Almost 1 In 3 US Warplanes Is a Drone

parallel_prankster writes "A recent Congressional Research Service report, titled U.S. Unmanned Aerial Systems, looks at the more-prominent role being played by drones. In 2005, drones made up just 5 percent of the military's aircraft. Today one in three American military aircraft is a drone. The upsides of drones are that they are cheaper and safer — the military spent 92% of the aircraft procurement money on manned aircraft. The downside — they're bandwidth hogs: a single Global Hawk drone requires 500 megabytes per second worth of bandwidth, the report finds, which is 500 percent of the total bandwidth of the entire U.S. military used during the 1991 Gulf War."

Comments

first post!

[Anonymous Coward]

posted remotely by a drone...

Re:first post!

[rickb928]

True dat.

Re:first post!

[Synerg1y]

EMP'ed

That's a ton of bandwidth

[nirgle]

Sort of a Netflix in the sky?

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[GameboyRMH]

You could run Netflix quite comfortably on 1/100th of that!

That's 500 megabytes per second, or roughly 4x the bandwidth of a GigE connection! Sounds to me like they're doing something seriously wrong, even if you assume they're receiving multiple hi-res live video streams simultaneously from the drones. Maybe the video isn't compressed at all?

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[masternerdguy]

Or it isn't just video, but a stream from a complete sensor package. Not to mention the cameras they have deliver much higher resolution video than the HD streamed on Netflix (or at least I'd hope).

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[GameboyRMH]

What sensors could they have that could require more bandwidth than a video camera? Most would require much less - for one thing radar and IR aren't in color, and that's assuming the most asinine possible way of transferring the data.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[tibit]

It's neither 500 megabytes/s nor even 500 megabits/s. There is no link capability in the U.S. space communications systems, or even anywhere, that could handle that reliably from just one drone, never mind multiple drones at the same time. That drone would need a big effing antenna to push that much data over a couple dozen thousand kilometers to the space segment. Let's get real: do the /. editors have no sense of magnitude at all?!

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's get real: do the /. editors have no sense of magnitude at all?!

No.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[WindBourne]

More importantly, they can NOT do LOSSY compression. It has to be lossless. After all, it is the FINE detail that lossy wants to lose and that the DOD/NRO desperately needs. 500 MB/sec is just fine.

Actually, the more that I think about it, I wish that the number was not released. It says a lot about what level of resolution is possible.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[ifrag]

Let's get real: do the /. editors have no sense of magnitude at all?!

For that matter how did this get published by Wired without catching that? Or are they also known to be an unreliable source with poor fact checking?

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[ericloewe]

It's neither 500 megabytes/s nor even 500 megabits/s. There is no link capability in the U.S. space communications systems, or even anywhere, that could handle that reliably from just one drone, never mind multiple drones at the same time. That drone would need a big effing antenna to push that much data over a couple dozen thousand kilometers to the space segment. Let's get real: do the /. editors have no sense of magnitude at all?!

You said it. Come on, Gigabit ETHERNET pushes, realistically, ~120 MB/s. HSPA+ pushes some 4 MB/s (VERY high estimate). Satelite links are projected to supply 1.5MB/s, which means, realistically, less than 1 MB/s per user, with high latency and a stationary satelite dish. I'd say that the 500MB/s figure is probably for the data before it's compressed (losslessly, of course)

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[TKane]

My wife's 2+ year old, off-the-shelf Canon 7D takes 18 megapixel images. RAW file size is 20+ MB and it can shoot bursts of 12+ images in under 2 seconds. That's 120 megabytes/second (bursted) from consumer grade gear. I imagine the CIA/DOD can afford much better gear that captures much more data than a single $1700 DSLR. I also assume one drone can carry multiple devices. As far as data transmission, I would bet that being loss-less and encrypted take much higher priority than compression. I would love to hear the number for the total amount of data gathered by drones monitoring the OBL strike. Hopefully I will still be here in 50 years.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[smitty777]

Let's not forget some of the bandwidth is taken up with real-time control of the aircraft. Other than video, there are a ton of sensors these things could carry, and I'm sure the weapons systems take up some bandwidth of their own.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[wagnerrp]

No, real time control of the aircraft is only available within a few miles of the base station. When it's actually on point, all communications is relayed via satellite link, which means latency on the order of seconds. You can give it commands of where to go and what to do, but the drone otherwise flies itself on autopilot. Additionally, the Global Hawk has no weapons systems to speak of.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[smitty777]

True, but I was thinking more of the Reaper, which does have real time control and weapons systems. Which (according to wiki, it does have both autonomous and real time control, and of course can carry the Hellfire, Paveway, and JDAM missile systems. As far as data inputs for the systems, we've all seen the footage of the laser pointer guiding the LGMs to the target.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[The Grim Reefer]

You could run Netflix quite comfortably on 1/100th of that!

That's 500 megabytes per second, or roughly 4x the bandwidth of a GigE connection! Sounds to me like they're doing something seriously wrong, even if you assume they're receiving multiple hi-res live video streams simultaneously from the drones. Maybe the video isn't compressed at all?

Compressed? The video feeds weren't even encrypted at one point.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[PlaneShaper]

It could easily be 500 megabits/s. What most people here seem to fail to realize is that the Global Hawk is not some camcorder with an MPEG-2 stream. The RQ-4 collects high-resolution *still-frame* imagery.

FMV streams are some video typically ranging from 1 Mbps to 10 Mbps -- i.e. they record no more and no different than a digital camcorder. The RQ-4 records National Image Transmission Format (NITF) images rather than a video stream, which might range from hundreds of MB to a few GB per image, depending on resolution, and it can collect those images at some frequency. These images are encoded with geospatial data and would probably need to be lossless. It has a high-powered, high-resolution digital camera, rather than a camcorder, not significantly different in concept than the imaging sensors employed on the U-2 or SR-71. The sensor(s) on the RQ-4, if used as robustly as possible, could very likely over-saturate even the 500 Mbps link.

This article from the actual Air Force: http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123185754 has the RQ-4 collecting 400-700 images in 14 hours. This article: http://air-attack.com/page/54/RQ-4-Global-Hawk.html claims the RQ-4 can collect 1,900 images in 24 hours. Just doing the math on that first estimate from the Air Force, 550 images at a low end of 500MB per image is still almost 50 Mbps. That's an order of magnitude lower than the 500 Mbps claim in the PDF file (which, you'll note the claim comes from the Navy, NOT from Wired). However, the numbers I used are the low estimate. At the high estimate, 1,900 images/day at 3 GB/image, you're looking at a 528 Mbps requirement. Pretty spot on.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[Wyatt Earp]

Global Hawk has a suite with synthetic aperture radar (SAR), electro-optical (EO), and infrared (IR) sensors.

The sensor data is transmitted at up to 50 Mbit/sec through satellite or to a ground station.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[Wyatt Earp]

Real time control is also available on Global Hawk through satellite link.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[cheater512]

Yes but 500mb/s sounds like no compression at all which is plain excessive.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[WindBourne]

Or it sounds like they have a lot of high resolution detail from multiple cameras in real time with LOSSLESS compression (2:1), mixed with a number of sensors seeking out radiation, virus, etc.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[tibit]

I agree as far as amount of imagery collected and stored on board. They can't transmit all of that in real time, not using the space segment at least, and most likely not using point-to-point links either.

The drones aren't the only ones using the space segment, command posts etc. probably use a lot of it already. All of the drones in one theater using on the order of 500mbit/s on the space segment at once, perhaps 1-1.5gbits/s from all theaters so that it'd be spread across a couple birds -- that I can live with, that's realistic just by looking at what's flying and what the antenna sizes are. But 500Mbps from just one drone, transmitted via space segment -- haha. Perhaps if the other drones transmit nothing besides basic telemetry, or if you're flying just one drone in a theater. I don't even know what sort of an uplink a drone has, it's probably something off the shelf, they likely wouldn't develop a whole new uplink from scratch just for a drone. If they use a radio package that is available for other projects, then it's likely around 64Mbits/s when conditions are good.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[ericloewe]

We're not discussing how much bandwidth it needs. We're discussing how much is realistically available through the kinds of links that can be used with drones. Frankly, I don't see that kind of bandwidth available for multiple drones. Really rough estimate says 2 drones would saturate a single satellite, assuming some older tech.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[noh8rz2]

My wife's 2+ year old

I should hope so! Otherwise you would have been betrothed at birth, like an arranged marriage or something.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[cheater512]

Lossless compression is a hell of a lot better than 2:1.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[WindBourne]

Really? I am curious what algorithm that you have that does a hell of a lot better than more than 2 to 1 compression i.e. much more than 50-60% compression, on general data, let alone pictures.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you know that the military must use lossless compression for all applications? Even a live HD video feeds?

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

finally an intelligent comment - a typical satellite connection is only 10 mbps, maybe 20 mbps if you really have clout

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[messymerry]

It's also a great excuse to argue that these drones should be capable of more and more autonomous functions. More like a Skynet in the sky.

Re:That's a ton of bandwidth

[Mister.yoda]

I am working for a terrestial infrastructure project. We have installed 1950 IPCCTV cameras. Using H.264 codec, the combined bitsteam is 4 GB/s. The Storage Area Network required to store it for 90 days is a massive 2.5 Peta Bytes (1 Peta Byte = 1,000 Terra Bytes or 1,000,000 Giga Bytes). Try beating That!

Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this a legitimate comparison?

I mean, Lego is reportedly the world's #1 tire manufacturer, just based on the number of tires it produces, but it's not exactly an automotive powerhouse.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[SJHillman]

I'd say it's only a legitimate comparison if drones and manned aircraft were used in comparable roles. Can a single drone take the place of a single manned plane for a given mission? In some cases yes, in other cases you may need 3 drones to take the place of a single fighter jet - especially in combat conditions.

Sort of like with Legos... how many Lego tires would you need to replace a single Goodyear on a car? Adjust for that and you get a more useful comparison.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[dwillden]

Agreed. In fact why don't we talk about a comparison of processor speeds between 1991 and today?
From some random tech site giving a history of processors:

June 1991 Intel 486 introduced Clock speed: 50 MHz Number of transistors: 1,200,000

vs

Take your pick of quad or eigjt-core processors running at around 3.3 GHz.

What other useless comparisons can we use?

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[GameboyRMH]

That's surprising. Tires only come in a minority of LEGO kits and pretty much never wear out.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Sockatume]

I am not sure that any amount of Lego tires would fit onto a full-sized car. People, do not replace your spare with a trunk full of Lego ones.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[idontgno]

They do, however, get lost. In profusion. Down air conditioning floor vents, outside in dirt, in the bellies of hungry stupid little doggies, down sink and tub drains, God only knows where.

I speak from experience, having raised three avid Lego fans to adulthood and in the process of raising three more.... and most of the axles or hubs from any Lego set older than 1 year old are missing the wheels or tires. If you were to build any wheeled vehicle from any of Legos in our house, you'd have to put it up on little Lego cinderblocks.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[FhnuZoag]

This is a good point, but then again, you can imagine that in some cases you might need three manned planes to take the place of a drone - for example, in long period monitoring missions where crews would need to take time off to rest.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[iggymanz]

not to mention the bellies of little stupid geek spawn

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

Crews can rest on the plane. Many have cots. The limiting factor is fuel.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[JSBiff]

Actually, the more important question is capability. I mean, I don't really care if it takes 3 drones to do the job of 1 manned aircraft if they can do the same job, and the drones cost less than 1/3 the cost of a manned aircraft. If you have cheap, "disposable" drones, you don't care if they get destroyed by the enemy - no pilot, no casualties.

The bigger concern is capture - like what happened in Iran. What would be particularly scary is if an enemy can take control of the drone, and either launch weapons at us or our allies, or at a civilian population - could you imagine if a Syria or Iran managed to take control of a U.S. drone and use it to attack protesters? Or a mosque, or a school? They could claim it was the U.S. doing the attack, and further incite hostilities amongst their people and cement their hold on power.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Chowderbags]

Next up on Mythbusters, can you fill a flat with Lego tires and drive away?

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[ShanghaiBill]

Manned aircraft also have more down time for maintenance. If a drone fails, you are out the cost of the drone. If a manned aircraft fails, you lose the cost of the aircraft and the lives of the crew. Dead crews are bad PR.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[El Torico]

I've wondered who made tires for the Smart Car.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

Had mod points yesterday, none today. You get a post-points +1. Sorry :(

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[couchslug]

Given their loiter time, drones replace multiple jets and allow using fresh aircrew while keeping one machine on-station.

They also do NOT require expensive combat search and rescue resources because when they go down their crew aren't IN them.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Pope]

I mean, Lego is reportedly the world's #1 tire manufacturer, just based on the number of tires it produces, but it's not exactly an automotive powerhouse.

Maybe, all I know is that they're the only ones making Ferraris I can afford! (or were)

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[radtea]

The bigger concern is capture - like what happened in Iran. What would be particularly scary is if an enemy can take control of the drone, and either launch weapons at us or our allies, or at a civilian population - could you imagine if a Syria or Iran managed to take control of a U.S. drone and use it to attack protesters? Or a mosque, or a school? They could claim it was the U.S. doing the attack, and further incite hostilities amongst their people and cement their hold on power.

