Angry Planet - Drones of war: How smart will they get?

Episode Date: August 4, 2015

Drones linger over battlefields all over the world, and over places that don’t realize that they’re battlefields until the Hellfire missiles strike.  Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. They're huge rates of PTSD in the drone community and other things, because, I mean, these guys are just staring at people all day long, and then every so often they have to blow them up.

This week on War College, I'm joined by Matthew Galt and Joe Trevithic to talk about drones. They may be the current state of the art of war, but they certainly aren't without technological or human problems. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. So today we're actually talking about drones. and specifically military drones. We'd previously talked about the F-35 fighter jet and various problems that had come up with that.

And that led to a conversation, okay, so if this is a really problem, jet, what comes next? And one suggestion was it could be, you know, drones will replace them entirely. Joe, could you just sort of give us a rough idea of what missions drones carry out now? Sort of almost anything you can imagine is at least on the docket for what drones will be able to take care of in the near future. But right now it's primarily surveillance, both just observing the battlefield and more what you would consider to be the job of traditional spy planes, you know, flying at high altitudes near or above, you know, enemy countries or enemy forces or something like that, as well as a number of armed. drones carry out very limited strikes. It's primarily used for attacking insurgents and other

sort of lower grade military forces. You know, not necessarily what you consider to be fighting, you know, big, you know, conventional wars. Okay, so basically they carry, the ones that are armed carry one or two missiles, something like that? The predator that many people are familiar with, you know, the first of these really big, you know, in terms of big time armed drones, that carried two Hellfire missiles. The larger Reaper drones, which came after, another product of the same manufacturer, General Atomics, they can carry four Hellfire missiles or four laser-guided bombs, you know, sort of give you different options.

There's two other variants. There's a Grey Eagle that also carries four Hellfires and a something called a Fire Scout, which you don't really see a lot of, that kind of, kind of, looks like a helicopter that can also carry two hellfires and can be equipped with guns or rockets instead. And they're used, these drones and their missiles are used primarily against targets on the ground. Is that right? Yeah, this is for ground attacks.

The Navy is working on advanced drones that may be able to take the role of a fighter jet and do dog fighting in the future. Other countries are also claiming that they're working. on this, but so far no one has put into service a drone that really matches up with a fighter jet. But it's definitely something that people are actively working on, and I think it's easily something that I'll see in my lifetime. I just grew up around model airplanes, and including model airplanes that, you know, you had a remote control, and you could make them dive and all sorts of stuff.

I'm very fond of crashing mine. So, anyway, really, what's the... difference between a drone and a model airplane other than the fact that mine didn't carry hell-fire missiles? Not a lot, actually. In a very basic way, the drones we have today are just kind of an extension of those model airplanes you had as a kid. In fact, in World War II, Germany had radio-controlled flying bombs that it used against the

allies. It was kind of the birth of what we would think of now as drones. what's changed dramatically is technology. So, but does that mean that there's actually people controlling these drones? I mean, I guess I know the answer to that is yes, but I mean, so they're not completely automated, right? I mean, there's, if I had a remote control, there are people operating the controls now, right? Yeah, I mean, I was just going to, I mean, that's more or less the plan is that basically, you know, the Pentagon especially likes to point out that with ground attacks via drone,

you know, there's always somebody behind the trigger, so to speak. There is, you know, like any airplane, there is the, you know, capability for an autopilot. You know, they can fly pre-programmed routes. You know, the pilot doesn't always have to be directly, you know, flying the drone, so to speak. But that's sort of an existing level of automation. And there are plans for much more serious automation, which could allow drones, and again in the near future to take on an automated mission and maybe even take on an automated strike. The Navy, for instance, was testing out a drone called the X-47B,

which looks like a sort of miniature flying wing, one of these stealth flying wings. And it was basically taking off and landing on aircraft carriers on its own authority. It actually aborted one landing attempt on its own authority when it thought, you know, the computer onboard thought that it was not going to work, not going to land successfully. It aborted that landing. And then even more recently, they had it link up with an aerial refueling tanker and both just link up with the tanker and then eventually take on fuel and refuel in midair, all

autonomously. So we are moving towards automation. That's where these are going. But right now, like you said, Jason, yeah, there are people back home in boxes, literally steel boxes, out in the middle of the desert that are sitting and controlling, um, controlling these drones. And it's actually one of the big- You mean like trailers, hold on, you mean like a trailer, uh, not like as a- Like a shipping container. They look like shipping containers. Okay, okay, all right, I just, I was just thinking of, okay, I just was thinking about

people being stuck in little metal boxes like in a prison. I think if you, well, if you talked to some of the drone pilots, um, they may say that, in fact, they felt like they were inside of. a prison. Getting enough pilots for the drones is actually one of the big problems with this program.

