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First All-Drone USAF Air Wing
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Tue Aug 12, 2008 02:28 AM
from the going-for-the-high-score dept.
from the going-for-the-high-score dept.
bfwebster writes "Strategy Page reports that the United States Air Force has announced its first air wing that will consist entirely of unmanned craft. The 174th Fighter Wing has flown its last manned combat sorties; its F-16s will be entirely replaced by MQ-9 Reapers. Reasons cited include costs (maintenance and fuel) and the drone's ability to stay in the air up to 14 hours, waiting for a target to show itself."
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Not the first UAV wing.... or the last. (Score:5, Interesting)
This has been in the works for a while now, but I should mention that this is not the first all-drone USAF wing. The 432nd is. Last year when I visited Creech AFB and the 432nd wing [utah.edu], I was briefed on the Air Force's plans to start transitioning a number of wings to unmanned wings and the ANG wing from Syracuse was the first one on the list. Interestingly, it will not be the last either as the UAV mission has become the Air Forces single most requested asset. Additional ANG wings in California, Arizona, North Dakota, Alabama, Texas and Nevada are next. Look for additional changes at March AFB and Minot AFB.
Re:Not the first UAV wing.... or the last. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Not the first UAV wing.... or the last. (Score:5, Interesting)
Afraid I can't be too specific about what division, etc. but Beale AFB in Northern California has a "permanent temporary flight restriction" over it. Since it's just south of me, and on the way to just about anything interesting, I run into it all the time when I fly privately. (I'm a private pilot)
It's not a big deal, really - in order to fly above the AFB's airspace, I have to be in touch with regional (NorCal) Approach Control and have to submit to their direction. (Why else would I be in touch with ATC?!?) But at least 1-2 days/week this "temporary" flight restriction is in effect, so they're flying UAV's all the time.
The biggest problem with ATC is that it's completely segregated. Since it mostly works, it's not often criticized, but it does put a significant amount of load on the pilot. For an hour-long flight, it's not atypical for me to fly for 20-30 minutes before I get a flight plan opened and in positive contact with ATC, what with all the frequency change requests, briefings, waiting in line, and other handshaking chatter I have to do! God forbid I should crash in the first half of the flight!
Another example, if I'm flying 3,000 feet over X airport, I'd think it would be a good idea for pilots at X airport to know. But unless I actually announce on the appropriate frequency, there's no way for them to know. And there's no easy way for me to know if I'm near an airport unless I'm using a GPS. And, cruising at 140 MPH means I'm only going to be over the airport and associated traffic for anywhere from 1-2 minutes. And the next airport is 20 miles away, 1/7 of an hour away, another 8 minutes or so. Remember when I said it took 20 minutes to get a flight plan opened? Further, it's perfectly legal for me to fly just 2,000 feet over the vast majority of smaller airports without announcing anything at all, even though it's common for traffic to fly in to airports a few thousand feet high if they aren't familiar and sort of "drop in" after announcing.
effort to do things that should be 100% computerized. If aviation radios had the equivalent of TCP and self-announced their position a la GPS, it could be a real-time, fully-coordinated, highly secure and all-but-automatic system that required almost no actual human intervention on the radio for most tasks.
Note: I wouldn't use TCP - it sucks ass when the packet loss gets any higher than a few percent - but there are a number of protocols that have been developed for such a purpose. For example, many game developers use UDP and then code lots of logic into the application, which extends UDP into a quasi-protocol.
The technology really wouldn't be all that hard. Just break down the Earth into groups of coordinates, perhaps 30 seconds or so on a side. Then, a GPS unit would "announce" it's position into an IRC group of the coordinate block that applied. Depending on the speed of the aircraft, it would also "subscribe" to the coordinate blocks that are deemed appropriate - the faster the plane, the larger the radius of coordinate groups it would request updates from.
Running a radio-based packet-switching network is pretty well understood - HAMs have been doing it for a long, long time, along with cell phone providers, Wifi, WiMax, UWB, and gobs of other technologies, any of which would probably be quite sufficient for the task. There is a *lot* of radio space available for aviation, [smeter.net] since aviation radio is one of the older technologies around, and simple packet-switching technologies allow many radios to share a common communications channel.