Given the frequency with which Americans have killed civilian people I don't see why you would given any special concern to remotely operated killing machines in this regard.

Furthermore, no one needs to control an American remotely operated killing machine to do this: they can more easily just send their own killing aircraft to kill protestors and then claim it was the Americans. People with power pull this kind of stunt all the time and always have, long before the era of killing aircraft.

The larger concern to my mind is that proliferation of automated and remotely operated killing machines demonstrates that the world is still full of people who are smart enough to build such machines but dumb enough to think that killing people is a particularly effective or efficient solution to any given problem. It takes only a cursory look at history to show that killing people is rarely effective and never efficient. For example, German politicians in the 1930's were deeply concerned with food security and chose to invest in killing people rather than researching more efficient and intensive agriculture. Rather than gaining food security this resulted in a nation where many people were dead, many buildings were destroyed, and many people were starving.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[kilfarsnar]

Manned aircraft also have more down time for maintenance. If a drone fails, you are out the cost of the drone. If a manned aircraft fails, you lose the cost of the aircraft and the lives of the crew. Dead crews are bad PR.

Meh, they'd just do like they always do and either not tell anyone, or make up some story about how the plane was shot down while engaging in a 6 on 1 dog fight, heroically saving the nation from flying terrorists...

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[angelbar]

with cannons !!

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

For politicians the ratio is much higher

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[h00manist]

And so now the leading investment is in anti-drone missiles. Then, unmanned anti-missile-launcher robots. Then... every country just keeps on finding ways to shoot, rather than talk. Perhaps it will end when every growing leaf becomes either weaponized or dead.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

More like: Next up on Mythbusters, can you replace your spare with a trunk full of Lego tires by shooting them out of a cannon, across a highway, through a house, and through the trunk lid?

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[BlueStrat]

Actually, the more important question is capability. I mean, I don't really care if it takes 3 drones to do the job of 1 manned aircraft if they can do the same job, and the drones cost less than 1/3 the cost of a manned aircraft. If you have cheap, "disposable" drones, you don't care if they get destroyed by the enemy - no pilot, no casualties.

Where a drone is of particular usefulness is in situations where your pilots might rebel and refuse to carry out your orders. Like launching a Hellfire or dropping some napalm into a crowd of your own nation's domestic civilian protesters.

Drones don't refuse to carry out orders or object on moral, humanitarian, or legal grounds. They don't leak mission details to reporters or investigators/prosecutors, even years later. What dictator or ruling elite wouldn't cream themselves over the idea of having a tame "Skynet" do most of the "heavy-lifting" of the suppression, enforcement, and punishment work of controlling a captive population under tyranny?

Drones (unarmed...for now) are already being used domestically. There are already calls from some in civilian law enforcement for armed drones for use against violent suspects. This is scary stuff. I can imagine only too easily how "mission creep" and incremental expansions in the laws could see widespread domestic civilian LE use of armed military drones in the relatively near future.

For that matter, seeing what the US government will already do and what lengths they will already go to openly, I would be shocked if there weren't already armed drones being used domestically by the military and/or one of the alphabet agencies, or a "we don't exist" special department that handles the tracking and elimination of "domestic civilian enemies of the state".

Strat

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[cavreader]

The latest carrier based drones have airborne refueling capabilities just like the manned jets. But manned jets have to contend with pilot fatigue. One of the latest tests off a carrier was a 55 hour non-stop single drone mission. There is not a pilot in the world capable of handling missions of that length. Even the existing manned B-2 bombers that launch missions from the mid-west to targets in the middle east are pushing the limits a pilot can handle.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[khallow]

And so now the leading investment is in anti-drone missiles. Then, unmanned anti-missile-launcher robots. Then... every country just keeps on finding ways to shoot, rather than talk. Perhaps it will end when every growing leaf becomes either weaponized or dead.

Just like they do now? I wonder when those Europeans, to give a notable example, will stop shooting each other and start talking?

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except Armed Drones still require human intervention and guidance. The ground crew for an armed drone such as the reaper has the pilot, overseers, mission planners - they're all in the same area. Yes, there is the risk of overriding a rebelling pilot. However, there's also the risk of a rebelling pilot firing weapons into crowds against orders. You can remove the pilot in this situation.

For now, unmanned aircraft are extremely limited in their operational capacity in the United States (and in other countries). Civilian airspace is governed by the FAA. They're hard-asses about allowing aircraft in their airspace for various reasons: observability (being able to see the aircraft is important to other pilots), communications (telling the aircraft to move is pretty important), safety (don't want drones falling apart over cities and killing people with debris), and scheduling (don't want random drones flying in landing routes near airports).

But, you are right. It's scary to think the drones could be up there.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

Drones still have to be piloted, they're just piloted remotely.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[drainbramage]

So far you need to skip the fighter jet idea.
Most drones are not even jets, they won't stack up well to a MIG or Mirage except as FOD.
--
Should we ever field (it will happen) air-to-air fighter drones the rules of engagement will have to change drastically.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[BlueStrat]

Drones still have to be piloted, they're just piloted remotely.

Not strictly true anymore. Say "hello" to the Northrop-Grumman X-47B. Say it nicely, though.

http://www.as.northropgrumman.com/products/nucasx47b/index.html

http://www.gizmag.com/x-47b-first-flight-the-era-of-the-autonomous-unmanned-combat-plane-approaches/17817/

Strat

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad PR is irrelevant. It all comes down to money, and it'll be a cold, cold day in hell before the defense budget is cut.

But dead crews are crews that no longer have to be paid. Losing a manned plane SAVES money :P

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

Drones still use pilots. Why do you think they need so much bandwidth.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's a pretty meaningless comparison. The article mentions 7500 drones versus 11,000 manned aircraft, but then goes on to mention that over 5,000 of these drones are Army Ravens. The Raven is a small, hand-launched aircraft weighing about 4 pounds. It's basically an RC plane with a camera; it's pretty much meaningless to compare this thing to a B2 stealth bomber or a Navy F-14.

There are far fewer drones filling roles traditionally filled by aircraft. The Predator and Reaper conduct ground-attack missions, and there are only 241 Predators. The Global Hawk is a spy plane similar to the U2, and there are a total of 25. But that probably understates the importance of drones. Numbers don't really tell the story. I mean, the military has nearly 200 F-22 Raptors but not a single one has seen combat. The Predator has played a much larger role, for instance taking out Taliban leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and being used for ground attacks in Libya. A much more important measure of the importance of drones would be something like number of missions flown, number of hours flown, or number of attacks.

I think the bottom line of the article is right though. The role of drones has expanded rapidly and dramatically. We have far more drones, they fly far more missions, and they fly a much larger range of missions than they did ten years ago. You could argue that the writing is increasingly on the wall... the role of a pilot is to provide control, navigation, and targeting. Now that a computer can take off, fly, navigate, and target, do we really need to risk pilots any more? The recent capture of a drone by the Iranians is an interesting case. You could argue that with a human onboard, the drone's navigation couldn't have been tricked by the Iranians (assuming that is what happened). But if you'd had a piloted situation, you would have what is a worse situation- the Iranians might have taken down the aircraft, gotten the technology, and either killed or captured an American pilot. Drones are more vulnerable but they're also more dispensable.

The role of drones is only going to increase. In 2013, the Navy is going to conduct carrier trials for the X-47. The X-47 is a drone that can fly up to 2100 miles and carry 4500 pounds of bombs, and it will have refuelling capabilities. So the carrier-based strike missions traditionally conducted by human pilots are going to be conducted by drones. The X-47 also has a longer range than traditional aircraft, which is presumably possible in because it doesn't need to carry a pilot or a cockpit. There's no obvious reason the role of drones can't be further expanded. Cargo aircraft, attack helicopters, air superiority fighters... anything an aircraft can do, we can design a drone to do it. And we can design drones to do things that piloted aircraft never could.

I think the big question is what this means for American military power. In the short term, I think this works in the military's favor, just because they're so far ahead of everyone else. China is busy trying to build a stealth fighter, but manned stealth fighters are yesterday's technology. The Predator and its offspring are the future. The problem is that playing catchup may not be that hard. The Predator isn't built by one of the traditional aerospace companies like Boeing or Lockheed, but by a small upstart, General Atomics. That suggests that it wouldn't be hard for a country like China or Russia to start developing their own drones, maybe not as good as American drones, but they could just churn them out in massive numbers. The Iranian incident also suggests that traditional dogfighting may become less important, increasingly cyberattacks and electronic warfare will dominate.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[artor3]

During the height of the Iraq War, Blackhawks seemed to go down so often one wondered if they were just flinging the things out of catapults, and yet I don't recall any made up heroics explaining the crashes.

Now, picking up a soldier from a friendly hospital... there's a real story of heroics.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[artor3]

You're being paranoid.

Drones may not object on humanitarian grounds, but they're basically just tricked out RC planes, and the people operating them are just as capable of refusing an order as a jet pilot or a member of the national guard or a cop. Why do drones scare you more than them, especially considering that we've seen (around the world and at home) examples of the later groups using deadly force against protestors?

You're fantasizing about the end of civilization when you talk about the government dropping napalm on protestors. They could also set up Nazi style death camps and start killing anyone with brown hair. Both scenarios have probabilities that would need to be expressed on a logarithmic scale.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[SJHillman]

I think the next step might by hybrid squadrons of one or two manned fighters escorted by a dozen drones specialized for various roles from recon/surveillance to ground attack or even missile interception. You'd get the benefits of non-manned craft (cheaper, more expendable) along with the benefits of manned craft (judgment, ability to function without comms). if the drones lost GPS or control link they could be programmed to fly formation around the manned craft until link is re-established or they return home. Interesting possibilities in the gray area between a manned airforce and a completely robotic airforce.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[phyzz]

The latest carrier based drones have airborne refueling capabilities just like the manned jets.

If you're talking about Northrop Grumman's X-47 UCAV, it is only developmental and has not yet flown off a carrier... But yes, drones having refueling capability, buddy refueling even more so, are going to set a new standard on mission duration.

But manned jets have to contend with pilot fatigue.

UCAV too in a sense : they are constantly monitored by one or two operators (sometimes even flight-rated pilots), who DO have to manage fatigue; the good thing is they are in a facility where crews can rotate without the aircraft having to provide accommodations for all those people. These aircrafts are unmanned in the sense that there is no man ON BOARD, but there is of course a man (or woman, one or more) in the loop. This is why they are sometimes called "remotely" piloted aircraft.

One of the latest tests off a carrier was a 55 hour non-stop single drone mission. There is not a pilot in the world capable of handling missions of that length. Even the existing manned B-2 bombers that launch missions from the mid-west to targets in the middle east are pushing the limits a pilot can handle.

Wikipedia states that a B-2 mission has lasted 50 hours with round-trip flight from Barksdale AFB to the Middle-East, but I cannot find any reference of it in the official U.S. Air Force website, which states that B-52s during Operation Desert Storm used to undertake missions of 35 hours. In both cases, these are bomber aircrafts which are designed for long duration missions : the B-2 has two pilots, is thoroughly automated, and of course has a toilet. Lockheed's U-2 Dragonlady pilots are not so lucky on their 9 hours mission (see http://www.blackbirds.net/u2/u-2mission.html) at 70k feet in their astronaut-like full pressure suit.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Drones don't refuse to carry out orders or object on moral, humanitarian, or legal grounds. They don't leak mission details to reporters or investigators/prosecutors, even years later.

You do understand that drones are still controlled by humans?

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[tibman]

The more you know: Drones have pilots, just not in the cockpit.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where a drone is of particular usefulness is in situations where your pilots might rebel and refuse to carry out your orders.

You seem to be under the impression that a drone is some sort of autonomous AI. A drone is still a piloted aircraft - it's just that the pilot is sitting in an office somewhere, flying it by remote control.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Shotgun]

They also won't kill their crew by pulling to many Gs (an all to common occurance in fighters).
They also allow the designer more leeway, because they don't have to design around a 6', 190lb meat bag and all the stuff it needs to stay alive at altitude.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

As an owner, I'm offended by your comparison of the Smart Car to a Lego car. Go ahead and laugh, but I don't care what you think, Lego cars are awesome.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Shotgun]

Fighter jets aren't really fighter jets anymore, and haven't been for over a decade. They are more aptly described as a "weapons platform". The days of yanking and banking with a bogie on your six are as long gone as the shoot-out with six-shooters at high noon. The modern fighter has a fire-and-forget, over-the-horizon. The Air Force already has friggin' acronyms for the terms, they are so common. The pilot picks a target from the radar screen, assigns a missile to it, launches, and picks the next target.

There is no reason that function can't be performed by a remote pilot firing a missile carried by a drone.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Shotgun]

You're think more of a high-flying AWACs ship controlling drones below. The workload on a pilot trying to control a high performance jet and all the drones would just be to high. There is a reason that the nose mounted, forward firing gun was a major innovation of military aviation in WW1. It allowed the pilot to fire and fly at the same time.

