UCAV's and UAV's for the US Airforce, Navy, and Marines

Why not replace every military aircraft with UCAV's and UAV's now? Cancel all other aircraft, make connection from pilot to aircraft unhackable (make as good as possible). Create hmd for ground pilot's helmet to see 360 degree veiw around aircraft (many cameras) and can dogfight better than manned planes. Aircraft can be better than manned version and cheaper, maybe all stealth force. Imagine unmanned tankers and bombers and fighters and AWACS and transporters and jstars etc. I think that sounds better than present. But never any AI, always man in loop. Maybe preprogram bombers and have pilots on ground fly fighters for for protection, maybe even preprogrammed support craft(AWACS and transporters and tankers and jstars etc.) but always able to over ride and pilot from ground. Maybe even unmanned helos (transport and attack and medavac with medics on-board). While aircraft on ground anyone can talk to pilot(s), make communications much more secure. Also posted on ATS (more general forum).

Mods move where needed (probably drones section). Sorry

The tech is not there yet.

Not enough bandwidth, time delays, Situational Awareness, etc

SpudmanWP wrote:The tech is not there yet.

Not enough bandwidth, time delays, Situational Awareness, etc

I mean divert money to make this happen.

USAMC wrote:

SpudmanWP wrote:The tech is not there yet.

Not enough bandwidth, time delays, Situational Awareness, etc

I mean divert money to make this happen.

LOL.. What money? It would be nice to be able to say we are only bankrupt, but we're wayyyyyyyy beyond that I mean with Obamacare and bailout nation, there's just not anything left for actual things that count.

Assume good govt voted in 2010 and 2012, money problems solved.

USAMC wrote:Assume good govt voted in 2010 and 2012, money problems solved.

I'd rather assume the big man upstairs has a bushy white beard.

It's more than just more money = better tech = UAv's.

You have to test these systems, I think even more so than what we have now. I don't think it's feasible right now to develop and test the holy grail, which would be a fully automated system. Moreover, I (and some others, including some who have a say) don't belive a fully automated system that can kill should EVER be put in place. Automate AWACS maybe, for example. But don't fully automate fighters. Too many things can go wrong.
One of those is the enemy hacking or disrupting communications between friendly forces and the 'bot. What if an enemy recovers one of those and back engineers it's systems? Moreover, how do you prevent potential hacking of the robot? You can't just send a UCAV out into the wild blue yonder and let it do it's thing. For practical reasons you're going to want to know where it is, what it's doing, and what it's seeing. This implies connections, and that's a weak link.

Lets see, use money on tech that we do not know will work, or buy jets using tech that we do know will work.

No contest.

Besides, any signal can be jammed and China recently demonstrated the ability to knock down a satellite.

The only way this can work on a large scale is a stable AI, and we are not there yet.

Unmanned systems are great force multipliers, but that's all they really are for now. Their problem is that it's too easy to break the chain between man and machine when all it takes is jamming certain frequencies, which is a very cheap investment for a country realative to how much we spend on UAVs. However, in a low EA environment like Iraq and Afghanistan, they operate unhindered and do fine. I would venture to guess that with the realitive proximity of Russia and China to Afghanistan, those two countries are very keen to the frequencies our UAVs are using, and working robustly to exploit EA opportunities. Because of this, we still need manned aircraft that have the ability to carry out missions in a heavy EA environment.