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Demand For Unmanned Aircraft Outstripping Their Capabilities
coondoggie writes "Has the highly successful but disparate unmanned aircraft strategy deployed by the military outstripped the Department of Defense's ability to handle its growth? The Air Force, Army, and Navy have requested approximately $6.1 billion in fiscal year 2010 for new systems and expanded capabilities. The Pentagon's fiscal year 2010 budget request wants to increase the Air Force's Predator and Reaper unmanned aircraft programs to 50 combat air patrols by fiscal year 2011 — an increase of nearly 300% since fiscal year 2007. In 2000, the DoD had fewer than 50 unmanned aircraft in its inventory; as of October 2009, this number had grown to more than 6,800. The program's success, however, is causing some big cracks in the system. According to a report issued this week by congressional watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office. The military is facing a number of challenges — including training, accessing national air space, and improving aircraft communications systems — that must be overcome if unmanned aircraft are to take their place as a central piece of the military's future, the GAO stated."
Can we start a talking points bingo pool on which pols first utter the phrase "technology transfer" in relation to this report?
(Personally, though, I'm sick of subsisting off the technological table scraps of war.)
Someone had to do it.
The alternative to Heinlein might be that English guy - Kipling. Reading him gives a lot of insight into military life, and incidentally a little insight into politics. Of course, it helps to actually LIVE what he writes about, to fully appreciate it.
Yes, human life is tragic. We have all the resources available to make life on earth a near paradise, but we prefer to shit on each other, and ruin everything.
Ahh well. On subject. The morality of these unmanned killing machine? They don't appeal to me very much. Somehow, it seems a bit cowardly. Osama bin Laden told his troops that digging into the earth in the Tora Bora mountains would save them, because the Americans have no stomach to come into the trenches, and fight hand to hand. We seem to have proved him right in those mountains, and we continue to prove him right with our little toys.
Yeah, it may be considerably less cowardly to target a high value individual with a missile, than to target 3000 civilians with human missiles. Still - it's not the sort of thing the military has done traditionally. No more 'Charge of the Light Brigade' for us.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The most important part of this for the Pentagon is that there's no human cost to losing a UAV on the American side. There are no airfields with reporters to deal with - you're not going to allow a journalist on to an airforce base inside the control room for "security" purposes. The pussies who call themselves reporters don't go out of the green zone anymore, and it's hard to get anyone to care about a grainy video or far away sounding reports from foreign news sources. You can bomb the hell out of whomever you like. Even the most dovish democrats will have jobs tied to it in their home districts. Americans have proved we have an endless capacity for funding war. And with UAVs, no caskets with American flags, no problems.
“Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.” -General Westmoreland
the roman catholic church way back when did some good work on what is a just war. the considerations they used still pop up in debate. but i once asked a gung-ho solider if he had heard of the concept and he had not, but i am sure he was also a gung-ho Christian
here is a trivial link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_War
A reasonable person however would distinguish between justice and morality, IMO.
some reasonable moralities do however categorically disapprove of atrocities.
"The military is facing a number of challenges, including training, accessing national air space and improving aircraft communications systems..."
And rehabilitation. For reasons not yet understood UAV remote pilots are suffering more burnout than most others, as well as PTSD to an extent that mystifies.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Afghanistan has vast mineral resources. But you’re partially right. The real reason is, that Afghanistan lies in one of the strategically most important areas of the world.
It is the only country in the world with borders to the ex Soviet Union, China, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq. The meaning of this should be obvious. It shouldn’t even be called a country at all, with its diverse tribes and influences. Imagine all those countries had borders to each other, and you would put a blender right in the 5-country border in the middle. The result would be Afghanistan.
In practice, this meant, that during the cold war, the Soviet Union of course wanted that area. But the US didn’t want it. So the cold war got very hot. But the USA were wise back then. They knew that you can’t win a war in that area. Ever. That’s why the tribes still battled themselves to this day. So they sent ammunition and weapons to the Afghans. Who of course happily accepted. It was a “win-win”. Except that the only ones dying were the Afghans. (Two of my uncles died in it, and probably 3 were tortured, so I know very well what I’m talking about.)
Of course the Soviets failed to conquer the country. And Kharzai was pro-US, while the Soviet Union broke apart. All was good for the USA.
Except that now, the Afghans hat shitloads of weapons and a population of which all the young had not ever seen anything else, except war. You can guess what that resulted in. The mental psychological fallout turned some to religious extremism. An easy thing to exploit. Some used it, and gained political power over Afghanistan, by opposing the cruel dictatory pro-US Kharzai. Back then, the Taliban were seen as the less bad choice in the face of his crimes.
Now something had to be done, to gain back power. So the USA used their own man, Bin Laden, and the attack of 9/11 as an excuse (no idea how much of it was planned, so I don’t judge here), as a reason to go to Afghanistan. Completely forgetting, that you can not ever win there. (As they said themselves, some decades earlier.)
And now they struggle in the same way as the Soviet Union did. I would’n be surprised at all, if the SU would fuel the Taliban, just so they could see the US fail in the same way, for shits and giggles. ;)
Fact is that the US will also walk out of Afghanistan without winning. That’s no shame. That’s just how it always was, is, and always will be, I guess.
We should just declare it a uninhabited wasteland, and let the people move away. That would be better for everyone.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Someone who thinks Afghanistan borders Iraq, who thinks Karzai was already in power before the Taliban, who insinuates the USA organised 9/11 and who thinks the Soviet Union still exists gets moderated to 4?
While I have heard this before, and it makes sense, you have to remember Italy switched to the Allies side near the end of WWI and they still got Mussolini.