Russia and China haven't stood still over the past 15 years while we've been otherwise engaged. What we've done with drones has been excellent, but you're not going to be loitering for hours over enemy airspace in a "modern war" against even a close peer adversary.
Drones have a part to play in modern warfare - and some of the smaller man portable versions are going to be revolutionary. But the ones capable of playing in the big leagues where you'd quite like them to come back are just as expensive as manned aircraft.
Yes, the US relies on expensive technology in either drones or manned aircraft. What they are loosing is the ability to have pilots get close to the enemy and actually utilise their eyes.
Has the effectiveness of CAS aircraft gone down with the introduction of these types of systems?
As far as guided weapons go, the GPS guided bombs are the preferred CAS solution. Current laser designators compute the map coordinates of target locations. These are then uploaded to the aircraft, and then to the weapons. Shortly thereafter the weapons land within a couple of meters of the designated spot. The "eyes on the target" are the eyes of the ground troops, who have the greatest interest in eliminating said target.
The use of GPS guided bombs means that CAS aircraft can loiter at fairly high altitudes (> 5000 ft), and drop munitions as needed. This eliminates the need for titanium bathtubs and the like.
The cannon on the Apache is secondary, the Hellfire II system is the primary weapon of the Apache Longbow.
> As far as guided weapons go, the GPS guided bombs are the preferred CAS solution.
I would say that any fire and forget system is preferred, which includes smart bombs but also the Hellfire II system utilized by Apache Longbows and drones.
> The use of GPS guided bombs means that CAS aircraft can loiter at fairly high altitudes (> 5000 ft)
I'm not disagreeing with you but the Hellfire II system is fire-and-forget, has an 8km range, and is utilized heavily on drone platforms operating at high altitudes.
The Su-25 is actually deploy as part of Russian Army regiments for that exact purpose. If you're not familiar with the Su-25, it is the Russian analog to the A-10 Warthog. Both aircraft fulfill the Close Air Support (CAS) role for ground troops and are designed to loiter in enemy airspace for hours. The Su-25 was used in Chechnya, Georgia, Northern Iraq, and Syria to provide CAS to group troops.
CAS is inherently dangerous to pilots as is evident by the fact that both the Su-25 and the A-10 have titanium bathtubs that the pilots sit in to protect them. The United States has been successful in using Drones in the CAS role in order to save lives. The cost of a drone is mostly irrelevant until it exceeds that of a conventional aircraft in the same role. As long as there is at least a cost and performance parity, the drone will win out because it doesn't put a pilot in danger.
So I'm not really sure what you're saying but it seems wrong.
They'll remove entire map grid squares with artillery. The Russian army has always been an artillery force that happens to also have lots of tanks, planes and infantry.
Combine that with the disparity in willingness to take casualties and you can see why perhaps the West isn't that interested in risking a conflict with Russia or China over regional aggression. The really interesting part will come if Putin decides to test NATO over a small Baltic member state...
unmanned drones are expensive because the technology to develop a good one takes forever. R&D is expensive (naturally, and commercially). So both sides have pros and cons. Except, to be real fair, if you can mass produce unmanned military drones at an affordable cost, unmanned drones are the superiors.
I'm not sure what you're driving at. I'm assuming by your "attacking and defending" remark that you're referring to fighter aircraft, there are not currently drones to fulfill the roles of a typical fighter aircraft. Like any aircraft, drones are best suited for a particular role.
Drones are quickly replacing aircraft like the A-10 because the primary threat to these aircraft comes from ground fire, drones however operate out of visual range.
Russia is not using aircraft in Ukraine because regular Russian military is not "technically" there. It's kinda hard to deny your presence if your planes are bombing the country. Most of Ukraine's meager air fleet was grounded in the beginning of conflict so that whole thing turned into artillery war.
On another hand take a look at Syria. Pretty much everything Russia does there is air support.
With modern drones, we're not losing crews anymore, just hardware. So we could build enough of them to be overwhelming against any opposing force. (Except, perhaps, an even larger swarm of enemy drones.)
https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/cheap-drones/
How many drones would it take to get $500 billion into the bank accounts of defense contractors?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_CF-105_Arrow
Many Canadian aerospace engineers went to work for NASA on the Apollo program.
Still probably a good idea for carriers to have a mix of manned and unmanned aircraft.
Hmmm...this analogy fell apart.
#1 rule of war. Never take to war what you can't afford to lose.
It was noted the navy has the same issue. If we lose an aircraft carrier we lost the war economically. At that point its cheaper to just give up.
Whether F-35 should be that fighter is another question, there is a lot of disagreement on that one among people far more qualified than me, so I have no opinion there.
It's not a bad example actually -- US economy and military spending are so far ahead of competition, that if we can keep $$ losses under ~1 to 5 (their 1 to our 5, that is), and probably much more than that if you account for production capabilities and strength of the economy, that any opponent would be economically devastated. WW2 and the cold war demonstrated that quite well: Soviet costs were technically lower in absolute terms, but in relation to the size of the economy they were absolutely destructive.
Your Soviet analogy makes sense, even though their mistake was building it (and not losing it - I don't know about great losses of the Soviets after 45)
Also, IANA expert but I think carriers today only make sense against pre-missile and pre-jet militaries. IMO a carrier can only operate under air superiority and effective missile defense one of which probably even small countries can contest these days.
One problem with the missile strategy (which is the one Soviets tried) is that even if you might be able to cost-effectively attack a carrier group with missile cruisers, they are pretty much useless for anything else.
The Falklands war suggests otherwise. The Argentines had the most advanced weapons the French would sell them.
That's not the Navy's approach. The general thinking is that carriers are so valuable, their crews so difficult to rescue, not to mention their nuclear payload, that the loss of a carrier in heated combat will likely precipitate a full nuclear exchange. See TheSumOfAllFears for some of that scenario. The economics are beside the point.