US now trains more drone operators than pilots

[Merlin]

Change is coming fast.

US now trains more drone operators than pilots

23 Aug [Guardian] Unmanned fighters and bombers are the future, believe military chiefs

As part of an expanding programme of battlefield automation, the American air force has said it is now training more drone operators than fighter and bomber pilots.

In a controversial shift in military thinking – one encouraged by the confirmed death of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in a drone-strike on 5 August – the air force is looking to hugely expand its fleet of unmanned aircraft by 2047.

Three years ago, the service was able to fly just 12 drones at a time; now it can fly more than 50. At a trade conference outside Washington last week, military contractors presented a future vision in which pilotless drones serve as fighters, bombers and transports, even automatic mini-drones which attack in swarms.

Five thousand robotic vehicles and drones are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. By 2015, the Pentagon's $230bn (£140bn) arms procurement programme Future Combat Systems expects 15% of America's armed forces to be robotic. A recent study 'The Unmanned Aircraft System Flight Plan 2020-2047' predicted a boom in drone funding to $55bn by 2020 with the greatest changes coming in the 2040s.

Some analysts view the Flight Plan study a virtual death knell for the pilot profession and predict the F-22s successor, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, could be the last piloted fighter programme. ....

[Merlin]

This Week at War: The Drones Take Over

23 Aug [FP] What the four-stars are reading -- a weekly column from Small Wars Journal.

The U.S. Air Force will reach a milestone this year: For the first time it will train more pilots for unmanned aircraft than for manned aircraft. A decade ago, unmanned aircraft were hardly known. Now they dominate the Air Force's pilot training system, and it is very unlikely this trend will ever reverse. In fact, it is not hard to imagine that within another decade unmanned aircraft operations will dominate day-to-day Air Force operations, force planning decisions, and budgets.

We can see how the Air Force's drones will soon crowd out manned aircraft inside its aircraft hangars. By 2013, software and communications improvements will allow the Air Force's unmanned-aircraft pilots to simultaneously fly three drones at one time, and four in an emergency. Another factor supporting the likely proliferation of drones such as the Predator, Reaper, and Global Hawk is their low cost compared with new manned aircraft such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

According to the Government Accountability Office, $24.5 million will purchase a set of four MQ-9 Reaper hunter-killer drones plus a ground station and satellite relay. ... The latest guess of the price for a single F-35 fighter-bomber is $100 million. ... This gap in cost led Defense Secretary Robert Gates to demand the cancellation of the manned F-22 Raptor program in order to fund the purchase of more drones for service in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The F-35 and the Reaper obviously have different roles and are not direct substitutes for each other. Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, the officer in charge of the Air Force's unmanned-aircraft programs, admitted at a recent news conference that the Air Force's current unmanned systems might be vulnerable to air-defense threats, electronic attack, and satellite communication problems.

But at the same briefing, Deptula made it clear ... that the Air Force expects unmanned systems to transform the service's doctrines, force structure, organization, and culture. Drones are taking over the Air Force -- this year's graduates from Air Force pilot training can explain that. ....

[Chogy]

I believe this is too much, too quickly, and the USAF is crumbling under congressional pressure to "get into THIS fight... make yourself useful. Don't worry what a future conflict might require, you need to justify your budget NOW, in this war."

The day will come when our drone fleet will be perceived as a bunch of pesky mosquitos to a well-equipped and armed modern enemy, and our manned aircraft will not be numerous enough, or well-trained.

[Maxor]

Likely but with military budget cuts, and having to prove itself as well as struggle like mad for every airframe its hard to blame them. Its amazing how much of the military is about politics, youd think the navy would have to struggle more but it doesn't seem to.

[diablo49]

I am under the impression that drones suitable for conventional warfare would be equipped with long range air air or air ground missiles depending. Of course they would have top notch electronic suites Wouldn't this be a case where large numbers of relatively inexpensive drones with fire and forget missiles would be preferable to less top notch manned aircraft in a conventional war? If air warfare for the most part is decided long range I can't help but see the potential where one can gain experience in warfare from relative safety and little chance of losing that valuable training to enemy fire. That this person could control multiple aircraft is hard to look past as well.

