Sure, but that's not the issue. That problem can be solved in a hackish fashion for a LOT less than $200mm and perhaps even in an elegant fashion for less.
If every Predator gets a 100W wideband transmitter and SOME of them get instead of weapons the equipment necessary to process the reflections and do the calcs then the others can get that target information and blammo.
If there are 100 Predators for every F35 in the combat zone and they ALL turn on their transmitters simultaneously at some kind of interval you're never going to know which one is carrying weapons and which one is command and control. So you can't do prioritized targeting and thus you're shooting blind. Yeah you can shoot down some of them but once you're out of missiles that's it.
Do we have to worry about 3rd world countries being able to muster this kind of response? No. But there are plenty of industrialized countries that could, and they could bleed us dry one $200mm plane at a time.
I think there's a general disconnect between HN users and how the defense industry works.
When you are designing a weapons system designed to kill people, you cannot just design something 'in a hackish fashion'. No, this shit has got to work correctly all the time.
The cheapest Predator drone cost about $5M and top flight Predators and Global Hawks cost between $20M-50M. This means flying 100 of them is not reasonable. UAVs are also not autonomous and need manned pilots. Even if you were to build 100 drones, are you going to pay for 100 extra pilots, create some kind of airport that can house 100 drones, keeping them all fueled and maintained in the desert?
Kinda naive to think that you can just use SV start up philosophies in this application.
> When you are designing a weapons system designed to kill people, you cannot just design something 'in a hackish fashion'. No, this shit has got to work correctly all the time.
No, with that part of engineering as with EVERY part of engineering: it depends. Do you want UNIT reliability or SYSTEM reliability? Does every plane have a literal 100% chance of intercepting every target it is tasked with? No, of course not. But the missiles do, you say? Again wrong. But surely SOME portion of the entire system will work ALL THE TIME! Nope, no engineer worth his salt will give you a 100% guarantee for anything as unknown as "stopping all possible threats".
Furthermore plenty of systems that are supposed to be very reliable are made up of less reliable parts. The whole Star Wars program was based on defense in depth where no one layer of system was going to stop 100% of the warheads but multiple layers acting in concert would be able to (presumably) stop them all or almost all. Hackish is fine provided that you've got substantially overlapping coverage from multiple command and control drones. No one drone has to work 100% guaranteed because even at only a 95% success rate (which is abysmal compared to the "all the time" demand you're making) with three overlapping zones gives you .05 * .05 * .05 = .0125% chance of failing. I'll take 1/8 of a chance of failure per thousand incidents as successful enough.
Again, I'm not talking about having 100 drones with 100 pilots but perhaps having 100 drones with 9 pilots for the command and control drones (one for every 10 mules) and some kind of a very rudimentary, randomized loiter algorithm for the mules.
> Kinda naive to think that you can just use SV start up philosophies in this application.
I want to say a bunch of really snarky stuff in response. I'm an outsider to SV; I grew up in MN, went to school in FL and now I live in TX. None of these places ever get accused of being even SLIGHTLY SV-ish in nature so I don't see how I deserve that kind of comment. Ultimately though you've made a lot of assumptions that don't necessarily hold. The idea that you're going to defeat the US using the same kind of procurement and whatever that the US uses is a non-starter. You don't try and beat the US at a symmetric war but you can defeat them with an asymmetric one. We're losing how many lives and how much money in Iraq and Afghanistan right now to IEDs which are what, 10 notches below the fancy shit we have? And yet all our fancy airplanes haven't saved a single soldier from an IED that I'm aware of.
I'm not necessarily saying that you absolutely 100% can use SV philosophies in war and win, but I am saying that the notion that the way the US military does it is the ONLY way to do it isn't correct either.
I don't know why you are referring to the Star Wars program since it was not a program that was ever fielded.
Anyway, so is your strategy to fire multiple missiles at a time for each target? Assuming it's possible for UAVs to engage air targets (which they cannot right now), how many are you going to shoot off for each target, at the cost of $0.5M for each missile, just because you developed an algorithm in a 'hackish' manner?
