"Paul F Austin" wrote in message
...

You're making the assumption that the FOV will remain "soda-straw". When
you

A reasonable assumption on his part I'm afraid.

consider the DAS baselined for F-35, an operator of a UAV designed to fly
a
CAS mission could have the same situational awareness as a pilot on board
and _better_situational awareness than any aircraft now flying,
essentially
a 4pi steradian field of regard The camera systems (from Indigo Systems
http://www.indigosystems.com/company/PR/pr_030318.html) are quite small
and
would be feasible for an aircraft able to carry the ordnance in the first
place.

Cameras haven't been the problem for at least the last 30 years, the band
width
to move their product back to the controller is.

Current generation UAVs are designed as ISR platforms rather than as
UCAVs.
Expect the sensor suite to be different for a different mission. In fact,
one of the "UCAV" platforms being bruited about is a pilotless F-35. There
are a lot of issues to be resolved and development to be done before a
UCAV
flies a CAS mission but there are no laws of physics that prevent it from
happening.

Agreed.

The real question is whether a remotely piloted CAS aircraft works better
than one with a man aboard. The up side of a UCAV is more fuel and
ordnance
for a given airframe, reduction of pilot fatigue and manning issues not to
mention reduction in people at risk. The down side is the vulnerability of
datalinks to jamming, airspace deconfliction and failure tolerance since
an
on-board pilot can compensate to a limited extent for equipment failure
and
damage..

An item of concern is the numbers of UCAV you could have up at any given
time to perform CAS or other missions. With manned planes the limit is
pretty much how many planes you have. With UCAVs, unless they are
autonomous,
there are limits to how many ways you can divide up the available control
band width to use theUCAVs concurrently.
It may be that manned planes will continue to be needed for high intensity
operations long after UCAV become capable of CAS.