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It seems to me that the entire concept of air war is designed around a presumption of human pilots. That you can only have a limited number of aircraft that ha
by 7952 12y ago
It seems to me that the entire concept of air war is designed around a presumption of human pilots. That you can only have a limited number of aircraft that have to be very capable. This rules still seems to apply to drones, even though they could be made cheap enough to be expendable. At that point a drone is just a very cheap missile and the more you have the better.
Is 1 fighter/bomber aircraft more useful than 10,000 single use drones? Only if you are flying from a secure base; and any serious adversary will try and prevent that. Lets hope we only ever have to fight people in pick up trucks with those billion dollar fighters.
- mikeash 12y agoFor a lot of things, there's no substitute for getting a decent quantity of high explosives to the target. A tiny, expendable drone won't be able to carry a 500lb bomb. Range is another consideration. As you shrink aircraft, their range generally shrinks too. Your 10,000 single-use drones probably won't be able to fly across the Pacific. Smaller, cheaper, and more numerous may well be better, but it's all relative. Incidentally, this basic scenario already played out for strategic nuclear bombing. The "drones" there are ballistic missiles, and they gradually supplanted manned bombers in large part because they were cheaper. (Being able to launch on short notice and extremely difficult to intercept were factors too, of course.) Manned nuclear bombers still exist, but are very much secondary to ICBMs now. But note that ICBMs, while quite a bit smaller and cheaper than a B-52 or B-2, are still gigantic and expensive compared to just about anything civilian scale.