Almost 1 In 3 US Warplanes Is a Drone 328
parallel_prankster writes "A recent Congressional Research Service report, titled U.S. Unmanned Aerial Systems, looks at the more-prominent role being played by drones. In 2005, drones made up just 5 percent of the military's aircraft. Today one in three American military aircraft is a drone. The upsides of drones are that they are cheaper and safer — the military spent 92% of the aircraft procurement money on manned aircraft. The downside — they're bandwidth hogs: a single Global Hawk drone requires 500 megabytes per second worth of bandwidth, the report finds, which is 500 percent of the total bandwidth of the entire U.S. military used during the 1991 Gulf War."
Video streaming (Score:2, Insightful)
This accounts for most of the bandwidth.
The number in the article is indeed way high... not to say Global Hawk does not have some serious data output.
I work on NASA"s Global Hawk program, and used to work on many DOD ISR programs.
500% of the bandwith? (Score:2, Insightful)
Breaking News! Modern technology uses more bandwidth than available 20 years ago! Film at 11.
They're comparing it to the time when 14.4 kbps modems were considered blazingly fast.
Re:Bandwidth (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure where the submitter gets his 500MB/s from, but as others suggest it's probably 500Mb/s.
However, you might say 500Mb/s is still a tad much, however I have a good idea why it might be that high.
First, a drone typically doesn't have just a single camera. It'd be a bit of a waste to get cheap there really, when you can put three or four cameras per drone.
Second, I can imagine military regulations dictate that judging kill orders based on compressed live images from a shaky drone isn't good enough. Has to be a raw data stream to ensure the best possible information is available.
These are of course just my thoughts and I don't have any experience or insider knowledge to back them up with.
Asinine comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
which is 500 percent of the total bandwidth of the entire U.S. military used during the 1991 Gulf War.
As a Gulf War vet who worked with the communication network at the time, that "500 percent" metric is pointless. In 1991, we were still playing games on Commodore 64's. Hardly anything in our military inventory was networked, and what little was, was largely special-purpose point-to-point equipment. Is 5x the bandwidth of a pre-internet era war supposed to be impressive? Quick, tell us how much more bandwidth it was than we used in World War 2!
Re:That's a ton of bandwidth (Score:4, Insightful)
You could run Netflix quite comfortably on 1/100th of that!
That's 500 megabytes per second, or roughly 4x the bandwidth of a GigE connection! Sounds to me like they're doing something seriously wrong, even if you assume they're receiving multiple hi-res live video streams simultaneously from the drones. Maybe the video isn't compressed at all?
The Downside (Score:5, Insightful)
The downside — they're bandwidth hogs: a single Global Hawk drone requires 500 megabytes per second worth of bandwidth, the report finds, which is 500 percent of the total bandwidth of the entire U.S. military used during the 1991 Gulf War.
I think the downside is that the drones are used in "secret" CIA wars, routinely kill civilians, have been used by the President for extra-judicial assassination of at least one American citizen, and are increasingly eyed for use in domestic airspace. I'd put their bandwidth usage pretty far down on the list of reasons to be concerned about drones.
Re:That's a ton of bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nerds for t3h win! (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably pilots of regular aircraft resenting having the drones piloted by lowly "non-comms". After all the regular pilots are seemingly on the way out and thus its likely that many are being converted over to drone piloting. RHIP
Also when they started arming the drones. Originally they were scout-only.
Re:Is this a legitimate comparison? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:5 Steps to Internet Bliss (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is this a legitimate comparison? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the more important question is capability. I mean, I don't really care if it takes 3 drones to do the job of 1 manned aircraft if they can do the same job, and the drones cost less than 1/3 the cost of a manned aircraft. If you have cheap, "disposable" drones, you don't care if they get destroyed by the enemy - no pilot, no casualties.
The bigger concern is capture - like what happened in Iran. What would be particularly scary is if an enemy can take control of the drone, and either launch weapons at us or our allies, or at a civilian population - could you imagine if a Syria or Iran managed to take control of a U.S. drone and use it to attack protesters? Or a mosque, or a school? They could claim it was the U.S. doing the attack, and further incite hostilities amongst their people and cement their hold on power.
Re:500 megabytes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps bandwidth should never have been rated in bits per second in the first place? I blame my CompSci/IT predecessors (and marketing people, no doubt). I think they wanted a bigger number, and 300 bits per second sounded more impressive for that modem they designed than 37.5 bytes per second.
But, since the byte is really the smallest meaningful unit of data is a byte (yes, a single bit can represent a boolean value, but you can't transmit a single bit; in the simple case of a modem, you would generally transmit a byte; with modern networks, you transmit a packet, and I believe the smallest amount of data you can encapsulate in a packet is also one byte, isn't it?), data speeds should really be measured in *bytes* per second.
Also, most people think of data in terms of bytes - they buy hard drives in bytes (well, gigabytes and terrabytes), RAM, USB flash drives, sd cards for their phones, cameras, and other consumer electronics. In fact, bandwidth is the only place we still talk about bits instead of bytes, and that's ridiculous. It needs to change and the bits per second standard needs to die.
Re:Is this a legitimate comparison? (Score:5, Insightful)
Given their loiter time, drones replace multiple jets and allow using fresh aircrew while keeping one machine on-station.
They also do NOT require expensive combat search and rescue resources because when they go down their crew aren't IN them.
Re:Is this a legitimate comparison? (Score:2, Insightful)
The bigger concern is capture - like what happened in Iran. What would be particularly scary is if an enemy can take control of the drone, and either launch weapons at us or our allies, or at a civilian population - could you imagine if a Syria or Iran managed to take control of a U.S. drone and use it to attack protesters? Or a mosque, or a school? They could claim it was the U.S. doing the attack, and further incite hostilities amongst their people and cement their hold on power.
Given the frequency with which Americans have killed civilian people I don't see why you would given any special concern to remotely operated killing machines in this regard.
Furthermore, no one needs to control an American remotely operated killing machine to do this: they can more easily just send their own killing aircraft to kill protestors and then claim it was the Americans. People with power pull this kind of stunt all the time and always have, long before the era of killing aircraft.
The larger concern to my mind is that proliferation of automated and remotely operated killing machines demonstrates that the world is still full of people who are smart enough to build such machines but dumb enough to think that killing people is a particularly effective or efficient solution to any given problem. It takes only a cursory look at history to show that killing people is rarely effective and never efficient. For example, German politicians in the 1930's were deeply concerned with food security and chose to invest in killing people rather than researching more efficient and intensive agriculture. Rather than gaining food security this resulted in a nation where many people were dead, many buildings were destroyed, and many people were starving.
Re:Is this a legitimate comparison? (Score:4, Insightful)
Manned aircraft also have more down time for maintenance. If a drone fails, you are out the cost of the drone. If a manned aircraft fails, you lose the cost of the aircraft and the lives of the crew. Dead crews are bad PR.
Meh, they'd just do like they always do and either not tell anyone, or make up some story about how the plane was shot down while engaging in a 6 on 1 dog fight, heroically saving the nation from flying terrorists...