Most people seem to think that bandwidth/commlinks for realtime control of UAV's (and the problems associated with their loss) are the problem. Well that depends on how you use the UAV and is by no means a bar to their employment in current, or indeed, future roles.
The enabling factors for UAVs, particularly CUAVs aren't so much the comms links or air frames although these are important. The key enabling technology that will see an exponential growth of their capability is computer processing power and novel approaches to their software.
Yes it will take a lot of bandwidth for non-stop remote-pilot control flying. But we don't need to do it that way. Anyone can see that a short data message to tell the aircraft to go to a certain point, or attack a certain target takes neglible bandwidth. The software on board assesses it's threat environment thru it's sensors, and works out how to achieve its set objective in a way that a real pilot would. This is not artificial intelligence - this is simply the CPU applying
Input (from sensors and targeting instructions)
against
Rules (flight controls, weapon release parameters, survivability subroutines, laws of aerodynamics, where is the ground, possibility of collateral damage)
to produce
Output (achieving release parameters, staying airborne, evasive manoeuvres and getting outta there!)
Now think about this - combine CUAVs into teams that can cross-reference their actions with one another and work out how to attack targets together for maximum effect
and can all pull 20G turns cos they don't have pilots...
They may not be as clever or as good looking as (Lynx) pilots, but would you want to mix it with them? And with the objective-oriented software architecture, one controller could 'fly' 3 or 4 or more together - controller inputs destination, issues weapon states, loiter time, objectives, goes for a brew and comes back when they get there - he doesn't fly them there himself. And he's cheap.
Failsafes are easy to build in - eg no release without the executive order from General Whoever.
The rise of the computer will see the fall of pilots. Take for example passenger aircraft - leaving aside for the minute that psychologically noone wants to be flown by a computer. If over 90% of all accidents are pilot error, if we replace the pilot with something that would not make those errors then we could slash the accident rate by nine-tenths (and remove the problem of terrorists in the cockpit).
Now although ironically this would then leave 100% of all accidents being down to aircraft malfunction, I think you can see what I mean!
Now I speak as a pilot - I do think that there will always be a place for a manned aircraft, but the UAV's are coming and they'll likely go to SEAD next after recce. It always makes me smile when people say things like "nice toy" as recounted above, but the chairman of IBM once said that he saw a world market for "4 maybe 5" computers; Bill Gates once said that he couldn't see why anyone could ever need any more than 4 MBytes of disk space; and many of you will have heard the officer who complained in WW1 that airplanes "are a damned nuisance, and frighten the horses!"
Should we now change that to:
"UAVs are a damned nuisance, and they frighten the pilots"?
Last edited by ChristopherRobin; 14th May 2002 at 20:57.