If you gave each pilot 10 drones to control, good luck trying to execute evasive maneuvers on all of them when they come under attack.
Evasive maneuvers are something that a probabilistic algorithm tied into good sensors is probably better at performing for a swarm than a human would be, especially if the performance characteristics of these drones were made to be more extreme than most jets.
1. That's not a characteristic inherent to drones, that's just what we've done to date. And there are remote controlled fighter jets that the military uses for practice.
2. Because it seems well within our capabilities to do some basic missile evasion AI, that's just a small subset of the challenge of making a fully autonomous UAV. You need to identify the missile and its trajectory, identify its flight and kill characteristics, and then identify the various actions you could take and evaluate their likelihood of successfully evading the missile. Then you carry that flight plan out. Rinse and repeat until you're no longer in danger.
I'm not recommending that they do it one way or another - there're a lot of new possibilities that should be explored, which means that more of the same might not be the way to go. All I was saying that it's silly to say categorically that "drones are slow", because they certainly don't have to be - if anything, they have the potential to be even faster and more maneuverable than manned fighter jets, because you can get rid of a lot of the cruft and restrictions related to keeping a pilot alive and letting them pilot effectively. No more canopy, no more cockpit shielding, no more visible instrumentation and layout requirements, no more ejection seat, no more oxygen supply, no more human survivable g-limits, etc.
I'm also not advocating for a completely autonomous drone, just saying that automatically flying a plane to evade a missile doesn't seem terribly difficult, as far as AI problems go, and the amounts of money thrown at these sorts of things are absurdly large.
Heh probably at least a little. I've got a decent grounding in AI and some in computer vision, and those portions at least seem doable, I've worked on some basic guidance algorithms before, and I know people who are having some success making generalized autopilot systems for drones for spatial waypoint following and flight controls, so that portion seems achievable as well. Once you can reach that level of abstraction, it starts looking like something a minimax algo with sufficient look-ahead depth could deal with, at least with a very rough level of precision. But yeah, devil and details.
One issue you're not considering WRT to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, vs. "Star Wars" as used by its opponents) is that even a partially effective system negates an adversary's first strike capability, since they can't choose which missiles and warheads get taken out.
Most of the arguments fall into one of two categories:
1. Performance is linear(ish) with cost
2. The US operates at a global maximum in price/performance
I disagree with both. Performance is roughly linear with cost given a certain operational parameter envelope. Things change when you change the envelope though. Dramatically. And the idea that the US has chosen the ultimate operational parameter window which cannot be improved on under any circumstances isn't believable.
I do appreciate everyone arguing with me long enough that I could distill it so succinctly. You may still disagree with me and that's OK. But at least my crazy heretical thoughts are more easily digested now.
Again, it's a cost issue. If you think you can build a super Predator with some type of targeting radar, and a swarm type of AI for under $10M, you're not being realistic. Current build Predators are already over $4M a copy, and even with this fantasy equipment you've described, wouldn't stand a chance against a decent human in an F-15.
It's important to understand the limits of radar too; it's not like in a video game where you get this god view of the airspace around you. You are always making tradeoffs in flight about where your radar is focused, it's range, and how many targets it can track while scanning. That's why the US and it's allies rely so heavily on an AWACs system.
UCAS aircraft that can drop bombs in a contested airspace are going to cost north of $50M per copy when all is said and done, and UCAS that can do A2A combat will be double that. Once you start putting high performance jet engines in drones, the costs start to rise. Same with avionics.
Today's drones are very very simple aircraft compared to high performance fighters.
Agreed, cost is what would drive using drones instead of high performance fighter aircraft.
I am not suggesting that you build unmanned F-15s for the $4mm each that you can build a Predator for. That's patently ludicrous I agree with you! So no fancy engines, nor fancy avionics. Also don't bother with swarm AI, have people on the ground handling targeting. Don't develop a billion dollar solution when $50k/year (roughly) works just fine.
