Lockheed Martin Plans Unmanned Aircraft 322
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Lockheed Martin's secretive Skunk Works unit--which previously developed U-2 spy plane, the SR-71 supersonic spy plane and the radar-evading F-117 stealth fighter--has big plans for its latest project: drones. Among the concepts under development, according to the Wall Street Journal: 'One drone would be launched from, and retrieved by, submarines; another would fly at nine times the speed of sound. A third, which is off the drawing board but not quite airborne, has wings designed to fold in flight so that it could rapidly turn from slow-speed spy plane to quick-strike bomber.' The WSJ's reporter also is allowed a rare visit to the Skunk Works complex: 'A factory hall was filled with the prototype of a massive helium-filled airship that one day might ferry troops and heavy equipment to distant battlefields faster and more efficiently than ships--no port or airbase needed. The blimp would float just above the ground on four hover pads, meaning that "you could literally pick a farmer's field" to set down in, says program manager Robert Boyd.'"
A UAV? Whodathunk? (Score:0, Insightful)
Like the skunk works is open to the WSJ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Skunk Works [amazon.com].
This is a group that developed the first operational jet fighters, and that kept the U-2 and SR-71 and stealth planes out of the public eye forever. We think the Wall Street Journal is getting the real story from them? If it's true, you have to wonder why the massive cultural shift at Lockheed is happening just now...
Re:Oh noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
The best pilot in the world still blacks out at about 9G. Even if the drone isn't as tactically capable as the human, it can survive far greater physical hardship. What use is your intelligence, your skill, your human flair for battle, against an adversary that can turn at speeds that would leave you a gooey mess in the cockpit?
A serious fighter drone would just slaughter human pilots, just on the superior performance of an aircraft that doesn't have to worry about keeping the pilot alive. It would be like Spitfires going up against a Harrier.
Re:big balloon at war (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, you have to look at things relatively speaking. A lighter than air ship may be large and slow, but to technology that exists today, large heavier than air transports are probably large and slow enough. A lighter than air ship may have a more friendly failure mode too.
Of course, 99% of these ideas never amount to anything.
Furthermore... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even assuming that the AI pilots are markedly inferior to humans, there's still a great advantage to using them. They're cheap. Training a pilot is an expensive thing to do and it takes a lot of time. Losing a pilot is bad news. Losing significant numbers of pilots also has the effect of undermining political support at home - every letter sent to the mother of someone who isn't coming home chips away a little at the mindless jingoism that you need to have to conduct a war.
So, let's suppose that the AI drones are so crap that the kill ratio is ten to one - a human pilot will on average bring down ten AIs before being killed himself. This need not be a problem. A computer program costs nothing to copy, and the hardware's relatively cheap, and robots don't have families. Throw a hundred AIs into the air and let them all be slaughtered if necessary. Who cares? Make 'em kamikaze if you like. It still costs less than training humans to do it.
For a Western army, recruiting humans is expensive, because citizens of very rich countries expect to be paid well to risk their lives. Probably the economics work out differently for the likes of China, but for the USA... let's fill the sky with droids.
Ahhhh! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Germans got there first (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course! We learned all about it in school. There's World War II, stinky cheeses, Godzilla, and The French.
We didn't miss anything, did we?
Re:Dirigible Usage (Score:3, Insightful)
Right! Especially when most of the casualties, day-in and day-out, are the result of other medeival-minded religious zealots people from neighboring countries blowing up civilians with car bombs paid for by Syrians and Iranians. Maybe we'll finally get that imperialism right though. We keep letting whole countries like France, Japan, Germany, Kuwait and more slip through our clumsy imperialist fingers.
Better weapons -- less death and destruction (Score:3, Insightful)
If they're admitting it exists now, it's old news (Score:2, Insightful)
That means whatever was revealed is ancient history and absolutely NOT the state of the art.
It may also be a pile of red herrings designed to delude competitors or enemies, such as a series of expensive dead-end projects they WANT the bad guys to worry about, while the real toys continue to remain hidden.
Have a crapload of dead-end secret projects you can't fund? Can't exactly scrap them in public, so hey, pile them up, call them really really secret and show them off. Turn a pile of garbage into a hot new machine, and bonus points for getting the WSJ to write it up. Brilliant! Very typical defense contrator stuff.
In any case, that giant airship or one like it has been in tons of UFO reports for at least two decades. That we had one wasn't much of a secret. Why the hell we would need such a thing was more of a question. I don't buy the story given. Hauling troops anywhere quickly is what they said the V-22 was for, and that sure has turned out _real_ well. Our military would never settle for a slow blimp, unless it's got anti-grav or some exotic weapon.
Military automation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So sad.. (Score:1, Insightful)
It's interesting for us
the most cool applications of technology are military. Those of us who've worked on 'defence'
related projects probably find them the most challenging and interesting cutting edge research
work aboout. But that is itself an awful reflection of our society. The reason these projects
attract attention is that is where the money all goes.
Once you grow up (past 25 according to an earlier Slashdot article) most of this fades
away. Maturity brings a proper perspective on the value of life, and the political lies
behind war can no longer be ignored.
The 'moral' implications are thrown into sharp relief when you read this as a non American.
In the context of the USA being involved in an illegal war of agression it's actually quite
sickening to read. If we were reading this on a (imaginary) German site in the 1930s talking
about "amazing V2 flying bombs" and "final solution ovens" I wonder if it would be so savoury.
Likewise I wonder if we would be so enthusiastic if Al Quaida had a technology website exponding the virtues of the latest nailbombs and chemical warefare agents. Knowing this technology is going to
end up used on your own family might make it little less exciting heh?
Given the additional context that the USA is 3 trillion in debt and facing inevitable economic meltdown because of its foolish military adventurism just adds a further insult to the article.
