I was looking at a now withdrawn announcement from some Army official who was crowing about a recently conducted drop test where the US Army after God only knows how much development, reviewing and testing, armed a drone with a hand grenade and dropped it somewhere proving once again that gravity is an absolute victor in the war against airborne. It all kind of missed the whole intent, purpose and carnage of a war being waged in Europe right now. Yep, they got confused.
Two of the words that matter a lot when designing a killing machine are Payload and Warhead. They are not the same thing. A bomber has a payload and the entire thing is built to drop the payload and come back. A missile or artillery projectile has a warhead and not one spec of the item is designed to return to the launcher. If your design teams are confused about what they're building what you get is a payload system that costs up to 40 times what a simple projectile costs.
This was lost by the various military idiots as they tried to emulate that fallen rock idol of long range cannoneering, Saddam Hussein and Project Bablyon.
The USN got into the mix with just about the same results although there is no evidence that they or anyone else had the lead engineers executed. They were designing an artillery system for their newest bleeding edge land attack destroyer and after decades of research $ development (R$D) they ended up with a gun system that fired little projectiles with tiny warheads a long way way for roughly the same cost as existing Tomahawk missiles with much better warheads. It was another clear case of design specs leading the research teams deep deep into the woods where they build a secret and deep hole in the ground and burned money in it every night for literally years.....
The problems, as I see them with the military developing the attack drones of the future is that they keep turning to both the wrong people and to the wrong facilities. They keep going to aviation experts and they keep going to the military/navy research labs. What they need to find is the guys and teams that developed the sonobuoys.* The buoys were sensors that were designed to be launched out of aircraft, splash into the ocean which would activate their batteries and depending on the buoy, drop hydrophones and other cool things deeper into the water in order to find and track submarines. They were 100% expendable and designed that way from the ground up. We used millions of them in the Cold War.
What the military needs and is unlikely to get is for the Project Leaders and Teams to understand that the weaponized drone is only going to be successful if it is dirt cheap and designed to show up at the launcher in pallets loaded on multiple tractor trailers. It will not work if it requires field servicing, special schools to operate and maintain it or the expectation that it will ever return.
We're not going to get that of course. We're going to get a nifty $7,000,000/drone system of systems that can be retasked by specialized crews with modules that will let it fly detection and surveillance, fly special mission packages containing Top Secret ISAR and MASINT modules and a fully configurable warhead in multiple packages. Oh, and it will of course, be under the sole control of the targeteers back at the Air Force Base in Nevada or maybe Al Udeid.
I do wonder if the Army and Marine Corp doctrine has studied any part of the war in Ukraine and worked out how the flow of battle in both the attack and defense is going to be changed by the wide acceptance of thousands of kamikazi drones dominating every inch of the battlefield from the C4I nodes in the deep rear areas to the Forward Edge of Battle.
These are the sorts of things I really enjoyed talking about with the Old Man who finished his time in the Army as the Director of Weapon Systems and who, a very long time ago, was part of the Hellfire Program Office in the Pentagon when that missile was undergoing development and fielding.
BTW, I do know how to deal with them defensively and so does anyone else who actually thinks about it but I very much doubt that we will ever see that level of integration between the IC and the producers of large smoking holes in the ground. Those days are way behind us now.
*If you read the silly article you see the headline writer has not the slightest idea what the article was about. This sort of conveys, in nutshell, the problem that designers have when the specifications are gooned up and nobody is willing to say so.
4 comments:
ma Lockheed and pa Grumman need to be broken up like ma Bell. Look at what technologies were unleashed. Congress needs to stop legislating one size fits all technical performance, I.e., insensitive munitions statute is poorly crafted and causes very expensive solutions to a rare possible hazard.
viz the insensitive munitions, every EOD tech Chief I knew at Mobile Unit 5 was missing a finger or two. It was an amazing lapse back in 1996 and I was surprised to see that and that they were chiefs. OTOH, a few years before that I went to set up operations at a site swept by a team of our EOD and found that they missed unexploded ordnance and left blasting caps strewn all over the place. I don't even want to know what they did with 40mm grenade rounds....
Weapons development and procurement is seen as a life long gravy train by "defense contractors". Not as something to achieve as efficiently as possible. As long as that mindset is allowed to persist we will have massive expensive boondoggles instead of functional useful systems.
Oh, Lord, sonobuoys. I was an AX in the Navy. I was filling an AT billet, so every six months I had to bone up on sonobuoys, MAD booms, etc., since I didn't actually work with them, but was tested on them for the advancement tests.
--Tennessee Budd
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