attacks of 9/11 are just about as morally bankrupt as the destruction of Iraq's water supply in the Gulf War. Both led to tremendous civilian casualties, and had a much larger impact on the civilian populous than the military.
7. Believe it or not, I read that Atlantic article a few months ago. Post-Gulf War civilian deaths have nothing to do with the destruction of Iraq's drinking water, and that the "food for oil" program makes up for the medicine and technology which is banned by the sanctions. That must be why UN officials have resigned in protest over the sanctions. Maybe we would have finished the job in '91 if we actually cared about civilians. George Bush's post-War speech urging the Iraqi people to revolt, backed up with exactly 0 tanks, pretty much shows how little we cared.
8. We are a free nation which was brutally attacked by terrorists. So we don't have to concern ourselves with civilian casualties?
What about the many brutal regimes the U.S. has supported over the years, butchers like Pinochet and Suharto? Wake up, we have no moral high ground in the world. Neither does anyone else. Maybe Mother Teresa and Gandhi.
The problem with having the moral high ground is that your morals are unique to you and not really a basis for a rational foreign or military policy. Morally, Osama bin Laden is just as entitled to his belief of Death to America as I am to my belief that he should rot in a collapsed cave somewhere near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. None of that will ever convince us that the other is "right."
Now, clearly the 9/11 attacks were brutal and horrible. I submit that ANY TIME that civilians are killed it is a horrible thing. And the U.S. government does it ALL THE TIME. It's far easier and politically convenient to incur a few unfortunate foreigner civilian casualties (that our own military only barely acknowleges) than to send the boys home in body bags.
That, my friend is the definition of moral bankruptcy. But that's just my definition of moral bankruptcy, yours may be completely different.
The facts remain, though. We did carpet bomb Afghanistan. We did kill civilians in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. To me that is an outrage; to you it's not.
I'd like to respond to a few of the points you make here:
- "...we might find largbe bombers with large loads are capable of attacking it just as effectively s a number of smaller tactical jets." That sounds like carpet bombing to me -- does it? Carpet bombing means dropping of large quantities of bombs indiscriminately over a large area without using guidance techniques to ensure that only military targets are aimed for. We have simply not done this at any point during the current campaign.
- A B-52 would almost never be called upon to drop a single bomb within a 10-meter circle. If they are so accurate, then why did we invent cruise missiles? -- oh no, we would never invent two weapons capable of hitting the same target, would we? Please see the nando times article I linked in my previous post.
- Is 600
... civilian deaths in Afghanistan accetpable? (Qrlx apparently did not read the article very carefully, as he suggests the discredited number `5000' as a possible number of casualties) -- I certainly welcome your suggestion for how we could eliminate al Qaeda without causing any civilian casualties at all, but back here on earth we have done our utmost to avoid such casualties, while our enemies have done their utmost to maximize them. So again, your suggestion that there is some sort of equivalence here is absurd.
- I was trying to make the point that it wasn't *just* an attack on a civilian population. It had deep symbolic significance. It was an attack on civilians, but also an attack on the perceived Excesses of the West. -- and again, you speak as if this made the attacks the equivalent of attacks on military targets of nations which have attacked us. Do you really believe this?
- I'm saying that the "dual use" standard knowingly puts civilians at risk. -- but your definition of `dual use' is `considered by others to be a symbol of our culture'. Are you really suggsting that because a madman like Osama Bin Laden considered the WTC to be a symbol of America, we were `knowingly putting civilians at risk' by letting people work there? Really?
- Maybe we would have finished the job in '91 if we actually cared about civilians -- I certainly agree that we should have, but to claim that civilians are suffering because of our actions and not because Mr. Hussein is funneling off relief money to pay for palaces and tanks is nonsense. Please see the article from The New Republic which I posted earlier in this thread.
