Charlie wrote:Arioch is right, final strike orders will human ones for a long time still. I often wonder weather it was movies that made people afraid of machines like that. ED-209, HAL 9000 and other robots come to mind. Are people naturally afraid of machines that can replace them or decide to remove them with force?
"Our parachutes were made by the lowest bidder"...
Charlie wrote:Is it hard coded it us?
... but yes. Drones basically represent a form of influence that can be exerted over people, and thus someone will always oppose them. If you e.g,. got rid of all of the explicit weapons that have ever been made, then someone would start agitating over shovels/spades. If you purged the Earth of anything other than dirt, water, and soft plant matter, then someone would raise a fuss over words and/or limbs being usable to exert control over someone.
And no matter how far they took it they'd be right, you can use all of those things & more to control people, it's just people tend to be neurotic about it. That's why people like me oppose gun control (note: not a gun-nut, nor an NRA member, though that bullet key-chain was tempting): when we see gun-control advocates, they always seem to be pushing something absolutely nutty, emotional, and/or political instead of something reasonable. It happens.
Charlie wrote:As for hacking, I really don`t think it would be that easy for a military system to be hacked, even by a another military power. If it were so, it would have already been done.
The difficulty varies, but it actually has been done before. A US military 90's-era design lacked the proper encryption, so some militants in the middle-east were able to get into it's data stream. I don't think that they could control it (as I best recall it had two data streams: an unencrypted video stream, and an encrypted control/telemetry stream), but if I remember right they were able to time their jamming to take it down where they wanted. Presumably this wouldn't happen in a modern design (bogo-mips are just so cheap now), but it is worth noting. Also of note (though also unlikely to be useful) is that encryption systems have been found to have flaws after their introduction before.
icekatze wrote:As for the technology itself though, I suspect that if the US Air Force didn't have such an enduring love affair with the F-22, drone fighter technology would be years ahead of where it is today. I worked on a civilian program that did image recognition and autonomous guidance programming back in 2005, and I can tell you that it is not a lack of technology holding them back.
The lack of a multi-year WW3 or other long-duration air war is the reason why fighter drone technology hasn't progressed faster than it has. There hasn't been enough utility to justify a crash-program.
Arioch wrote:There really isn't a pressing need for better drone technology; in another limited war, the weapons we have work just fine, and in a serious war against a real opponent, drones will be of limited use. Indeed, a serious war is what I'm concerned about; I think we are getting too used to having total air superiority, too reliant on remote control and GPS technologies (a real opponent can knock satellites down with ease). A war against a real opponent could make us deeply regret terminating the F-22 production line; the F-35 is an inferior "budget" model that won't be operational for a long time.
I somewhat disagree on the usefulness of fighter-drones in a major war. They could potentially be very useful for Wild Weasel, as well as for area-denial (let's say, directly over a major enemy airbase), both of which are tasks that could be done in a jamming-resistant way. However, the chances of such a war breaking out are so low...
As for the F-22, I agree. Maybe we stopped production at the right point, but I think we should have paid to have the production line put into climate-controlled secure storage. It shouldn't have taken even a meaningful fraction of the program's cost, and it's "insurance value" would have been immense.
icekatze wrote:We have the technology, but we haven't put it to use. When we do get around to making a drone fighter aircraft (which last I heard was planned for sometime in the next 20-30 years.), then we'll know for sure, but I predict that they'll outperform manned aircraft by a significant margin.
I don't know.
I would expect that, but if we managed to get a fighter-mountable free-electron laser weapon (let's say with an explosively-pumped pulse generator), then it could completely change fighter doctrine away from the maneuver strategy that we currently follow, to a fuel-preservation strategy, with the fighters (and bombers, and..) mounting omnidirectional laser optics. That could massively rebalance the importance of maneuverability in air combat.
Regardless, I expect drone technology to be leveraged into improvements for control systems on manned aircraft.
Charlie wrote:In all the history I've read, America`s modus operandi is to throw vast amounts of men and machines at a given problem. Id along with it`s large scale of production capabilities make it rather good at fighting conventional wars, I also think that if it was not the aggressor in the conflict the war wariness would not become a problem.
The US modus operandi since the Civil War (North vs. South, not Colonies vs. Britain; it was apparently one of the earliest wars to be indicative of what WW 1 & 2 would be like) has apparently been closer to "throw the most effective method against the problem", though certainly we don't normally skimp on volumes either.
The note about aggressor status is quite accurate. We seem to react like a bunch of exceptionally dangerous hornets...