Think IRC, with SSL enabled as appropriate. (granting an FAA-granted 4096-bit certificate would make it damned hard to spoof a radio call!) I could write the software in a few months. I could program the GPS unit with a GPU and a bare-bones Linux core in perhaps 6 months. But it would take me 10 years (at best) to get this rammed through the Gubbmint if I had nearly unlimited funds and some damned good lobbyists on my speed-dial. Augh.
But, I digress. What was I talking about, again?
Parent
Re:Not the first UAV wing.... or the last. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not to say the system can't be improved. It IS to say that the problem is very difficult. NATCA [natca.org] has said for years that the quickest and cheapest increases in capacity would come from adding runways. The fifth runway at ATL has more than borne out that position, taking airborne delays from a bi-hourly occurrence to something that is rarely seen in good weather.
Parent
Re:Not the first UAV wing.... or the last. (Score:4, Interesting)
What bothers me about this is that you take away risk to persons from war, and those persons are more willing to wage war...which leads to more war.
Probably the only thing that has saved us since WWII is the fact that the leadership realised that they were personally no longer safe in the context of nuclear weapons - so to save their own skins, they strenously avoided world war 3.
If we can wage war at no risk to ourselves, then war will become a more viable option - which is a bad development.
Parent
Re:Not the first UAV wing.... or the last. (Score:4, Interesting)
You should know that the pilots of these craft are actually subject to a lot more stress from the job, because they actually watch the missiles fired from the point of launch to the impact and they are forced to see exactly what they're doing to the people they're attacking.
Well, in that case, they should make "being a zero-empathy sociopath" part of the necessary qualifications for becoming a drone operator. That way, the extra stress doesn't appear, and the kill rate might actually go up a bit.
Heck, anyone who has to see what dropping a couple of hundred pounds of explosives on a bunch of people will do in order to be somewhat distressed by doing that almost qualifies already.
Parent
Re:Not the first UAV wing.... or the last. (Score:4, Informative)
The ANG have been getting better kit over the years so they can be more useful in wartime. The idea is that they mirror the Active force instead of working with leftovers.
Smart ANG folks want the newer systems because they will have a long service life and protect their bases from closure, and it makes sense to give them such systems because ANG careers can be much longer than Active careers and airman experience levels quite high. (The Air Guard and Reserve are desirable jobs, which is why there usually aren't many vacancies.)
Parent
Simpsons was Prescient (Score:5, Funny)
Skill training completed. (Score:2)
I hope that USAF has their drone skills maxed. It would suck to invest all that only to realize you need (Drones V) and Drone Interfacing maxed out.
Drones = racist (Score:5, Funny)
The correct term is Unmanned American.
Re:Unmanned = Sexist (Score:4, Insightful)
A) Accurate
B) keeps the PC idiots at bay.
Parent
Re:"Unmanned drone" (Score:4, Funny)
So an "unmanned drone" is a truly purposeless thing. Of course, they're heading there anyhow: their penises get ripped off during sexual intercourse, after which they die.
In human relationships, this is called "marriage," but we only die on the inside.
Parent
Fighter ?? (Score:2)
Surveillance Wing yes
Ground Attack Wing possibly
Fighter Wing, no way
Re:Fighter ?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Fighter Wing, no way
Why not? The limit to the performance of a modern fighter aircraft is how many Gs the pilot can handle. Put the pilot on the ground, and you can make a far faster, more agile, smaller, lighter, and vastly cheaper weapon.
-jcr
Parent
Re:Fighter ?? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that very few of the talented pilots want to do this stuff. I have quite a few friends that are either instructors or students in the USAF. Two I was talking with the other day said that if they were forced to do UAV flying, they'd have to find some way out of flying all together. For most of them, they signed up to be fighter pilots, so even flying a bomber would be a let down.
They're competitive as hell by nature... I'm interested to see how this turns out for the USAF considering the antipathy I've seen towards piloting these things.
J
Parent
Re:Fighter ?? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that very few of the talented pilots want to do this stuff.
So?
Put the best pilot in the world in an F-16, and a much less skilled pilot on the ground, controlling an aircraft that can out climb, out turn, and out run him, and it's game over. Whatever his skills are, if he blacks out at 12 Gs, he loses.