What I was suggesting is that you build a bunch of aerial SAM launchers. Take a Predator, put something that can receive targeting info on it, arm it with air to air missiles. Deploy many of these in the sky. Then for every 10 missile mules, you put up a single command and control Predator. It has the fancy equipment to ensure that you can actually do targeting. Then put a transmitter on all Predators which can be turned on such that you can't detect which Predator is the command and control one.
Let's suppose that you could create this fleet of 11 for $4mm * 11 + $2mm * 10 + $20mm * 1 = $84mm This is very conservative in my mind because at this point we're basically paying US prices for the gear.
Again, we're not going for the fanciest, best, most high performance stuff ever built. Use old designs, don't worry about the best survivability, don't make them too rugged and thus don't drive up the cost. We're going for The Innovator's Dilemma style worse-is-better so long as it's functional enough to mule up the ordinance.
You can now afford at least 2x of these 11 unit Predator swarms for every 1x F-35 that can be deployed. An F-35 only carries 10 air to air weapons and that's when loaded with nothing but. The odds they get both command and control Predators on every engagement is statistically slim provided you're talking about at least a few dozen engagements.
That means that just playing a numbers game you're going to shoot down the F-35s and because you've got so many damn drones in the air enjoy quite a bit of air superiority. It's not exceedingly difficult to imagine that if the sky was thick with these things that the F-35s might not get all their ordinance away before being shot at making the grinding more painful.
Could the US manage such a feat of engineering discipline and fast-track development? NOT A CHANCE!! If you're thinking that this is unrealistic based on how things work in the US you're 100% correct. But to suppose that no other industrialized country in the world could embark on such a venture and succeed? If you believe that please stop reading HN because startups could never work/win against the entrenched giants who have all the advantages.
It's not a matter of startups, or entrenched giants or any such thing, or the Innovator's Dilemma. It's a matter of communications, cost and performance.
A Predator can't fly as high as an F-35 or F-22. It can't maneuver nearly as well either. Can't fly as fast. It can't be refueled in flight, so it's range is lower than the F-35. So you'd have to hope that the missile it carried could compensate for these deficiencies. However, missiles are very finicky, and have launch parameters that help them improve their odds. The military looks at it in terms of PoK (probability of kill). So to be cheap (so you can afford to have swarms) you have to give up performance. This will affect PoK.
Next you have to have robust, un-jammable commlinks. So far, no one has those. That's going to be expensive to develop. Humans can make decisions when the comms are degraded, or non-existent. AI has a long ways to go, and AI is expensive. To remain cheap, you'll have to give that up.
With you napkin/elevator calculations, you would be trading 22 Predators for each F-35. 22 Predators is $88M, and the F-35 will eventually drop close to $100m as it reaches IOC. Still, not a bad bargain if it works.
But now, since you've gone cheap and off the shelf, you've got a slow, unmaneuverable aircraft that can't detect a target (no radar), can't communicate well with it's controllers, and can't climb very high, limiting the range of its missiles.
Then, even if you outfit this Predator swarm with an UberMissile, you'll have blown your cost equation out of the water when this swarm comes up against SAMs, or a squadron of F-16s. The swarm won't even see the F-35s due to frontal aspect stealth, and they'll be able to target the Predators and kill them like baby seals. They'll be able to engage, kill, and disengage before the low performance Predators will be able to react.
I want to write to back you up on this. I've spent most of (not all of) my career in military avionics and aerospace. And this was at small companies. The big companies win the big contracts, but so much is contracted out, and there are plenty of other options. But I digress...
This is a really hard, multi-dimensional optimization problem. The engineers at Lockheed Martin, Rockwell, etc., are not dumb. They are the opposite of dumb. They are rocket scientists, in both the colloquial and literal sense. The same holds true for us at the smaller companies. Heavy STEM educations, a lifetime of engineering and research. I've done a lot of work on next-gen battlefield stuff. It's not easy. It's not. It's control theory, filter theory, AI, computer vision, RF design, and so much more. If you can't play in at least 3-4 of those fields at a pretty high level you aren't invited to the party. I've seen far more professional, intelligent, and pragmatic engineers in that work than what I've seen pass for engineering in Silicon Valley.