Beside, the physical limitations of the pilot physiology would limit what the drones could do.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the more important question is capability. I mean, I don't really care if it takes 3 drones to do the job of 1 manned aircraft if they can do the same job, and the drones cost less than 1/3 the cost of a manned aircraft. If you have cheap, "disposable" drones, you don't care if they get destroyed by the enemy - no pilot, no casualties.

Where a drone is of particular usefulness is in situations where your pilots might rebel and refuse to carry out your orders. Like launching a Hellfire or dropping some napalm into a crowd of your own nation's domestic civilian protesters.

Drones don't refuse to carry out orders or object on moral, humanitarian, or legal grounds. They don't leak mission details to reporters or investigators/prosecutors, even years later. What dictator or ruling elite wouldn't cream themselves over the idea of having a tame "Skynet" do most of the "heavy-lifting" of the suppression, enforcement, and punishment work of controlling a captive population under tyranny?

Drones (unarmed...for now) are already being used domestically. There are already calls from some in civilian law enforcement for armed drones for use against violent suspects. This is scary stuff. I can imagine only too easily how "mission creep" and incremental expansions in the laws could see widespread domestic civilian LE use of armed military drones in the relatively near future.

For that matter, seeing what the US government will already do and what lengths they will already go to openly, I would be shocked if there weren't already armed drones being used domestically by the military and/or one of the alphabet agencies, or a "we don't exist" special department that handles the tracking and elimination of "domestic civilian enemies of the state".

Strat

You speak as if drones are skynet controlled robots. This is not the case, they're controlled by human operators. But don't let facts get in the way of a good tinfoil hat rant!

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[cavreader]

"If you're talking about Northrop Grumman's X-47 UCAV, it is only developmental and has not yet flown off a carrier... But yes, drones having refueling capability, buddy refueling even more so, are going to set a new standard on mission duration."
You are wrong when claiming it has not been used off a carrier. The reliability of drone carrier launches and captures has proven better then a piloted aircraft. Unfortunately, you will need to apply for a higher security clearance to obtain the evidence but there is some video evidence on the Internet if you look in the right places.
Every advanced aircraft in the US arsenal is in a developmental state of varying degrees. The F-15 has been in development since 1970. People think they really know the actually status of US military technology development but they really don't. Secrecy has been compromised in some areas either by accident or even deliberately but there are also some systems that are actually secret.
You cannot compare drone operators to an actual pilot. Drone operators experience no G-forces and there is great difference between sitting in a cockpit for an extended amount of time compared to a sitting in a cushioned lounge basically playing a video game. Even a jet flying in a straight line subjects a human pilot to constant G-forces. Drone operators also work in shifts. A manned jet can't change pilots in the middle of the flight operation. Drone operations are also conducted with multiple personnel present at all times to monitor the on-going operation. The B-2 has a pilot, copilot, and flight engineer and the copilot can give the pilot some down time. Most F-15 variants and all F-22's are single pilot platforms. Although there are certain types of manned jets like an A-6 that do have 2 personnel aboard the primary responsibility for flying the plane is relegated to a single pilot. The other co-pilot is usually operates the radar, communication, navigation, and weapon systems. And the co-pilot is exposed to the same G-force fatigue as the pilot.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[SJHillman]

Wasn't thinking the pilot would control the drones - I would expect them to still be controlled remotely, but would share info with the manned aircraft. if the remote link got cut, then the drones should stick with the manned craft via radio beacon, visual recognition, etc.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Thing 1]

Just like they do now? I wonder when those Europeans, to give a notable example, will stop shooting each other and start talking?

Um, just before the bankers take them for all their sovereign worth? Beware banker-driven peace.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

What stupid faggots modded this bullshit up?

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

What would be particularly scary is if an enemy can take control of the drone, and either launch weapons at us or our allies, or at a civilian population

And from the other country's point of view... What would be particularly scary is if an enemy sends drones right to your doorstep, and can either launch weapons......
If *your* enemy from an ocean away were sending drones to your doorstep, I'm sure you'd find it extremely provocative and find any means to capture their drones. The viewpoint is all relative.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where a drone is of particular usefulness is in situations where your pilots might rebel and refuse to carry out your orders. Like launching a Hellfire or dropping some napalm into a crowd of your own nation's domestic civilian protesters.

Drones don't refuse to carry out orders or object on moral, humanitarian, or legal grounds. They don't leak mission details to reporters or investigators/prosecutors, even years later.

You do realize drones don't pilot themselves, right?

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[BlueStrat]

Drones may not object on humanitarian grounds, but they're basically just tricked out RC planes, and the people operating them are just as capable of refusing an order as a jet pilot or a member of the national guard or a cop.

See my comment here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2613584&cid=38654478

The X-47B is an autonomous drone. More and more will be coming online.

Strat

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[BlueStrat]

The more you know: Drones have pilots, just not in the cockpit.

See my post here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2613584&cid=38654478

Not all drones use remote piloting. Autonomous drones are already in use.

The more you know.

Strat

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[BlueStrat]

Except Armed Drones still require human intervention and guidance.

Sorry, that's not true of all armed US drones. The X-47B is autonomous. See my post here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2613584&cid=38654478

Strat

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

> The B-2 has a pilot, copilot, and flight engineer

The B-2 is indeed tri-seater, but the third seat is a non-aviator seat. It is not even an ejection seat. Some allege the third seat was originally installed for a "political officer" type crew, i.e. a texan with a Colt Navy so the pilots cannot even think of defecting to the USSR in their 2bn. USD toy. Others say the the third seat was for instructor purpose and ferry use and has been recently converted to an ejection seat, with a new hatch cover cut into the B-2's roof. Others say the third seat is now gone from the B-2's so the crew of two can take turns sleeping on the floor during long duration sorties.

Anyhow, the B-2 is essentially a twin-crew platform and the cabin is rather cramped by now, because the plane's electronics have been modernized with several IBM laptops velcroed to the dashboard, for lack of funds for an integrated avionics overhaul.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[BlueStrat]

You do realize drones don't pilot themselves, right?

You're wrong, sorry. There are already autonomous armed drones in US military service. See my post here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2613584&cid=38654478

Strat

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Alioth]

A jet flying in a straight line *does NOT* subject a pilot to G forces (well, except the normal 1G pointing straight down). G forces are only felt when an acceleration of some sort occurs (change in pitch, turning, accelerating, braking). Flying straight and level, you feel the same G force as sitting in a chair in an office.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

blackhawk down?

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[dcw3]

Meh, they'd just do like they always do and either not tell anyone, or make up some story about how the plane was shot down while engaging in a 6 on 1 dog fight, heroically saving the nation from flying terrorists...

Riiiight...we just don't tell anyone about dead bodies. Get a grip. Would love to see you dig up any citation indicating anything close to your comment.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

If one of those countries can break the encrypted link, then the U.S. has bigger problems.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Drones don't refuse to carry out orders or object on moral, humanitarian, or legal grounds."

But their operators might. What's the difference between an operator of a drone and a pilot of an airplane?

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[cavreader]

Does that include the takeoffs? Just the speed is enough to raise the G-force level a pilot is subjected to handling even when they use after burners or super cruise in a purely straight line flight path. The F-22 airframe for example is capable of performing maneuver's a human pilot has no chance of surviving. There are even cutoffs that prevent the pilot from even attempting such maneuver's. As it stands the US or anyone else for that matter have hit a wall in the performance of manned jet fighters until someone comes up with an inertial damping system.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[jwhitener]

Are 100% of drone attacks done via a remote with a human at the other end?

I suppose that distances the human pilot from the napalm, but I imagine that most sane pilots would still refuse to napalm a crowd of civilians.

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[BlueStrat]

Are 100% of drone attacks done via a remote with a human at the other end?

Unknown. I'd think that information is probably classified. Although, I doubt they'd be buying UCAVs (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle) if they didn't plan to use them, or are already using them.

Whether or not armed drones of either variety have been used domestically, I've not heard of any instances of that occurring.

Yet.

They are currently using unarmed remotely-piloted drones for domestic surveillance, so I have to believe that sooner or later the same people who let guns be sold to drug cartels and that raid Amish farms and Gibson Guitar Corp. with heavily-armed SWAT teams will try to expand armed drone and armed autonomous UCAV usage to domestic use. It is almost inevitable unless there are major reversals in the growth of government and government power, and not just a party change between political parties that both work to increase the government's size and power.

I suppose that distances the human pilot from the napalm, but I imagine that most sane pilots would still refuse to napalm a crowd of civilians.

Depends on the pilots. There are always those who will blindly follow orders and not ask questions. This is where autonomous drones can come in handy. No screening and testing pilots to find those who would napalm their own civilians needed. Just a TLA suit pulling up to the flight-line with orders/authorization papers, and carrying a sealed, ready-to-be-plugged-into-the-drone mission data module.

Strat

Re:Is this a legitimate comparison?

[kilfarsnar]

Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman? Just sayin'...

500 megabytes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody is smoking crack.

Re:500 megabytes?

[ArcherB]

Somebody is smoking crack.

Relax. It's probably megaBITS. Most people get that confused.

Re:500 megabytes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, submission sauce comes from the bottom of this page: www .globalsecurity. org/space/systems/bandwidth. HTM

Mbps = bits
MBps = bytes

This has to be the most common frustrating gap in knowledge for IT ppl from top to bottom of skill. The kinda thing a cs teacher should write on the board at the beginning of the semester, saying, "if you remember nothing else from my class..."

Re:500 megabytes?

[jschultz410]

Agree. There is no way in hell one drone needs anywhere near that kind of bandwidth. Even 500 Mb/s is incredible. If it turns out 500 Mb/s is accurate, then whoever the contractor is that designed this thing needs to be fired pronto.

Re:500 megabytes?

[localman57]

The thing is, I think we're all assuming they mean 500 Mb/s of radio bandwidth. If they're storing the data internally on hard drives or other media, and brining it back, that may be a bit different. Still, the data needs to be stored and processed to be useful, which means it is being processed somewhere. My guess is that the drones have some level of radio bandwidth for real-time operation, and then also are capable of brining back higher resolution information for post-processing.

Obviously military hardware is going to be better than the cisco I just bought for my cable modem, but given I have trouble actually getting sustained 150Mbps 12 feet away through clear air from fixed antennas with no restrictions for weight or power consumption, I have serious doubts about the viability of including a reliable 500Mbps radio link into a moving drone many miles away through bad weather.

Re:500 megabytes?

[rickb928]

And you paid, what, $150 for your Cisco? That buys you the cable for the one of drone's antennae.

Just one antenna.

You do get what ya pay for, sometimes.

Re:500 megabytes?

[JSBiff]

Perhaps bandwidth should never have been rated in bits per second in the first place? I blame my CompSci/IT predecessors (and marketing people, no doubt). I think they wanted a bigger number, and 300 bits per second sounded more impressive for that modem they designed than 37.5 bytes per second.

But, since the byte is really the smallest meaningful unit of data is a byte (yes, a single bit can represent a boolean value, but you can't transmit a single bit; in the simple case of a modem, you would generally transmit a byte; with modern networks, you transmit a packet, and I believe the smallest amount of data you can encapsulate in a packet is also one byte, isn't it?), data speeds should really be measured in *bytes* per second.

Also, most people think of data in terms of bytes - they buy hard drives in bytes (well, gigabytes and terrabytes), RAM, USB flash drives, sd cards for their phones, cameras, and other consumer electronics. In fact, bandwidth is the only place we still talk about bits instead of bytes, and that's ridiculous. It needs to change and the bits per second standard needs to die.

Re:500 megabytes?

[init100]

But, since the byte is really the smallest meaningful unit of data is a byte (yes, a single bit can represent a boolean value, but you can't transmit a single bit; in the simple case of a modem, you would generally transmit a byte; with modern networks, you transmit a packet, and I believe the smallest amount of data you can encapsulate in a packet is also one byte, isn't it?), data speeds should really be measured in *bytes* per second.

I disagree. There are several reasons why data transfer capacities of network equipment is measured in raw bits per second. First, different encoding schemes use different numbers of bits to transmit one byte. Second, at what layer do you want to measure the byte transport capacity? Do you wish to use the frame payload, the IP packet payload, the TCP stream payload, or something else? Third, even with a set encoding scheme and a defined layer, different packet sizes will give different amounts of overhead and thus differing data transport capacities for the same raw bitrate. Transmitting a stream of packets with a one-byte payload results in much more overhead and much lower payload transfer rate than if you use packets carrying 1 kb of payload. Fourth, features of various protocols significantly affect transfer rate. For an example compare the transfer rate of TFTP and FTP on the same network.

Re:500 megabytes?

[The Psyko]

No. First of all, 1 byte != 1 packet. And if you were measuring in bytes per second, which bytes? 7-bit? 8-bit? Bytes are at a different layer. If anything, you might want to measure symbols per second, but then that can vary as well.

Re:500 megabytes?

[m50d]

If you're using ATM like most of Europe then it's (IIRC) 56-bit cels that matter.

Re:500 megabytes?

[marcosdumay]

You can blame it personaly on Shannon.

