Winner of a 2005 Flight International Aerospace Industry Award, the J-UCAS X-45 program is a Boeing/DARPA/Air Force/Navy effort to demonstrate the technical feasibility, military utility and operational value of an unmanned air combat system for the Air Force and the Navy. Operational missions for the services may include persistent strike; penetrating electronic attack; suppression of enemy air defenses; and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

The initial operational role for the J-UCAS desired for the Air Force is as a “first day of the war” force enabler that will complement a strike package by performing the SEAD mission, via lethal and non-lethal means. In this role, J-UCAS would accomplish preemptive destruction and electronic suppression of sophisticated enemy integrated air defense systems (IADS) in support of manned strike packages. Throughout the rest of the campaign, J-UCAS would provide continuous vigilance with an immediate lethal strike capability to prosecute high value and time critical targets. After the conflict, the J-UCAS could fly peacekeeping mission, such as enforcing “no-fly” zones; these typically entail flying long hours of patrols (so called “dull” missions).

DEAD, not SEAD

ASEA on the UCAV?

It took us more than 20 years to get ICBMs up and running, and really a decade more to perfect them.

Such is the nature of large scale technology advances, particularly when human life depends on their performance.

Added to the mix is the fact that our development cycles now have much more ambitious aims than in the past. If anything, in some cases the cycles are getting much tighter.
Our weapons platforms are much more powerful than anything in the past.

A contrast in this regard might be the F22 against the Eurofighter. (One certainly does not develop advanced platforms like the f22 in “5 to 8 years”, BTW.)

So your assertion:

We have lost the agility and ability to produce new vehicles in a 5-8 year timeline, and for a substantially smaller price. It is a profound loss of R&D capacity that also affects our space programs. Worse still, this also affects private efforts, whether the new private space efforts, or even aircraft manufacture. It takes way longer than it should for too much money to produce new vehicles, both military and civilian.

is not really true.

True, one can have such rapid advance as the Manhattan project or the 1960′s era space program, The latter ate up something like 5% of GDP (or maybe that was government spending, i forget). If there is political will, we can do this again.

Certainly, there is a lot of political maneuvering about and around DoD R&D cycles, and these sort of things can cause damage, but again it is mostly a political issue and not a techncal or business issue.

So, yes, I think that you are being a bit naive about defense development cycles, and projecting a “declinist” POV onto an industry that has met with much success.

What matters is political commitment.

You could leave out the word “aerospace”. It’s true everywhere. CYA, suck up, don’t do anything wrong (“Take all the risks you want, provided they work out.”).

rr

2018? Ten years from initial rollout? Also:

“”"It could be 25+ more years before we get to that sort of thing as practical operational matter.”"”"

More than a quarter century?

There is something very wrong with this development and deployment timeline picture, and I don’t care if I sound “naive” about the cost and time considered “necessary” and “SOP” for such efforts.

We have lost the agility and ability to produce new vehicles in a 5-8 year timeline, and for a substantially smaller price. It is a profound loss of R&D capacity that also affects our space programs. Worse still, this also affects private efforts, whether the new private space efforts, or even aircraft manufacture. It takes way longer than it should for too much money to produce new vehicles, both military and civilian.

And, I believe we should be able to produce and thoroughly test vehicles of equal capability to those forecast, and to do it in the shorter time frames I mentioned. My scenario should not be considered unrealistic. Any excuse that “technology is more complex” is bogus.

For all our “modernity,” we have become a sluggish and bloated society, encumbered by enormous government, huge business conglomerates that imitate government in their procedures and bureaucracies, and more and more encumberment of society in general. At the same time we have devalued ingenuity in most areas of manufacture and development, and refuse to train and create a large enough and capable enough crop of new, brilliant engineers. Plenty of lawyers, marketers, and financial geeks, but too few aerospace engineers.

I’m the biggest fan USAF has, and I sure do not see UAV’s (even Army ones!)as the end of the world. That said, we still need new tankers and more F-22′s. No networked system works without [near-total] air superiority.

It’s a desert topping! It’s a floor wax! IT’s both!

Higher performance, larger drones (UAV) could have a variety of utility, and could be re-fit for a variety of missions.

In Iraq, video monitoring and mathematical pattern analysis have been very helpful in the largely successful struggle against improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Pictures of frequently traveled sites are examined regularly by both computer software and live soldiers, and if either one sees anything out of the ordinary, they can call in the bomb squad (EOD — Explosive Ordnance Disposal) to clear the way before sending out a convoy. This system has led to the death of over 3,000 terrorists caught in the act of setting up roadside bombs, or lying in wait to set them off and attack their victims with gunfire. Hundreds more terrorists were captured, and many thousands of roadside bombs were avoided or destroyed before they could go off.
And there’s more.

Analysts collect all sorts of data from the field and crunch the numbers to predict, with a high degree of accuracy, which routes are most likely to be under attack on a given day. Personnel can then be extra vigilant and take added precautions. This is the same sort of mathematics used by Wall Street “quants” to find financial patterns that they can exploit; marketers use it to decide which catalogs to stuff your mailbox with. However important those applications may be, it’s good to know that it also saves lives.

Meanwhile, in view of the recent news from Afghanistan, the headline
“Two More Years of Magic Will Do It”
at first seems sarcastic, but it’s quite serious — and clear-eyed but hopeful. The article says that while Afghanistan will never become as tranquil as a Connecticut suburb, the Taliban is vulnerable to a war of attrition, because the good guys’ firepower is so vastly superior:

[The Taliban] can still entice poor, but adventurous, country boys to come along and raise some hell. And usually get killed by smart bombs the star struck kids cannot comprehend. Meanwhile, more and more of the tribes are getting a clue and making peace with the central government. . . .The foreign generals believe it will take another year or two of smart bomb magic to kill enough thrill seeking tribesmen, to get all the tribes on board.

The Taliban continue to get slaughtered whenever they mass..