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Has it not been realized? I think it has, there is a ton of drone stuff going on. The DoD hasn't rewritten the war fighting manual and strategy yet though so
by Nelson69 13y ago
Has it not been realized? I think it has, there is a ton of drone stuff going on. The DoD hasn't rewritten the war fighting manual and strategy yet though so manned fighters and bombers are still part of the plans but I don't think UAVs haven't proven themselves. This is a titanically slow moving organization... lives and deaths are on the line with their decisions.
One of the real lesson of the JSF is the amount of institutional inertia surrounding it. We were effectively pot committed before they had demo planes to play war games with. They spent 10+ years selling the idea. How do you kill a project like that? There is a certain irony to how the US picks weapons platforms too, everybody wants a new toy so who says "no" when the toy isn't quite up to snuff? So politically, we kill all the things the JSF is going to replace, we build love for the new platform, promise the world when nobody has even seen it.
The whole "jump jet" fascination is an interesting one, why do you need to land or take off a fighter/bomber from a place where you can't fuel it, can't reload it, and it doesn't carry cargo and people? Now the concept is cool, I get that, I just don't see where it fits in to the war fighting plan in a general way, not until planes have like nuclear reactors for fuel or something like that. It just doesn't seem generally useful.
- Spooky23 13y agoThe Marines have "amphibious assault ships" that are sort of like aircraft carriers for helicopters. S/VTOL aircraft can operate from these locations. I was told by a Marine that the Harrier obsession stems from Guadalcanal in WW2. The waters in the Solomons were heavily contested and the Navy basically took off and left the Marines stranded. That institutional memory is hard to shake.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> The Marines have "amphibious assault ships" that are sort of like aircraft carriers for helicopters. There actually very much like medium-deck carriers, which are the biggest carriers anyone not the US Navy operates anywhere. The Marines seaborne aviation capacity carried on its various amphibious ships outclasses, IIRC, all the non-US naval aviation in the world combined.
- spartango 13y agoFurther, the next generation of Littoral Combat Ships (LCS, Freedom- and Independence-class) have large enough "flight decks" that drones and other small aircraft can be launched from them.
- whatusername 13y agoThe OP has quite a large section on S/VTOL and Guadalcanal.
- ImprovedSilence 13y agoDrones are great, but their control systems are ridiculously easy to take down. What happens when you command links are taken down? (RF jamming, satellites destroyed, etc) You're gonna need a "human powered" "analog" fallback.
- PeterisP 13y agoWhen command links are taken down, you're gonna need autonomous drones, not humans. The resistance for autonomous killers is political/ethical, not technical - so as soon as they're really needed (i.e., a single serious combat incident with command links failing), they'll get a chip upgrade to continue combat themselves in case of comms breakdown.
- TsiCClawOfLight 13y ago+1 on the amphibious assault ships. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_carrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_carrier Also, corvettes and the like can rearm and refuel the helicopters they carry.