At the first half of the XX century he made the absurd decision of measuring information in bits, not bytes despite the huge total of 0 digital computers available at that time, all of them with 8 bits word length.

Re:500 megabytes?

[JSBiff]

Yeah, but you seem to be missing my point. Why it communications (networks, modems) still measured in bits when everything else has moved on to 8-bit bytes as the basic unit of measure? We needn't be slaves to the past.

Without Shannon's work, we'd never be where we are today, but that doesn't mean we can't adjust terminology as it becomes inconvenient/confusing to continue to use the old way of saying the same thing.

Re:500 megabytes?

[marcosdumay]

That's because bits are the best units for calculating things like channel bandwidth.

In a second tought, that is also because the communication channels you are talking about are serial. When you measure throughput of L2 cache, you measure it on pages per second. When you measure throughput of an HD you'll measure it in sectors per second (but with disks it is usual to convert to bytes after measuring). In an equivalent way, when you measure the throughput of a serial line it makes sense to use bits per second.

Re:500 megabytes?

[JSBiff]

I just disagree. I don't at all see that it makes the most sense to measure the speed of anything in bits, pages, or sectors. I mean, sure, at a low level that's what's happening, but you can convert all of those to bytes. a page might be 1024b, or a 1024kb, or 512kb. Whatever, at the end of the day, everything can be expressed as bytes.

1 in 3

[noobermin]

Does the statistic also represent kind of how slashdot is? Only 1 in 3 "first post" comments are actually funny? I'd expect even less...

Re:1 in 3

[masternerdguy]

The first post should just be automatically deleted.

Re:1 in 3

[Torfbolt]

Which makes the second post to first post. Complete induction...

Re:1 in 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong: A "post removed" post would be the first post every time defeating first posters.

Re:1 in 3

[oreiasecaman]

...but then the second post would become the first, and so it would be deleted too! no one would post anymore :)

Re:1 in 3

[Anonymous Coward]

And nothing of value was lost

Re:1 in 3

[mcgrew]

To tell the truth, I try to avoid getting first post because they're so often modded down simply for being first, even if they are the rare non-joke FPs.

As to the subject and the AC FP, I'm sure he's telling the truth. I'm an office drone, too! Aren't you?

Re:1 in 3

[Forty Two Tenfold]

defeating first responders.

FTFY

Nerds for t3h win!

[Anonymous Coward]

In your face super hero fighter jocks! We can build something that the lowly non-coms can fly. Now excuse me while I read up on some more control theory. Things are going to get interesting..

Re:Nerds for t3h win!

[WillAdams]

Actually, one needs to be a commissioned officer, Captain last time I checked to be flying a drone (for the Air Force at least).

Re:Nerds for t3h win!

[Anonymous Coward]

(I wrote the previous post)

I did not believe this at first but looked it up. Now days they use officers. Initially they did allow non-comms to pilot drones, but a quick google search indicates that they no longer do this. They changed the practices so that now it is officers. I am kind of curious now what was going on to make that change.

Re:Nerds for t3h win!

[Phrogman]

Probably pilots of regular aircraft resenting having the drones piloted by lowly "non-comms". After all the regular pilots are seemingly on the way out and thus its likely that many are being converted over to drone piloting. RHIP

Re:Nerds for t3h win!

[nitehawk214]

Probably pilots of regular aircraft resenting having the drones piloted by lowly "non-comms". After all the regular pilots are seemingly on the way out and thus its likely that many are being converted over to drone piloting. RHIP

Also when they started arming the drones. Originally they were scout-only.

Re:Nerds for t3h win!

[tsotha]

The army allows noncoms to fly drones. Officers in the air force jealously guard their turf, even though most of the early combat pilots weren't officers.

It needs what???

[DeathToBill]

500MB/s? I just... wow. How? How do you get 1/2 GB/s per drone from the other side of the world? Presumably they don't care about latency!

Re:It needs what???

[Spritzer]

I'm thinking someone got confused by the 600MHz bandwidth of the SAR/GMTI sensor package.

Re:It needs what???

[Anonymous Coward]

The control centers are portable modules. You can probably stow two or five drone control centers inside one of those big old cargo planes as well as the drones they are supposed to control and do the whole recon from 30,000 feet and safely outside missile range.

Re:It needs what???

[L4t3r4lu5]

It doesn't get to the other side of the world. Drones are controlled from reasonably close by, and I would suspect they're fairly autonomous during flight. That drone brought down near the Iraq border was downed by spoofing GPS coordinates, telling it it was back at base and should land. Besides, the Global Hawk is a surveillance drone, so I would suspect 500MB/s is downstream.

Plus, you're forgetting that the military always get the cool toys first. 500MB/s to the user will come to us regular Joe's eventually.

Re:It needs what???

[operagost]

Either that, or they accidentally capitalized the "B" in "Mb" somewhere.

Re:It needs what???

[neyla]

It's utter bullshit offcourse. Some journalist probably mistook frequency-used for data-transmitted or something along those lines.

Flight-data (speed, position, velocity, status) is a tiny trickle of data, the only data that are significant is when transmitting live-video, which not all drones do 100% of the time. And even when they do, it's not 500MB/s. Full-HD-video from a blueray-player is on the order of 35 megabit/second, thus 500 MB/s would be the equivalent of streaming around 100 HD-cameras in blueray-quality-video.

That's not what's happening. The number is bullshit.

Re:It needs what???

[Spritzer]

Some quick searching found this.
From THIS article:

To demonstrate the concept, Northrop Grumman's test team developed and installed on Global Hawk a new 1.4 terabyte (1500 gigabyte) computer server capable of storing all of the imagery and sensor data recorded during a complete Global Hawk mission.

With a 42 hour mission time that computes to just under 10MB/s or approximately 80Mb/s bandwidth. That sounds more reasonable.

Re:It needs what???

[L4t3r4lu5]

From Wikipedia "The digital sensor data can be transmitted at up to 50 Mbit/s to a ground station in real time, either directly or through a communications satellite link."

Wish I'd read that before posting my other comment.

Re:It needs what???

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, the Global Hawk is a surveillance drone, so I would suspect 500MB/s is downstream.

Most of it is indeed downstream. If you figure one standard definition camera on board, and you want to minimize compression artifacts but use one of the required NATO-approved codecs, you're looking at 12kb to 60kb per frame. When you consider that you need to record full frame rate, again, let us assume 30fps per NTSC (or ATSC's 480p) then you're looking at (1s)(30f)(12kb)=360kbps to (1s)(30f)(60kb)(1800kbps). Now, consider that this is the US military, and they demand the highest quality with minimal collateral damages, and each drone has not one camera but many cameras, and they do not store the data on board for security reasons, you can begin to appreciate just how easy it becomes to hit that 500mbps mark. They have cameras for the targeting system, for forward view, and redundant cameras uses for additional perspectives, and the video isn't used just for hunting and killing, but to supervise the pilots to ensure that they are performing their mission and not carrying out their own agenda based on prejudice (such as a Muslim-hating redneck targeting Muslims for fun, or a traitor not targeting actual criminals/terrorists/hostiles) you might better understand why so much bandwidth is needed. It is possible to compress the video more highly, but there are codecs which must be used for multiple logistics and legal reasons, and even more efficient codecs won't get down the bandwidth all that much, really, because these applications require a lot more key frames than your typical CCTV situation. Also, because of latency, as much of the data as possible has to be maintained in the analog realm (IP video lags very badly and this application requires response to be as realtime as possible - remember, actual pilots fly most of these things) or a raw/PCM digital stream, with A/D conversion or digital encoding used for transmission for security and bandwidth concerns, and for the recording (recorded remotely - again, security concerns).

Now, knowing all of that - it's a good thing that AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast aren't their provider, because they'd overrun their bandwidth cap in under a day with just one drone. ;)

Re:It needs what???

[asylumx]

OP is incorrect, he paraphrased from here: http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/bandwidth.htm

However, he translated 500Mbps (megaBITS per second) to megabytes per second. 500Mbps is actually closer to 62.5MB/s -- still a lot compared to residential bandwidth in the US, but not half a terabyte every second.

I couldn't tell you why OP didn't copy/paste, he's only a few words off from the original anyway.

Re:It needs what???

[afidel]

No, no they are not. All the USAF drones are controlled from Nevada.

Re:It needs what???

[Dan East]

Drones are controlled from reasonably close by, and I would suspect they're fairly autonomous during flight.

That's not correct. While there are some types of small autonomous aircraft used directly by troops, most of the drones are piloted from locations in the continental US, like Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

These remotely controlled planes can hover in the air 24 hours at a time, collecting intelligence or carrying out a strike in Afghanistan.

But the pilots are thousands of miles away, sitting in front of a bank of computer screens. And that distance, which is the strength of the program, has also created unique challenges.

http://www.npr.org/2011/11/29/142858358/drone-pilots-the-future-of-aerial-warfare

Re:It needs what???

[PlaneShaper]

On page 17 of the actual report (page 22 of the PDF file), it says "a single Global Hawk...'requires 500Mbps bandwidth...'" So yes, somewhere between there and the Wired story, someone miscapitalized the B. That statistic is cited within the report as being from the Department of the Navy.

Re:It needs what???

[Anonymous Coward]

Other branches have drones as well

Re:It needs what???

[Baloroth]

The Global Hawk is capable of carrying a 2,000 pound sensor suite. IR, SA radar with moving target indicator, optical, SIGINT, ELINT, and who knows what else. 500MB/s is not unbelievable when you account for all of that.

Re:It needs what???

[muon-catalyzed]

downed by spoofing GPS coordinates

I doubt that, more likely it simply malfunctioned, if they were that smart, why not just EMP the drone? Or do they did just that?

Re:It needs what???

[sgt scrub]

Plus, you're forgetting that the military always get the cool toys first. 500MB/s to the user will come to us regular Joe's eventually.

From whom? Surely not one of the existing ISP's in my area. Oh wait. You probably mean a 500MB cap will come to us regular Joe's. /snark

Re:It needs what???

[afidel]

True but the majority are USAF and AFAIK none of the drones are controlled from the field (though they can get a video downlink in the field).

Re:It needs what???

[WillHirsch]

You might call the source for this claim journalistic, but it is at least from within the military. Could the encryption of the transmitted data, or maybe massive redundancy, account for the size of the figure?

Re:It needs what???

[GameboyRMH]

No that's still completely batshit crazy. People in this thread who have done the research are saying it's actually 50mbit which is sensible and believable.

Re:It needs what???

[L4t3r4lu5]

When you say "pilot" you don't mean that in the "control the aircraft directly" sense of the word as, say, a fighter pilot would control a jet. I envision a guy with a laptop typing in commands at a prompt to instruct the aircraft to fly itself to a specific location and perform a specific action autonomously, and report back with the data.

Re:It needs what???

[L4t3r4lu5]

Maybe those DARPA guys have a directional EMP device in the basement somewhere. However, I can't help but think that anything powerful enough to down a craft several thousand feet in the air would cause significant collateral damage, as well as pull the fillings out of the operator's jaw.

Re:It needs what???

[L4t3r4lu5]

Mod my parent post down, please. It's pretty much all factually inaccurate and corrected in responses (which should be modded up). To summarise, USAF drones are controlled from Nevada and not close by, Wikipedia states sensor packages report back 50Mb/s of data to local ground forces, or the operator by satellite, and there is no evidence of the UAV aquired by IraN being downed by GPS spoofing.

Thanks to those posting corrections.

Re:It needs what???

[paiute]

No, no they are not. All the USAF drones are controlled from Nevada.

The drone program would pay for itself if they installed the control rooms in Circus Circus and let kids fly them for quarters. Kill a terrorist, get a plush stuffed animal!

Re:It needs what???

[tibit]

Even that is probably wrong. Do these things run line-of-sight only? If they do, then it should be pretty damn easy to jam the downlink. If they don't then I wonder how those must clobber whatever space segment is used to relay all the data.

Re:It needs what???

[Dog-Cow]

50 mbit per video feed. No drone has only one feed.

Re:It needs what???

[tibit]

Sorry, RF engineering reality is there no matter who pays the bill. And 500 mbits/s downlink just doesn't compute, even if it's line of sight to a control center. They presumably fly many of them at once from one control center...

Re:It needs what???

[Sockatume]

Actually, he does mean "control the aircraft directly". UAVs are piloted in real time on a system that wouldn't look particularly alient to a flight sim nut.

Re:It needs what???

[tibit]

That sounds more like it. Still they can't do probably more than a dozen at once via satellite or they'll run out of channels...

Re:It needs what???

[GameboyRMH]

Let's say it has 5 video feeds. That's 250mbit/sec. Then let's double that for sensors and control signals.

That's exactly 1/8th of the bandwidth accounted for.

Re:It needs what???

