Senior Member
Registered: 11-07-07
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Alewisde,
First off, no platform runs strictly on GPS. There are always INS/AHRS redundant backups for which the GPS is merely a 'present position' correction of drift. Indeed, we also have the ability to get _the same_ correction using radar patch maps and IR/laser ranged positional updates from presurveyed landmarks. In theory, you can even extend this further with star tracking. All of which is typically automated, even in manned systems. If you know where you are, you know where you /can/ go as a function of mission rules uploaded by DTM cartridge. Again, this is all automated, even in manned systems.
Point Blank: The likelihood of a runaway robot is unlikely to be higher than that of a manned system which obeys the same rules with the same nav systems.
Every guided munition you've ever heard of is a UCAV. Albeit one of extraordinarily short endurance. We pop those off downrange all the time.
Heart of the envelope (NEZ), no manned platform ever made will beat a modern missile. Future weapons will extend this performance deficit even further by employing turbines for propulsion. Miss once = come around again.
You will GLC or run out of energy trying to beat that threat and it will be available, on the cheap (50 year old target/recce drone technology), IN PACKS that range over hundreds of miles, self acquiring and classifying as they go.
In less than 5 years, the best fighter on the planet is going to be a 747-400F with a 1.2MW COIL in its nose that, against airbreathing targets at altitude, will have nearly LOS (1,000km?) range. While the groundbased (cheaper and easier to systems integrate) equivalent THEL is something like 4-6MW and needs only a relay mirror to clear the cludge at low altitude and do even better.
With effectively zero time of flight to any target in the earth's atmosphere, there will be NO DUCKING the DEW threat when it gets here either.
And a 25-40 year lifed weapons system that is less than 5 years old when the technology matures will be the last thing we want to be stuck with.
Congress has mandated that at least 1/3rd of all deep strike be unmanned by 2010. They are also bound by the Nunn amendment which /requires/ Program Termination if it goes beyond 25% over budget, short of the SecDef prostrating himself to complain of miracles, and even this leaves the ultimate budget choice in their hands.
Specifically, Congress bought into the JSF program on the basis of the F-35 being a pork barrel export program 'sure to undercut all other aircraft' as the next F-16.
This in 1994 when it was Pentagon estimated to be a non-ISR (fed by offboard sensors, ironically supposed to be in UAVs) vanilla airframe in the 28/32/35 million dollar range for A/B/C variants. In less than three years later in 1997, the CBO, GAO and CRS all said it would be closer to 65-70 million. And their estimates have continually been proven right as more systems and more weight have been plugged back in to keep pace with systems like Rafale and Typhoon as much as the Su-30.
Currently, we are looking at costs on the order of 112 million dollars _for the cheap (CTOL) version_ in a program that is likely going to exceed 276 billion compared to the original 191 billion predicted.
And all these cost numbers are continuing to climb as the U.S. production slumps to less than half what was originally (wildly) overestimated for home use and foreign customers run shrieking away from the program, holding desperately to their wallets.
Once you acknowledge the threats, the requirements and the costs, you define the limits of how long you can stay with a given platform solution.
To which I will add a few other things:
It is becoming easier and easier to make nukes. To the extent that we may no longer need highly refined radioisotopes in the trigger and can use SPH or MSH in the casing. This is likely the secret behind Iran's 'abandonment' of a conventional bomb making process.
Add to this the certainty that China, our next likely 'superpower' rival and probably already economic if not military superior /already has/ nuclear capability and delivery systems, having exported both to Pakistan and North Korea.
And the notion of rampaging the planet with a conventional forces looking to be the lion that got moused is increasingly untenable as a manned-system potential for (short range, short persistence = high exposure) extreme losses.
Not so the UCAV which could run out 1,100nm and stay there for 2hrs. And now can be AAR auto-refueled.
If you no longer, if ever, want(ed) to fight a full scale conventional war on the premise of possible nuclear ceiling excession, then spending gazillions pushing yourself into the national poorhouse for the sake of military supremacy is stupid.
Wars must buy you more than a breathing space to prepare for the next war.
Overspending on a useless capability is in fact the route that the Russians took and we countered every step they made with small conventional forces and massive (cheap) nuclear superiorities, throughout the Cold War.
We now face the same threat as a function of their selling WMD to keep us chasing our tails outside NATO's effective containment of the bluff and poseury theater conditions (INF/CFE etc.).
Speaking of roads... The last time we had positive confirmation of UBL's whereabouts in Pakistan was in late 2003 when we were told that he would be coming through a specific area on one of three given trails.
We only had ONE Predator to cover all of them, we threw the dice and we lost the toss.
If some 1,500-2,000 CCIP F-16s cannot go into hostile airspace without raising a ruckus and/or cannot _stay there_ long enough to FFTTEA 'the one war we have' (always lost), they are not worth replacing.
While 50 more Predators (doubling the inventory) capable of 17-24hrs @ 500nm radius looks increasingly a better investment on the route to true UCAVs.
The one 'last 10%' (unacknowledged) technology imperative that the F-35 may bring to the table is either it's own DEW (probably HPM initially) capability.
Or optical invisibility.
Yet no one has specifically said that directed energy cannot be applied to UCAVs. Nor have they said that an F-35 is a smaller optical as well as radar target than a UCAV.
Because both would be lies.
There is no easy route here people. Probably the best thing we could ever do would be to admit that man's place on as well as over the battlefield in general is _done_. And then decide whether we want to replace him.
Or replace war.
If UCAVs do nothing else, they give us the (10-15 million in 2000 when the UDS program was set up, now probably 20-25 million, still less than a third the _cheapest_ price that the F-35 is being argued for) breathing room to see how things settle out in the directed energy game.
There is technology out there which will protect against the DEW threat. But again, /paying for it/ may be an issue that doesn't have to be resolved if you have sufficient robots as to saturate and hypervelocity missile suppress.
We have made this kind of choice before. With the nominally inferior P-51D vs. the Me-262.
CJ
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