Drone fever: catch it! RT America, in August:

The US will drop billions on defense spending with the purchasing of 55 Global Hawk drone planes over the next few years. Each of the four dozen-plus spy crafts comes at a price tag of $218 million apiece — ten times the price of the largest armed attack drone.

That’s not quite true; a Global Hawk costs about $35 million when you don’t include development costs. To put it in perspective, a brand new F-35 costs roughly $208 million (.PDF) by the same standard, though Canadians will be paying a discounted rate of $65 million (Canadian). The Global Hawk is also probably far more valuable than the F-35, as it can actually do more. In fact, planes without pilots may make the piloted ones extinct, and I just don’t count that a bad development for American blood or treasure.

A drone solves many of the basic problems of combat aviation: a piloted plane can only be in the air for so long before the pilot’s diaper is full, his food and water exhausted, and his body physically in need of rest. If shot down or crashed, a pilot puts more American lives at risk in attempting rescue. UAVs can be commanded by colonels or piloted by privates. Unlike an F-35, Global Hawk crews may relieve another in mid-flight.

Indeed, one cannot even call UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) “drones” at all, as a drone is a machine that operates autonomously. UAVs are remotely piloted aircraft.

Drones can operate from any base with room for a maintenance and ordnance crew. They can travel any distance necessary to reach a theater of conflict. Once there, they can fly high and slow, circling and observing, for days at a time. Refueling — another procedure potentially conducted with UAVs — allows them to loiter beyond human endurance. A remotely piloted aircraft can accelerate and maneuver at stresses that would turn a human pilot to Jell-O. There is simply nothing a piloted plane does as well or better than a plane piloted from far away.

Their deadliness is not just a matter of weaponry, but sensing capability — cameras, radar, etc. — that make their ammunition count, especially when operated with skill and patience. If such aircraft are useful in finding and killing terrorists, they are at least twice as useful in conducting an actual war: every phase of the Libyan conflict saw another pair of drones arriving over a new front. The entire Libyan conflict saw 145 strikes; for this entire year, Pakistan has seen something between 57, according to the government, and 64, as reported by New America Foundation.

One more problem UAVs solve, from Stars & Stripes:

A 2009 RAND report said that, by 2016, the Air Force will have fewer than 1,000 fighter aircraft in its inventory, which represents only 32 percent of the number in 1989. The Air Force currently has just over 1,900 fighter/attack aircraft in the active, guard and reserve forces, according to Air Force officials.

“With fewer aircraft, it is difficult for all pilots to fly enough to maintain their combat skills, and it is particularly difficult for new pilots to gain enough experience in their first flying tour to be prepared for follow-on nonflying and flying positions,” the report states.

If the Air Force doesn’t fix its capacity to train more pilots on fighters, “eventually there won’t be enough pilots produced to fill all the cockpits,” said Al Robbert, director of the Manpower, Personnel and Training Program at RAND Project AIR FORCE. The Air Force, he said, may “have to give up some combat capability in order to build a bigger training capability.”

That spells a bright future for UAVs. If we can get past the hysterics, we might see an opening to make the common defense cost less and risk less while doing just as much, if not more, and doing it just as well, if not better. I say again: we may look back on the Libyan conflict as the beginning of the end of manned combat flight.

Lt. Col. Dan Ward, US Air Force, has made an important contribution to fanboydom. Don’t Come to the Dark Side: Acquisition Lessons from a Galaxy Far, Far Away is also a great introduction to the pitfalls of military program management:

In the single most realistic scene in the whole double-trilogy, Darth Vader complains that the second Death Star construction project is … behind schedule. In fact, much of the drama in Episode VI revolves around this delay.

Consider the implications of pop culture’s most notorious schedule overrun. In the Star Wars universe, robots are selfaware, every ship has its own gravity, Jedi Knights use the Force, tiny green Muppets are formidable warriors and a piece of junk like the Millennium Falcon can make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. But even the florid imagination of George Lucas could not envision a project like the Death Star coming in on time, on budget. He knew it would take a Jedi mind trick beyond the skill of Master Yoda to make an audience suspend that much disbelief.

You can read the rest of Col. Ward’s hilarity here (.PDF).

Update: video was removed.

Via Inhabitat.

