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Air Force Drones Hit 1 Million Combat Hours
coondoggie writes "If you needed any more evidence as to how important unmanned aircraft have become to the US military operations, the US Air Force today said drones have amassed over one million combat hours flown. While that number is impressive, it took the planes known as Global Hawk, Predator and Reaper, almost 14 years to do it, but it could take only a little over another two years to cross the two million mark according to Air Force officials."
"A moment of silence, please, to honor the brave robot we lost today in Libya: http://is.gd/e1Oyyj "- Original Link
I don't know how many years on this Earth I got left. I'm going to get real weird with it. - Frank Reynolds
of innocent civilians.
U.S. military / CIA seems to like bombing wedding parties and funerals, then label the dead as "combatants"
Bet its at least several thousand young children, alone. But, those are brown children, so not murder, but collateral damage-- right?
So proud.
I wonder how many Combat hours boots had in the last 14 years.
Heh. The slashdot advertisement I got was for "RC Airplanes" :-)
Murdering goat herders from 50000 feet by remote control is the most extreme form of cowardice I have ever seen or heard of.
...that these things, by today's definitions, are neither hostile nor a part of war. It would be a much less peaceful world otherwise.
This old Sci Fi show I once watched, where the captain and crew entered a gateway to another world and
upon arriving they basically intervene between what appeared to be an imbalanced fight two quarreling cultures.
The weaker was protected, embraced, and they were invited to their subterranean living quarters. Complete with cryogenic chambers, there were thousands more "sleeping" people in large tubes just waiting to awaken as soon as it was safer for them. They noticed how small the active culture apparently was, that they used drones to fight the throngs of stronger adversaries, and asked for an exchange of technology that would return balance to their war so they can harmonize with the environment. The technology exchanage was about to occur, until one of the crew inspected the cryogenic chamber records more critically outside of the watchful eyes of the alien leader, and discovered that all the remaining thousands if not MILLIONS of cryogenically "sleeping" people were actually clones! The population variance was 5 castes of people that were cloned to untold more.
Going back to the alien drone combat, a man of the captain's crew was given control to manually engauge an adversarial attack ship and upon destruction he noticed that there were living people aboard the attacking ship. They began questioning the motives of the alien hosts whom they were invited to inspect and trade with, and that they were being deceived on the nature of their culture.
The nature of that alien culture was no different than the US armed forces: personell interacted in a caste system no different than communism, everyone was groomed to be the same visual attire, all trained to the same style of conduct and all in order to their superiors. It's no wonder US can't get any volunteers when no war was declared by Congress, unless they can gain young volunteers on the auspice of an exciting moment of automated warefare, but if you asked the recruiter if he knew your cousin "Jeremy" whom you know entered that "service" through the same office then the recruiter would ask "who's Jeremy?" That's right: once you are in the US armed forces, you all get the same haircut and the same living quarters and attire: you all look the same once you are in, and you will be working for a "competitive wage" so-long as it's the same as your fellow recruits (a communist wage). Who is Jeremy? There are like 500 Jeremies? Can you be more specific which one or what he looks like?
It's GOOD to be a war criminal like Barack Hoover Obama.
Disagree? Then you are racist.
When my dad was in Viet Nam he flew C-130s in combat situations, and while he was there he led the entire Air Force in combat hours. I remember he had 1,142 combat missions, I don't remember the number of combat hours, but I think his career total including C-141s and non-combat hours was maybe 10-11,000. So he probably had what, 1-2,000 combat hours? It probably cost a million dollars to train him. I realize humans are controlling these things, but still, the efficiency of the whole thing is pretty staggering when you thing about it.
UAVs are smaller, more versatile, cheaper to buy and maintain, stealthier, don't get tired(in the traditional sense) and can loiter for greater periods. The Canadians estimate each F35 at $150M. I don't see an advantage for the F35 that UAVs won't meet or exceed in a few more years. The F35 is a plane looking for a mission, like the Comanche attack helicopter was.
I like the program and hope to see it expanded. I think the US should have these continually flying sortees all over the world. So if a bad guy shows up in Europe, the US can easily take him out with a Tomahawk missile or two.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all.
(I know, I'm like a broken record on this -- for those who remember broken scratched records...)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I'll bet that's gonna leave a mark
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Robots dehumanize war, but if war shifts away from human casualties, isn't this a good thing?
Will drones ever be cheaper than training a grunt?
Them's some mighty selective notions of "honor" and "cowardice" you got there, skippy! Care to explain your reasoning further (mostly so I can dissect your straw men, sneer at your ad hominems, Godwin you relentlessly, and generally mock your pathetic attempts at antidisestablishmentarianistic trolling).
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Sounds a like an episode of Stargate SG-1. Can't remember the exact episode though.
