Will a UAV make us redundant ?
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Well, on my PC Board at Ramridge House in '49 I had a hell of a set-to with some Gp Capt who thought that the writing was on the wall for manned aircraft. It got quite heated and I went a litle "OTT". He clearly thought I was a brash young undergrad (which I was) and I thought he was a pompous old technofart (which he probably was not). I was quite glum about my prospects but the Air Commode must have been on my side. "Plus ça change..."
It does strike me some times that you young tearaways are busy pricing yourselves out of the market. The Treasury must be licking their chops at some of the current gizmos.
WHEN the day comes that UAVs take over the main offensive and defensive combat roles, THEN the culture of military aviation will have died and the raison d'être of the RAF with it. Best then to burn the light blue uniforms and hand the "unmanned airfarce" over to the fisheads and grunts - who have been plotting and scheming to kill off the RAF for the last 80 years. We can then shake the graveyards with our mirth at the inevitable "blue-on-browns" and "brown-on-blues".
It does strike me some times that you young tearaways are busy pricing yourselves out of the market. The Treasury must be licking their chops at some of the current gizmos.
WHEN the day comes that UAVs take over the main offensive and defensive combat roles, THEN the culture of military aviation will have died and the raison d'être of the RAF with it. Best then to burn the light blue uniforms and hand the "unmanned airfarce" over to the fisheads and grunts - who have been plotting and scheming to kill off the RAF for the last 80 years. We can then shake the graveyards with our mirth at the inevitable "blue-on-browns" and "brown-on-blues".
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UCAVs may be cheaper to purchase as a unit. But they are not intended to fly for the 6,000 hrs life of a FJ aircraft.
Hence, you have a training problem. If some form of ground control is to be utilised, people must train regularly and in so doing, you rapidly use up the system life of the UCAV and need to buy some more. Please do not shout about simulators, you have to use the real thing to determine its actual limitations amd weed out the 'bugs'. It is lethal to base operational plans on a defence contractor's optimistic claims for the capability of its product only to find out the hard way that the thing does not work as advertised. Consider what the 'cost' of that situation could be.
Even if the thing is simple and can sit on a shelf until required, you still need to carry out some maintenance activity, which equals cost.
Finally, we never, never, never fight the battle we plan for!!! So the in-built flexibility of having the human, right there in the air platform 'close' to the difficult bit, is vital when it's 'all change'.
I am not a luddite, these things have their place and will, no doubt, develop. But using simple unit cost as a prime justifier for following the UCAV route is a flawed argument. Even the Americans have realised that one.
lm
Hence, you have a training problem. If some form of ground control is to be utilised, people must train regularly and in so doing, you rapidly use up the system life of the UCAV and need to buy some more. Please do not shout about simulators, you have to use the real thing to determine its actual limitations amd weed out the 'bugs'. It is lethal to base operational plans on a defence contractor's optimistic claims for the capability of its product only to find out the hard way that the thing does not work as advertised. Consider what the 'cost' of that situation could be.
Even if the thing is simple and can sit on a shelf until required, you still need to carry out some maintenance activity, which equals cost.
Finally, we never, never, never fight the battle we plan for!!! So the in-built flexibility of having the human, right there in the air platform 'close' to the difficult bit, is vital when it's 'all change'.
I am not a luddite, these things have their place and will, no doubt, develop. But using simple unit cost as a prime justifier for following the UCAV route is a flawed argument. Even the Americans have realised that one.
lm
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There currently is no real impetus to go to fullscale UAV
deployment because the solution we have works well
enough already. NATO manned airforces are capable of
closing down the air-defense networks of any likely feasible
enemy without significant combat losses. If the cold war
was still rolling this would not be the case.
I personally believe that an actively funded UAV program
with todays technology could create aircraft that would be superior in combat to conventional air forces.
However there is always a lot of investment in status
quo, so I don't see NATO doing this overnight. However
a small country which was willing to take a chance on
new technology might well be able to field systems which
could beat a more conventionally equipped opponent.
The places where I would look to see this happening would
be say, India-Pakistan, China-Taiwan.