-jcr
Parent
Re:Fighter ?? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's potentially. Right now drones are itty bitty things with props, meant for long times in the air essentially for surveillance.
Dogfighting requires situation awareness that is very difficult to achieve in a drone. One big problem is image throughput and controller display. It's not an unsolvable problem but it would cost a lot right now.
On the other hand, dogfighting is a rare occurrence in modern wars. I don't think there were even one instance in Iraq. I think the F-14 did dogfighting in anger exactly twice in its entire career with the US Navy (a lot more in the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s, of course).
Parent
Re:Fighter ?? (Score:5, Interesting)
"I was talking with the other day said that if they were forced to do UAV flying, they'd have to find some way out of flying all together. For most of them, they signed up to be fighter pilots, so even flying a bomber would be a let down."
That's why the Army needs to take over the drone program. The AF has shed a stunning number of missions and aircraft (it didn't originally want the A-10) and wants to only do air dominance.
Fine, take away all other missions and give them to the folks who need them most. Have Army and USMC UAV operators do rotations on the ground as forward controllers, and they will surely be motivated to fly UAVs effectively.
Parent
career death, probably (Score:5, Insightful)
The fighter pilots are the aristocracy of the aristocracy of the AF. Even aside from the love of flying that drove them into that job, the perks of being a fighter pilot, the status and career path that conveys, are not things they're going to surrender willingly.
Parent
Re:career death, probably (Score:5, Insightful)
, the perks of being a fighter pilot, the status and career path that conveys, are not things they're going to surrender willingly. ...which is why mounted knights maintained their position and status when firearms made their favorite mode of battle obsolete, right?
Oh, wait.
-jcr
Parent
Re:career death, probably (Score:4, Insightful)
Armor went away fairly quickly, but cavalry persisted for half a millennium after the invention of firearms.
rj
Parent
Re:career death, probably (Score:4, Insightful)
The mounted knights were hardly the ones to throw their hands up and say "okay, I am redundant and resign" though.
That's exactly my point. There will always be people who want to maintain the status quo, but things change. Technology advances, and eventually the advantages of new ways of doing things can't be ignored.
-jcr
Parent
Re:career death, probably (Score:4, Insightful)
Right now, fighter pilots are sitting at the top, and they decide who gets the thumbs-up or thumbs-down for the assignments/jobs that build the career of a future general. Change will not come from within the culture. UAV pilots are not in the club, and it will be a long long time before one is made wing commander, much less Numbered AF or MAJCOM. You might have one as commander of a UAV-only wing, which will be looked at, career-wise, as a junior jamboree.
I'm not saying that change won't happen, only that the fighter pilots will balk, complain, sabotage, foot-drag, and all but revolt all the way down the line.
Put anyone in a position of privelege, and they'll in short order think that the privelege is natural, and do everything in their power to keep it. It's human nature.
Parent
Re:Fighter ?? (Score:4, Informative)
The Air Force has finally come out of denial on that point, and is creating a "UAV operator" career path that does not require rated pilots. Among other things, it will open the field up to a lot of people who have the technical chops but can't pass a pilot physical.
rj
Parent
Hive mind (Score:5, Funny)
What, they were all queens before?
That explains Top Gun, I suppose.
Re:Hive mind (Score:5, Funny)
That explains Top Gun, I suppose.
Careful, Tom Cruise is going to sue your suppressive ass!
-jcr
Parent
Moving to UAV's (Score:5, Informative)
Inthis area the Air National Guard is also moving to UAV's. The 119th (Happy Hooligans) based in Fargo retired their F16s a while ago, and now flies Predators. The refueling wing based in Grand Forks also flies UAV's now.
that really is a really bad development (Score:4, Insightful)
As the personal cost of war for a country decreases the willingness to go to war goes up.
From what I've read elsewhere the other day it seems though that drones have a 'hidden cost' attached to them, the people that control the drones get to see the result of their actions and they are having serious psychological issues as a result of that.
Re:that really is a really bad development (Score:4, Insightful)
killing someone is still going to have an effect on you.
