AH, BUT GENERAL LEE...:

Attack of the Drones: Now that congress has killed the F-22, the Air Force is facing another shock to the system: planes without pilots. (Fred Kaplan, Sep 19, 2009, NEWSWEEK)

For more than 60 years, the Air Force has trumpeted itself as the service of glamour, its pilots ruling the skies, soaring, diving, bombing, and strafing from far above—yet still commanding the clash of armies on the ground. In movies, they wore white scarves and set the girls' hearts aflutter.

But all that is changing in ways that few outsiders understand. A fierce fight is on for the mission, culture, and identity of the Air Force, and the Top Guns are losing. This is the real story behind a passionate political struggle this past summer over a major weapons system, the F-22 Raptor, the world's most sophisticated fighter plane. [...]

Just as the Vietnam War paved the way for the rise of the fighter pilot—before then, much higher status was given to pilots of nuclear bombers—the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are demanding a new Air Force culture. "War is the great teacher of innovation, the great stimulus to thought in military affairs," says Ashton Carter, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and logistics. The present wars, he adds, "have challenged the cultures in all the services…There's a heated competition to be relevant."

Iraq and Afghanistan are very different wars from the war the F-22 Raptor was designed to fight. (Not one of the advanced aircraft has flown a single mission over either theater.) The enemy isn't a foreign government, but an insurgency; there are few "strategic" targets to bomb and no opposing air force to go after. So the main Air Force role is to support American and allied troops on the ground. This means two things: first, airlifting supplies (General Schwartz's specialty); second, helping the troops find and kill bad guys.

For this second mission, the Air Force has been relying more and more on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with names like Predator, Reaper, Global Hawk, and Warrior Alpha. Joystick pilots located halfway around the world operate these ghost planes. They pinpoint their targets by watching streams of real-time video, taken by cameras strapped to the bellies of the UAVs. Many of the aircraft also carry super-accurate smart bombs, which the joystick pilots can fire with the push of a button once they've spotted the targets on their video screens.

...what if war weren't terrible but were no big deal?

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 19, 2009 4:55 PM