Will a UAV.........
Congratulations to The Apprentice for opening-up this string - an historic move.
Equally historic:
"Methinks writing off UAVs might be a bit premature";
"we're a long way off from over-the-air re-targetting";
"UAVs are OK for recce in hot areas - and the odd A/G munition has been pooped off by them already - but we're a very long way from sufficiently reliable systems to control anything more than over-the-air re-targetting of recce sensors, I would guess"
As the Chief of Staff of the USAF said recently, this technology is developing faster than our capacity to use it.
The fact is .....it's all been done already and most of it is already routine - in some quarters.
Predators were passing live target imagery to F-18s in Kosovo. USAF AC-130s now receive real-time Predator imagery for "air to air re-targetting". The capability to pass real-time Predator target data to RAF Jaguars (at low level) and AH64s is proven.
OK, Hellfire is a short range weapon, that's a weapon issue, not a platform issue. The new MQ-9s will carry14 Hellfires or just about everything else in the shed.
Early Predators were non-de-iced - its wasn't part of the ACTD. Now RQ-1s are de-iced so the all-weather issue is down to the sensor.
The current Predator SAR is ballast but the next generation will offer real-time all-weather, targetting against fixed and mobile targets (subject to ROI), it's flying on the MQ-9s. The imagery is geo-referenced so can be passed directly to a JDAM. The UCAV is a reality.
As for re-fuelling them A-A, with nearly 30 hours endurance, why would you want to - but this too will come.
As far as I know, there has never been a lost link over the satellite, due to weather or anything else - and they don't need to be LEO or MEO (in fact they shouldn't be). And, we don't need to buy a network of our own, most of the USAF\other agency stuff goes over commercial networks (encrypted).
We have two options; we can nit-pick this techological revolution in the hope it will go away, or, we can live in the real world.