This is a big, big deal. Able to fly farther and stay in battle longer than manned planes, drones could help solve the most pressing problems facing American air power in the vast Pacific. Namely, distance and sortie rate.
It's clear the Pentagon needs a dogfighting drone, especially as it shifts forces to the Pacific to counter a rising China. The U.S. military's main air bases in Japan and Guam are many hundreds of miles from potential war zones such as the Taiwan Strait, whereas China's air bases are a few scoremiles away.
American aircraft carriers theoretically can sail close to the battle zone, but in practice the threat of Chinese ballistic missiles could keep the flattops a thousand miles from the main fighting.
Forced to fly hundreds of miles in order to reach battle, U.S. jets could run out of fuel a few minutes after arriving. And the great distances also limit the pace at which commanders can send more planes into the fight, since too many aircraft will be tied up in transit.
"Without secure close bases, sortie rates rapidly decline," the California think tank RAND warned in a 2008 study.
Dogfighting drones could change all that. Loaded with missiles, a robotic warplane could linger for 12 hours or more over the battlefield, extending American firepower against waves of Chinese planes."
Just as armored infantry (the hoplite) allowed the Greeks to dominate the ancient world, just as the longboat allowed the Vikings to expand well beyond their borders, and just as the longbow allowed the English to destroy the French, this technological advance will conceivably allow our military to deter any conventional military from war with us or our allies. Who would want to fight and die against robots?
Also, who knows what the military skunk works can do that we don't know about? However, we need to keep in mind that any technology that the military can use against our external enemies can also be used against us, the citizens. How we deal with that issue will likely determine if we are ruled by foreign despots, or homegrown ones.
We make better drones that kill Skynet's, of course.
ReplyDeleteWhich is good. There will be a giant and lucrative market for that product.
DeleteAny technology we develop will either be stolen by Chinese hackers and spies or sold to them outright by traitors infesting office. How the hell do you think the chinese managed to develop
ReplyDeleteFighters like the ones they are currently fielding. Slick Willie sold them a lot of the tech they needed in the 90's, the rest they stole. If America doesn't get a handle on cyber warfare and soon we will be finished.
I thought that the zips (Chinese people) were our allies. Didn't Barack bow to them and apologize?
ReplyDeleteI have a serious, serious problem with this tech. In order to near-real-time remotely control the drones, we either need line-of-sight from the control point to the drone such as would be needed for laser communication, or we need the ability to be in radio contact with the drones to control them. Radio communications over the target seems to be very easy to disrupt, much in the way that GPS signals from the GPS satellites are easy to disrupt from a signal source on the ground. Throw in the previously mentioned stolen or sabotaged (*) technology, and this seems like a recipe for disaster.
ReplyDelete(*) Just like the NSA replacing software in consumers' home routers.