[UnderseaLcpl]

Originally Posted by Zachstar

You want to go up when the enemy is using lasers and rails and whatever weapons that give no opportunity for you to evade before you are blown to shreds?

Granted no "Iraq" or "Falklands" war will feature such a threat but if a serious superpower war starts it will within a decade (You think we are the only one developing air lasers?)

I can accept that it is a better idea for transport craft to be human operated. (For morale only for the troops need to be thinking about the fight and not if the AI pilot will go skynet on them)

But that's it. Anything else just is better unmanned. Because Unmanned scales. 100 UAVs scanning an area 24/7 is better than 1 AWACs that is a sitting duck if an enemy somehow manages to slip through. 100 UAVs sniping insurgents in a town is better than 1 Apache having to attack and duck to avoid RPGs. Heck even against fighters 100 UAVs being missile trucks and losing most of em to take out the enemy air force is worth it.

I have to hand it to you Zach. It's a common fallacy in people to fight the last war, and you certainly can't be accused of that. However, you're talking about a type of warfare that is decades away, if not centuries.
You have to keep in mind the types of countermeasures that might be employed, as well as new offensive technologies, logistical elements, and support structures.
Perhaps the enemy has localized EMP weapons, or a means with which to strike your C3 installations. A massed UAV armada, by its' very nature, would require a relatively centralized command structure, and we've already moved beyond that phase of warfare. The trend now is towards decentralized command and small-unit leadership supported by strategic assets.

As just one example, for your consideration, let's consider the UAV's weakest link; the command structure. Remote UAVs will require a command signal. The farther they roam, the stronger that radio signal needs to be, and the more likely it is that the source will be DF'ed and hit with artillery or airstrikes. You could use an airborne command platform (and we do) but then you have a giant beacon for HARM missiles.

You're on the right track, but UAVs are still in their infancy. Relying on them too soon could have disastrous consequences. A sterling example of such a thing is the U.S. Army's "Transformation" doctrine, used primarily in the 1990's. It focused on modern electronic command and control, and was hugely successful in controlled excercises. However, it had a number of tremendous failures that made themselves apparent on the modern battlefield. One was the reliance on EPLRS (Enhanced Position Location Reporting System), which worked wonderfully in the desert environment of the excercises, but not quite so well in terrain that had trees, hills, or anything other than flat sand. EPLRS uses an ultra-high frequency wavelength, and does a poor job of communicating with anything that is not within line-of-sight.

I'm getting off-topic here, but I will say that reliance on the Transformation doctrine and derivates contributed to the rude suprise we got in post-invasion Iraq. Now the military is dilligently working to perfect an operational doctrine for that kind of environment, and I suspect that they'll have it perfected shortly after the conflict is over.

You, on the other hand, are fighting a war whose necessary infrastructure does not exsist. Once we have an armada of sattelites with shielded directional-transmission capability, as well as the means to defend themselves from ASAT and surface to space lasers, a UAV armada might work. Until then you're thinking at least two generations of military technology ahead of where we should be focussing, namely, the next war.