The End of an Era: US Navy is giving up on fighter pilots & turning to drones

[Onkel Neal]

The US Navy is planning to stop using crewed fighter jets in the coming years, according to Navy secretary Ray Mabus, turning instead to uncrewed aerial vehicles and drones to perform missions at sea, on land, and in the air.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/17/84...drones-instead

The F-35C "should be, and almost certainly will be, the last manned strike fighter aircraft the Department of the Navy will ever buy or fly," Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said in a speech Wednesday at the annual Sea-Air-Space Exposition outside Washington, D.C. Fighter jocks would still be needed for dogfighting, but Mabus envisions a future when strike missions will be fulfilled by unmanned aircraft.

http://www.navytimes.com/story/milit...nned/25832745/

http://gizmodo.com/us-navy-secretary...-in-1698416632

http://arstechnica.com/information-t...ff-to-history/

[Aktungbby]

Nothing really new here if you think about it properly: Once you get past Von C's rule 1: "In all things be very strong", Rule 2 kicks in: for every expensive problem on the battlefield there is a cheap solution. Example: the highly-trained expensive mounted knight on horseback -solution 'give that illiterate peasant a musket!' The peasant isn't doing the fighting he's launching a 'drone' piece of lead to do the job. Got an entire nation that won't surrender and a million casualty list expectation to invade-Japan...send EnolaGay and Bock'sKar, two B29's, with an atomic bomb each to solve that problem. Were already killing terrorists in white Toyota's with Hellfire equipped drones; this is more of the same. College grads are expensive, take 25 years to grow and require pensions, and flying bombers is tedious at best...at least they'll need 'fighter jocks' for dogfights.

[Oberon]

ARSS is where it's at. Hyper accurate airborne sniper drones. One shot, one kill, minimal collateral. Cheap, efficient, and affective. Fleet of those over Iraq and Daesh would be too scared to come out from under the ground.

[CCIP]

What I wonder about is whether carriers themselves are next - which IMO would be a wise change of strategy. Drones launched from smaller ships or even submarines would be a better use of resources than putting all the eggs into big, easily-trackable 100,000t baskets.

[mapuc]

I have seen this. Instead of pilot sitting in their fighter jets, they were sitting in an ordinary chair with a special made keyboard and two joystick and a two computer screen.

They were at some bunker some where in the world.

The Drones was "launched" or should I say "Fired from tubes" from special build carrier.

I saw it in a dream-

The pilot was sitting i a huge room-computer side by side against the wall. and side by side against each other in the middle of the room.

The carrier, didn't look like ordinary carrier as we know them. When a drone was fired out of a tube its wing was like glued to the fuselage...already when the drone had left tube the wings started to open into its correct form and the engine started..

I didn't see everything in detail.

Markus

[Torplexed]

For centuries in human warfare, one side or the other has always managed to lull themselves into thinking they have some sort of built-in edge for their warriors and armies. Be it religious, intellectual, racial, spiritual, or technological. Now as they slowly start taking humans out of the cockpit and turret it looks to be slowly devolving to "my robot can beat up your robot."



We obviously haven't achieved the dark vision of the Terminator's Skynet or The Matrix yet, where machines make the decisions on when and where to go to war. Nor is the human role disappearing from war, or old technology going away soon. But it is clear that something important is afoot in the interaction of humans, technology and armed conflict. The human role is slowly shifting from being "in the loop" of decision with our machines, making all the key calls to, as a U.S. Air Force report described it, "on the loop" of decision, where our role is more to manage than to direct the operations of robots. The looming debate then is whether that human role will ever move ultimately "out of the loop". I'm sure many will be deeply concerned by these developments, arguing that it should be nipped in the bud, just as many wish the concept of an "atomic bomb" had never been invented.

[CCIP]

That's true, but hasn't war always been ultimately about dehumanization? It's just that up until recently, it hadn't usually been literal dehumanization.

If you think of war as an extension of politics, which in turn is an extension of economics, then ultimately what wins and loses wars is the weapons which are capable of overpowering not simply human spirit or skill, but more fundamentally - economic systems. I think it's good and culturally important to put a human face on war, to learn its stories and to respect the heroes, decisionmakers, and what war does to real people - but ultimately, if you don't have a military that's capable of controlling, securing, and disrupting global economic systems, you're not going to achieve much. Which is why, as dehumanizing as it is, cyber warfare and drones are staying as long the world economy works the way it does.

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by CCIP

What I wonder about is whether carriers themselves are next - which IMO would be a wise change of strategy. Drones launched from smaller ships or even submarines would be a better use of resources than putting all the eggs into big, easily-trackable 100,000t baskets.

No kidding, there's a lot of risk in deploying carriers to a war zone. Sink a couple and all of a sudden the Navy has a $12 billion budget shortfall.

[SSI01]

Trust me, in a few years they'll even be able to dogfight - a drone can pull a g-load that would kill a human pilot or cause serious permanent injury. The only use I can see for biological units in the future is to pilot the COD onto and off the ship now and then.

What's Tom Cruise going to do when fighter pilots will be upstaged by a room full of overweight kids with pimples and coke-bottle glasses who can fly a computerized drone like nobody's business?

There is a bright side, though - the robots don't get drunk, miss movement, ask embarrassing questions or wear adult diapers and drive across several state lines to assault spouses of other astronauts (former aviators). Also they don't get involved in events that result in police calls and accusations of sexual assault.

[Mike Abberton]

Let's just hope noone finds a way to intercept and jam the data link, or all of a sudden all those drones are on whatever canned evasion/return home software they have programmed into them.

Mike

[em2nought]

It's probably easier to get a drone operator to follow an illegal order. I'm pretty sure that in the future our gov't is planning on handing out lots of orders that true patriots would view as illegal.

[Oberon]

SSI01 is pretty spot on, within half a century you won't even need the biological unit in the equation except perhaps to just verify that the drone is behaving itself. Jamming will be pointless then because the drone will be able to operate on its own. Then, yes, there does become a question of how world governments will use their new army of unquestioning killing machines who don't sleep, eat, tire, or get PTSD.

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by CCIP

What I wonder about is whether carriers themselves are next - which IMO would be a wise change of strategy. Drones launched from smaller ships or even submarines would be a better use of resources than putting all the eggs into big, easily-trackable 100,000t baskets.

Very timely point, CCIP.