KZ,
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More importantly: Can the UAVs/UCAVs evolve enough to replace manned aircraft? If so, in which fields?
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UCAVs are superior to manned aircraft in every way.
1. They can fly farther and stay longer.
Which means that they offload tanking requirements for jets which cannot. And they allow for operational flexibility in both a conventional (Turkish/Hellenic) confrontation and an OOTW/SSC one. In the former case, you cannot 'flex' or shift forces from one region to another so long as a loitering threat is present. While nominally a strategic technique (Crome Dome), where the nations are in fact city states, it offers a reasonable ability to control a tactical frontage as well. In the latter, the effect is one of having not just 'fustest with mostest' but 'mostest for the persistentest'. So that, in conditions where THERE IS NO AIR THREAT, you can hold down political attrition due to unwarranted loss of men in patrol and sweep operations designed to keep an insurgent or cross-border force from massing or stockpiling their own logistics bases.
You can't shoot what you can't see and where aircraft are your predominant watch towers as much as bomb trucks, you have to BE THERE to do the mission.
2. They don't need training or support.
We spend upwards of eight BILLION dollars a year in simple currency training. Not UPT, not housing or familiy bene's. Just in preparing one pilot at 20hrs per month per mission, for a 5,000 dollar per flight hour airframe. Indeed, notionally, a UCAV should be able to operate (without high G, supersonic or man-rated systems redundancies, all of which add MMH:FH headaches) at about 1,200 dollars per flight hour. Which beats even the 'cheap' Gripen by a factor of 2.
3. They can share basing modes.
I cannot overemphasize how important this is. Every time you create redundant command or support chains, you add /billions/ to the costs of your warfighter-at-peace. In particularly, high level (officer promotion) career pathing designed to retain reasonable numbers of officers in competition with civil sector jobs, just goes right through the roof for what becomes a very top heavy (non operationally centric) force structure.
And yet of even more importance is the simple availability vs. ramp-umbrella nature of a hybrid vs. monolithic 'total force'. Design 12 carriers with an 800 airframe inventory deployment capability. Deploy them for 60-90 days longer than they should be. And after the second cruise, you will DESTROY (familiy lives and thus) your retention and therefore your Force Structure /because/ there are 3,000 USAF aircraft which 'never deploy' in the same grind. Now, buy 1,500 _robotic_ UCAVs which can, via the miracle of JPALS and a truly _Common_ not 'Joint' design, land anywhere at any time. Raise the paygrade of your maintainers (the 'underpaid heroes' as the pilots like to sneer) by half the costs you save in your Core Force of bye-bye pilots. And realize that even though you have half the 'total force'. Because EVERYONE goes to sea (or at least can, if that's the only force option available), you can have deployments which are either twice as long or twice as often without overstressing or exposing the forces in question.
Even, theoretically, stretching the typical naval aircraft replacement cycle out from every 10 years to every 15 or so (if not quite the USAF 20-40 year cycle).
4. Intensity vs. Cyclative Ops.
One of the many things we have discovered we are STILL vulnerable to is the raid window phenomena. Particularly in the early stages of a campaign, you must mass forces to achieve sufficient ratios of primary and support mission function to roll back and reduce a threat defense. What this means (with a given force size) is that you cannot have more jets in the air than you have in the airwing or AEF 'anyway' because the cost of a multimission platform, along with it's size and manning ratio bloats the inventory cost to the point where only limited numbers are affordable (and thus fewer targets are hit which takes longer which means that the D1/R1 scenario is not really 'safer' so much as static in the way it deals with key variables like tanking, route lanes and EA, DEAD/Escort windows etc.).
To a large extent this tactical predictability modifier is offset by one system: Cruise Missiles. Which 'get you over the hump' of massed aimpoint crippling of the IADS and C2 while allowing you to tailor specific systems to deep and/or counterforce (TBM etc.) threats which may need larger warhead counts as area or multi-point targets.
Yet what happens if every cruise missile gains landing gear? And multiple, separable, warheads? And a wing area/thrust combinant sufficient to allow for high level, transonic, ingress with 'the rest of the package'?
You get a UCAV, that's what.
