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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.
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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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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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]
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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?
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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).
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No, it is the USA. So it would be an Imperial Shitload. Anyway, total BS.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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?!
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.