You really aren't going to sit in an armchair and design up a system that'll work. OTOH, if you make something that does work, the military will beat a path to your door. Look into SBIRs, for example. I've worked on a lot of them. The door is not closed. The door is closed to half-baked schemes, but if you have an idea for putting some low cost hardware and software together, you can do something with it. I'm being more than a bit facile here; it isn't so hard to get through a Phase I and Phase II SBIR; getting your system deployed is quite a bit harder. Still, there are options. Just be prepared for the fact that they are going to take your product, stick it in a field, and shoot (literal) bullets at it. Ohh, failed the projectile test.... Yes, I take the point about swarms, but war is an extremely hostile environment (no pun intended). And as soon as you have tipped the equation towards "disposable", expect the enemy to change their systems to help you 'dispose' of them as soon as possible. Maybe your drone can operate in the theater today; what about 10 years from now? I honestly don't know, the calculus is anything but clear to me.
There's no arguing that the major aerospace companies are files with smart people. But these companies have historically not been very good at optimizing total operational cost. For a recent example, look at SpaceX. Every design decision they've made is to optimize operational cost instead of performance. The majors have been busy optimizing for performance, and they've ended up with very expensive rocket systems.
It is the same for military procurement.
Something else... If the drones are cheap and "disposable", then maybe upgrades can occur more frequently to keep up with current events. I don't think that trying to design weapon systems to least 40 years is the way forward.
I'm not at all against drones. They are clearly working for us and others; for me to try to claim otherwise would be trivially wrong. There will always be a tension between cheap-and-fast vs expensive-and-precise.
I've spent my career doing this stuff. I'm telling you, it is not trivial. It is being worked on, but you can't just strap a missile onto a drone and call it good.
A piece of context I left out. I don't want to kill people. Yes, despite working on war machines. I ain't tossing out cheap, disposable, optimized for operational cost out there, because that means you are, eventually, killing children and other innocents. No thanks. We aren't talking 'cool robotics here'. We are talking corpses, burned bodies, melted faces, families broken, futures destroyed, blood, pain, horror. There are no words for it. I worked on this stuff because I consider the alternative to be worse, but it's ambiguous. I'll spare you the "A Few Good Men" speech, as I'm sure you get what I mean.
"Move fast and break things" is a great way to build a Facebook. Not so much for war machines, IMO. Feel free to chalk that up to trying to preserve a career, but it's not (you, ansible, didn't say that, someone else did). It's the realization that everyday, when you go to work, you are designing something to cause unbelievable misery, often for political rather than ethical reasons. It's hard to live with. I'm not denying that there is politics and all of that other stuff happening, it certainly does, but it is not the only thing going on.
Sorry, I realize this is a downer for HN, where we are supposed to be chipper, enthusiastic, and supportive, but we are talking about killing people here. It's not a situation for being 'disruptive' or whatever SV meme you might think of (again, you didn't use that term, I'm responding more to the thread at large).
Given all of that, is there room for innovation? Sure. And it is being worked on. I've worked on next-gen autonomous robots and UAVs for war. You may or may not read about it some day. But it ain't easy. Another poster brought up the IUD analogy. Sure, if you blanket the sky with fire you can take down a modern US jet. And kill everything else as 'collateral damage'. I don't want to fight war that way, and I don't think we ever should, except perhaps in extremis. Because at that point we have lost whatever it means to be human.
Sorry, I think about this stuff. A lot.
edit: a big reason for the expensive airframes and other weaponry is because we decided we don't want to carpet bomb and otherwise use non-precision weapons. Spend a million and hit the window where the target is sitting, vs 50K to drop a bunch of bombs that destroy a city block. Precision is often efficacious, to be sure, but we are doing this for moral reasons as well.
