The Navy plans to lean heavily on science and technology development as it builds its future force, which will feature unmanned systems working in concert with manned aircraft and an underwater network comparable to the interstate highways system, Navy leaders said today.
The emphasis on effective new technologies is becoming critically important as “our adversaries are doing pretty well with adapting to the new technologies – in some cases, faster than we are,” Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin, deputy chief of Naval Operations for Warfare Systems, told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
For Aucoin and Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. Mathias Winter, who also spoke at CSIS, science and technology development are key to minimizing critical gaps for future naval operations, specifically in the unmanned domain.
WNU Editor: The U.S. Navy has been talking about this for a long time .... US Navy Wants To Replace F-35s With X-47B and other full size UAVs (Next Big Future). I can understand why the US Navy wants these systems .... they act as force multipliers that gives the Navy extended range and coverage. But the next two questions are .... how much will this cost to make it work, and does the technology exist to make it possible. My guess is that in both cases (money and technology) .... the US Navy is coming up short.
3 comments:
I don't see a future without extensive use of drones. It doesn't make sense in light of the technology available and becoming available, and the cost of training pilots, and the lack of pilots. I think we are at a technological cusp and UAV technology will continue grow.
Once again the generals are fighting the last war. The use of drones has had some moderate success against the Third World. But, the vulnerabilities of unmanned systems will become apparent once they are used against first world adversaries. The real revolution will be in the electronic countermeasures, anti-sattilite and EMP weapons systems developed to counter such "drone" technology. Even the manned systems that rely heavily on digital systems will be affected. This will prove very costly to the U.S. Air power takes decades to develop and deploy. A step in the wrong direction can be fatal. I believe the drone revolution will be surprisingly short lived.
Look at countries like China that produce the bulk of the worlds technological toys. How many RC planes and helicopters do they make and sell to the U.S? They have the plants to make RC helicopters by the millions, we don't. It doesn't take a genius to slap some firepower on an RC toy. They could produce millions of armed toys. Sure, they would have to be hardened from outside interference but that isn't impossible. Even if they aren't armed they could produce enough toys that every soldier in the field could have a miniature flying machine they could pull out of their pack and toss into the air. Imagine a Chinese soldier hunkered down behind a wall throwing up a tiny helicopter he could use to see where the shooting was coming from. Imagine that with the target in the sights of the mini helicopter the coordinates could be relayed to field guns. Every soldier in the field could be a forward artillery spotter. In a scenario where satellites have been destroyed and air access has been denied, drones would become worth their weight in gold and then some. A single tiny UAV with a halfway decent camera and maybe a laser target designator could turn a battle on its head. Drones become the crossbow, software becomes the armor, and now you have yet another arms race like warfare has seen forever. Every offense in military history has an exploitable weakness and a new technology or tactic is developed to counter that, but just because something has a weakness doesn't mean it won't be used in war. Most bullets can be stopped by appropriate armor but not everything will always be armored and bullets will continue to find flesh. Drones are the same way, sure they can be countered but not all will be stopped and the ones that succeed can change the tide of war. To ignore the potential of the drone because somebody might find a way to jam them isn't really much different than ignoring the crossbow because somebody will figure out armor. Crossbows (to use an antiquated example) went up against armor for a long time with varying success, but if crossbows were abandoned the minute armor showed up, history would have unfolded in a very different way. Personally, if I was hunkered down taking fire from the enemy, I would love to have a little UAV I could pull out of my pocket and toss into the air to see if I could find where the fire was coming from. Throw FLIR cameras on the thing and the possibilities grow exponentially. Just because somebody can Jam it doesn't mean somebody can't figure out a way to harden it and the race is on. They aren't going away.
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