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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.
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
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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
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
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.
Most likely not. Since the 80's the military has been using frequency hopping radios. Every tank, armored personnel carrier, most humvees and infantry team have one. The new ones being deployed to ground forces have a MAC address since they will be part of a battlefield TCP/IP network and relay data.
Perhaps the pilot will control the lead plane and the others will automatically fall-in in formation?
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?
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.
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."
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.
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
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
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.
Property for sale in Nice, France
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
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'?
:)
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
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?
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
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
No, no. It's Attack of the Drones
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!
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..
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!!!
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.
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
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.
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"?
>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!
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
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.
Don't forget, that conventional aircraft need to sacrifice some of their carrying capacity for life support and armor to protect the pilot. At a 3000lb payload without having to support a pilot and their required accessories (not to mention the bulk of their user interface), you can build a cheap, lightweight, almost disposable attack craft. It's pretty much guaranteed that you will have multiple UCAV units assigned to a given controller.
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!!!
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Smash enemy air defenses.
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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.
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
Yeah, but they sold planes to lots of people. Syria uses a bunch of Russian equipment. Maybe not MiGs, but SAMs and the Su planes.
Attention Slashdot editors:
Enough with the advertorials or whatever you call them. I aint buying one!
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
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?
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.
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
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
The Russians have done this since air warfare started.