Re:UAV (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Military automation (Score:2, Insightful)
I do think kickstarting democracy in Iraq and hoping that Iraq's example is enough to put the Iranian political dissidents over the top and bring down their dictatorship, followed by the rest of the region, is our best chance of permanent peace in the Middle East. The rule that democracies don't attack other democracies should hold. It's just a damn shame some people would rather see Iraq and Afghanistan go up in flames than for President Bush to receive any credit for their success.
Re:So sad.. (Score:2, Insightful)
I am primarily concerned with the "not getting my house blown up and my wife killed" implications, and from that angle, i want our armed forces blowing up someone else's backyard instead of waiting for someone else to blow up mine.
There is no morality, only law, and law is a malleable thing. The West has tried really hard at making sure that "morality" has become subjective to the point of irrelevance, and now that they've succeeded, don't whine about the result.
I would bet that in 50 years we have wars with no human casualties, but staggering industrial/economic damage done by intelligent or remote controlled artificial agents, if not pure software.
Re:So sad.. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you feel strongly about war, create political pressure to stop it. Don't troll slashdot and whine about how some new technology can be misused.
Re:Need to compete - a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
First, by frequency hoping and other spread-spectrum radio methods.
Second, with bombs. With lots of bombs. With lots of large bombs. With lots of large and fast bombs.
Get the picture? Jamming in a war-zone gives you a very short life expectancy.
Re:red herring (Score:2, Insightful)
The point is that excellent design ideas often have hidden, unexpected flaws that are easily exploitable.
It just happens that the titanics' flaw was just the thing it was designed against.
Re:Furthermore... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not losing men would be a good thing. However, losing 40 multi-million dollar aircraft would probably even more demoralizing than losing one or two planes, and one pilot.
Re:It's a bright day (Score:2, Insightful)
And what the hell is so "horrific" and "terrifying" about unmanned drones and transport blimps?
Re:Military automation (Score:1, Insightful)
The threat of attack will not be a deterrent, since provoking attack was entirely the point.
I do think kickstarting democracy in Iraq and hoping that Iraq's example is enough to put the Iranian political dissidents over the top and bring down their dictatorship, followed by the rest of the region, is our best chance of permanent peace in the Middle East.
If you think Iraq is causing Iranians want to follow that example, you're nuts. As nuts as Saddam who thought the Arab Iranians would support him when he invaded Iran. If anything, Iraq is becoming more like Iran as Iranian-backed clerics gain more power there. Please, please, please tell me that your domino theory doesn't involve invading Iran to give them a nudge if they don't follow along with the program.
It's just a damn shame some people would rather see Iraq and Afghanistan go up in flames than for President Bush to receive any credit for their success.
Funny, I thought the ones wanting to see Iraq and Afghanistan in flames and the ones crediting Bush with "success" were the same people. I mean, it is starting wars and the results thereof that we're crediting him with, right?
Causes of war is not technology (Score:5, Insightful)
(1) People get edgy with all those hormones and fight for no reason at all.
(2) Someone is genuinely trying to hurt someone else or exert their will with physical force. The other party isn't going to take any more of it and decides to fight to protect themselves.
In international politics, (1) is only a problem if you have a single person or very small group of people that decides when to go to war. Democracies, by and large, don't have this kind of structure. Besides, it's always in everybodies' interests if the two people got along and got rich trading with one another.
(2) is far more common. This is the case when you have a corrupt government that seeks to either exploit its people or neighbors with physical force. War doesn't start when they decide to threaten force or use force to exert their will. War starts when somebody stands up to them.
It's often confusing to determine who "started" a war. Did Hitler start WWII, or did England when it decided to fight Germany's expansion policy?
It's nice to imagine some kind of conspiracy where the "military complex" determines when and how to go to war. I'll grant you one thing: Technology creates uncertainty, and uncertainty allows bad people to be more bold in their actions.
Here's a current modern day example. Iran has at its head a group of people whose purpose is to start a world war. They want a new piece of technology --- nuclear weapons --- because they think it will give them power enough to stand up to the US. It's really not certain if nuclear weapons are powerful enough to convince the American democracy to cower in fear. (They may well be!) So Iran is more bold in moving towards aggression and making threats.
When the US and its allies begin the invasion of Iran, likely, the blame for "starting" a war will go on the heads of President Bush and his friends. (Note: Already, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia have pledged to help with the invasion of Iran. There are several other smaller countries, including some Middle Eastern ones, who have pledged to help as well.) However, the true cause of this war should be Iran's aggression and threats to the annihilation of Israel and a nuclear attack on Europe and the US.
The Vietnam war, likewise, wasn't caused by a bunch of military industrialists. It was caused by communist aggression. They tried to turn a sovereign, democratic country into a wing of the Communist empire by force. The war really didn't start until the US decided to stop the aggression with force. Did the US start that war? No, but it was there to try and finish it.
Re:long-term occupation... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well then, Iraq is not a quagmire. Communications intercepted to/from Evil Clowns like Zarqawi indicate that the insurgency is actually pretty desperate about the lack of wider Islamic support for their car bombing campaign, and are having a harder time raising cash and willing suiciders. Many of their mid-level managers are getting wacked, too, which takes a lot of the fun out of it.
They're especially upset (the insurgents) because damn if, despite promises to behead anyone that votes, the Iraqi people just keep on going, in the many millions, to the polls and doing things like ratifying a constitution, naming their own parliment, and so on.
Re:Oh noes! (Score:3, Insightful)
A UAV operator is probably a lot cheaper to train, also probably has a much higher survival rate, probably needs much less education, and they could probably recruit droves of them at any Computer Gaming convention.
Re:The Germans got there first (Score:2, Insightful)
By that definition the F-16 isn't operational.