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Rise of the Robot Squadrons
Velcroman1 writes 'Taking a cue from the Terminator films, the US Navy is developing unmanned drones that network together and operate in 'swarms.' Predator drones have proven one of the most effective — and most controversial — weapons in the military arsenal. And now, these unmanned aircraft are talking to each other. Until now, each drone was controlled remotely by a single person over a satellite link. A new tech, demoed last week by NAVAIR, adds brains to those drones and allows one person to control a small squadron of them in an intelligent, semiautonomous network.'
While useful, isn't this just a larger drone with it's parts connected by signals rather than wires? Sure, it's got ablative resilience (one of three drones can go boom and you still have the rest of the formation), and more payload (more drones to cary stuff), but there doesn't seem to be any capacity for communication beyond holding formation and relaying orders from the human controller.
Moderation : -1 Conservative Viewpoint
Or the balls to use that air superiority. When used in WWII the war ended quickly.
Ending WWII was just as much due to Soviet air superiority and Soviet tank superiority as it was to US air superiority. The US didn't have tank superiority since, apart form Soviet armor, Allied armor uniformly sucked a**. A major reason the 8th air force was able to wreck the Nazi military industrial complex, and more importantly their fuel production from the air (which was easily the part of the bomber campaign that hurt the Nazi armies the most) was the fact that from 1943 onwards the Soviets managed to re-equip their forces with large numbers of modern Soviet designed fighter and bomber designs and those Soviet air forces tied down large numbers of german fighters on the eastern front. If anything defeated the Nazis it was the fact that they over-extended themselves militarily in every way.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Controversial? The only controversy is people who want to fly planes but are losing their jobs to video game nerds.
They are controversial because they are rather indiscriminate weapons; figures vary wildly but a midrange one would be that they kill about 10 civilians for each target killed. There's a tradeoff between killing terrorists and alienating the civilian population.