There are a lot less civilians in the air than on the ground. As to cost, air to air missiles are not cheap and there not light so sending a mix of real and 'fake' drones is a viable option. At which point you don't need great air to air drones just good enough that ignoring them is a bad idea. My point is you don't need just cheap there is a lot of value in preventing hyper specialization.
However, there is no credible threat to the US military which changes things.
I do appreciate your perspective RogerL. And I do appreciate the fact that we're taking about "cool" robotics that are primarily intended to cause pain, suffering and death. Sometimes at a large scale.
The political reality of the USA right now is that we've got a huge military industrial complex, and it ain't going away anytime soon. One way or the other, we're going to be building weapon systems for air superiority and other uses.
Whether or not that is all a good idea is a discussion for another day. I think that over the last two decades, the USA could have been using more "soft power" to better accomplish our long-term strategic goals than with the precision guided munitions that seemed to be the preferred solution.
Anyway...
At this point, I'd just like to (A) see a better value for my tax dollar. And (B) I'd like to see our military prepared properly for the next war rather than the last one.
With regards to (A), on the cheap vs. expensive scale, I strongly think that we have erred on the side of expensive with regards to the F-35 (and the F-22). I think the Super Hornet (F/A-18E) is expensive enough as it is. Sure, the Navy bought it first, so of course the Air Force doesn't want it...
As far as (B) goes, with all the sabre-rattling we get from Russia and China, realistically speaking, we're not going to be another shooting war with either of them. I'd rather we have more weapon systems that can deal better with the threats we currently have, and will face next. I don't see how the F-35 can really help with that either, in part because the cost means we can't deploy them in the numbers we really ought to.
I realize that automation right now is not up to what a pilot can do, but it is rapidly improving. I'd rather we have a base platform that can accept upgrades easily as they become available, and that can be deployed in numbers to be effective.
> You really aren't going to sit in an armchair and design up a system that'll work.
A lot of the engineers at these companies could do that just as well as I could and succeed at it too. Just because they're technically gifted doesn't mean they'll climb to management and be given enough resources to see a hare-brained project through. I know they're smart; I worked with a lot of them when we were in grad school. Many of the people in my research group went on to work for NASA, Lockheed, and especially Raytheon.
> I've seen far more professional, intelligent, and pragmatic engineers in that work than what I've seen pass for engineering in Silicon Valley.
I would tend to agree that the breadth of technological prowess necessary to succeed at defense stuff is higher than in the valley. But don't confuse the incredibly smart and talented engineers with the often less smart and talented management. Defense contractors are often risk-averse and people trying to ensure long careers can be as well.
When things move as slowly as they do in the military expectations of what can be done by folks not necessarily in the know set the pace of development more than the actual technology does. If something isn't believable it won't get funded. And without that funding the feasibility can't be proven.
I appreciate your insight and honesty about the whole situation. I think if I could get over the moral aspect of making weapons the bureaucracy involved working with/for the military would still drive me insane.
I've made a pretty decent career of tackling projects that a lot of people wouldn't want to touch. Because I have a pretty decent grasp of what's technologically achievable and I'm too stubborn to admit defeat it usually works out OK. I could tell you that I could make something like that work but even with my track record would you believe me? Highly unlikely. I can't say that I would blame you, either.
Ultimately though you're judging the ideas I'm putting forth on US military standards. Someone trying to wipe the US military out would be incredibly foolish to try to win at symmetric warfare. The F-35 is designed to try and win those kinds of battles but because things are so uneven no intelligent enemy would fight us that way. Just look at the whole Iraq/Afghanistan IED situation. Someone is going to build the aerial equivalent of IEDs at some point and when that happens you're going to want survivable airframes over fancy ones in a BIG way.
Part of the reason why defense companies are risk-averse and bureaucratic is because things just CANNOT fail. It's not like, oh yea, my program crashed, I'm just gonna fix this bug and re-compile. No, if your jet crashes on its first test flight, the pilot is going to die. If one thing is wrong with a space satellite, yea no, you cannot pull it back down to Earth to fix it up.
