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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Is this a legitimate comparison? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-10 02:33 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.