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

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?

[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

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: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: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: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: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.