Not $ 85m a piece useful. It’s a jock strap project. That’s really all there is to it. It exists because of the, “That’s SO FUCKING COOL!!!”, aspect.
Yeah, what if something else extremely unlikely happens and we didn’t spend billions to prepare for it?
Even if we went to war with Russia or China, you don’t have dogfights at Mach 4. A much more inexpensive platform would be 1000x more useful. But in the highly unlikely eventuality that we go to war with Russia or China I am sure that the F-22 will have a modestly better kill ratio than older F-14s, F-18s and F-16s.
Meanwhile we still don’t have an elite anti-terrorism strike force designed to move into any city on Earth on short notice and kick in the right doors. We need to spend a lot more on getting our ground forces into shape, and less on the air force.
msmith537 But you are talking about upgrading an old standby. As **Declan **pointed out we could be upgrading F-16s and F-15s and do just fine. The Raptor is a big pile of pork that is a complete waste of time. We need to be focusing on ground troops with robotic augmentation that can run in quick secure a whole neighborhood and then move out when the objective is complete.
I agree that we need more counter-terrorism training, although I’m pretty sure (without actually knowing) that our Special Forces qualify in that regard. Maybe there aren’t enough of them, but then again, it’s very difficult to become a Navy Seal.
And we do need warplanes. They are extremely useful for ground troop movement support. The argument is whether or not in the future we’ll actually need pilots for those warplanes.
It’s not just about upgrades. For a long time, there was serious talk that the main battle tank was an obsolete weapons system. But, it turns out that having a giant gun mounted on an nearly indestructable vehicle is actually pretty useful in an urban environment.
I think its inevitiable that you will soon have pretty much autonomous drones fighting wars. At the very least rather than an operator clicking a button and saying “shoot that”, they will say “patrol around that area and shoot anything that looks like an enemy”.
The big problem I see is not some terminator style “rise of the machines,” but something like the problem you see now with land mines in the aftermath of wars, but orders of magnitude worse. Rather than land mines waiting til you step on them, they will come and get you, so whole regions could be rendered effectives uninhabitable. Of course you could build safe guard in to prevent this kind of thing, but you could easily build safe guards in land mines, but you still get whole regions that are scattered with live ones.
Unlike landmines, robots require a power supply and regular maintenance so I doubt that this is going to be a serious problem. Again unlike landmines, robots are expensive so I doubt the military will just leave them lying around.
There would be, you’re right, a built in time limit on them, but it could be quite a long one (as presumably long-life would be an important asset to drones).
In current “low intensity” conflicts probably not (additionally in those kind of conflicts there are plenty of good reasons to engineer good safe guards to prevent embarrassing civilian casualties). But in a major war with both sides churning out thousands of them, to try and out-number the other side, I think its pretty likely. At the moment they are the cutting edge of super power high-tech, but when Russia/China/India (or whoever) are producing the drone equivalent T34 or AK47 then that would no longer be the case.
Yes in the very distant future you could imagine inexpensive robots that can function autonomously posing a problem similar to landmines. I would still imagine that fairly simple software solutions combined with political pressure would take care of the problem.
You can have long-lived robots but they would still need some regular energy supply. I suppose you could imagine some kind of very long-lasting battery but that is a very distant technology.
I can see within the next 50 years portable 3D printers being able to assemble cheap robots that can be assembled in the field. You don’t need them to be terribly expensive. Just look at how cheap a computer is today versus 50 years ago. I am not talking about a very distant future, I am talking about when my Grandchildren will be the operators of these machines while I am still (hopefully) alive.
They don’t need to last for decades like landmines, even being rogue for a week is a horror scenario. And that IS NOT very distant.
Not to distant at all, the it was less that a decade from the Wright brother’s first flight to 10,000’s of warplanes being churned out in WW1, and 100,000’s of planes (and the wiping out of whole cities) a few years after that in WW2. I’d argue we are well past “wright brothers” stage now when it comes to autonomous drones.
Well the catalyst might be the wiping out of a good chunk of the population of Kashmir or Taiwan (or whatever border flash point is unlucky enough to be the Guinea Pig for this new style of warfare ).
And even then have you seen how well theland mines treaties are going (only 150 or so years after their first use in war).
Why would the military allow the robot to go rogue? There would be a huge effort to ensure that the robots are always under control. It wouldn’t be in the interest of the occupier for robots to go around randomly killing people including their own forces.
It wouldn’t be “rogue”, the best robot would be one that is very efficient at identifying and killing anything that wasn’t positively identified as “friend”. Any safe guards you put in to get it identify civilians as “friends” could be exploited by the enemy, and would simply not be worth their while (any more than attempts to limit civilian causalities in WW2).
In a major war the priority is winning, as shown in Hamburg and in the Battle of the Atlantic (and numerous other examples). In our current conflicts, this is not the case, but there WILL be a major conflict at some point in the future (I’m not predicting where, or who will take part, but it WILL happen), and it WILL likely feature alot of autonomous drones. At that point all such niceties fly out the window, its only afterward we have to deal with the repercussions.
I don’t know. Countries with the technology to create sophisticated drone armies probably can create nuclear weapons as well. If such countries go to total war against each other, stray robots would be least of the world’s problems. And I am skeptical that truly autonomous robots will be possible for a very long time. It would require massive advances in AI as well as energy technology. And it will probably take many decades , if at all, after such a robot is created for it to become cheap enough to be disposable. To use your airplane analogy, flight technology may have advanced hugely since Wright but not to the point where planes are disposable.
This is the kind of thinking that leads to defeat. The great powers have ALWAYS known they would easily overwhelm insurgencies, and considered the insurgencies’ political issues irrelevant.
Yet the United States defeated Great Britain, North Vietnam held off Japan, France and the United States, and so on – sometimes the insurgency wins despite your overwhelming advantage.