... murdering innocent people with impunity from the comfort of a base in the US.
They want us dead. It's really quite that simple. It is much more effective to reach out to where they are and kill them before they get here.
UAVs are smaller, more versatile, cheaper to buy and maintain, stealthier, don't get tired(in the traditional sense) and can loiter for greater periods. The Canadians estimate each F35 at $150M. I don't see an advantage for the F35 that UAVs won't meet or exceed in a few more years. The F35 is a plane looking for a mission, like the Comanche attack helicopter was.
You will be hard pressed to find a more strident critic of the F-35 than myself. I think it's an overpriced, under-performing, designed-by-committee farce. That said, it's still a fighter. UAV's, thus far, are not. I keep hearing people say "we should get rid of manned planes because UAV's do the job better and cheaper". Well, in many cases, yes. UAV's are pitch-perfect for things like long range maritime surveillance. But we're still going to need manned aircraft for many, many decades. We're nowhere near a manned UAV fighter. Not even close. What are you going to do when a squadron of MiG-29's enter your airspace?
UAV's will probably never completely replace manned aircraft, even in the future. What they will replace are "boring" jobs that require long stints in the air that could just as easily be handled at a desk back in the states. But we're going to need manned fighters for a long time. I would argue that we don't need F-35's, and that's debatable, but we've got to have some kind of fast jet with missiles and guns and a man in it.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
an accomplishment really, its like gloating about the uptime counter on the
quarter million dollar accounting server with occasional atrocious mathematics.
Less war machines...more science machines.
Good people go to bed earlier.
If drone attacks don't count as hostilities, surely drone hours aren't really "combat" hours.
zombie nixon, pleased
in these 'contingency operations', then its kind of hard to understand what 'winning' means. nobody can tell us. can you?
i read somewhere that you can't win a counter-insurgency by pissing off the entire population.
and i read another thing about this place called vietnam, where we killed hundreds of thousands of them, someting like 10-2o times more than they killed of us. and they still won.
i believe our executive branch just told us that the UAVs in libya are not a 'hostile act',
so i am trying to figure out how you can be in a 'war' if its not 'hostile'.
or is it 'contingency operation' ? i get them confused.
if you are bankrupt.
ask Adolf Hitler.
a little low i think.
the street without any way to feed themselves.
you want to have robots picking the crops and building things . fine.
who decides what the robots pick and what they build?
and how much of it they pick and how much they build?
its going to be the people who own the land and the people who own the raw materials that the robots work with.
everyone else is going to be sent to die.
not armed combatants.
if you make the soldiers robotic, then you will have an ever increasing percentage of dead who are civilians.
The US is still using the proverbial 1% doctrine, where if there's a remote chance the bad guys are there...well fire away! The President even admitted the hit rate for the OBL raid was about 55%. What no one seems to give a shit about is if you adopt that 1% chest-thumping policy, you're wrong 99% and killing innocent civilians. In fact, wasn't it the current regional commander who admitted we're killing far more civilians than tur'rists?
I'll be more impressed with these drones if we see them performing as well as manned aircraft in a humane war.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
And conveniently I just made a 12 minute YouTube video with some answers (or at least good questions) about that, talking about a balance between five interwoven economies that shifts with cultural change and technological change:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
A PDF file of the presentation is here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
More related stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
Still, in general, you raise good questions. Ones that are ultimately political, even as many mainstream economists might imply they are just technical issues...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
There is so much technological progress now that U.S.A. is not on war with anybody, imagine if U.S.A. was on war!!!!
"They" is the people who attacked WTC twice, some embassies, and other places, and those allied with them.
"Us" is Americans, and in fact Western society in general.
"Here" is the US, or in general Western or non-Muslim countries.
I guess you haven't heard about the jihad going on that aims to make the entire world Muslim, all others must convert, be subservient or die.
with gold and/or swiss francs, which he was running out of.
and they are just about as bad as any other owner.
ask the ukranians.
according to Yves Smith in EConned.
in most sciences, when mathematical models do not match reality, you change the model.
in economics, you hire more lobbyists.
Don't forget that most peaceful ordinary civilians killed in wars are not killed by nation state soldiers.
Nor are they killed with mass-produced modern weapons.
Knifes or sharp edges and explosives first and only then AK-47's. They would use sticks and stones and throwing people off of buildings and high places if they though it would be good enough, and it is, and they do: that sort of stuff that happens all the time in a certain part of the world. ...It is tempting to draw the conclusion that the killers are actually only half human, sub-human if you will. Tempting but unlikely to be helpful, least of all to the victims (who are usually closely related to the killers -just as in violent crime).
i was actually the jackass bleating about Bush going into Iraq without an agreement from the UN.