[LWATCDR]

Actually only for take off and landings. It is the latency issue that causes them to have local pilots for take off and landings.
it is funny but I was talking to a friend of mine that worked on drones about two years ago and he told me the same thing.
Bandwidth is and will be an issue for a long time to come. You only have X amount of spectrum in which to transmit data. That is why AEW aircraft take controllers with them instead of beaming the data back to some command center.
Bandwidth gets tricky when you get past LOS range and satellites introduce real latency issues.
Also their is not proof that Iran brought down that drone by spoofing GPS. It is actually very unlikely that they did. Drones use encrypted GPS and it is not very likely that Iran broke the encryption keys. It is far more likely that the drone had a problem and came down.

Re:It needs what???

[Baloroth]

500Mbps seems to be the original source. However, this source, which seems considerably more reliable, being written by an expert in the field, states it could be up to 500 megabytes, and points out how a high-res camera can use 75 megabytes to stream. Speculative, but by far the best source I've seen. 50mbit/s is far too low. Even a single truly highres camera (keep in mind these are probably more than HD cameras) can use more than that.

Re:It needs what???

[SuricouRaven]

If you shoot the UN trucks, you lose points.

Re:It needs what???

[Anonymous Coward]

Not exactly a laptop...

http://www.designundersky.com/storage/blog-images/2010/february-2010/drone-guerrilla-gardening-warfare/drone-pilots.jpg

Re:It needs what???

[GameboyRMH]

500Mbits I could believe, I agree 50Mbit is on the low side but it's not unreasonable. An HD video camera should be able to fit in there, and with good optical zoom (which the drones certainly have) 1080p would be plenty good enough. One video stream is good enough even for ground recon or attack, considering they could switch to a downward-facing camera to look at the ground while flying on instruments, and if they need beyond-HD resolution they can always take some snapshots and spend the next few minutes downloading them.

Re:It needs what???

[Anonymous Coward]

"That drone brought down near the Iraq border was downed by spoofing GPS coordinates"

This is complete speculation and most experts consider it pretty unlikely that Iran had anything to do with bringing the drone down.

"The notion that Iran could have cracked through the encryption “sounds like a made-for-TV movie” says John Pike, a satellite expert and president of Globalsecurity.org. ”If they could overcome the sorts of of crypto systems that would protect this drone, they would not waste their time on surveillance drones. They would be breaking into banks.”"

Re:It needs what???

[LWATCDR]

Umm... No you are wrong.
Video?
Try Sigint, Elint, synthetic apature radar, IR, and on some missions gamma and neutron.
In other words the entire spectrum from HF radio to well past UV.
so in other words I call ignorance.

Re:It needs what???

[PPH]

Keep in mind that drone video feeds are probably not yet encrypted or even very well compressed.

Re:It needs what???

[JoeRobe]

I've seen lots of video (here, for example) where it looks like the "pilots" have multiple control sticks and many-paneled displays showing video feed from a UAV. So these "pilots" may have more feedback from the aircraft than an in-plane pilot would.

Also, people were commenting about the bandwidth - Reaper drones have Raytheon multispectral targeting systems that must require a good bit of bandwidth (multiple video feeds at different wavelengths). Also I would imagine that the drone is sending back tons of information that is critical to the aircraft but not to the mission, such as fuel levels, engine operation details, and feedback from thousands of sensors (each one may not contribute much, but there are probably a lot of them, plus redundancies). I still think 500 Mb/sec seems high, though...

In these sorts of situations, I wonder if there's the same level of adrenaline rush that in-plane pilots get, since that adrenaline provides a pilot with heightened awareness of his surroundings and the ability to make quicker decisions. I suppose current UAV missions don't involve "dog-fighting" or things that would require quick thinking, but that's got to be an eventual goal.

Re:It needs what???

[dave420]

True, but I doubt many drones have 83 video feeds, which is what it would take to saturate 500MB/s at 50Mb/s.

And Islam is a many-faceted religion, as all are. Generalisations don't help your cause, in fact they just make you look foolish.

Re:It needs what???

[Anonymous Coward]

no because you can basically just assume that the press will confuse "bits" v. "bytes" wherever possible.

Re:It needs what???

[dave420]

Half a Gigabyte per second, you mean? ;)

Re:It needs what???

[Fallon]

First? I support the MILSTAR satellites, & they were designed decades ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milstar The military stuff may be cool, but it's more often than not very old rather than cutting edge, especially with satellites.

And most if not all of the Predators in Afghanistan are controlled from stateside air force bases, Las Vegas, Arizona & a few others I think.

Re:It needs what???

[thejaq]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105629/ Forward thinking

Re:It needs what???

[Kjella]

However, he translated 500Mbps (megaBITS per second) to megabytes per second. 500Mbps is actually closer to 62.5MB/s -- still a lot compared to residential bandwidth in the US, but not half a terabyte every second.

So he doesn't know bits from bytes and you don't know giga from tera, but together you're dynamite ;)

Re:It needs what???

[khallow]

Sure, it's happy talk. But an early adopter of high bandwidth networks will make that technology cheaper. And there are plenty of areas in the US with competition in providing bandwidth to the internet.

Re:It needs what???

[Anonymous Coward]

You know military are so conscious people and would never use a high powered radio emitter/antenna tuned to exactly your favorite station/wi-fi channel/whatever.

Re:It needs what???

[Anonymous Coward]

From Wikipedia "The digital sensor data *can* be transmitted at up to 50 Mbit/s to a ground station in real time, either directly or through a communications satellite link."

Yes it CAN be transmitted at that rate because that is what the RF/MII/PHY part supports at ideal conditions. But at what rate it is really transmitting is anyones guess (except the guy who watches the netflow analysis of course).

Re:It needs what???

[wagnerrp]

Actually, full HD video from a bluray player is on the order of 600Mbps, or as high as 3Gbps if it upconverts from the raw 24fps YUV to 60fps RGB. The source this article came from actually stated 500Mbps for the whole uplink from a Global Hawk, not 500MBps. Even nerds can't seem to regularly get that one right.

Re:It needs what???

[tsotha]

For that sensor package. The problem with speculating about required bandwidth is it really depends on what kind of sensors are there. When I was working with satellites we had some gigabit plus streams, so it's not difficult at all for me to believe they have a package that requires 500Mb/sec. Particularly since the stuff they're putting on Global Hawk is reputed to be satellite quality sensors.

Re:It needs what???

[tsotha]

I'm pretty sure you're not going to get the real number from wikipedia, particularly if it involves a system that can be upgraded without changing the air frame.

Re:It needs what???

[Thing 1]

True, but I doubt many drones have 83 video feeds, which is what it would take to saturate 500MB/s at 50Mb/s.

And Islam is a many-faceted religion, as all are.

Reminds me of Heywood Banks: "I'm looking at the world through fly's eyes, looking at the world through fly's eyes, looking at the world through fly's eyes, and you can just buzz off."

Re:It needs what???

[Alioth]

They don't have autoland? The Hawker Siddeley Trident 3 airliner had fully automatic landing in the 1970s!

Re:It needs what???

[asylumx]

Ya, my mistake. Thanks for calmly and coolly correcting me.

Re:It needs what???

[LWATCDR]

The Air Force drones do not. The Army and Navy Drones do.

Re:It needs what???

[neyla]

uncompressed, sure. But who the hell sends uncompressed video anywhere ?

Re:It needs what???

[Anonymous Coward]

Drones are controlled from reasonably close by, and I would suspect they're fairly autonomous during flight.

Incorrect in this case. It can be controlled from anywhere on the planet.

Re:It needs what???

[Anonymous Coward]

All the USAF drones are controlled from Nevada.

That is incorrect. Specifically in this case, none of the Global Hawks are.

Re:It needs what???

[neyla]

encryption doesn't (generally speaking) change the size of the data at all, allthough it's prefered to compress data prior to encryption both to reduce encryption-workload and to lessen known-plaintext-vectors, and doing so would actually *reduce* the bandwith-requirements.

Redundancy increases data-size, but not by an order of magnitude. It's just back-of-the-envelope offcourse, I stand by my claim: it's a ridicolous amount of data. An average drone-plane, as used in war-theatres today, certainly does not produce that much data, not even at peak, nevermind average.

Re:It needs what???

[asylumx]

Yup, thanks -- got tunnel vision on posting the info and didn't check my own info :)

great!

[Anonymous Coward]

If the military needs more bandwidth, they'll invest in new tech, so in a few years that tech will get to us and we'll get faster internets.

Re:great!

[BosstonesOwn]

Yeah , then Verizon or AT&T will sell it as 5g and lower the caps even more producing an even more overly inflated bill, all while a senator tells us that this is needed because a truck has crashed in the internets tubes causing a backup of bits which are not being processed fast enough to fight the war on terror.

And it will only cost 45 Trillion to get the technology into the right peoples hands.

All joking now done, the cameras on those planes must be feeding extremely high def video back to the mothership to use that much bandwidth.

Re:great!

[neyla]

The number claimed is simply unrealistic, and must be a mistake.

full-HD as coming from a blueray-disc requires on the order of 35 megabits second. 500Mbytes/second is the same as 4000 megabit/second, or more than 100 times what a full-hd-movie coming rom a blueray-disc uses.

Yes there may be more than one camera. Yes it may be more than full-hd. But no, not more than *100* full-HD-cameras.

Re:great!

[Dog-Cow]

It's already been mentioned numerous times that it's Mbps, not MBps. Also, Blueray video is compressed, and relatively low resolution compared to what the drones are sending back.

2 out of 3 US Workers

[Ukab the Great]

are bandwidth-hogging drones. Eat your heart out US military.

Re:2 out of 3 US Workers

[Anonymous Coward]

That means they need a data cap!

History's Detectives: Drones used since 1940s

[peter303]

They ran a piece last summer tracking down a 1940s drone. It had a new-fangled invention called a TV camera that weighed 100 pounds at that time. The operator had to be in line-of-sight.

Re:History's Detectives: Drones used since 1940s

[muon-catalyzed]

The first drone? Wikipedia again, has it all..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_TDR

Re:History's Detectives: Drones used since 1940s

[timeOday]

This is exactly what's so interesting about the rise of the drones. They're by no means a new idea. They're one of those things the military poured money into, decade after decade, seemingly into a pit. The, all of the sudden, BOOM.

It almost gives you hope for laser weapons and ballistic missile defense (if "hope" is the right word for a weapon).

Re:History's Detectives: Drones used since 1940s

[iggymanz]

hmmm, wonder wikipedia is wrong, could there have been experiments with unmanned balloons with automatic cameras in the 19th century? certainly tethered balloons were used that way (though I wouldn't count those as "drones", would have to be untethered....)

Re:History's Detectives: Drones used since 1940s

[iggymanz]

if it's anti-missile, then yes "hope" would be the right word

Re:History's Detectives: Drones used since 1940s

[olau]

Maybe what happened was that the rest of the world caught up technology-wise to make it feasible.

Video streaming

[Anonymous Coward]

This accounts for most of the bandwidth.

The number in the article is indeed way high... not to say Global Hawk does not have some serious data output.

I work on NASA"s Global Hawk program, and used to work on many DOD ISR programs.

Re:Video streaming

[Thing 1]

Did you protect your IP? Not that it matters, really; NSA et al have their hooks in teh TOR etc as well. Good luck continuing working!

Bandwidth

[inhuman_4]

How the hell can the manage 500MB/s? That is an insane amount. We can stream 720p with 5.1 audio over a 5mb/s connection. So what the hell are they using all that bandwidth for?

Clearly the military needs to invest some money in compression and/or greater automation in these things. 500MB/s should be enough for a wing of UAVs.

Re:Bandwidth

[synapse7]

Run their IP through youhavedownloaded.com ?

Re:Bandwidth

[skovnymfe]

I'm not sure where the submitter gets his 500MB/s from, but as others suggest it's probably 500Mb/s.

However, you might say 500Mb/s is still a tad much, however I have a good idea why it might be that high.

First, a drone typically doesn't have just a single camera. It'd be a bit of a waste to get cheap there really, when you can put three or four cameras per drone.

Second, I can imagine military regulations dictate that judging kill orders based on compressed live images from a shaky drone isn't good enough. Has to be a raw data stream to ensure the best possible information is available.

These are of course just my thoughts and I don't have any experience or insider knowledge to back them up with.

Re:Bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm let me see.

IR, UV, other EM spectrum, Radio waves, Radiation, MAD, Telemetry, RWR, Radar, just to name a few. All realtime and presumably high fidelity

Re:Bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

"Second, I can imagine military regulations dictate that judging kill orders based on compressed live images from a shaky drone isn't good enough."

Yeah sure douchebag

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0

Re:Bandwidth

[Amouth]

and your still not there -- unless they are morons and everything is completely uncompressed/raw frame - but even then i don't think you would hit 500MB/s

Re:Bandwidth

[GameboyRMH]

"He, uh, downloads songs from the web"

"Yeah, how many?"

"All of them."

"Well you're in a pack of trouble with the record companies there, son!"

Re:Bandwidth

[Sockatume]

There's some debate about whether "B" or "b" means "bits". I see you prefer the "small b means small quantity" convention.

Re:Bandwidth

[asylumx]

That's not video from a drone, that's video from a manned helicopter. They had a lot more to go on than just these images, you just don't get to see everything they had in one little youtube video. Not entirely relevant, and certainly not grounds to call the GP "douchebag" over.

