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The Air Force's Love For Fighter Pilots Is Too Big To Fail
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Just look at what's been going on throughout the Air Force. It's as if drones pose such a threat to traditional means of aerial warfare that the flying service's historically kneejerk resistance to anything too closely aligned with sweeping technological change finds it bristling today at prospective gamechangers of the unmanned sort. Nevermind that the AF's active remotely-piloted combat aircraft outnumber its active manned bomber inventory by about 2-to-1. For perspective, as Lt. Col. Lawrence Spinetta writes in the July issue of the Air & Space Power Journal, an official USAF publication, consider that 'RPA [remotely-piloted aircraft] personnel enjoy one wing command' while fighter pilots control 26. In other words, 'the ratio of wing-command opportunities for RPA pilots versus those who fly manned combat aircraft is a staggering 1-to-26.' Such personnel policies that seemingly favor manned standbys are part and parcel of deep-rooted, institutional stigmas. In a 2008 speech, General Norton Schwarz, who served as AF chief from 2008 to 2012, did not mince words when he said that this systemic obsession with all-things manned has turned the Air Force's swelling drone ranks into a 'leper colony.'"
Both the USAF and the U.S. Army field Predators. The Army has them driven by sergeants, and has autoland installed. The USAF has them driven by officer pilots, and refuses to have autoland installed on their birds.
USAF drone crash rates are much higher than Army crash rates.
Drones are effective for some things but I doubt they'd be effective in a real war vs a competent adversary.
Why not? The limiting factor on a manned fighter's turning radius, time-on-station, cost, and political expendibility, is the man. Since drones are cheaper, you can employ more of them. A manned fighter might defeat an air-superiority drone, but it won't defeat a swarm of them. A huge cost for manned fighters is training. Drones don't have to be trained. They just have to be programmed. The drone pilots can do most of their training on simulators. In past wars, pilots have spent 95% of their air time flying to and from their targets, and only a few minutes engaging them. With drones, you can have less experienced/capable pilots ferry the drones to the target, then have your best ace take over for the dog fight. If your ace screws up, he learns from the mistake. If a manned pilot screws up, he is dead, and all his skills and experience die with him.
We are in the process of spending nearly a trillion dollars on the F-35. It is, by far, the most expensive weapon system in the history of the world. We spend a tiny fraction of that on drone development. Yet I predict that, within a decade, air superiority drones will make the F-35 obsolete.