-- Andrew
deployment because the solution we have works well
enough already. NATO manned airforces are capable of
closing down the air-defense networks of any likely feasible
enemy without significant combat losses. If the cold war
was still rolling this would not be the case.
I personally believe that an actively funded UAV program
with todays technology could create aircraft that would be superior in combat to conventional air forces.
However there is always a lot of investment in status
quo, so I don't see NATO doing this overnight. However
a small country which was willing to take a chance on
new technology might well be able to field systems which
could beat a more conventionally equipped opponent.
The places where I would look to see this happening would
be say, India-Pakistan, China-Taiwan.
-- Andrew
BEagle, Flatus and LM
I am pleased that you have given some thought to the issues here, as have I. I agree with LM, a pilot means flexability. Also I had never considered the issue of UCAVs having a limited lifespan.
I think the proponents of UCAVs have not given enough thought to the nagative implications of autonomous offensive systems.
I am pleased that you have given some thought to the issues here, as have I. I agree with LM, a pilot means flexability. Also I had never considered the issue of UCAVs having a limited lifespan.
I think the proponents of UCAVs have not given enough thought to the nagative implications of autonomous offensive systems.
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When you lose comms (happens fairly regularly) with a manned aircraft, you still expect it to do its job and then land somewhere in one piece. If you lose contact (no matter how many Megs/sec)with a UAV, then its landing might be catastrophic or at least politically unacceptable, especially if its carrying things that go 'whoosh..... bang'.
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Lost comms is generally not a catastrophic failure, however it means that you may have to wait an awful long time to get that "real-time data" the manufacturer promised you would get.
An awful lot of that huge new US Defence budget is going on UAV`s.
Maybe they price US lives higher than ours, (or at least can afford to).
Another point is how do you train with the things, especially in UK airspace !.
Many a poor Gazelle pilot has been sent aloft with a video camera, simulating a UAV.
An awful lot of that huge new US Defence budget is going on UAV`s.
Maybe they price US lives higher than ours, (or at least can afford to).
Another point is how do you train with the things, especially in UK airspace !.
Many a poor Gazelle pilot has been sent aloft with a video camera, simulating a UAV.
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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.
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.
Weellll......I doubt they will have a big fighting role in the foreseeable future, but their importance for recce and cloak-and-dagger tasks is already large and growing. On this topic, the Washington Post covered quite a bit of this under its "Dot.Mil" column, and a look through their archive could be interesting. Amongst other things they reported that the live video feed from Predators to HQ during Op. Anaconda had been more of a distraction and a temptation for the staff to interfere with micro-tactics than anything else. One US Army officer told them it was "an interesting toy" but not much else!
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It will take a fundamental change in mindset and the way business is conducted. Mistakes like micro-managing will be made and lessons learned but that doesn't detract from the potential of this technology.
Their fighting role will take some time to develop but that is because of the slow mil procurement processes.
"One US Army officer told them it was "an interesting toy" but not much else!"
Yes and Bill Gates said "the internet will never take off" (or words to that effect) but boy did he move fast to exploit the internet once he realised his mistake.
Their fighting role will take some time to develop but that is because of the slow mil procurement processes.
"One US Army officer told them it was "an interesting toy" but not much else!"
Yes and Bill Gates said "the internet will never take off" (or words to that effect) but boy did he move fast to exploit the internet once he realised his mistake.
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"?
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.
There are just as many stories about futures that never came true......I advise Herman Kahn's "The Emerging Japanese Superstate", the same man's predictions of the colonisation of Mars by 2000 and personal helicopters instead of cars, Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History" and most futurologists' predictions generally. Also hordes of hard-right rants about the fall of the West. I recall finding in my university's library a book called "The Death of British Democracy", published 1977. About the only thing nobody mentioned was computers. Predictions and conservatism both tend to be wrong.
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I agree many predictions made in the past about the future have been wrong. My point was that you can find lots of quotes even from people with apparent credibility to support either case - talk is cheap.
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Green Bottle has it exactly.
Giving the commanders information which allows them to micro-manage is, and always has been, an error.
