Drone Wars? Not Quite.
I'll be the first to admit it: drones are quite the rage.
In 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates hinted that the F-35 Lightning II might be the last manned fighter ever fielded.
He's not alone, either. For years, headlines have heralded the end of manned flight, and the coming drone wars. Not to mention, Twitter is littered with several accounts ostensibly belonging to self-aware drones: Drunken Predators, Party Reapers, Sexy Ravens, and the like.
While the bulk of military technology has remained relatively stagnant over the last decade of war, unmanned aerial vehicles have taken off. Rifle companies roll into battle with hand-held Raven UAVs, while brigades and divisions are armed with Shadow and Grey Eagles. According to a recent New York Times article, the Pentagon's unmanned arsenal has grown from 50 to 7,000 unmanned vehicles in just ten years.
But will our military become a pseudo-Cylon force by the end of the century? Perhaps not.
Peter Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century was interviewed in a recent article in The Economist:
[A]t a time of falling defence spending, UAS procurement and development may lack allies against powerful and conservative constituencies. These include sceptical military bureaucrats, fast-jet pilots, and members of Congress fighting to preserve traditional weapons programmes and the jobs that go with them.
But the real impediment to Drone Warfare may be more mundane.
Recently, Noah Shachtman of Wired Magazine revealed that America's drone fleet was hit with a computer virus. What's more is that the data links which control America's fleet of drones is suceptible to jamming and anti-satellite technology, video feeds have been hacked, and GPS signals can be jammed.
Drones may be able to stay aloft for 36 hours without a break, but human beings can't be jammed or hacked. In the 21st Century, that might make all the difference in the world.
The author is a helicopter pilot qualified in the UH-60 Black Hawk and LUH-72 Lakota helicopters. Serving as the lead Observer/Controller for Unmanned Aerial Systems at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels, Germany, he has logged approximately 5.3 hours walking through the forest in Germany in search of wayward Raven UAVs. With little success, one might add…
Outsourcing humanity for semi autonomous machines. Who will hold a job in the DoD 30 years from now. Reverse engineering the brain and artificial intelligence development is all the rage right now. I wonder if it possible to create that ‘global information grid’ for the sake of total information awareness when there are no boots on the ground. Will the battle tested field generals be sent packing, only to replace them with drones who shoot first and ask no questions? Is this what military strategists truly desire?
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The human in the cockpit is the limiting factor to significant advancements in fixed wing aircraft.
Are you assuming the data links, navigation systems, GPS, software applications and communication networks on your airframe are not subject to hacking or jamming? Do you think your supply chain is so “air tight” that malware couldn’t be inserted during upgrades or testing? I think both manned and unmanned AC are equally dependent on data systems to operate properly and therefore both are equally vulnerable.
Yes a manned system may be able to RTB, but that’s really about the only advantage.
Truly much of this debate occurs in the vacuum created by the lack of any credible threat. Vietnam was the last conflict in which this country faced a substantial air threat in which thousands of aircraft and aircrew were lost, and which necessitated the maturation of the “strike package” – a creature possessing significant amounts of energy and resources, coordinated and synchronized, to get a weapon to a target.
Since then, the United States has been able to do pretty much what it wanted to do in the air and space domains – especially if using the World War II, Korean, and Vietnam conflicts as benchmarks for “contested” control of the air domain.
Creating weapons, doctrine, and employment in this environment is dangerous – a variation on “fighting the last war.” Retired MajGen Dunlap hinted as much in his NPR interview (reference the SWJ link dtd 11 Oct) when he pointed out that the US is operating drones in an uncontested environment. His response was to the concern about drone employment against the United States, which supposedly has an air defense system.
But the reverse applies – creating doctrine based on experience in a realm in which the enemy does not get to vote is hardly a recipe for success when placed in a situation where the enemy does get such a choice.
The use of the word “irrelevant” is inappropriate – but I would say that the argument about manned versus unmanned air platforms, while important, is entirely secondary to determining the role of airpower. If we do not put some thought into what we actually need to be doing in air and space, in environments both contested and uncontested, than the “how” of what we are going to do may actually become “irrelevant.”
SJK