Re:Bandwidth

[tsotha]

How the hell can the manage 500MB/s?

Multiplexing. Lots and lots of multiplexing.

Re:Bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can find me a reliable BLOS 500 Mbps datalink, I've got an RFP. The author is unaware of physics and is off by roughly an order of magnitude or two. We still have ATSC v.s. NTSC problems; which is a pretty realistic perspective on the state of UAVs.

Re:Bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

There is *no* debate on this, except when people are unaware of the distinction.

Re:Bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

and your still not there -- unless they are morons and everything is completely uncompressed/raw frame - but even then i don't think you would hit 500MB/s

Let me put it this way. Just try snooping multiple 3G signals in a town with HSDPA+ connection. You are looking at towers capable of transmitting 84 Mbps each.

500% of the bandwith?

[Anonymous Coward]

Breaking News! Modern technology uses more bandwidth than available 20 years ago! Film at 11.

They're comparing it to the time when 14.4 kbps modems were considered blazingly fast.

Re:500% of the bandwith?

[timeOday]

My objection to that comparison is they're probably not counting the 1991 bandwidth used by analog voice radios, much less radar and jammers at the time (which obviously blast a lot of energy into the RF spectrum). It would be more accurate to say, "digital transmissions from a single drone are 5x what they were..." etc.

5 Steps to Internet Bliss

[Haileri$]

1. Convert your country to some un-American religion (try not worshipping money or something) 2. Pretend you have $hitloads of oil 3. Run around a lot in the wilderness wearing nothing but Gucci handbags so when they inevitably invade they have to chase you Benny Hill style with drones 4. Once your entire country has been upgraded to a 200 GB/second cloud to handle all the drones flying around fess up that the oil was a myth. 5. Download-pr0n heaven

Re:5 Steps to Internet Bliss

[operagost]

1. Convert your country to some un-American religion (try not worshipping money or something)

Which "American" religion worships money? I think it's Environmentalism, but I'm not sure.

Re:5 Steps to Internet Bliss

[Rennt]

Government.

Re:5 Steps to Internet Bliss

[Anonymous Coward]

Capitalism.

Re:5 Steps to Internet Bliss

[SuricouRaven]

All of them.

Re:5 Steps to Internet Bliss

[h4rr4r]

Many fringe American Christian groups do and some less fringe. They believe if you are poor or rich is based on how Good or Faithful you are.

Re:5 Steps to Internet Bliss

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because the populations in Iraq and Afghanistan have outstanding internet service at this point.

Distinction without...

[RobinEggs]

Relax. It's probably megaBITS. Most people get that confused.

Which is still a metric shitload.

It must be streaming all that uncompressed video back to its pilot that costs so much bandwidth.

Re:Distinction without...

[EvilMonkeySlayer]

If you're using it as a surveillance platform you probably don't want your video to be compressed (assuming lossy compression), last thing you want is to misidentify some vehicle as military target, drop a bomb or fire a hellfire missile at the thing only to discover it was really a civilian vehicle misidentified because of blockiness introduced by the video compression.

I'll assume they mean megabits too, that makes more sense. The cameras on something like a predator drone are quite probably very high resolution and there is more than one of them.

Re:Distinction without...

[flyingfsck]

No, it is the USA. So it would be an Imperial Shitload. Anyway, total BS.

Re:Distinction without...

[Anonymous Coward]

Applying H.264 compression to raw video will not hurt the video and will save lots of bandwidth.

The average 1920x1080 at 24 frames/s blu-ray is ~30-33 megabits/s.
Raw video 1920x1080 @ 24 frames/s would be ~1.2 gigabits per second (24 bit color). You could do some loss-less compression to get it down a bit but not much.

There is no way they are transimitting multiple RAW HD video streams, I would bet my paycheck they are using H.264 compression or MPEG2.

Re:Distinction without...

[marcosdumay]

Well, I'd want most video to be compressed in a way that lets me see the features of the ground better (not jpeg), and the option to switch into the uncrompressed mode for a small region of interest.

But that is how I think I would design such a thing. And I'm not designing anything like that... Maybe they have a good reason for not compressing their video, but more likely, there is some counter-inteligence going on here.

The obvious solution to the bandwidth problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is to make the drones autonomous, possibly using some kind of AI. I hear there's some great research going on at a company called Cyberdyne Systems.

Why spread propaganda?

[arcite]

There has been no proof that the drone that Iran 'acquired' was brought down by spoofing...

Re:Why spread propaganda?

[L4t3r4lu5]

Yes, sorry. I don't have my Press hat on today. Please amend my post to have the word "Alleged" in the appropriate places.

Saying that, I didn't notice anyone saying that this wasn't the case either[dramatic ellipsis]

Re:Why spread propaganda?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for Iran stating that it was.

Re:Why spread propaganda?

[aceboomblain]

And the US asked for it back

Re:Why spread propaganda?

[aceboomblain]

Oops, misread parent post. Yes, it was speculation that GPS spoofing was involved.

500MB/sec?

[jimicus]

500MB/sec isn't right in a million years.

Blu-ray uses about 40megaBITS/second, and that includes audio as well as video. So if we were to say a couple of megabits/second for control (which is probably generous); that means each drone sends out the equivalent of over a hundred totally separate high-def video feeds each with 5.1 channel DTS surround sound.

Re:500MB/sec?

[tsotha]

You didn't pay $150m for your blu-ray player. Your idea of "high-def" and the military's idea of "high-def" are totally at odds. A 1080p stream from that altitude would be worthless.

Re:500MB/sec?

[Anonymous Coward]

Think a few dozen cameras at much higher resolution (we want to see the ground from the sky, we need more than ~1000 horizontal pixels), higher fps, and relatively shitty compression.

Misleading Title

[Anonymous Coward]

aircraft != warplane

Re:Misleading Title

[Thing 1]

So far...

Asinine comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

which is 500 percent of the total bandwidth of the entire U.S. military used during the 1991 Gulf War.

As a Gulf War vet who worked with the communication network at the time, that "500 percent" metric is pointless. In 1991, we were still playing games on Commodore 64's. Hardly anything in our military inventory was networked, and what little was, was largely special-purpose point-to-point equipment. Is 5x the bandwidth of a pre-internet era war supposed to be impressive? Quick, tell us how much more bandwidth it was than we used in World War 2!

Re:Asinine comparison

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a V2 loaded with reel-to-reel tapes and sent in the general direction of London...

Re:Asinine comparison

[Amouth]

looks like the record for ww2 for Morse code was 35 words per min.. split the difference (10 min to operate and 35 max) lets use average of ~23wm. 5 letters per word and average 3 bits per letter so 3*5*23= 345 bits per min per operator = 5.75 bps per operator

for 500MBs = 4,194,304,00 bps

so 500MBs is equivalent to ~729,444,174 radio operators from WW2.. which happens to be ~66x the number of people drafted for WW2.

sorry i couldn't find any stat on the number of radio operators active during WW2.. so i just deiced to run with the what it would take route.

Re:Asinine comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

to bad the tapes of that time were highly inflammable

Re:Asinine comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you. As a Comm Officer, I saw that statement and just had to laugh. Frankly I'm surprised it was ONLY 500%

Re:Asinine comparison

[Hatta]

I'm still playing games on my Commodore 64 in 2012.

Re:Asinine comparison

[fnj]

They could actually do rather better than 35 wpm in WW II. The Kurier system for automated burst transmission of morse from U-boats could transmit an entire message of 7 letters of data in 454 ms including lead-in. That works out to about 185 wpm. Ordinary 45.45-50 baud RTTY used by all the combatants as routine was at least 80-90 wpm (they used 5 bits per character plus some overhead to shift between character sets).

Re:Asinine comparison

[Amouth]

i was just going off Wikipedia (yea i know - but common.. this isn't exactly important work we are doing here :) )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code#Speed_records
"The fastest speed ever sent by a straight key was achieved in 1942 by Harry Turner W9YZE (d. 1992) who reached 35 WPM in a demonstration at a U.S. Army base"

which for a person's hand sounded reasonable - i honestly didn't think about trans coded in to mechanical bursts for subs

but i would be willing to argue that because you have to have a human transcode it before the machine could burst it your average input is still based on the average per operator (you would need more than one operator to feed the machine to maintain a higher rate).. and as this was a comparison on bandwidth consumed over time (with no time given - just assume over the time of the war) .. i was using average speed.

Re:Asinine comparison

[E_Ron.Eous]

You could not be more wrong in more ways.

Re:Asinine comparison

[Thing 1]

M.U.L.E. FTW! (Or was that Atari 400/800? Or both? Anyway, good times!)

its 500 Mega-BITS-per-second

[Anonymous Coward]

from the arcticle, page 17 ...

"requires 500Mbps" ...

AT&T/Verizon

[p51d007]

Sure hope they aren't on a at&t or Verizon data plan! LOL. The I.T. guy at our office says we use to much bandwith. I sent him this, said we don't use THAT much, so hush ;)

Re:AT&T/Verizon

[element-o.p.]

He will probably just tell you that your office would use less bandwidth if you'd stay off of /. ;)

That's a good thing

[Donwulff]

Besides 500MB/s being slightly dubious... so what? They're reconnaissance planes, their primary purpose is gathering intelligence. So they're gathering it, at 500MB/s. So their downside is that they're good at what they're doing?
This would be an issue if we were told "They use 20% of the total available bandwidth for military applications per plane just to stay in air", but I do not believe this to be the case or we would be told that. So what exactly is the downside?

Re:That's a good thing

[Donwulff]

Skimming the actual report, the number in there is predictably "500Mbits", it seems to be Wired who got that mixed with megabytes. Still as some earlier posters point out one needs to go no further than Wikipedia to find out that number is still likely off by a magnitude as the real figure seems to be 50Mbps. I assume the 500Mbits figure came from people trying to get funding for more bandwidth, and may be based on theoretical maximum, such as the capability of the link installed on them.
The report in question does, however, warn that "The finite bandwidth that currently exists for all military aircraft, and the resulting competition for existing bandwidth, may render the expansion of UAS applications infeasible and leave many platforms grounded". This sounds slightly dubious, as the report itself notes that moern UAV's are autonomous-capable, and all the bandwidth is basically for sensors, which can be switched on and off on the basis of need. Unless there is need for 24h uninterrupted surveillance, the bandwidth isn't such a limiting factor.
From a satellite bandwidth link we learn the supposed total bandwidth available is somewhere in the ballbark of 12Gbps. This would mean a single Global Hawk uses 1/240th of the total available bandwidth when ran over satellite. Granted, that may seem bit of a andwidth hog, but it's important to notice there's no difference between that and a manned airplane running with equivalent sensors forwarding data. As such it's hard to see this as a "drawback".
If one looks for a drawback from the report in question, it's their reliability, as according to the report in 2005 Global Hawk for example had 13 times as high "Class A Mishap" rate as U-2 spy-planes. On the other hand, the report claims that in 2009 Predator-drones reached a lower mishap rate than small single-engine private airplanes in the USA.

The problem with drones

[apcullen]

Am I the only one waiting for our entire fleet of drones to be hacked and turned against us like in battlestar galactica

Re:The problem with drones

[gtall]

Yes, and stop watching TV, its bad for you.

Re:The problem with drones

[TallDarkMan]

It's already happened. Look at the planes that hit the WTC towers back in 2001. It wasn't the supposed terrorists that they released to the public (specially since 1/3 of them were/are still alive. On a more recent note: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/10/nation/la-na-drone-arrest-20111211

Re:The problem with drones

[Thing 1]

Yeah gives "BY YOUR COMMAND" new meaning...

its 500 mega-BITS-per second !!

[Anonymous Coward]

How many "OMG 500MBps" posts do we need ?

its Mega-BITS ...

page 17 from the article clearly states Mbps... (and not MBps)

500MB/s ~ 4k resolution, 30 frames, uncompressed

[Big_Breaker]

Global hawk is a high altitude, high resolution surveillance bird. It's like a drone version of the U2. I'm not surprised that it would generate HUGE amounts of data. They aren't spending tens of millions of those things to mount a web cam. Bandwidth for more pedestrian drones like the Reaper should be far lower.

I think the bandwidth and security solution will be high altitude relay planes/blimps over friendly territory so that signals can be line of sight in the air and then sent down to ground stations in friendly territory. That type of bandwidth is only problematic until it hits a terrestrial wire. At 40-50k feet line of sight is 200 miles to sea level and 400 miles for another high altitude airplane. By contrast geosynchronous orbits are 22,000 miles away and its a round trip. I guess it is possible to use LEO satellites but those are vulnerable in a way that GEO is not.

Line of sight signals from aircraft could be stronger and therefore harder to jam. Also the angle of the signal would be harder to duplicate and overwhelm from the ground. Also with multiple relay stations you'd have an alternate way to calcuate position like GPS but without the low power satellite constraints. Bonus points for one time pad encrypting the really sensitive stuff like controls. A 120GB SSD is a lot of unbreakable communication.

a'la Jonathan Swift:

[Thud457]

dem der Iraninan hackermerators need to installitimate TOR on dem der badboys!