[Rumrunner]

Drones are the future of numerous forms of warfare, air, sea & ground. Might as well get used to it and be happy that there are still people flying them

[Maxor]

Rum I sorta agree that there is going to be a very large role for them in the future but I also find it hard to believe that other advanced countries aren't looking at ways to jam the control signals in ways that make them essentially useless. Subverting 100 individual tank drivers is one hell of a giant undertaking and will probably have a fairly small success rate. Finding a control frequency band when you are monitoring a broad spectrum and sending a shutdown command or just noise jamming isn't close to the same scope of undertaking, All of the US has seen terminator and matrix a couple to many times to really get political support for independant drones in the next 2 or 3 generations, even if it is technically feasible by then. (I think it will be for a small number of highly specialized tasks not for general combat roles. Eventually but not in my lifetime, probably not untill my kids (which don't exist yet) are looking at the end of their lives)

Another side of things is that you can't really automate your repair chain and anything that can hope to stand up to a manned MBT can't be made cheaply enough to be disposable, So you still need armed techs in the warzone and they are going to demand the ability to defend themselves from the other guys drones as well so thats not cutting your supply chain as much as you would have hoped.

[gunnut]

Awesome! And they say kids spend too much time indoors playing video games.

[jlvfr]

Awesome! And they say kids spend too much time indoors playing video games.

Give it another year tops, and we'll see Microsoft relaunch their Flight Simulator, with the catch phrase "Prepare yourself for the Air Force!"

[Chogy]

In terms of capabilities... I have heard the argument again and again. "Why not have air to air drones? A swarm of them? More and larger air to ground drones?" Let me ask a question in return.

Why don't we have drone tanks? Take an M1A1 and turn it into a robot? The answer is simple - the reality is, combat tank operations are too complicated (for now) for robotics. The human brain, senses, and above all its decision-making abilities outstrip computers and wireless datalinks. And I don't think anyone will argue too much that aerial combat is even more complex, fluid, and difficult than 2 dimensional tank combat.

We have robotic tracked vehicles that do very simple missions like scouting and EOD. We have aerial drones that also do simple missions. But the more complex scenarios for both call for a human along for the ride. For a large number of reasons, aerial drone combat in the traditional sense is much farther in the future than people think.

[jlvfr]

Chogy, don't forget: drones like the Reaper are not independent. They do have a human driving them. So, in your case, we'd have an M1 remotely driven by a crew in, say, a simulator-like room (autoloader maybe?).

But I too think that it's a bit too early for all-robot-armies, for 2 reasons:
- the driver still has too see what the drone is doing, where it's going, what's around it etc. I don't think that modern optics are good enough to provide the kind of instant 360º coverage required for some missions (like air-air);
- reliability of control comms. what happens if the link between controller and drone is broken (for whatever reason)? Then you have a multi-million armed robot flying/driving/swimming on it's own. Self destruct? RTB? What if, say, an armed air drone looses it's link while doing 400knots at low lvl over a city?

[Chogy]

^^ exactly. The bandwidth to make a drone that could do 1/10th of what a manned fighter could do would be astronomical. Multiply that by dozens or hundreds of drones. And how is this bandwidth achieved? Radio. Plain old radio, somewhere above UHF in frequency. Bounced off a satellite, you are looking at a 1/4 second delay in two-way communication.

You can encrypt it, make it frequency agile, but it is still radio, subject to jamming, failure, interference from the sun and thunderstorms, etc.

[Jimmy]

I am under the impression that drones suitable for conventional warfare would be equipped with long range air air or air ground missiles depending. Of course they would have top notch electronic suites Wouldn't this be a case where large numbers of relatively inexpensive drones with fire and forget missiles would be preferable to less top notch manned aircraft in a conventional war? If air warfare for the most part is decided long range I can't help but see the potential where one can gain experience in warfare from relative safety and little chance of losing that valuable training to enemy fire. That this person could control multiple aircraft is hard to look past as well.

Effective air to air drones are years away. In addition to everything Chogy said, another problem with mounting long-range AA missiles is that you need a long-range fire control radar and all the computers that go along with such a system. At this point, you basically have a fighter, minus the couple thousand pounds of life support equipment. What's the point?

[omon]

I'm sure we will see such drones, as soon as artificial intelligence, is intelligent enough, i don't see why we can't make it piloting the drones, just tell it what needs to be done, and it will do whatever pilots do, no need for radios, or any other kind of remote control. we would still need to comunicate with planes, but it won't be constant string of commands, bandwidth wont be an issue.
pilot can take 7 or so G's, unmanned drone is only limited by airframe rigidity, and with carbon fiber getting more common i don't see why a drone can't handle 30+ G's,
and if drone is lost no piloting skills are lost, upload software in different drone.

[Kernow]

Why is it that the USAF fly the drones. In the UK this is a Role that the Royal Artillery undertake.