Hacker News Reader

Comment by 55acdda48ab5 | Hacker News Reader

> the A-10 fleet as ground-piloted drones.

This is just a super expensive and failure prone way to do what 100 year old artillery technology does.

Site the enemy, call in artillery fire.

Drone techno fetishism is a big problem right now. Most of this stuff does not work nearly as well as people are pretending it does.

View on HN

Artillery (while often sufficient) is not as accurate as someone hovering/diving from directly overhead. This is why artillery often employs aerial spotters.

http://www.c4isrnet.com/story/military-tech/uas/2016/04/08/a...

Artillery has a range measured in the tens of miles (discounting MLRS and ATACMS). Drones have a range measured in the hundreds of miles.

Yes, artillery has short range, if you excludelong-range artillery.

But I'm not sure what kind of point you can reasonably rest on that.

I don't know why you would discount ATACMS. Technically that's artillery, and end-to-end it's cheaper than aircraft.

While I don't have number in front of me, my instinct is that ATACMS is more expensive and less flexible on a per target basis than aerial bombardment using an A-10.

It's not more expensive when you consider the entire system: training, aircraft maintenance, air traffic control, time-on-station, wear and tear on the airframe, top cover in contested airspaces, etc. Plus the occasional loss.

During peace time an ATACMS sits in its sealed container doing nothing and requiring no maintenance, whereas pilots require constant training.

Maybe if we had a WW II style conflict where you were doing three or four productive sorties a day, but I can't imagine we'll see a conflict like that again

Even if so, it might still be cheaper to keep units equipped, trained, and operational with it between actual combat missions, which might make it more cost effective on a long-term analysis. Combat aircraft are expensive even when they aren't fighting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com