If the thing costs $100mm apiece agreed that it's best if it does not fail.
If it costs $1mm apiece I am less convinced.
How much money is spent engineering to ensure that There Can Be No Failures (tm) of the first flight versus me accidentally destroying the first dozen $1mm drones? Which represents a false economy?
Remember that a drone doesn't have a pilot on-board so if it goes down in flames we're only out the money, not human life.
I appreciate your passion for the subject man, but I feel like you're purposefully taking stuff out of context and generally ignoring a lot of what I write. I've said nothing about space. And I've mentioned several times that I'm not talking about making things that would pass US military muster! The way the US military conducts business is not the ONLY way to conduct business. It's been fairly successful so far but it does not immediately follow that it's the only way.
We lost in Vietnam because it was a war of attrition that our military was completely unprepared to adapt to. We said that we won but in the end it was us that left, not the enemy.
No, after a critical change in political leadership (LBJ -> Nixon, and for that matter the general in charge, Westmoreland -> Abrams), we won, and the first attempt by the NVA to invade the South was utterly crushed, with only 40,000 of the 150,000 invaders managing to get back north, losing their equipment, which included more tanks than used in any single WWII battle. That was an achievement of the ARVN with air support from the US (the South had and used their own, BTW).
Of course the second invasion succeeded, because the US Congress by then was on the other side and had defunded the South, as I recall ammo was so low an infantryman had 1 grenade and less than 100 rounds.
Side note: the cost of outfitting the North with 3 complete armored/mechanized armies (first used up piecemeal, second in that first invasion failure) is now credited with helping to bankrupt the USSR.
> I think if I could get over the moral aspect of making weapons the bureaucracy involved working with/for the military would still drive me insane.
It's not so bad. Okay, it is bad, but I'm driven crazy by a lot of the stuff in the civilian world as well.
Someone, I don't think you, opined that we shouldn't be planning our war machines out a few decades. Not to be mean, but they are clearly woefully misinformed. I'll try to add some data for those not in the field.
I was just watching a youtube clip on a B-52 upgrade. A plane we plan to fly into 2040 or so, which is an 80 year life cycle. I started cackling while watching this 'modernization' as I watched a crew member pull a black rectangle out of the avionics. My gf asked me what was so funny. How to explain.
This was a DTM. I have done a lot of work with them. They are more commonly called a 'brick'. It's a tiny amount of flash memory used to move data on and off the airframe. Cost many thousands of dollars, slow, old technology - well, I'll let google tell you, I don't yack about military capabilities (https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=a1ff338...). But old, obsolete, and so expensive we kept them locked up in our SIL, with sign out procedures to actually get the chance to put your hands on one.
Replace that puppy with a USB stick! Pivot! Be agile!
Ya. Okay, so this is a device to move data around, and yes, one of the last things I was working on was a USB version of these. Oh, it was still the 'brick', but with some ports added. I also worked on previous versions that had a slot for PCMCIA cards. This is still the state of the art version, so far as I know.
Why so slow to update? Well, there is the one vendor problem, to start. The military is trying to move to open, but it is slow, and we have untold systems that are not open. It's sole source, and the lead time for orders are, interesting.
Screw that noise, I'm putting in a USB port. Sure you are. Equipment on a 1960's airframe should handle that, no problem. Okay, so we have a major development effort ahead of us, but it is not insurmountable. How many billions do you want to spend? Because it makes no sense to do this for a B-52, and not other airframes. So it needs to be robust, radiation hardened, capable of operating in dust storms at 150F, in Siberia during blizzards. It needs a self destruct capability so the crew can destroy it if they need to abandon their equipment. And so on. We aren't exactly talking 2 week sprints here.