- We are a free nation which was brutally attacked by terrorists. So we don't have to concern ourselves with civilian casualties? -- no, as I've pointed out repeatedly, we are going to great lengths (and putting our men on the ground at grave risk) to avoid civilian casualties. To pretend that because some civilians are inadvertently hit means that we should not be fighting is nonsense unless you can propose some other way to adequately defend ourselves.
- The problem with having the moral high ground is that your morals are unique to you and not really a basis for a rational foreign or military policy -- no, no they are not. That the attacks of September 11 were morally wrong is an objective fact, not a `point of view' which is open to debate, and about which all opinions are equally valid.
- Morally, Osama bin Laden is just as entitled to his belief of Death to America as I am to my belief that he should rot in a collapsed cave -- no, he is not. To pretend that the belief that America should be destroyed is morally equivalent to a belief that it should not is nonsense.
- None of that will ever convince us that the other is "right." -- the fact that this is true does not change the fact that one of us is right and the other isn't. If I couldn't convince you that two and two make four, they still would. But I notice that you put the word `right' in sneer quotes. Perhaps you believe that there is no such thing?
- I submit that ANY TIME that civilians are killed it is a horrible thing. -- while true, that doesn't make it an equally horrible thing for us to hit civilians by accident while attempting not to do so as it is for them to intentionally kill as many civilians as possible.
But again, we have a larger disagreement here. You seem to believe that it is unacceptable for the US to defend itself. Can you justify this position?They list the carrying capacity of the X-45 as 1500lbs. This is fairly typical in military hardware bids though - take whatever it can actually do - and times that by 2 for the press release.
The 1500 lb figure is by the way -- their own.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
...is an interesting article in The Atlantic Monthly magazine by James Fallows, who knows his politics and his airplanes (I think he's a pilot).
w s. htm
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/06/fallo
In case you don't want to read the whole article: The JSF is the Pentagon's attempt to control the cost of developing reducing that spending is a good goal. We can (and should) try to do that by making peace via diplomacy and global co-operation (e.g. the U.N. & world criminal court), but we're still going to need armed forces to enforce the peace, no matter how good our diplomats are.
2. I think drones will first be used to knock out anti-aircraft guns and similar targets to make everything safe for the piloted planes.
3. I'd like to see how well an unmanned fighter can do in a "John Henry-style" contest against a plane with a pilot. I'd guess the piloted plane will still be better in most real-world scenarios, so it must come down to cost. In no particular order, there are two costs when a plane is shot down: building a new plane, and training a new pilot. (Yes, of course, there's also the "priceless" human life involved, but in a war some soldiers are going to die, no matter how careful we are.)
4. All of the discussion about whether drones are more or less moral than piloted planes strikes me as pointless. Just like computers, weapons are tools. They can be used to do bad things or good things, depending on the people operating them. I'm not a believer in artificial intelligence, but I definitely believe in human stupidity.
--- iJoel
Somebody mod this up! A peaceful use for this technology (since it is said to be able to voice synth and communicate with normal air traffic controlers) would be to make cheap fed ex deliveries to places all over the world. They could be sent to their destinations with a single mouse click, unload 3000 pounds of goods and refuel and take off again, since there's no pilot fatigue.
From the perspective that friendly fire casualties should be more important in this time, I agree. As enemy fire casualties become fewer and fewer, friendly fire obviously becomes more important (as you said). However I (still) believe to say that friendly fire casualties are on the rise is inaccurate. I (still) think a better way to tell if friendly fire is on the rise is by percentage of overall troops.
Hi neocon, just got back into town so I apologize for the delay.
:-)
The debate over "carpet bombing" is getting to the level of "That depends on what your definition of 'is' is."
You've said something else which strikes me as odd: "To pretend that the belief that America should be destroyed is morally equivalent to a belief that it should not is nonsense." I'm not trying to say that the two beliefs are equivalent. But which belief is "right" is going to depend on who you're talking to. Most Americans will tell you that the "right" belief is to defend America. Most Al Qaeda will tell you that the "right" belief is Death to America. Both sides have their convictions, their moral reasons for their beliefs. In their minds, they're both "right."
