Just wait 'til micro and nano drones come along. Drones being deployed from other drones. Sleeper drones. Aqua drones. Stealth drones. Etc.

Manned aircraft, carrier battle groups, fixed bases, and unit formations are one step closer to obsolete. Drones will find the CBG, and a ballistic missile will finish the job, except the CBG won't go anywhere near the threat zone.

Other countries will be able to skip generations of weapons and doctrine, just like they fast forwarded to mobile phones and internet and 200 channels of satellite TV. And they'll have a motivated and trained corps of patriotic hackers who can make this stuff work.

And 100 per cent of politicians?

Levity aside, drones appear to be follow on from the stand-off weapon, only the stand-off weapon carries its own weapons these days.

God help us if we are counting Ravens as "aircraft."

Model planes indeed.

A lot of squeeze for not much juice.

At the point where a battalion has a dedicated, armed drone with several hours of loiter, "most" weather capability, and mobile launch/recovery -- then we will really be getting somewhere.

I would point out though, that a lot of people are starting to sound like Rumsfeld, and assuming that technology reduces the need for Soldiers.

You don't have to put forces on the ground after you destroy an Army and destabilize a country with firepower...unless you want to have a strong voice in the outcome.

Consider the many, many ways law enforcement agencies can use eye-in-the-sky drones deployed over our cities and towns, all in real time or stored forever. News enterprises too. They don't all need to purchase their own drones, either. Just access to the feeds.

The Marine Corps is, right now, deploying a trial squadron of drone cargo helicopters to Afghanistan as a workaround for IED-prone road convoys.

I did a story for Leatherneck in 1987 that included a section on experiments with drones at China Lake. They were using early Israeli drones and training pilots on an old taxiway using radio-controlled model airplanes. Very sophisticated: the "pilots" sat on old folding chairs depoyed alongside the taxiway and spent hours in the hot sun practicing touch-and-go landings. Meanwhile, they showed me a story of a breakthrough drone landing aboard the USS Iowa--head-on into a cargo-type net. For all that it seems quaint now, the Marines told me then that they'd work their way up to long-range/long-hover weapons platforms and down to squad-deployed drones the size of small birds. And dang if we ain't there now.

The same story included a section on a Marine Corps flight mapping project at NAS Point Mugu that included 3D satellite mapping of the entire earth to facilitate remote-feed nap-of-the-earth access and egress to/from any point on the planet. I asked for a dummy mission to the Hagaru-ri airfield on the 1st Marine Division line of egress from the Chosin Reservoir. Within about thirty seconds, I was watching a sped-up simulated flight from a base in Japan to Hagaru-ri. The readout, for eventual use in cockpits, was a wire frame that matched up with the airplanes real-time position and flight characteristics. It might have been based on Microsoft's Flight Simulator home computer software. I was told that this would be useful for flying drones at any time of night or day and in low-visibility weather that would deter humans in a cockpit. I believe it was the first time I ever heard of GPS.

Sooner or later--I reckon sooner--we'll move from man-flown remote-controlled drones to autonomous robot drones.

Skynet became self aware: August 29 1997

Personally, I'm just waiting for the Singularity so this Dell Latitude E6500 that I'm currently "piloting" can come to life and strangle me with my own mouse cord...thus ending my time on BDE staff.

Oh, yeah: Not in the Leatherneck article, but while I was at Mugu, I saw a few launches of F-86s. This was 1987! Turns out they had been decommissioned by foreign air forces and repurchased by us U.S. taxpayers. These F-86s had day-glo orange markings and were remotely flown due west, out over the Pacific, where they were tracked and brought down by a ground-to-air missile guidance system that was touted as being "semi-autonomous." This experience resurfaces every time I fly alongside the California coast: Is the IFF working?

I personally am somewhat struggling with the "Wh"y of UAVs and the proliferation of this type of warfare. Is it because it is a cost saving? Is it because it is more effective or it is more efficient. Or is it because we are afraid of putting our youth in harm's way? If the latter is true, what does it say of a nation that is afraid to show resolve and real moral courage by risking its most priceless commodity, its people? What does that nation stand for?

The University of Alaska has drones with ground-penetrating radar that can measure the thickness of ice in the Bering Sea! They have scouted the last 60 miles of the voyage of the USCG icebreaker Healy and the Russian ice class tanker Renda to deliver 1.5 million gallons of gas and diesel to Nome, Alaska. The university reports that the ice pack ahead is thinner than what the Healy has been battering through for days.