The increase in the cost of weapons since World War II has been staggering. The Spitfire, probably the best fighter in the world in 1939, cost £5,000 to build. When its current equivalent, the air defence version of the Tornado, entered service with the Royal Air Force in the early 1980s, each one cost £17 million: one hundred and seventy-two times more expensive after allowing for inflation. Subsequent prices have been gentler, but that doesn’t help much: the total program cost for the next-generation Eurofighter, of which the Royal Air Force has ordered 232 for production between 2002 and 2014, is £15.9 billion, or about £68 million each. No country is several hundred times richer than it was at the beginning of World War II, so far fewer weapons can be built. Approximately the same amount of factory space was devoted to the construction of military aircraft in the United States at the height of the Reagan defence build-up in the 1980s as was devoted to the same purpose in Germany during World War II. But whereas in 1944 Germany was building three thousand planes a month (and losing them at the same rate), American production of military aircraft in the 1980s averaged about fifty a month. (Emphasis mine)

As one of those procurement decisions made under Carter, the High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) replaced the old WWII-era Willys Jeep during the 1980s. Having operated several models of it over the course of my nine years in uniform, I can testify to this vehicle’s remarkable utility; I once took an M1030 model up a 40-degree slope with a 2,500-lb electronics shed on it. (That’s the very system I’m talking about there on the right.) The HMMWV can literally go anywhere.

Being designed for middle- and high-intensity conflicts, however, the humvee was never supposed to be a combat mainstay. Ironically, low-intensity conflicts require vehicles to carry more armor, not less, as ambush tactics predominate.

But what always stuck in my craw was that taxpayers shelled out $50,000 for a stripped-down military version with no A/C and a three-speed transmission while civilians could get the fancy version for roughly the same price. So now that the Army isn’t buying them anymore, I expect they’ll do exactly what they did with the Willys Jeeps: sell them. As a kid I saw ads for surplus jeeps priced to move. If that happens again, I might just buy a hummer.

Y’know, to prep for the zombie apocalypse. Or for mud-riding.

Do you remember when the right erupted over the CBS docudrama about the Reagans? It turned out to be a somewhat oversimplified telling of St. Ronald as good-hearted, if slightly confused old man. This is brought to you by the maker of Kiefer Sutherland’s torture porn TV show.

There is good news this morning however. From the Wall Street Journal, a tale of how one soldier’s life was saved by a Kevlar helmet. The Army’s decision to adopt Kevlar protection came in 1978 under the Carter administration. In fact, a lot of weapons we take for granted in the modern military were designed at his initiative: the AH-64, the Humvee, the M-1 Abrams and the M-2 Bradley were already in development when Reagan was inaugurated. Likewise, current procurement is helicopter-heavy and mine-resistant only after years of resistance from Donald Rumsfeld. The more you know!

The hold means no nominations can move forward unless Senate Democrats can secure a 60-member cloture vote to break it, or until Shelby lifts the hold.

And what, pray tell, does Shelby want to extort from the administration? The Mobile Press-Register reports:

- A $40 billion contract to build air-to-air refueling tankers. From CongressDaily: “Northrop/EADS team would build the planes in Mobile, Ala., but has threatened to pull out of the competition unless the Air Force makes changes to a draft request for proposals.” Federal Times offers more details on the tanker deal, and also confirms its connection to the hold.

- An improvised explosive device testing lab for the FBI. From CongressDaily: “[Shelby] is frustrated that the Obama administration won’t build” the center, which Shelby earmarked $45 million for in 2008. The center is due to be based “at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal.”

The story of the tanker planes is ridiculous. Northrop wants to team up with Airbus to build them in Alabama; rival Boeing wants to build them in Washington. Now Northrop wants the Air Force to change its criteria for selection or else it will take its football and go home.  The second one is new to me, but just how bad is the problem of improvised explosive devices in the United States? Because I don’t see the FBI deploying to Pakistan anytime soon.

Maybe I’m wrong; maybe Northrop/EADS should have the contract and the FBI desperately needs this facility to be in Huntsville. Or maybe Shelby is just a pig at the trough in Washington taking “the party of no” to petty extremes. As I noted back in September amid the “czars” nontroversy,  the GOP obstructionism is aimed at hampering Obama’s ability to govern. Effective leadership consists of delegation to competent subordinates; block the subordinates, and you block the leader. As of August, Obama still didn’t have half his team in place:

While career employees or holdovers fill many posts on a temporary basis, Mr. Obama does not have his own people enacting programs central to his mission. He is trying to fix the financial markets but does not have an assistant treasury secretary for financial markets. He is spending more money on transportation than anyone since Dwight D. Eisenhower but does not have his own inspector general watching how the dollars are used. He is fighting two wars but does not have an Army secretary.

He sent Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to Africa to talk about international development but does not have anyone running the Agency for International Development. He has invited major powers to a summit on nuclear nonproliferation but does not have an assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation.

All of which suits Shelby and the GOP just fine, I’m sure. After all, they were willing to block Obama’s nomination for head of the Transportation Security Administration just to keep the people at the x-ray machines from unionizing. The funny thing is, I remember when Shelby was the Democrat who unseated Denton by accusing him of overconsuming pork.