May I suggest you visit some of the sites that host footage of the "war"... like liveleak, etc? There you will find out that "killing someone" is about as traumatic as watching a sporting event, complete with cheers, laughter and jokes. I can imagine someone yelling "fuck yeah" in a bunker in Nevada just as they do on a rooftop in Iraq.
Parent
More humans in the loop (Score:5, Insightful)
Call me a heretic, but I'm coming around to the idea that armed UAVs are a better way to do business.
A traditional piloted ground-attack aircraft is an expensive, valuable thing with an expensive, amphetamine-fueled, scared-shitless pilot stuffed in it.
That pilot has a handful of seconds to ID his target, execute the attack, and then evade ground fire. Even in an environment where the USAF had total air superiority, there have been case upon case of pilots attacking the wrong target at the wrong time.
And modern air-ground weapons are so powerful that the smallest mistake can have catastrophically bad results.
But with the UAV, that element of personal risk is gone. Furthermore, instead of just one hopped-up, terrified, sleep-deprived individual making the go/no go call (and aiming the weapon to boot) you can have a series of targeting experts watching the video feed and making a soberly analyzed decision on fire/no fire.
And yet, as mentioned, while the people shooting the weapons may be isolated from personal risk, the incredible clarity of the visual feed does not isolate them from personal *cost* - and that's not a bad thing. Taking a human life should never be a painless endevour.
If we have to drop explosives on people, I'd rather that the people pulling the trigger have the opportunity to do a proper job of IDing the target, of assessing the likely collateral damage, and then making a calm and unrushed shot.
DG
Parent
Next in "Bangalored" list? (Score:5, Funny)
SO when are these jobs getting Bangalored?
Remote control or Autonomous? (Score:3, Insightful)
It is in our nature to destroy ourselves (Score:1)
Allow me... (Score:2)
Let's get these out of the way:
-- I, for one, welcome our new drone UAV overlords.
-- In Soviet Russia, the drones unman you!
-- 1. Buy drones
2. Create all-drone aircraft wing
3. ??????
4. Profit!!
Did I forget any?
Numbers (Score:1)
I was trying to find the answer to this on Wikipedia a while back to no avail: Where do the numbers (174th, someone mentioned 432nd, etc.) come from? How are they picked? What do they represent?
- RG>
There's one less excuse for my bad golf score! (Score:1)
A sad, sad day (Score:2, Troll)
It's a sad day for the world.
Drone air wings will make it more likely that the US will launch more attacks and wars of aggression.
But don't worry -- "our" corporate mass media will make sure we know the "rationalizations" and "justifications" for each attack. :-(
Re:A sad, sad day (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I doubt it. The US is already in a position where it can start wars where it basically has unchallenged air-superiority. If all it wants to do is bomb the hell out of somewhere, it can do that basically risk-free with manned aircraft.
The reality is that although airpower is an essential part of modern warfare, it's not the only thing that matters. Eventually you need soldiers on the ground holding territory, and that pretty much always gets messy.
As far as I can tell, UAV's create a shift in tactics for both airpower and the ground support, but it doesn't radically change the overall equation of war, at least not for the US.
Parent
Someone explain to me (Score:1)
Re:It is at moments like this... (Score:2)
Sweet, can I have my flying car now?
Parent
Re:It is at moments like this... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:What happens when a drone malfuctions... (Score:4, Funny)
...and fails to follow orders? Do they court-martial it?
Actually no. They make a movie [wikipedia.org] about it with a hot babe [wikipedia.org].
Parent
Unfortunately, no (Score:2)
The enormous sucking sound you hear is the money being vacuumed out of the Mother of All Aircraft Buys. So long, Lightning II, we hardly knew ye.
The problem with weapons programs is that when they get far enough along, so many people are sucking at the tit of government budgets that it's nearly impossible to kill them.
Case in point, the F-18 program... in the early 80's, it had gotten expensive enough that NavAir leaders decided they'd rather just cancel it and buy more F-14's and A-6's. Nope. The Hornet program was far enough along that a slew of Congressmen and Senators wanted to shovel money to their districts.
The most we can hope for, I think, is that the Navy cancels their version, or the USMC cancels theirs. I think the program is largely a waste, just a stealthy F-16 with less payload and range under most mission scenarios.
Parent