The regular fuel shipment by barge was delayed by a storm and other screw-ups so they had to turn to the Russians for a small tanker with a double hull that was certified for this type of ice. It sounds like the Healy could use its own drone to scout courses through the ice pack. I don't know if she's big enough to carry a helicopter, but a drone would be much cheaper.

BTW, the USCG is down to one icebreaker in the Northern Hemisphere and she's based in Seattle. The other icebreaker will be in a major overhaul till 2014. I wonder what the impact of future budget cuts will be.

...by other drones and very nasty electonic warfare tools, like lasers and microwaves and gamma rays. Of course all of that EM noise will give away position and heading, so aircraft, ships and vehicles will have to be agile, and the EW systems will be very nasty and adaptive.

Robert Heinlein must feel very smug in heaven or hell or wherever.

I've been reading McMaster's Dereliction of Duty and this post about drones made me wonder how LBJs 1964 escalation of the war might have been different if he had access to drone technology. He and JFK conducted a covert war with SF so they might have used drones heavily if they had the chance. Just an interesting thought experiment I thought.

Manned high-performance jet aircraft have pretty much reached their design limit because the design of the Mark I man in the cockpit has maxed out the use of pressure-fighting devices. There are, I'm told, two choices (besides designing a more high-performance Mark II human): recline the man fully on his back to add limited performance potential or remove the man and use blunt-force engineering to max out high-stress performance of aircraft parts. Think about the recline option. He'd need a display to see via cameras--sort of like the unreclined UAV driver already uses from a safe distance.

But why? Send robots to dogfight other robots? Maybe fighter robots can guard bomber robots? But the whole idea of UAV is to field many more cheap aircraft than its possible to field expensive field manned aircraft.

Imagine refueler drones topping off missle-armed drones guided to target by loitering AWACs drones guarded by masses of cheap, small laser-armed fighter drones. You know, something you read about in a sci-fi thriller when you were thirteen.

There's an old scifi movie/book about a kid who masters a computer game developed secretly by aliens who have reached their design limit so use mastery of the game as a way to find users who can exceed the design limit. I played my first round of Space Invaders in 1979, when I bought my first computer. I sure didn't exceed anyone's design limits at 33, but what about those much younger Marine model-plane pilots I encountered at China Lake in 1987? By then, they might have once been teens with desktop computers at home. And what about pretty much anyone who grew to maturity in the past thirty-plus years--including all of our UAV jocks?

The biggest issue I have with UAVs is that they are relatively unresponsive when directly supporting ground operations such as raids, mvmt to contacts, etc. I would rather have a manned ISR asset responsive to what I need on the ground; tracking and talking me on to a squirter/PAX egressing from a target compound, supporting my clearance of a mountain camp, etc. The bigger issue among manned ISR(fix winged fighter jets) is whether our current fleet of planes is overkill for most areas we will operate in( with air superiority).

Should we purchase less costly planes to fill the manned ISR missions and only employ fighter jets for kinetic missions? Many more sorties in AF and IZ are employed as non-standard ISR than dropping bombs on any given night or day, not to mention time on station restrictions of our fighter jets.

UAVs will be in high demand, but they still have their limitations that will require boots on the ground.

Also, while we're talking about UAV technology, here's a funny article about the, "US providing DRONE TECHNOLOGY to Pakistan: http://tinyurl.com/3mg6ecy
Spoiler alert: Drone Technology= Raven

http://xkcd.com/652/

The next step is insurgents leveraging 3-D printing tech to produce cheap UAVs with explosive payloads and remote control via commercial channels en masse. If our FOBs can be paralyzed by some goat farmer lobbing rounds in its general direction from grandpa's 82mm, think how it's gonna look when every round comes in NOE on a 10 digit grid.

Two decades down the road, there will be ubiquitous swarms of micro and nano UAVs communicating with each other and their control center by low power point to point RF and lidar comms. ISR and kinetic ops will rely mostly on them. They will be produced and recycled locally using fab tech.

In three decades, the US military will have fixed DFAS and DTS.

The next generation weapons vendor will be outfits like www (dot) digikey (dot) com

Drones still require a satellite uplink to receive commands from halfway across the world. You could just blow up the satellite.

A friend of mine is really into these things. We were in the field last fall and mounted a camera on one of his and used it to take aerial photographs of an adjacent unit... My friend is an amateur but a motivated insurgent could easily figured a way to drop explosives hooked up to a cell phone into FOB.

This stuff isn't even that expensive.

http://www.rchobbyhelicopter.com/store52/agora.cgi?product=UAV_-_Quadcopters_-_RC_Quad_Copter

If we ever go up against a low tech, but competent adversary we might get our butts handed to us while the Field Service Rep struggles to get Blue Force Tracker and RIPRNet to work.