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Pentagon Office Planning 'Avatar' Fighters and Fighter-Launched Drone Swarms (washingtonpost.com)
schwit1 writes: High over Alaska last summer, the Pentagon experimented with new, secret prototypes: Micro-drones that can be launched from the flare dispensers of moving F-16s and F/A-18 fighter jets. Canisters containing the tiny aircraft descended from the jets on parachutes before breaking open, allowing wings on each drone to swing out and catch the wind. Inch-wide propellers on the back provided propulsion as they found one another and created a swarm.
comments here say this would be good counter to russian anti aircraft weapons, but real beneficiaries of drone swarm technologies, which are relatively cheap and easy to deploy(and will be ever more so as times goes on), and not that secret, will be smaller nations defending against bigger costlier high tech aircraft, missiles, and drones( and big ships at sea).
this would be another form of asymmetric warfare, like guerrilla and terrorist warfare.
in fact, biggest losers will be usa and nato.
Why? That's what nukes are for. And if we ever reach the point of wanting to indiscriminately kill tens of thousands of civilians, then wiping out their cities would probably be seen as a bonus, not a deterrent.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Indeed. Release a drone from altitude and you don't technically even need to give it active propulsion, just active flight surfaces to control its glide. That said, with a glider or weak-powered craft, you are going to be fairly subject to winds. Then again, that only matters for some types of applications - it would be a problem for using them to conduct a ground attack or surveilance, but if you're using the drones as sort of a smart aerial "screen" against incoming missiles, maybe not.
Well the Tacit Rainbow project used very small jet engines I believe. I think that was sort of a big problem with that project in the 80s, the actual loiter time was much less than what was advertised so they did. But now drones loiter for 14 hours fully loaded, so I think the game has changed.