Air Force pilots especially do not like doing it. And this is something that Joe has researched extensively. Yeah, the morale issue, especially in the Air Force drone community, is still in the tank. Most

recently, the Air Force actually announced that it was going to be offering re-enlistment bonuses up to $15,000 to encourage people to stay in the drone field. But that's really just the latest iteration of all of this. These guys are working, you know, 8 plus hour, 12 plus hour shifts in a box. they were at least initially almost entirely basically stolen from jobs where they would have been flying fighter jets like real real airplanes and flying a fighter jet is not only something

that requires a lot of training and time on your part but it's also just it's a really prestige position and so I mean these guys were taken out of that role and put into this really unglamorous and as far as they were concerned a largely undignified role and there was at least one instance in the mid-2000s where they actually booed one of their commanders during a briefing when he showed up to talk with them. And they booed him when he came into the room. And it's, you kind of think of it

from their perspective. These are guys that were the best of the best. It's not easy to get through flight school. Like Joe said, it's a prestige position to be able to fly a jet in the American military. And they go through all of their long training process and they figure out

how to fly a jet and they spend their man at you know they spend their time and training simulations and then they find out okay we need you to sit in this metal box outside of Las Vegas

and pilot a drone that's half a world away and just stay on a computer screen and work a joystick and then you'll go home to your wife and kids and everything you know and it just it's not

it's there's a disconnect there, and a lot of these guys have had problems adjusting to that. Well, in a disconnect also between what they thought they would be doing and what they end up doing, oddly enough, a lot of research has shown that there isn't a disconnect between their distance from the battlefield and the kind of issues that they're handling. I mean, there's a huge rates of PTSD in the drone community and other things, because, I mean, these guys are just staring at people all day long, and then every so often they have to blow the He's right. The Air Force and other people have studied this and found that drone pilots have the

exact same PTSD rates as pilots in so-called active combat. Wow. So, okay, you're saying that they're basically watching people all day and then eventually perhaps deciding to take a shot. How well can they see the people that they're looking at all day. I mean, because what we see, the footage that's released is pretty grainy and often black and white, or maybe it's always black and white. Is that also what the... The black and white is generally the default still in terms of, you know, it's either black hot or white hot, where the system can either interpret the heat signatures as one or the other color, and it's an easy way just of creating that contrast. The fidelity you'd probably be saying, I mean, I don't know personally, but I imagine the fidelity you would actually be seeing in front of the screen would be much higher than the video that is released.

But from what you see in the kind of requirements they put out, that fidelity, the level of clarity is still basically being able to identify that it is a person, but you're not, you know, you're not doing any kind of facial recognition or anything on them. You don't know who it is necessarily. you know they're people. You may be able to see weapons or something, but you're, you know, you still have to make those decisions based on what,

what's limited, you know, what you can see. And it's also important, I think, to note that the cameras are getting better. The, the new hotness that's coming out

is a gigapixel camera that's going to be on the Reapers. It's called, and this is real, the Gorgon Stare. Wow. It's actually the second generation of that system.

Oh, nice. They're saying that's going to be able to watch 11 square miles at what time. And it's a whole collection of campers, basically. And they were having real problems with this when the first generation of the system, because of exactly what we're talking about, is that there was no good way to basically transfer all that information across the kind of satellite links they had. And there was no necessarily very good way for people to actually be able to be watching it all at the same time. You know, it was collecting all this information. but you weren't necessarily getting it in real time because there were so much of it,

and people didn't know what to do with it. Wow. So, but even with all that, so you still, I guess this is almost a side note, but, I mean, in order to be sure who people are shooting at, and we know that there's been plenty of collateral damage over the years, I probably shouldn't use that term, but there have been a lot of civilians where people who are not militants who have been killed in strikes. So they're relying on other forms of intelligence.

