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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."
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.
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...
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!
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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.
This package Does Not Contain a Winner
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.
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.
Actually, one needs to be a commissioned officer, Captain last time I checked to be flying a drone (for the Air Force at least).
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
aircraft != warplane
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!
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 ;)
Am I the only one waiting for our entire fleet of drones to be hacked and turned against us like in battlestar galactica
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]
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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.
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?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
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.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
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).
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
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
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
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?!
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
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."
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Tiny kamikaze drones!
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/tiny-kamikaze-drone/
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.
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.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
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.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
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.