Almost 1 In 3 US Warplanes Is a Drone

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

6 of 328 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

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.
1. Re:Is this a legitimate comparison? by JSBiff · 2012-01-10 04:04 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
  The bigger concern is capture - like what happened in Iran. What would be particularly scary is if an enemy can take control of the drone, and either launch weapons at us or our allies, or at a civilian population - could you imagine if a Syria or Iran managed to take control of a U.S. drone and use it to attack protesters? Or a mosque, or a school? They could claim it was the U.S. doing the attack, and further incite hostilities amongst their people and cement their hold on power.
2. Re:Is this a legitimate comparison? by Chowderbags · 2012-01-10 04:08 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Next up on Mythbusters, can you fill a flat with Lego tires and drive away?
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.
Asinine comparison by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-10 02:55 · Score: 5, Insightful

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!
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.