As a platform which is almost certainly of a lower-LO signature fraction (no cockpit, radar hogs nose, empennage or supersonic inlets). A platform which has superior MAWS+RWR integration of defensive maneuver and EXCM bloom. A platform which MUST have similar A2G sensor capabilities (these being baseline to all airpower, even at the cheap/throwaway level of the APY-8+AAS-52 of the Predator itself superior to all 'fighter' radars in the surface mapping and target resolution role).
What further differentiates the three approaches is of course price. A Block IV is gonna run you about 730 grande these days and while that's cheap compared to the money we throw at jets, on a per sortie basis, the throwaway is too high for common tactical targets (even if you can find them). A cheap UCAV with programmed-release (prebriefed ATO target folders) is going to run you about 10-15 million. And a full-LO treated, fully-sensorized, equivalent is going to run you 25-30 million. While a typical range of fighter figures is 40 million for baseline (JAS-39), 60 million for the 'best of last generation' (F-16E) and upwards of 70-100 million for the 'next step' in manned aircraft.
When combined with typically smaller deckspot footprinting in particular, the result is 'twice as many for the same cost' _on a longer sortie evolution_. So that you don't need to worry as much about massing for the initial raid/s. And once you gain Battlespace Dominance (S2A 98%, A2A 2%), you can run four and eight ship rotating packages to provide both SENSCAP and CAS Stack as a function of rapidly reducing target forces rather than COG'ing yourself into a clockwork approach to conventional airpower strategy.
So that you have ZERO 'raid window' for a threat to maneuver in the backfield, resupplying or positioning his forces, conducting a viable (Feyadin gun truck) campaign against your CS/CSS rear areas. Or inflict desultory attrition during 'operational pauses' that require you to turn and reengage or acknowledge (protect) a statified position due to weather (dust storm), choke point (cavalry forces insufficient to secure bridges en-route for mainforce exploitation) or densely urban block forces along AAs (desultory fires from buildings that would take more soldiers to occupy than you have in your van or main columns).
NONE of this happens with a UCAV. Because no matter where it's needed, it is there, with (AAR as a DGPS assumption) with upwards of 64 bombs per formation. For 10+ hours.
The very endurance of your force then allowing _deck crews_ to offset pointy-end sortie totals per day, with low relative utilization of the full force. So that nobody gets tired and you stick with a nominal 2-4hr (going, coming or there) cyclative swing on shoot to recover.
Put simply, airpower does no good in between a target and it's basing mode. Yet (subsonically) that's where 90% of it's airborne time is spent. And during a given 'air day' ops cyle of 9-11hrs, that total (per airframe) becomes even more irrelevant. If a BOMBER is only doing good when delivering fires or recocking back at base or boat, then you had bloody well better have a lot more of them, able to stay a lot longer, in one place or the other.
5. Oil Economics.
It is likely that oil production will no longer meet demand as early as 2020-2025 period. That will be less than half the length of the F-22 and a quarter of the F-35's useful operational life. Ignoring the likelihood of switching to methane or hydrogen, any jet which has twice the endurance, 1/10th the required training time on roughly two thirds the fuel (12,000lbs on an A-45 vs. about 18,900 on a JSF) is a 'good thang'. Similar comments apply to oil powered carriers which need oil powered escorts. If you can only afford two and only one is at sea at any moment, it needs to pack one heckuva wallop in it's airwing.
6. Threat.
There is no doubt in my mind that by no later than 2015, (the JSF's IOC is around 2012-13) that DEWS or Directed Energy Weapons Systems will be the principal S2A threat on the planet. No aimpoint errors. No time for evasion. No huge cost differentials (an S-300V costs more than the typical ATBM it's designed to intercept). Just a blink of an eye. And your body parts are flying formation with the atomized fuel fireball that was your aircraft. For those states which cannot afford to individually develop DEWS baselines (optics, atmospheric modeling, power chain chemistry or electrics) the alternative will be hunting-weapons that can be fired from catapults on the back of a truck, fly 200-500nm downrange and loiter for an hour or two. And then come home to a pararecovery if they encounter nothing. For somewhere between a conventional missile (350 grande for an AMRAAM) and a CM. To be reused. Something like the AQM-37 could theoretically make every manned fighter completely obsolescent using nothing more than pack-lemming firepower rules.