They need an aerial tonnage measurement...

[JoeMerchant]

The Navy uses displacement as a way to assess the "size" of their fleet....

Just numerically counting 2lb "drones" and comparing them to F-16s is not a terribly interesting statistic.

Re:They need an aerial tonnage measurement...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Navy uses displacement as a way to assess the "size" of their fleet....

Just numerically counting 2lb "drones" and comparing them to F-16s is not a terribly interesting statistic.

Yeah, you've hit it on the head. It's not really called out that most of what they're talking about are small R/C type aircraft "drones". Some of the bigger drones are designed for missile strikes but not the vast majority of them. Not to mention that if the folks your fighting have any kind of air power even the bigger drones are going to be toast in short order - drones don't dog fight too well.

The Downside

[kidcharles]

The downside — they're bandwidth hogs: a single Global Hawk drone requires 500 megabytes per second worth of bandwidth, the report finds, which is 500 percent of the total bandwidth of the entire U.S. military used during the 1991 Gulf War.

I think the downside is that the drones are used in "secret" CIA wars, routinely kill civilians, have been used by the President for extra-judicial assassination of at least one American citizen, and are increasingly eyed for use in domestic airspace. I'd put their bandwidth usage pretty far down on the list of reasons to be concerned about drones.

Re:The Downside

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but you can't exactly blame any of that on the technology.

Re:The Downside

[Minwee]

But do any of those factors lead to the Air Force getting a surprisingly large bill from AT&T?

Re:The Downside

[kidcharles]

Ah, but you can't exactly blame any of that on the technology.

I disagree with this to a certain extent. The fact that they are unmanned makes it much more likely they will be used because the risk is lower (sure, it's embarrassing when they get shot down and Iran shows them on TV but imagine how much worse it would be if they had a U.S. pilot instead). Their lower cost also makes them more likely to be used in high-risk situations. They replace on-the-ground operations which, while problematic on their own, are typically less likely to cause civilian casualties than firing missiles from the air. Also, the fact that they are remote piloted so present no risk of operator death likely only magnifies the outrage at their use in the targeted countries. Imagine your fellow citizens are being killed by robot planes in which there is zero possibility of striking back at the person pulling the trigger.

Re:The Downside

[cusco]

Acutally at least three so far. 2002, 2005 and 2010.

Re:The Downside

[Deliveranc3]

Agreed, no "cost" wars and drone vs drone war (and likely size cutting) leading to human subjugation (possibly by the winner but no reason it couldn't be collateral damage).

Are such obvious problems. it's rather amazing that these drone programs are proceeding at all.

Propaganda

[flyingfsck]

The 500MB/s is just as accurate at the 1 in 3 figure. In other words, BS.

Bandwidth used is 4k video

[ndege]

Wondering about the 500M per sec?

Take a look a the numbers for 4k video.

Now, be sure to keep in mind that on such an aircraft, there is at least one visual light spectrum camera, and at least one high resolution thermal camera.

If I were the one laying out the specs for this bird, I might want to look a direction other than just facing forward. Maybe a couple of cameras? The 500Mb or 500MB doesn't seem unreasonable when trying to pull all that data from the aircraft real-time; even compressed.

The telemetry data is small by comparison, but what is the refresh rate of said telemetry data? 30Hz? 50Hz? And, how much telmetry data is being sent? Keep in mind all the other data...even including the most basic lat/long, heading, airspeed (IAS via multiple pitot tubes), engine data (temperatures at different points, fuel flows, pressures, etc).

Here is a photo of the flightdeck/cockpit of a Boeing 777. Check out the cockpit of a C130 at night. Now, if instead of pushing all those sensor systems to a flightdeck on board, what if all that data has to be sent to the other side of the world?

Another [maybe flamebait] commenter suggested that the drone pilots operate in theater. From what I have read, the Airforce pilots the drones from Las Vegas; "just minutes from the slot machines."

  <rant> What makes so many slashdoters completely underestimate the complexity of such a system? The average /. crowd these days seem to be quite egotistical to assume that they could "do it better". </rant>

Re:Bandwidth used is 4k video

[element-o.p.]

Good analysis, and I pretty much agree with your overall points. There's a *lot* of data that a drone has to send back to the operator (that's kind of the point of a drone, no?) However:

<rant>...The average /. crowd these days seem to be quite egotistical to assume that they could "do it better". </rant>

Maybe that's because some of the people on /. have done it? I'm not claiming that an Arducopter or AR Drone Parrot is "better*" than a Global Hawk, but the fact is that there are indeed amateurs building drones that are more sophisticated than perhaps most not involved in the hobby suspect.

*"Better" is an ambiguous term, and before entering into a debate about whether one device is "better" than another, it is necessary to define the design requirements. For example, if I need a drone that can take off and land on my driveway, fly at a few hundred feet AGL in a residential neighborhood and operate on less than $1000 per year, then yeah, something I build at home myself is probably "better" than a Global Hawk. However, if I am entering into a military conflict with a well-armed, well-trained enemy with sophisticated ELINT capabilities, then my homebuilt drone is probably not the best choice.

Re:Bandwidth used is 4k video

[ndege]

Agreed. It is all about the design requirements. :)

Thanks for the clarification.

Dumb

[PopeRatzo]

That's like saying 3 out of 4 military assault vehicles is a jeep.

Or 3 out of 4 warships are tugboats.

Of course there are a lot of drones. They're cheap and practically disposable. They're unmanned because they go places where it's too dangerous to send a man.

God, I would have hoped we'd have more than just 1 in 3 military aircraft being drones. Aren't they the most effective weapon we have? Assuming by "effective" you mean "killing certain people with the least muss and fuss to your own".

How about this: "The majority of military aircraft are missiles."

Re:Dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

The majority of military aircraft are rifle bullets.

Re:Dumb

[drinkypoo]

The majority of rifle and cannon bullets aren't finned, or propelled other than at launch time. Can you really call an unguided projectile an aircraft? Missiles, on the other hand...

Tiny kamikaze drones

[G3ckoG33k]

Tiny kamikaze drones!

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/tiny-kamikaze-drone/

Re:Tiny kamikaze drones

[Anonymous Coward]

We've had kazikaze drones for a long time, they're called "missiles."

Private for the win!

[alexander_686]

Actually, most drones are flow by non-coms, because most drones (by numbers) are back-pack squad level drones. Basically, fancy model RC controlled planes allowing soldiers to see over the hill.

Is the F35 still needed?

[schwit1]

At $150M/plane can we afford a plane designed for yesterday's conflicts? UAVs are getting better and will soon surpass the capabilities of manned vehicles.

If the US had the F35 for the past 10 years would it have made a difference in the Iraq or Afghan wars? In the next 10 years where do we see it making a difference over the F18, F16, A10 or F15E?

The lifetime cost of the F35 is estimated at $1T.

Re:Is the F35 still needed?

[jonnythan]

The next time a conventional war breaks out, we won't have time to tell our enemies to hold on for a decade or so while we develop and produce a bunch of new warplanes. If the US does not continue to create new aircraft that can maintain air superiority, someone else will.

Re:Is the F35 still needed?

[TheDarkMaster]

F35? No, is a too ambitious money sinkhole. But an A-10, F-18, maybe an F-14? Yes, you will need. UAVs are good for many things, but you must remember that they also have obvious weaknesses, as the recent case shown in Iran. You can't fly a UAV against a competent enemy with ECM.

Re:Is the F35 still needed?

[spire3661]

The next air superiority fighter will be a drone.

Re:Is the F35 still needed?

[radtea]

If the US had the F35 for the past 10 years would it have made a difference in the Iraq or Afghan wars?

Sure, it would have made them much more expensive, funneling even more cash out of the pockets of working Americans who are doing something productive and useful with their lives and into the pockets of the dead-weight loss security-industrial complex.

Re:Is the F35 still needed?

[fnj]

Not a ridiculously unsophisticated UAV system, anyway.

Re:Is the F35 still needed?

[tsotha]

Quite a few people are asking this question. The problem is you can't answer it unless you know exactly what kinds of conflicts we'll be in for the next 30 years.

Re:Is the F35 still needed?

[bored]

The next air superiority fighter will be a drone.

If by drone you mean missile...

It is my firm belief that the next real war (if it lasts more than a few minutes) will totally remove the concept of air superiority, as well as above surface ships. I can't imagine that any serious national defense group isn't looking at totally automated surface to air and surface to surface missiles with computer vision and countermeasure filtering/avoidance systems good enough that they can hit ships and airborne aircraft larger than a few meters traveling at less than say 1500 km/h.

Computer vision systems are simply getting too good, and they are getting better every year. Given enough time and a system that can reacquire targets even if they are flying barely above ground level, it seems that it has to become a computer vs computer type problem. The nation that can build the largest number of small/fast/cheap missiles wins.

Re:Is the F35 still needed?

[GameboyRMH]

I don't see much of a chance of conventional warfare. The only potential enemies for the western world that would fight a conventional war are North Korea and China (and maybe Iran, but the US military could take them out before lunch using only some of their old equipment). China has too much to lose economically to start anything and North Korea has a less batshit-crazy leader now. Don't forget the Europeans have some pretty up-to-date stuff if needed, I know it will make America's collective dick go soft, but let those EF2000s and Rafales do some work.

Re:Is the F35 still needed?

[DarthVain]

Nah!

For precision work yes, but to really level a country you need bombers, at least cheaply. Drone bombers are a possibility I suppose, but you are really scaling up at that point. If you are going to have manned bombers, you will need planes or drones to defend them. Perhaps air command filled with drone operators for low lantancy operations...

Re:Is the F35 still needed?

[bored]

I really can't see how bombers are going to survive. They have enough problems with manned fighters. If a nation can build surface to air missiles that are tracking the bombers on multiple wavelengths (visible and otherwise), and have the ability to detect movement (rotation/translation/etc) with nearly 100% accuracy from both below and above, what chance does a bomber have? Especially against a hail of a dozens of devices built for 1/1000 the price of the bomber?

A bomber is going to need the equivalent of a carrier support group... Or possibly an arsenal of active countermeasures (aka themselves, self guided air to air missiles).

Re:Is the F35 still needed?

[tsotha]

I disagree about conventional warfare - we've never gone twenty years without a war. The situation will change in ways we can't predict, and I don't think we can count on the Europeans to pick up much of the slack - both because they don't always see eye-to-eye with the US and because they're not going to have the money to maintain first-class militaries. Look at what's happening in the UK - they have some kind of financial Zeno's paradox going on, where they cut the military budget in half every year. How much longer do you think they'll be able to project force at all? Could they even retake the Falklands if Argentina attacked today? Seems unlikely. France and Germany have a lot of hardware, but neither can project force very well. They just don't have the logistical support - things like transport aircraft and aerial refueling. They couldn't have maintained the air war in Libya without US intelligence and refueling assets, and Libya was the best case scenario for an air war: close to Europe and without any air defense to speak of.

As Rumsfeld famously said, "You go to war with what you have," and he was absolutely right. Conflicts can arise quickly, and there's no point deciding at the start of the conflict that you should have built a few more of these or refurbished some of those instead of retiring them, Having a few F-35s would be a bit of insurance against unforeseen problems. Ultimately I don't think the program will cost too much because we'll sell thousands to foreign customers, and that keeps assembly lines moving and workers paying taxes.

Having said that, I should say I don't see much use for manned strike aircraft if you have something better for air superiority. We can use drones or heavy bombers to drop bombs, and we have cruise missiles for SEAD. But it's going to be many years before we deploy unmanned fighters, and the linchpin of modern warfare is control of the air. Were it up to me I would have cancelled the F-35, built more F-22s, and put money into developing an unmanned heavy bomber. Nothing fancy, just a big bomb truck.

Re:Is the F35 still needed?

[DarthVain]

Erm, you are assuming a level playing field. If History has suggesting anything, it is that most wars are not.

When was the last time the US was in a shooting war where its air superiority was ever really challenged? WW2?

Almost 1 in 3 Politicians....

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost 1 in 3 politicians in the US are mindless drones as well.

Nothing new.

Re:Almost 1 in 3 Politicians....

[LostMyBeaver]

I was leaning towards 4 in 5, but ok :)

The one time I could probably contribute...

[elcid73]

...to the conversation on Slashdot, is the only time I don't feel comfortable doing so.

oh well.

(I was an AF theater comms officer dealing with this issue in 04-05)

Only one problem with that plan

[Moraelin]

I see only one problem with that plan. By the end of it, you'll have had

- your country used for everything from getting rid of old bombs by dropping them on you to testing new weapons by dropping them on you

- some hospital hit by cruise missiles which the USA still claims they hit their intended super-secret bunkers that nobody else ever heard of

- a few dozen children born with flippers because of all the uranium oxide dust from the depleted uranium ammunitions used. (While DU is actually pretty inert and safe as a penetrator rod that's not been fired yet, when it goes through armour at high speed it melts and burns, creating a lot of uranium oxide dust. Which is just as toxic as any other heavy metal compound, and for the same reasons: it's a frikken huge atom. So think spiking a well with lead paint, because that's the equivalent of what a few villages will be drinking afterwards.)