Charlie wrote:I would like to see much more development in the field of ground drones, for starters better E.O.D drones would be good, mine and other explosive clearance drones need some major improvements. I'd also like to see combat drones be used on a squad level. Such as small recon drones to give an extra eye in the sky when needed. Or small sentry drones armed with Light Machine guns that can be set to guard positions and give alert to drone operators wherein they can take action with said drone and LMG.
The big delayer on ground-based drones is terrain. Much easier to control something that doesn't have to deal with large numbers of obstacles. I assume that recon drones are available, but I'm not certain when you'd be able to use them, unless you've got a HUD I think that would be very awkward for infantry to deal with. The auto-sentry idea would probably be better as cheapo sensor heads, with a UAV in the area.
Charlie wrote:Maybe even small drones that are deployed into houses and other urban setting that can be detonated with different explosives, Flash bangs, HE, ect.
So, Smart-grenades? The US military was working on something sort-of like that for that infantry rifle that got canceled.
fredgiblet wrote:This. I don't get the obsession with the evil of drone strikes, I've never seen any evidence that they are any less precise than regular airstrikes.
It's an emotional reaction instead of a logical one. I can understand the worries about drones, but that calls for oversight, not rabid opposition.
fredgiblet wrote:As for the scale of conflict, I don`t think large scale nuclear conflict will really occur. I think the largest counties are smart enough to see what that would bring. It`s the smaller states that could start the limited exchange, North Korea comes to mind.
There's no benefit to anyone in starting a nuclear exchange, even places like NK simply don't benefit from it. HAVING nukes is great, because it means that an invasion is extremely hazardous, USING them is...problematic.
True, but if anyone would actually use them against the US (against someone else is different, a few years ago I could see the possibility of Pakistan and India getting into a shooting match again in a decade or two), then it would presumably be North Korea. Apparently, even back in the Cold War they were some of the only people aligned with the Soviets whose brass actually believed it's own propaganda. I think it's unlikely, but if anywhere was gonna do it, then NK (followed, probably distantly, by Iran), is who I'd bet on.
Arioch wrote:fredgiblet wrote: I don't get the obsession with the evil of drone strikes, I've never seen any evidence that they are any less precise than regular airstrikes.
I think this is purely a perception issue; I don't think that most people realize that these drones are piloted. It's also a problem with the nature of the missions (most of which are secret), so when the foes on the ground claim there are civilian casualties, the military really hasn't been in a position to contradict or clarify.
Technically speaking, legalities say that usually there are civilian casualties. I forget the details, but terrorists almost always fall into the "civilian" and "illegal combatant" categories. As a result, the military has to do some verbal dancing to move people away from the weasel-word (civilian) to the important one (combatant). The definitions in the Geneva convention & similar aren't designed for modern press releases.
Charlie wrote:This. I don't get the obsession with the evil of drone strikes, I've never seen any evidence that they are any less precise than regular airstrikes.
The precision often comes down to the human intelligence not only what can be seen from the air. Systems malfunctions form the lower percentage of incorrect strikes, as far as I know. It is more often miss identified targets by ground assets that cause a lot of the collateral damage.
There are other circumstances, too. Apparently within the last year or so the US Air Force accidentally killed some apparently peaceful cleric in Yemen. He had been raising some ruckus against Al-Qaeda if I remember right, a known member had gone to speak with him to try to iron things out, and we hit both at the same time because we assumed the Al-Qaeda member was meeting with another member that we just didn't know about. You can say that's what people get for knowingly associating with terrorists, and I would technically agree, but I also realize that things like that are part of the source of uproar in these cases.
Charlie wrote:Nukes are mostly show pieces however. Used in defensive ways, such as nuking an invading fleet, would leave you with an irradiated coast line and a considerable amount of sea area. Using them to attack a far superior enemy would be equally disastrous, America has more nukes. This is not even considering environmental damage or what the international community would do.
Technically, Russia has a good number more nukes than the US does. When the latest treaty restrictions went into effect, we actually
refurbished some to get ourselves back
up to the agreed-upon maximum. Apparently Russia's military is so technologically lousy (well, okay, "apparently" it was so lousy in the cold-war that we would have rolled into Moscow before we realized we'd won...) that they think (and I guess we agree) that nukes are the only way that they could protect their own borders from us if we decided to attack, so we let them keep more than us despite the land-mass difference.
Well, that and the fact that their ICBMs are apparently lousy shots. I got the impression that they might have built that "largest in the world" nuke so they could actually hit the target with a single warhead.