Your last para about the ship having sailed on the underlying assumptions is oh so right. And while I’ll admit it’s great to have when the stuff is working and it would be stupid not to take advantage of the capability as long it is working; to hang everything on something that might disappear overnight due to enemy counter measures is equally stupid–and obvious–yet that’s just what we’ve done. No Plan A.2 let alone Plan B. One doesn’t need 30 yrs, 4 stars and every command and staff school extant to figure that one out; it is blindingly intuitively obvious–to everyone except the big kids.

Upthread QM mentioned that the RF signal coming into a remote-piloted drone is like having a big “HIT ME” sign. And earlier he mentioned that the weak link is the satellite that handles the traffic. Those are what I see as showstoppers at this point. But that’s more of an “is this a good idea in the first place” kind of problem, not a “how can we make this good idea work” one. If you’ve got bad assumptions underpinning the foundation for your work, nothing you build on it will stand, no matter how good the engineering on it is. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that ship has probably already sailed.

As for DARPA working on comm drones at high altitude, that’s not something that takes an awful lot. That’s a matter of endurance at altitude.

The weakness is the problem of RF radiation that says to a missile, “here I am, come shoot me down.” Bottom line – there is no substitute for a man at the stick, in the air. The “Price of Admiralty” is the risk of men in combat. The button pushers have dreamed for years that we will be able to push buttons to fight the enemy, with little risk to men. While it has been many years since I was involved in Software Engineering, I am all to aware of what it takes, and the weaknesses of software systems. We are still taking baby steps in the realm of artificial intelligence, and this after more than 20 years of work. Unless there is some massive breakthrough, we will not be very much further down the road towards producing any sort of artificial sentience. And sentience is the very sort of thing that will be required. So far, only God has been able to produce such a thing, and you and I are it. I hold little hope that man will ever be able to do it.

I worked briefly in the aerospace industry before joining the Navy. Americans aren’t going into engineering anymore in college, especially post-grad, and if they aren’t taking underwater basket weaving studies they’re taking econ/business. Every DESIGN and TECHNICAL meeting I went to was nearly 50/50 engineers/business types. Some were over half biz types. The biz types did NOT understand engineering, nor did they add any value since at the end of the day the engineers were the ones making the product which had value added. The old-timers alerted me to this as being weird BTW, since they were used to more of a 90/10 split, with the business rep keeping them in check and letting them know if what they wanted to do was affordable or worthwhile.

I’m afraid this is going to be a growing problem in American industry just demographically (number of Americans getting engineering degrees, not race or anything like that) and that policy reform will be trying to fix the wrong problem. A tangible crystallization of this fear I personally think the JSF is a bean counter’s wet dream that will prove both too expensive and not capable enough, the apotheosis of jack of all trades, master of none.

I don’t mean to be too mean to the business development side of the house, they really do provide a vital service. It’s just that you only need so many of them and usually more engineers, but our colleges are turning out more of them than engineers so we’re putting them in positions that really do require specialized training that they lack. The results won’t be satisfactory.