Iran building copy of captured US drone

http://www.timeslive.co.za/world/2012/04/22/iran-building-copy-of-captured-us-drone

by jaxonrice • 14 years ago

9 16 14 years ago

timeslive.co.za

tomwalker• 14 years ago

I cant really blame them - it must be a golden oppurtunity

nosse4• 14 years ago

It will be interesting to see more and more countries building cheap hi-tech military robotics.

This will probably chance the doctrines. In short term I'd guess fighters become more relevant as they are needed to identify large quantities of flying objects. At the same time manned bombers become less relevant. With cruise missiles anything is destroyable. And with surveillance robotics everything is becoming observable.

Probably land groups become smaller as they have to try to be "too cheap to attack". It's not economical to send 1,5 million dollar cruise missile to kill five soldiers. How you can organize whole military force to effectively do their jobs, while gatherings of more than 5 people to the same spot is forbidden?

I'd guess future camouflage is going to be something that confuses the difference between military and civilian. And decoys are going to be big trend. Something like using artillery to disperse large amounts of heat sources that look like humans to IR-camera.

gsharm• 14 years ago

How does killing people equate to the military force effectively doing its job?

stoolpigeon3• 14 years ago

Killing people and destroying stuff is why they exist. The threat of it is sometimes sufficient but history has shown that often they'll actually have to go out and do it.

Whether or not people agree with the reasons and the use of the force, that is a political question not a military question.

I lean towards pacifism myself - but to think that a military exists for other reasons is to muddy ones thinking and introduce bad data.

nosse4• 14 years ago

Did I say this? I sure didn't mean to.

stoolpigeon3• 14 years ago

I agree in large - though manned fighters will become irrelevant too. As it is - much of the time an F-35 pilot will not be actually looking outside, they'll be looking into their helmet screen. There's a good EO DAS video that shows the reasons why - though the only one I can find right now isn't of the best quality - http://youtu.be/CwvnhFgzIKI

So the pilot isn't actually controlling the flight surfaces, that is all fly by wire. And the pilot is not actually looking outside with the naked eye. So - really the only reason to have a pilot actually in the cockpit is if the side sending up the plane is worried they'll lose the ability to control it remotely.

pooriaazimi• 14 years ago

How about the transmission delay of the video feeds? Is that really negligible?

nosse4• 14 years ago

"So - really the only reason to have a pilot actually in the cockpit is if the side sending up the plane is worried they'll lose the ability to control it remotely."

Well the only thing worse than losing your fighter to enemy force, is the enemy force controlling your fighter against you.

With current technology I'd say the best possibility is single manned fighter controlling few unmanned fighters with two-way highly encrypted optical link. So that when engaging enemy the pilot would just send one of the unmanned against a identified target, bit like a more maneuverable missile. Then the AI would kick in.

In the future something like electronic tunneling radio might do the job. I really don't believe in AI doing the whole thing, scenarios are too complex. And there has to be someone taking the responsibility.

kds2• 14 years ago

The 1,5 million dollar missiles (and more expensive ones) will be used for destroying the command centres controlling the pilot-less planes. Most of them as current locations are known even now.

A flock of such air-crafts in a fleet formation if used for massive offensive action (like the Luftwaffe-style bombings in WW2) could be "switched off" with an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse in the most severe case. Besides this extremity - a distributed but single-coordination-and-control battery of modern ground mobile anti-aircraft defence rocket complexes can deal with tens to up to a few hundreds flying units (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantsir-S1 ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9K22_Tunguska).

I don't think that in the observable future these drones could be something more than a single-plane single-mission reconnaissance tool used strictly against technologically vastly inferior armies/societies.

nosse4• 14 years ago

I would envision "single-plane reconnaissance" -missions. Lot's of them done from very low tech command "centers". More like a Toyota Corolla with some guy and a laptop, than bunker with tens of people. They would provide lot's to do for enemy fighters, while locating targets for artillery. Pantsir-S1 and Tunguska both have limited weapon systems, only good for targets below 15km. And spotting something that flies just above the tree-line is quite hard with radar.

I'm not saying someone would attack U.S. with huge drone flock. I'm saying that soon deploying marines to some distant country is going to be somewhat riskier.

stuckk• 14 years ago

These drones are useless if you don't have the satellites that control them. unless they plan on using it only under the satellite that they had recently launched.

hamidr• 14 years ago

That thing I know you cant name it a satellite.

harryf• 14 years ago

You could achieve a 10-15 mile radius with radio control. For defending a position with cheap flying objects, that's more than enough.

stoolpigeon3• 14 years ago

I think this is propaganda without much truth to it - but you are correct that UAVs (currently) depend on a lot of infrastructure, especially satellites - gps and command/control stuff.

bborud• 14 years ago

Of course, none of this would have happened if the IP had been properly protected.

Iran building copy of captured US drone

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