If it’s bloody dogfights versus the Red Chinese over the Taiwan Strait that represent our Air Force’s future, then we’re probably right to invest so heavily in speedy, stealthy, expensive manned fighters — even if the budgetary picture for these airplanes looks worse by the day.
But if counter-insurgency fights are the way ahead, then maybe, just maybe, drone airplanes can rescue the Air Force from budgetary and obsolescence meltdown, as Bryan William Jones and I reported for World Politics Review yesterday:
While the manned fleet teeters on the edge of failure, the Air Force’s flying robots are coming into their own. After suffering 20-percent crash rates during its first few years of service, the $10-million Predator is now roughly as safe as reliable as a manned fighter, and has added bigger engines and Hellfire missiles to its basic airframe. The $20-million Reaper began flying attack missions last fall and scored its first kill in Afghanistan in October. British officers heaped the highest praise on the new drone when they called it a “mini A-10,” referring to the classic close air support jet built in the 1970s and now struggling with its own age issues.
Reaper is designed to carry up to 5,000 pounds of ordnance, including Hellfires and laser-guided bombs — and, starting later this year, satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions, too, according to 432nd Wing commander Col. Chris Chambliss. Reaper’s combination of day and night cameras and ground-mapping radar means it can spot targets and fire weapons even through cloud cover. While it cruises at around half the speed of the Air Force’s mainstay F-16 fighter, the Reaper can loiter for up to 12 hours, much longer without refueling than fighter jets that aren’t designed for powered-down orbiting.
This ability to hang around, waiting for targets, makes the long-winged Reaper ideally suited for taking cues from ground troops and hitting elusive insurgents on short notice. At a 2004 conference, Maj. Gen. Marc Rogers, then Air Force Materiel Command director of transformation, called this “kill chain” “the most fundamental process in the battle space.” Shortening the chain has long been an Air Force priority. But for this purpose, the physics of fast, low-endurance manned jets are perhaps inferior to UAVs’ long loiter time. As long as pop-up targets are the Air Force’s main worry, more drones just might be the answer to its needs. …
Despite this, armed UAVs still get short-changed in Air Force spending plans. The service’s Fiscal Year 2009 budget, released in January, includes $13 billion for around 100 airplanes. More than 50 are Predators and Reapers, but those airframes cost only $700 million combined, including funds for research.
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Correct me if I am wrong David. Is it true that Predator/Reaper UCAVs have no friendly fire incidents? (er this only counts ground troops not collateral)
True, as far as I know.
Being a former RAF pilot I see the use of drones as being as a support measure rather than a direct replacement.
I do not believe we are at a stage yet where drones can totally replace the air-force. Certainly not when drones can be fairly easily jammed in an active ECM environment.
Where drones certainly do provide a massive boost is to be either applied to a high threat environment (SEAD) defeating the SAM threat prior to manned flights, or loiter over a low threat environment allowing assets to be directed where they are more appropriate.
[...] Exactly why the Air Force quit the program has long been a matter of intense speculation. Some say the service’s top generals, most of them former pilots, are biased against unmanned fighters. Others say that the Air Force decided to move its killer drone work into the classified “black” world. Related were the fates of the two X-45s. Apparently some senior officer wanted the X-45s destroyed. Now we know that didn’t happen, according to the Air Force: Officials at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum unveiled a new exhibit April 24 of military unmanned aerial vehicles representing each branch of service. Of the six UAVs on display, three artifacts came from the U.S. Air Force: [...]
[...] The Pentagon under Robert Gates appreciated this. The Air Force’s old senior leadership, hung up on the mythical glory of pilot-on-pilot dogfighting, did not. The Air Force made more manned F-22 fighters its number-one priority, instead of more and better drones. [...]