Lastly, the true delineator of target vulnerability is the effort needed to mass forces against it. For a carrier, that means getting something out far enough into-blue to make the ASST phase worthwhile (no shootdowns) and then /another/ delay for the followon fires to transit from whatever platform or basing mode they use. If we see every nation having /some/ access to overhead (in a fashion that the U.S. cannot politically deny access to) the targeting problem becomes essentially 'real time or several billion dollars to pay for the Sea Lite ruptured bird'. While the obvious solution to the transit phase delay of the kill mechanism is to remove the bus platform altogether. And simply put RADAC or similar guidance on every BM you have, sufficient to bus a bunch of rod-from-god killers out over fuel and munition and airframe packed decks and ramps. There is no raid window or opportunity for deceptive maneuever when the threat is transiting at Mach 10-12. Which is ironic given that, in seeking to go deeper and deeper in attacking 'high value' (leveraging) enemy strategic targets, we have in fact merely assured that our own systems are clusted in such HDLD groups as to be the ultimate point-target of their own, at ONE point in space time where they sit, 50-70% of the day.
ARGUMENT:
Airpower will never cease to exist. There are simply too many instances where it's ability to 'get lucky' and turn the course of the war by delinearizing a campaign is too advantageous to ignore or yield. But what we have to acknowledge that, short of deflector shields or 'perfect' optical LO, it's dominant tier high point as the keystone of a modern warfighter has long gone and thus the opportunity for 'clean wars' may have or be in the process of ending as well.
At which point you need to reenvision what war itself is for. With Nuremburg, we have effectively stated that wars for national gain are immoral acts of crime. This means that the amalgamation of strategic, cultural and geo resources under one flat is no longer 'acceptable behavior'.
At the same time, the urbanization of large segments of even nominally third world nations means that, despite our nominally /huge/ superiorities in conventional and nuclear capabilities; we may no longer be able to deal with a terrorist threat by simply levelling their hovels around their ears.
If you cannot chase down UBL with an existing warfighter system. And the perilous state of (oil as transport, industrial power and material resource, not unlike the English Oak problem of the middle ages) resource exploitation vs. useful contribution to the World Market is such that you may not be able to /afford/ the GDP percentages of a larger-than-life manned 'standing' force structure.
It may well be wiser to invest in security forces that work within the lines of an UN/Interpol-With-Teeth supporting mission for _law enforcement_.
And simply declare ALL war to be a crime against humanity with the uniformed soldiery, their political leadership and all manufacturers subject to trial and death penalty for exporting the act itself or the means outside national borders.
In this too the UCAV has a definite role to play.
Because if every nation cannot engage in war /at all/ without excoriation by the entire world community. And if, further, there is no 'hero complex' inherent to identifying with the military killer as someone who has special rights and priveleges the average man does not. And lastly, if the act of defiantly standing against an outside force simply because it is alien comes down to a man vs. silicon chip (The one irreplaceable. The other never alive to count coup over) engagement _as a functionally superior killer_ (the Paul Bunyon paradigm).
Then, perhaps, we can truly begin to be forced to build the lifestyles we want without the waste of 'security' assured by organized conflict.
CONCLUSION:
The latter being the most dangerous and ultimately, sad, element of our enduring love of airpower as a knight-mythos. Because we are now rich enough that, if we can learn to reduce our population to a stable level of 500 million-1 billion, we HAVE the economic mass and technologic superiority to give everyone exactly what they want.
The sole inhibitor to this process being that we are instinctually (millions of years) trained to realize that it is easier to take than to build. And so have a lust for the wildness of chaotic deconstruction as a means to free up base environmental /access/ to resources whose sum value (finally) is no longer worth as much as the social system which we must rebuild after each cycle of obliteration.
If war is a hurricane of mass annihilation.
Beware the one man that wants to either sew or reap Katrina, for profit or cause. Far better to single him out and hunt him down like a rabid criminal than give not just him but all his friends and cohorts the benefit of 'rules of war' entitlement.
Far harder for a nation to be a member of the UN and /disallow/ the pursuit of such a criminal by small groups of law enforcement legally entitled to be within their borders.
Far easier to support that One Ranger/Mounty system with UCAVs that are always overhead. And don't need to fear DEWS or Hunting Weapons. Because those are never developed as man portable S2A systems to threaten the most effective form of airpower we will likely ever know.
KPl.