"That the attacks of September 11 were morally wrong is an objective fact" How can this be? Show me the morals that are writ in stone. Morals are incapable of being objective. As they exist only in the mind of an indivudial, they necssarily are going to be different from person to person.
Look, we're both seem pretty knowledgeable about this dirty business called War, and that one way or another many innocents die when they're in the wrong place at the wrong time. My lesser problem is that America peridoically chooses to defend herself by bombing the bejeezus out of [INSERT COUNTRY NAME HERE.] The greater problem is that these events are always couched in some moralistic framework of Us vs. Them, Good vs. Evil, and I'm not buying it. Like "Liberating Kuwait." Kuwait was never "free" (and still isn't) in the first place! Or remember when the USSR was "The Evil Empire." How silly is that? It's an immature comic-book view of foreign affairs. And then look around at our allies in the world, Pakistan is a military dictatorship, Saudi a repressive Kingdom and religious state. How come they aren't so morally objectionable?
That's what really galls me, it's SO OBVIOUS that if you are playing nice with the US it doesn't matter what kind of country you're running (witness Tinanamen Square, that same regime enjoys MFN Trade Status). So long as you play ball with the US, you'll never be Evil.
Doesn't that offend your sensibilites, just a little bit? There is such a difference between our rhetoric and the way the world works. I just wish that, for once, we would cop to it and say "We didnt' get rid of Saddadm because he's the Devil we know." or "We prefer to work with military dictatorships is the third world because their countries are more stable and thus more appealing to American business interests." We all know that's the way it works, how come noone is willing to come out and say it?
As for America's right to defend herself, I really don't have too much of a problem with routing the Taliban and Al Qaeda. It might reduce the threat 30% for the next five years. But it will not remove the threat. And I have problems when we take at face value the adivce of some Afghani informant with his own agenda providing the target list. I also have a problem with DU weapons, and with land mines and cluster bombs. But I'm an idealist
One last thing: Let's say you had it in for the U.S. Would you send your military to invade the most powerful nation on Earth? Nope, you'd resort to terrorism. Not trying to say that it's right, or morally acceptable, but were you of the mindset that it's time to acutally attack America, terrorism would be your only viable option. Unless you can think of another, I certainly can't. Of course, we've been thinking the same thing for 50 years what with our stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and fascination with the rucksack nuke. Kinda makes the terrorists job easier; we already built the stuff, all they have to do is get their hands on it.
Just to respond to a few points here:
- The debate over "carpet bombing" is getting to the level of "That depends on what your definition of 'is' is." -- I don't thinks so. Words have meanings, and by the commonly understood meaning of `Carpet Bombing' or by any dictionary definition of `Carpet Bombing' which I have been able to locate, we are doing nothing of the sort. If you are going to use a private, personal meaning of a commonly used phrase, the onus is on you to explain that when using the term.
- You've said something else which strikes me as odd: "To pretend that the belief that America should be destroyed is morally equivalent to a belief that it should not is nonsense." I'm not trying to say that the two beliefs are equivalent. But which belief is "right" is going to depend on who you're talking to. -- not at all. One of these two beliefs is right in a real and objective sense, and one is not. The fact that some people believe the wrong one is right does not make the two views equivalent any more than it would make `2+2=4' and 2+2=5' equivalent if some people believed the latter.
- Morals are incapable of being objective. As they exist only in the mind of an indivudial, they necssarily are going to be different from person to person. -- and here we come to the crux of our disagreement. I would posit that this claim is simply false. Necessarily, there is, in fact, some objective moral truth to which we all strive, for if we do not accept this, then you have no grounds to possibly make the other claims in your post. You (rightly, of course) object to the massacre at Tianenmen, but how can you sustain this claim if morals are relative and the Chinese claim that their brutality is justified by their morality? No, your post practices a far better morality than it preaches.
For more on this theme, you may wish to check out my recent journal entry on the subject (and respond there).