Budgetary realities will not let this idea fly.  The money is better used on drone technologies (data link as well as airframe capabilities in range and stealth), as well as stealth cruise missiles.

 

I'd like to know more about that UAV problem. It looks to me that control input can be encrypted, so no one can send "false" commands to the craft. The data that UAV sends back probably not because of size and amount of it. When UAV loses link to controller, for whatever reason, it could have a built in capability to fly home on its own.

 

That doesn't look like something beyond today's technology.

 

DG

 

"But the big problem in the air force is their insistence on using officers as UAV operators, while the other services will use NCOs."

 

Before World War II, the Naval Service had no problem with training noncoms as combat aviators.  Aboard the U.S.S. Lexington,  at the outset of hostilities VF-2 was staffed predominantly by "flying chiefs," naval petty officers with the required training to qualify as aviators operating from aircraft carriers.  Similarly, U.S. Marine Corps aviation had no problem with "flying sergeants," many of them carrier-qualified as well.

 

I've read it argued that the Army's position - when it was the Air Corps and not the U.S. Air Force - to require a commissioned officer to pilot a piddlin' little liaison/observation aircraft while entrusting to a sergeant the command of a tank worth five or six times more money was flatly insane.

 

And thus the USAF's heritage of officer-worship for people who are basically combat-capable technicians. 

What is needed is a high altitude, high-endurance UAV with highly directional antennae to make a swarm of comms nodes - you'd be able to relay high-bandwidth comms and allow the network to configure itself as required using swarm logic- the current network is massively over reliant on satellites imo, not just because they're sitting ducks for electronic and kinetic attack but also because of weak signal strength and vulnerability to jamming. Develop a high-alt, somewhat low-observable relay platform and you have a scalable network that can be deployed to supplement existing comms. 

 

 R 

 

Definitely need an alternative to satellites, for munitions too (how redundant is GPS?)

 

A/I will start coming more into play too - especially for strikes that are akin to what a cruise missile would hit (i.e. infrastructure, airbases, C4, etc).  Dynamic targets of opportunity require a person in the link but dropping JDAMs on military installations is something that HAL can do.