Okay, we built it. Bolt that puppy on! No. Have you ever gone through the logistics of a retrofit? I have. So, a few of the things to consider. You have to ground each individual airframe - make time for the installation and tests. That means taking it out of service. What do you do with the crew in the meantime? Someone has to install it, someone has to test it. You need to give them training, and then test them to make sure they know their job. which means earlier some defense contractor had to author that training material, and someone else had to make sure that that material is correct. Then we have supply chain issues. Okay, so how many of these do you want me to build? At what price? Oh, ha, ha, add two zeros. Okay, for that price I will make a single line in a factory. Some of this is classified, so we are building a secure facility. Better add another zero to that price. It's built, let's start the run! Hmm, need workers, need to get them clearances, need to train them, need to do all the paperwork required by the government to prove you are handling classified materials correctly, prove that you aren't ripping them off (I honestly think we spend more money proving we aren't ripping the Government off than we save by avoiding the rip offs, but I digress). Okay, line is running. You only needed 1,000 units, you aren't paying to have these workers sit idle, so they are invited to pursue a career elsewhere. My line is mothballed. Oh, got a new order? I can maybe rehire and retrain and be ready in 6-12 months.
Okay, so we have our units. Who is going to maintain them, repair them, test them, store them. How do they get shipped to a war location? Who is going to track them?
Oh, forgot we actually have to get data on and off them. You aren't allowed to just stick a USB stick in a military computer (I hope the security reasons are clear). JMPS, the station the air crew uses to write and read data to these things, needs to be upgraded. This is a 'one size fits all' unit - they serve many different aircraft, so there are multiple data formats, multiple requirements. Which airframe do you want me to upgrade first? (insert massive politics here which don't necessarily bear much resemblance to the rest of the logistics). How fast and cheap do you want it? I can honestly give it to you fast and cheap - by using the same, obsolete protocols and formats from 40 years ago, tying you in deeper to that obsolete technology. But, I can do it faster, testing is easier. Oh, you want a new protocol? Hmm, wonder how many systems that is going to affect? Anyway, decision made, we hire some programmers, get them cleared, get that process going. Somewhere down the line we have to actually test this stuff, so at some point some aircraft will be idling on the runway while us software squirrels swarm around it, running out tests. Opps, some bugs. Can we keep this an extra two weeks? You have a war to fight? Maybe we can get some time in 2016? Awesome!
Software is written and tested, we have a 10 year installation plan, let's go! This is so friggin' agile! I mean, sure, USBs will be obsolete by the time it is fully deployed, but hey ho, we are current to the century!
Not so fast, young and foolish one. Time to rotate the air crew through training. They only have to understand 100 different systems, adding one more ain't no thing. They have to know the old system, and the new one, because it is not being rolled out all at once, and then there is the massive infrastructure for all the other airframes still using the old system. We have to interoperate. So, train air crew, either train the soldiers and marines who will be supporting this in various war zones, or wait for them to be rotated out and rotate in ones that have been trained in the states. Impose a whole friggin' logistics infrastructure over that to deal with having two incompatible systems fielded. Hire up IT folk willing to travel to IRAQ to install all the support hardware. It goes on...
I'm thinking, what, 3 sprints? Ya,right ;). Waterfall will become your best friend, and for a good reason, not obstinance and thick-headedness.
Anyway, this is a small view into how development and 'waste' goes on in the defense world. I put waste in quotes because a lot of this is unavoidable. At least, I've wracked my brain, and I don't see any easy, obvious way to stream line a lot of stuff. I was brief; the above implies a huge amount of logistics, and anything misplanned, any setback, has a ripple effect.
All of that has its frustrations, but it is also very challenging. It's a huge optimization problem. Sure, you are one piece, but your piece is inevitably trying to optimize for a very difficult environment (budget, schedule, capabilities, environmentals, you name it).
We can iterate, pivot, and throw away web apps. There was an article on Ars on how the old Android sw doesn't work because google is shutting down the servers for the obsolete capabilities. It doesn't, and cannot work that way in the military.
