Hacker News Reader

Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

It seems logical to me that this would have occurred long ago....I'm sort of stunned that it's just happening now. There is simply no reason to have humans in fighter planes or bombers these days, and retrofitting the old equipment should be relatively inexpensive. We should be retrofitting tanks and helicopters for this as well.

View on HN

The reason humans should be involved directly in war, and be put at risk, its to make it harder for leaders to declare war in the first place. If they know their own people might come back in body bags or get captured, they might think twice. Its a harder decision. If the only loss is hardware and foreigners, the decision declare war is a lot easier. These drones and remote control hardware, war toys of a military of cowards, used to automatically slaughter less advanced population, with out any self risk. If there is not risk, the military are no longer noble and can no longer be lauded for this bravery. They become a push button murder machine. The ultimate politicians toy.

IMO, war is nowhere near as clinical as it would need to be for remote controlled tanks, helicopters and other vehicles to be effective.

I've just finished reading Generation Kill for the second time - I highly recommend it for an idea of what things are actually like.

Communications jamming maybe? If a remote pilot could get disconnected, having a local pilot would be more reliable.

I think it's kind of useless even today without the controller very close by - flying a supersonic jet capable of 9G maneuvers remotely is way harder than a slow drone.

The only way to do it well right now would be to have one human piloted jet (preferably with 2 pilots) as the wing leader and the autopilot ones following it and executing commands issued by those pilots.

As mentioned above, these aircraft are actually less stable at slower speeds, and tend towards stable at higher speeds, so flying a jet capable of great speeds is much easier at those speeds as opposed to reduced speeds. With beyond-line-of-sight secure datalinks, there is really no reason to having manned aircraft in the vicinity. Live-fire exercises with modified, unmanned aircraft (which are not uncommon at present) as targets are not controlled from manned aircraft, but from the ground, and not necessarily from nearby.

It has been occurring for a long time. F-4s have been in use as remote controlled target drones for live fire exercises for quite a while.

What good is a remote control tank if you throw a bucket of paint over its cameras. Pretty cheap way to render it useless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com