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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
Civilians who go and get themselves killed in American airstrikes are combatants in the propaganda campaign against the World's Greatest Nation(tm).
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.
Why does skin color come into it? The US killed far, far more civilians during the Second World War than in Afghanistan. Get off your leftist high horse.
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.
Why can't we figure out that we aren't wanted in that part of the world and just fuck off? They don't want us, they don't need us. Just fuck off before we pick up more bad karma and blowback.
If you know your neighbor beats his wife and threatens to kill her, and she doesn't say anything, do you stay silent? What if you heard the story from a coworker, or from your brother across the country?
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I think most people would agree that they have a moral obligation to interfere in someone's life in some situations. There's a line somewhere, but it's probably different for everybody. Now what happens when the oppressor runs an entire country, committing what you consider morally reprehensible acts that are not illegal in that country? Who should have the authority to do something? Nobody? Can we really leave it up to the people when opposing viewpoints are quashed violently?
Sam Harris gave this interesting TED talk that argues that science can answer moral questions like these, though he doesn't really address how we (as in the people of the world) should deal with it. I don't think there is an objective answer to these things...that's what makes international politics so difficult. To some people, removing Gaddafi (when he made clear he wouldn't listen to dissent) is worth it.
Sounds a like an episode of Stargate SG-1. Can't remember the exact episode though.
Skin color is uncalled for but in the WWII you didn't have "intelligent" weapons so civilian casualties were unavoidable. If the video of the Apache from wikileaks showed something to the world is that intelligent only applies to the form or the actual weapon, still the people behind the weapon fails, get confused or simply think everything is a video game.
Also I didn't knew that you had to be affiliated to any particular political party to criticize unlawful killing of civilians be it from USA, North Korea, Mexico or from Syria. And if you ask me, politics is even more uncalled for in this discussion than skin color.
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.
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.
To some people, removing Gaddafi (when he made clear he wouldn't listen to dissent) is worth it.
In which case, you say in advance "we are going to remove Gaddafi by military force" not "we will just bomb military installations to protect innocent civilian lives, oopsie we accidentally killed his family by bombing his uncle's house".
Also, you get fucking international agreement for your police/military intervention, including that of Libya's neighbours.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Why does skin color come into it? The US killed far, far more civilians during the Second World War than in Afghanistan. Get off your leftist high horse.
Touchy.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
As much as I hate to admit it, since on just about everything else he is a total nutjob, but I have to agree with Glen beck when it comes to the ME: It is long past time for us to "Be Switzerland". it is time to pack up our shit and go home, to quit having a bazillion bases and spending money we don't have, it is long past time for us to be Switzerland. We have been stirring up shit since the end of WWII, causing nothing but misery and propping up "el presidente" thugs and scum, it is time to call it and just be Switzerland.
Frankly no truer words have been spoken, and actually getting to talk with some of the neocons that actually make policy (I live next to a conservative college that a friend does the rocketry and robotics clubs for so I get to tag along) frankly the reason why we have killed so many people in the ME and wasted so much money and caused so much hatred will make your jaw drop. Ready? Here goes....Jesus won't come back. I swear no matter what logic you throw at them their ONLY real answer is "When the Jews return to Zion".
I mean how fucking sad is it we are bankrolling Israel to the tune of 8 million plus PER DAY 24/7/365, no matter what they do, and are willing to prop up scum like Mubarak, all because of some words some goat herder wrote 1800 years ago about how some 2000 year dead guy had to have a certain race in a certain spot so he'd have a place to park his fluffy cloud. Sadly I felt like the Shat in Undiscovered Country going "What does God need with a starship?" because the only real answer they could come up with that is the Sky bully would give us a spanking if we didn't.
All those lives, all that suffering and misery, because of some words written on a goat skin, hell it wouldn't even surprise me if it turned out to be a mistranslation. Glenn Beck is right, its time to be Switzerland.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Our mistake was to think we could make Afghanistan and Iraq into functioning democracies just by fighting the bad guys. Democracy has to come from the people, you can't just set one up and expect it to work. You also can't easily defeat a group like the Taliban, as we have discovered.
The Arab Spring is a good example of how it should work. The people rise up, and maybe we help a bit with technology or military assistance as in Libya, but it is very much their revolution and their victory.
We need a version of the Prime Directive. As you say there is a feeling of duty to help, but you have to recognise that you can easily make things worse.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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 kid yourself, the world needs the US. They might not be thrilled about it, but it is true. Without the US getting their feet dirty and doing all the wet-work, all these other delicate flowers of countries might have to, you know, foot the bill.
i was actually the jackass bleating about Bush going into Iraq without an agreement from the UN.