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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."
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.
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Fighter Wing, no way
Why not? The limit to the performance of a modern fighter aircraft is how many Gs the pilot can handle. Put the pilot on the ground, and you can make a far faster, more agile, smaller, lighter, and vastly cheaper weapon.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The problem is that very few of the talented pilots want to do this stuff.
So?
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.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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
It is called transponder. It is mandatory in larger parts of Holland above 2500ft (even for gliders).
However, it would be nice to be able to receive the radarscope (without having a radar on board). ATC would be able to provide that on another frequency.
nosig today
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.
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.
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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
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only somewhat correct.
The drones can fly, drones and queens mate in flight. The queen flies to mate only once takes sperm (and in fact the entire gonads) from many drowns in the course of this fight.
She then uses this sperm over the course of her life. All fertilized eggs are female resulting in workers (in less modified with royal jelly casing them to become queens.
Drones are unfertilized eggs.
The drones penis is the same materials as the egg layer of the queen or the stinger of the female worker.
Under the wrong conditions a normal worker bee can start laying eggs. (This can happen in a queenless hive.) Since they eggs will be unfertilized all will be drones, and the hive is all but dead.
As to unmanned drone, well emasculated might be a better word for it.
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.
I disagree.
Humanity has never really thought about the consequences of war that much before they actually were fighting it.
And even then, it tends to lead to situations like were having in Georgia right now where people are arguing who shot first or who killed the most people and then everyone gets in a fight again.
In reality, unmanned fighting craft will be the wave of the future simply because its more economical to fight a war that way and it can deliver more death to the enemy without risking casualties on your own part. (That was the whole point of switching from fights, to spears, to swords, to guns, to artillery, to tanks, and then to bombers)
This leads to my second point, I always thought fondling of the Bolo books in which the question was brought up why humans even bothered to fight inside fully intelligent machines which could fight on their own just as well or even better.
Two reason were explained...
The first was to show to the machines that the humans were willing to die along side of machines. Something of a honor and respect thing so that the machines wouldn't turn on the humans.
The second was because it gave the machines hatred or a reason to kill. In one of the novels the machine actually tells the human "No. I will no longer kill for you." and talks the human pilot into negotiating with the aliens.
In that regard, machines can be used to create calculated war crimes, but they won't go crazy do to combat fatigue or predisposed hatred like you saw in the Balkan wars or the issues were seeing in Russia (Russians and Georgians are very fond of each other).
Machines would never take revenge own their own. They would never just bomb a village because they are too scared to go in themselves.
Yeah I know these machines aren't fully AI, but the same thing applies to a guy sitting in an air conditioned bunker pushing the buttons. He's not getting shot at and he's not usually going to start blowing up people without being ordered to.
That still leaves calculated war crimes by the upper brass, but those things have always happened without unmanned machines as it is.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
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Actually, I doubt it. The US is already in a position where it can start wars where it basically has unchallenged air-superiority. If all it wants to do is bomb the hell out of somewhere, it can do that basically risk-free with manned aircraft.
The reality is that although airpower is an essential part of modern warfare, it's not the only thing that matters. Eventually you need soldiers on the ground holding territory, and that pretty much always gets messy.
As far as I can tell, UAV's create a shift in tactics for both airpower and the ground support, but it doesn't radically change the overall equation of war, at least not for the US.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
" 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.
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