Almost 1 In 3 US Warplanes Is a Drone

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday January 10, 2012 @02:28AM from the skynet-approved dept.

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."

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Re:It needs what??? by Spritzer · 2012-01-10 02:50 · Score: 5, Informative

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??? by PlaneShaper · 2012-01-10 03:09 · Score: 5, Informative

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.