- a bunch of kids without fingers because they tried picking up unexploded cluster-bomblets which are about the size of a coke can

- a bunch of civilians shot or tortured by bored Blackwater mercenaries, and occasionally by actual soldiers

- an election overturned because it didn't elect the puppet government the USA wanted

- virtually all your natural resources and infrastructure handed over to western companies by the government, when the proper puppet government IS elected

- a LOT of news about idiot protestant ministers calling for essentially a crusade against your country for not worshipping the exact same as them

And other such stuff that's guaranteed to rile the population and get a bunch of lemmings to actually start shooting back at the troops and place roadside IEDs and whatnot, because pron be damned, they actually hate those invading soldiers by now. Which in turn will get anyone asking to pull back your troops from your country, bleated at that they're "not supporting the troops." So oil or no oil, now you'll have the US army loving you long time, and not the consensual kind of love. You probably spotted the vicious circle there.

But now it creates a bunch of other problems. Even if you somehow got out of it eventually, by now

- a bunch of people were pissed enough to join any fundamentalist sect or ideology that's against the Americans. If at the start you just had a religion that's just not American, now you'll have every shade of Wahhabi extremists who actually do want sharia law and executions for apostasy and burqas and whatnot

- those extremist guys bombing each other for not being the exact same flavour of extremism, plus bombing a few civilians just to drive their point across. Which will eventually add up to more dead people than the war and the bored Blackwater mercenaries ever caused.

- all sorts of corruption and local warlords, since that kind of thing thrives in such chaos

So all things considered, it seems like a bad plan if you just want to get fast internet for pron. Especially since that kinda extremists will then want to kill you if you actually watch pron, or for that matter even get a barbie doll with less clothing than a burqa.

It's all fun and games... until ...

[chrisphotonic]

It's all fun and games until, someone builds a $25 radio jammer in their basements and bring some of these down.

Unless....they are using quantum entanglement for the bandwidth. In which case, I want a quantum entanglement cell phone. I'd ditch the crappy Verizon network, and carrier/government spying. As far as I know, you can't easily spy on something that doesn't use radio waves.

Beat that corrupt government officials!

Re:It's all fun and games... until ...

[GameboyRMH]

You can still jam it though.

What's needed is to make the drones more autonomous, so they have some clue what to do if they lose the control signal, and I'm sure after the Sentinel capture incident they'll probably all be retrofitted with dead reckoning navigation devices so they can figure out when their GPS signal is being spoofed.

show-offs?

[G3ckoG33k]

"that "500 percent" metric is pointless"

Agreed!

"500 percent" may sound more "scientific" than "five times".

I guess they just wanted to sound learned, yet failed. :)

GigE can't push 120MB/sec.

[sirwired]

GigE uses the 8b/10b encoding scheme, which chops 20% of your bandwidth right off the top. So your 1.2Gbps "bandwidth" is instantly chopped down to about 100MB/sec.

Re:GigE can't push 120MB/sec.

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it use a start and stop bit? ;)

Re:GigE can't push 120MB/sec.

[Shimbo]

GigE uses the 8b/10b encoding scheme, which chops 20% of your bandwidth right off the top. So your 1.2Gbps "bandwidth" is instantly chopped down to about 100MB/sec.

The physical layer overhead from the symbol encoding is on top of the Gigabit rate. So, the encoding is 80% efficient as you say but you can still theoretically get most of a Gigabit throughput (minus a little for framing and higher level protocol headers).

Re:GigE can't push 120MB/sec.

[ericloewe]

Yeah, 100BaseT is frequently seen running at ~95 Mb/s. I haven't really hit gigabit's limit, but everything points to a realistic 990 Mb/s. It's probably the only standard where the advertised speed nearly equals real-life throughput.

Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

considering 1 in 3 US citizens are also drones.

Measurement is off by 8

[Anonymous Coward]

megaBITS.
Jeez, people - get this right!!!

off by 2^3 ?!

[Thud457]

Either that, or they accidentally capitalized the "B" in "Mb" somewhere.

Stupid hoo-mans, maybe you shouldn't use a protocol with every bit of redundancy squeezed out of if one bit error makes that much of a difference.

Bandwidth Hogs?!?!

[element-o.p.]

"The downside — they're bandwidth hogs: a single Global Hawk drone requires 500 megabytes per second worth of bandwidth, the report finds, which is 500 percent of the total bandwidth of the entire U.S. military used during the 1991 Gulf War."

500%? Pshaw! By that measure, I must be a bandwidth hog, too. In 1991, I was dialing up to the local university's Vax mainframe on a 300 baud modem. Today I have a 10Mb cable modem. That's a bandwidth increase of (roughly) 3,300,000% in the same time frame!

500 megabytes of data per second?

[Karmashock]

What? What the hell are they transmitting? Clearly not video because you can steam a dozen 1080p videos on youtube on a residential 12Mb/s data line.

I can only assume this is a mistake or they are not using compression for some reason. Possibly the video game industry can come to the rescue again. Pass on the net code to optimize this stuff. And as to the video... Possibly consider reducing the number of camera feeds being streamed or consider reducing resolution unless people are actually watching every single one of those cameras.

Re:500 megabytes of data per second?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever watched a 1080p video on Youtube? If you think it looks good enough for their application, you need glasses.

F-14s are gone...

[dreadlord76]

Actually, the Navy decommissioned all the F-14s. So any actively deployed drone is needed more than the F-14....

Oh those Tomcats....

7-bit bytes

[JSBiff]

Wow, does anyone still use 7-bit bytes? I thought we left that behind in the 80's?

Re:7-bit bytes

[guruevi]

Ever connected anything over the serial port? You can still select 7 bit encoding and it's required on some (weird medical) devices.

If you haven't done anything wrong

[Colin Smith]

You have nothing to worry about.

Re:If you haven't done anything wrong

[Thing 1]

I like how your subject and comment flowed nicely into your signature, which I cannot see now. :)

My response, though: agreed; except if you happen to be driving next to a "terrorist", or someone whose finances could threaten a sitting politician's campaign; then your car become collateral damage and it's an act of God or War, so insurance doesn't pay.

Clearly they need more on-board intelligence

[HiThere]

Needing that much bandwidth indicates that they would be quite suseptible to jamming, Even a spark-gap should do.

Clearly they need more on-board intelligence so that not so much info needs to go back and forth. (This doesn't strictly apply if it's purely reconaisance info that's being transmitted, but if it includes control signals, then yes. Even if it's purely reconaisance it would be better to record anything not urgent, so you aren't as revealing of your location.

I'll grant that this is the early days, but one SHOULD start expecting countermeasures, and design to render them ineffective. This kind of thing is much harder to retrofit, if you even CAN do it.

I HOPE it uses 1Gb! I want serious research!

[bussdriver]

The military will fund serious research into better internet technology if they have to run an air force of bandwidth hogs!

You think ISPs have any motivation? Hardware makers only slightly compete with improvements; due to the need for standards it lowers their motivation for R&D all they need to do is get to market 1st with the newest standards.

The military as usual, it going to fund the big steps forward with all the money they put into R&D.... which sadly we could have been doing more if we didn't need the waste money on the military just to excuse doing research to the foolish republicans!

Maybe if we could somehow disguise tariffs as a military operation we could restore the economy? Maybe we should say China is causing global warming so then we can invent some sort of atmosphere hack?

NASA should be working on robotics then they'd get more funding (and at least there would be some benefits from the research instead of military doing it all.) Besides, going to Mars is a stupid waste of money; robots already surpass humans in this niche and by the time Mars happens they will be 30 years more advanced! Going to Mars is a ploy by "idiot" Bush to sucker all you "smart" people into shifting priorities from immediate problems (climate) so even less money goes into pesky science. The budgeting shift he did along with that should have made this clear. If NASA worked on biology, he'd have taken them off evolution and stem cells and put them on curing the common cold and the suckers would praise the move...

If NASA didn't have a space industrial complex behind it that 1.5% of the budget they get would be cut.

Re:I HOPE it uses 1Gb! I want serious research!

[Karmashock]

you are very angry...

would you like a taco?

1.8 gigapixel camera, 3000 pounds of equipment

[Anonymous Coward]

Since there are so many silly posts assuming that these things have ordinary cameras: According to BBC one of the next generation drones has a 1.8 gigapixel camera. It is hard to say what the current generation surveillance drone has, but one or more 1 gigapixel sensors would not be surprising. 500mbit/s is peanuts if you're taking that kind of images.

The carrying capacity of a global hawk is about 3000 pounds / 1300kg (wikipedia), so they can carry a pretty powerful directional antenna. Point that antenna at a very high-flying support aircraft with (literary) tons of processing power, and the systems on the aircraft can be used filter away most of the "boring desert scenery" before sending it to a base with a satellite link. The question is then "given lots of power and a couple of hundred kg in equipment, how much bandwidth do you get for any given distance, with line of sight?"

IMHO, 500mbit/s should be possible in the microwave bands for a couple of hundred km, but 500mbyte/s does sound a bit excessive. It might not be impossible: Line of sight to a support airplane, really high up in the air where there is no interference, lots of power, no regulation that you need to bother about, and enormous budgets.

Oh dear god no!

[GrumpySteen]

They're using up all the megabits! What will our children and grandchildren do when they're all gone?

Humans still in control and Jamming

[Roger W Moore]

Drones don't refuse to carry out orders or object on moral, humanitarian, or legal grounds.

You do realize that drones are still piloted by human pilots right? They might not be sat in the aircraft but they are still in control and morally responsible.

Regarding the taking control of the drones I'd be far more concerned about them just jamming the signal. It is far easier to imagine an enemy doing that that figuring out how to decrypt a secure link on the fly.

Re:Humans still in control and Jamming

[BlueStrat]

You do realize that drones are still piloted by human pilots right?

You do realize that not all armed drones are remote-piloted, and that the X-47B autonomous drone is already in service, right?

See my post here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2613584&cid=38654478

Strat

Re:Humans still in control and Jamming

[Roger W Moore]

You do realize that not all armed drones are remote-piloted, and that the X-47B autonomous drone is already in service, right?

No I did not - thank you for the correction. I agree this is a lot more scary. Having any autonomous machine armed with lethal weapons is just insane....even without deliberate intent they have a system where a coding error can literally kill.

and what about the crash rate

[Anonymous Coward]

UAVs have 100-1000 times the crash rate of military aircraft in general, which in turn is 100 times that of commercial aviation.

The data bandwidth issue will be resolved. But the crash rate thing needs work, before you start flying those things over my house and kids.

And as far as having been around a while, Norbert Weiner (the guy who invented the term Cybernetics) discussed the sort of moral and ethical issues in "the human use of human beings" (1950) and "God and Golem, Inc" (1966)

All Hackable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Very recently, the US 'lost' a drone over Iran. There was a (quite plausible) story of GIS signals being jammed. The drone falls on backup programming in the case of being jammed (or at least it did). When given a 'new' signal from the ground (not from GIS satellites), the drone followed its way to its new home and (apparently) landed safely...in Iran. GIS signals aren't encrypted, and even if the command and control signals are encrypted, they are useless when jammed, and when the drone thinks its home, it lands. The method by which the one drone was hacked is repeatable. Adding encryption on command and control won't help with jamming (software updates to deal with jamming and use of dead reckoning could prevent some of these hacks (sudden impossible changes in coordinates) although that could be defeated by more subtle changes in coordinates). At the very least, jamming prevents launch signals, wrecks real-time intelligence gathering and can ruin missions. The methods that Iran used to jam drones can be passed to groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan (and Russia, China, etc., etc.). It was good technology for a while, but cheap anti-drone missiles will likely be loaded with electronic countermeasures that will confuse the drone and make for an easy target. Then its down to a matter of "cost of drone" vs. "cost of missile".

The Terminator scenario!!!!!

[AssholeMcGee]

I looks like robot bugs (insects) and drones may be the first.. Not surprising the have 1 out of 3 military air craft being drones, I guess the worry is when the US starts using them against its citizens not to just spy on everyone, but to carry out hit and deceased missions. I remind you that the inner belly had Martin King, JFK, John Lennon, ect, on a "top priority" terrorist list. I am not that worried about it, we got watch dog groups and slashdot to let us know when this will become a problem. Tho there will be no large computer database to destroy threats just the good old trusty Uncle Sam..

Hitch hikers guide to a drone

[NSN A392-99-964-5927]

I am Marvin not a drone and have been stood on this car park for 10,000 years; It gets so depressing not being a drone.

drones in planes and drones in government

[fudmer]

mechanical drones do the dirty work of war, and corporate drones do the corrupt work of government, but in both cases humans are made into bleeding victims.

Re:drones in planes and drones in government

[Paul Fernhout]

And it is mostly all ironic too... http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gatto/gatto-arch.html

Post-enhance?

[DjDanny]

Why not just capture the video in 320x200 res, and then 'enhance' it back in Washington?

Didn't you read the GP?

[sirwired]

The GP said you can get 120MB/sec. You can't. You can, in fact, get a Gigabit of usable bandwidth, but that isn't what the GP was asserting.