Cleft sticks were the start of a slippery slope, semaphore was a disaster and carrier pidgeons were the last straw.
If you think you can resolve this issue by ignoring the technology which makes the information available you may as well sit in a deck-chair and tell the waves to go back. Don't shoot the messenger.
As for "interesting toys"............not even the US has the $ to make "interesting toys" their highest and most urgent spending priority or the CoS USAF to request 5 squadrons of MQ-9s on the basis of recent armed RQ-1 experience - and he could put that funding into other "toys".
Giving the commanders information which allows them to micro-manage is, and always has been, an error.
Cleft sticks were the start of a slippery slope, semaphore was a disaster and carrier pidgeons were the last straw.
If you think you can resolve this issue by ignoring the technology which makes the information available you may as well sit in a deck-chair and tell the waves to go back. Don't shoot the messenger.
As for "interesting toys"............not even the US has the $ to make "interesting toys" their highest and most urgent spending priority or the CoS USAF to request 5 squadrons of MQ-9s on the basis of recent armed RQ-1 experience - and he could put that funding into other "toys".
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I could be wrong but I can't find where I am supposed to have made the statement you attribute to me WEBF. I am more likely to have said there is a place for manned aircraft for the forseeable future, however in 20 or 30 years time who knows?
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Let me ask you this GB, CR etc.
Would you put your family on an UAV transport ac flying them from say, Middle East, over the alps, Paris and London to Manchester over some f...ing big hills, in poor wx and across the most congested airspace in the world - and trust to the sensors and satellite link?
I don't think so - not now, not never!
Would you put your family on an UAV transport ac flying them from say, Middle East, over the alps, Paris and London to Manchester over some f...ing big hills, in poor wx and across the most congested airspace in the world - and trust to the sensors and satellite link?
I don't think so - not now, not never!
Sorry, I quoted the wrong person earlier.
Mike, good point. If you wouldn't put up with that then why should we put up with ARMED ones?
I'm not going to repeat my earlier points, go back and read them if you want.
Mike, good point. If you wouldn't put up with that then why should we put up with ARMED ones?
I'm not going to repeat my earlier points, go back and read them if you want.
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UAV's will be deployed because they will be better at
various operational tasks than manned combat aircraft.
Sooner or later some manned airforce is going to get
the stuffing kicked out of it by a UAV based force.
I would like to hope that its not ours because we are too
wedded to 'the way we do things now' to realise that
times change.
I'm not saying that manned combat pilots will disappear
overnight but the writing is on the wall.
For what its worth we can be encouraged by the example
of the Navy in 1905 launching Dreadnaught and making
obsolete every other battleship in the world.
-- Andrew
UAV's will be deployed because they will be better at
various operational tasks than manned combat aircraft.
Sooner or later some manned airforce is going to get
the stuffing kicked out of it by a UAV based force.
I would like to hope that its not ours because we are too
wedded to 'the way we do things now' to realise that
times change.
I'm not saying that manned combat pilots will disappear
overnight but the writing is on the wall.
For what its worth we can be encouraged by the example
of the Navy in 1905 launching Dreadnaught and making
obsolete every other battleship in the world.
-- Andrew
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It's going to happen
When we make decisions, in any environment, we employ a set of rules. This set of rules is used to determine what the best decision is through a form of risk management. Someone, somewhere, is busily beavering away finding out what those rules are. When he has finished he will have the basis of an AI capable of emulating the flexible mindset of the human pilot, but with all of the data in accurate numerical form available. This AI can be programmed into an appropriate computer which will then be used, on-board, to fly the UAV. Simple if-then statements will do for mission objectives, with more complex routines to cover more difficult manouvers such as air combat, but everything will be essentially if-then based (just like we work). For political reasons, there will likely be a human monitor (not mission essential) who will have the ability to destroy the UAV.
UAV's are unlikely to hit the commercial sector, though, since people are "happier" with human pilots.
Ta muchly
PTT
UAV's are unlikely to hit the commercial sector, though, since people are "happier" with human pilots.
Ta muchly
PTT