"Kevin Brooks" wrote:

"Paul F Austin" wrote
in message
...

"Chad Irby" wrote
"Keith Willshaw"
wrote:

"Rune Børsjø" wrote
How the hell is gonna tell friendly
from enemy? Civilian from
combatant? The only thing it'll be good
for is knocking out armor.
Attack helos still present a flexibility
and presence that you can't
get out of a glorified model airplane
kit.

You havent heard of IFF I take it

You mean like the IFF that fails from time
to time, or that can be
spoofed and jammed quite easily?

You have some of the following problems:

IFF jammed, UCAV won't shoot.
IFF jammed, UCAV shoots down anything in
front of it.
IFF spoofed, UCAV hunts down friendly targets.

IFF is easy enough, but "robust" IFF is
a real pain.

BFT (Blue-force tracking) is going to revolutionize
IFF. Because it
depends
on geo-location knowledge, that's tough to
spoof or jam. Spoofing requires
breaking encryption in real-time and jamming
has to be done continuously
into multiple aperatures.

Gee, how many times did we hear that, "Product
X is going to revolutionize
the way you do process Y!", only to spend the
next ten years doing process Y
the same way we always did because Product X
never quite lived up to its
promises, or ran way over budget and got the
axe, etc.? The Navy's A-12
Avenger, the Air Force's AMST, the Army's DIVADS,
Grizzly, Wolverine, M180,
various digital command and control packages,
the laughable attempt to field
those original big honking green monster boxes
(TACS computers)... A good,
reliable, and discrete IFF for ground units
will be wonderful, but I am not
holding my breath while waiting for it to be
fielded. Till then I'll take
the manned shooters in the close fight.

Brooks





One other thing:whenever someone comes up with technology that "will make
manned aircraft obsolete", something happens that keeps the guys and gals
in the cockpits. You will NEVER take people out of the cockpit. Oh, there
will be UCAVs for really dangerous missions, or as expendable wild weasels,
but I'll bet that manned aircraft are going to be around a LONG time.

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