I don't mean any of this as a rant. I think it is a really fascinating world, and not many here have experience with it, unless they served (I didn't) or worked for a defense contractor. I do urge you all to rethink making easy potshots at government programs. I have my thoughts about the F-35, and other programs, but hey, until you've tried to run even a tiny program you really aren't in the position to make an informed judgement. I certainly don't feel competent to say "you did it wrong" to F-35 except perhaps in the most sweeping, broad things. That DTM-PCMCIA-USB thing? Real story, and a reflection of the tradeoffs of having different hardware in different systems vs one-size-fits-all. You make 10 disparate systems, well, you are just duplicating effort and wasting tax payer dollars. Try to make one system to do 10 things? Whoa, buckaroo, specialization is the way to go. Solve one problem, cheaply. Okay, I am going to use COTS (commercial off the shelf). I don't think so. It is not secure, hardened, etc. Okay, I'll pay someone to make a system. Oh, tack on 3 zeros to make the IP owned by the government? Yell at me for that. Okay, we will accept a proprietary format. Don't forget to yell at me in 5 years when the company goes bankrupt, gets acquired, or whatever. I should of foresaw that, right? Oh, we'll be agile when that time comes and just swap in a new system. How long could that take? (I refer to to the top of the post for that). When we have all that yelling done, don't forget to yell at me for not having the insight of going with secure wireless that the military just invented... Oh, you want a modernization program to replace the USB? Okay, how big is that checkbook? And don't forget to schedule some yelling time when the wireless gets jammed in the next war.
Actually, re-reading your post made me realize that this has been tried before. The USSR had a philosophy that pilots were expendable, and that their aircraft were to be rigorously controlled by ground control intercept stations. These GCI facilities told the pilots every step of an intercept.
The USSR also combined this control with extremely cheap aircraft (compared to Western counterparts). The idea would be that Central Europe would become a huge kill zone with swarms of Sukhoi and MIGs overwhelming the higher tech NATO fighters. This philosophy lasted until around the 80's with the introduction of the SU-27 and MIG-29 which were comparable in performance to their Western peers. The USSR was also alarmed at how easily the Israeli's dismantled the Soviet armed Syrian AF in the Bekaa Valley in 1982. This led them to the realization that the "quantity has a quality of its own" mantra had limits.
This reminds me of the Millennium Challenge 2002, where the adversary won by using a large number of suicide motor boats to wipe out the Navi's sophisticated fleet.
I think you should look up the size of modern SAM launchers. They are massive and most of them consist of missile and radar system pair. It doesn't work the way you imagine.
Here's the thing: technology is moving faster than the military can procure it right now. Way, way faster.
When your procurement cycle is at least 10 years and you want something to work for at least the next 40 years and all that projects take much, much longer and get much, much bigger than they need to.
The SAM sites that people started designing 10 or 20 years ago are big, sure. What about the SAM sites that you COULD design today and build in the next year or two, but which the US military would never accept without the impossible to get sign-offs.
The military is kinda like the FDA. They want to make sure that the stuff that makes it through the process is definitely, for sure, to all reasonable scrutiny, acceptable. There are a TON of really neat devices out there that are 5-10 years from being available to the general public but if you're really dying you can potentially get as a part of a clinical trial.
To judge what's available today after jumping through all the hoops for a decade as "The State of The Art" is understandable, but not entirely correct. I can't fault you for thinking that it is but I won't agree with you either.
If every Predator gets a 100W wideband transmitter and SOME of them get instead of weapons the equipment necessary to process the reflections and do the calcs then the others can get that target information and blammo.
If there are 100 Predators for every F35 in the combat zone and they ALL turn on their transmitters simultaneously at some kind of interval you're never going to know which one is carrying weapons and which one is command and control. So you can't do prioritized targeting and thus you're shooting blind. Yeah you can shoot down some of them but once you're out of missiles that's it.
Do we have to worry about 3rd world countries being able to muster this kind of response? No. But there are plenty of industrialized countries that could, and they could bleed us dry one $200mm plane at a time.