Is that right in order to pick the village or the convoy or whatever that they're striking? There's supposed to be two kinds of, you know, there are two sort of broad categories of strikes. And one is where there's some person on the ground who is coordinating the attack. Either a military, these so-called joint tactical air controllers, the guys who are actually calling in the strike and they're talking back and forth, often sort of through three different, you know, levels of command to get to the person who's actually behind the controls. But that actually happens with regular planes too. And there's, you know, there's either someone like that coordinating the strike on the ground. There's some military unit on the ground who's coordinating

the strike, some level of coordination on the ground. And in the past, you then also, because of this difficulty, you had what they called signature. strikes. And there was basically a photo interpretation key, more or less. In imagery interpretation, when military analysts look at a satellite image, for instance, there's a key of the kind of things you expect to see, and people are trained for this, and you look at, you know, basically if I see this kind of these number of buildings, it's this kind of facility, or if I see this collection of vehicles, it's this kind of unit. And they applied the same methodology to, basically, if there was 10 guys around an SUV or there were too many SUVs outside someone's house one night,

that that was a terrorist meeting. You know, that there was a key, basically, of what made a terrorist sell. And this is how actually, it probably in no small part how you got instances like the attack on the wedding in Yemen because there were a lot of SUVs. And that was probably exactly the same. same key that somebody saw was like there was a bunch of people and a lot of vehicles. And that's not something you see every day. And generally that's indicative of somebody with a lot of money or something. And it turned out that it was probably, you know, because they had turned out all their money for the wedding. So I have a question, Joe, then. Does that mean, that gives me a question about who the order to strike comes from. Because the way you're making it sound now to me is that

there's this checklist, and if a situation that American drones are observing meets the criteria that's on this checklist, you go ahead and strike. Is there somebody at some point in that chain? Is there a human being that comes in and says yes, no? They're supposed to be, you know, this is one of the big issues is that the U.S. government has released very little information and even less information willingly about how drone strikes of any kind are carried out

sort of in this covert side. And this is largely on the more covert side. You know, this drone strikes run by the Central Intelligence Agency rather than day-to-day military drone strikes that basically fill in for what you'd expect for, you know, regular military aircraft. These kind of, you know, targeted strikes. against potential terrorists and the like.

And the government basically says that there are criteria and says that there are people who are supposed to be involved in the process who are sort of double and triple checking and that there's some sort of final say and somebody gets a final say. But of course they're not going to tell you what those criteria are because, you know, they will claim national security and say basically if we tell you what the criteria are, then terrorists won't do that. and they also won't tell you who's in charge of making those final calls, I'm sure, you know, to protect their privacy. You know, and so people have struggled to get even just the legal justification for these drone strikes at all, just at the very most basic level, let alone the actual policies that drive how the each individual strike is carried out.

You know, there's just a lot of, there's a lot of information that we don't. don't have. You know, I mean, and anybody who says it sort of, you know, they either have very good trusted sources who are telling them, or they're going off like what I'm doing and basically saying, this is what we can see, you know, and this is what we've been told in the vagaries of the official statements. Well, so let's just take it from, I mean, it's going from what we don't know, which is exactly how, I mean, these targeted killings are carried out to, just was wondering what other uses drones are put to right now. We talked about, I mean, they're used during battle at some point, are they?

Yeah. Yeah. They're sort of, I'm sure the, you know, the buzzword would be integrated into everything. They, you know, they do perform strikes like a, you know, like normal tactical aircraft. they perform various levels of surveillance. And this is something actually that should be mentioned is that when we talk about drones, you know, what most people think of are like the predators and the reapers, these sort of relatively large, you know, military looking like drones.

But, I mean, the term, this generic term covers everything from the kind of quadcopters you can buy off of eBay to things that are even larger than the predators and reapers. And so, I mean, it's a really broad swath of types of vehicles, you know, and they're not even all, they don't even all look like planes necessary. Some of them look like helicopters or not like anything at all, or they're blimps, or there are something else. So they're all sorts of different things. Most of it is most drones, I think, are surveillance, right? Like, I think, the overwhelming use for drones by most countries is surveillance. because you can have drones in the air 24 hours a day.

If you've got enough drones, you can have drones above the target for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, watching and waiting. Whereas with pilots that are on surveillance, you have to, like, a pilot can't be in the air forever. They have to come down at some point. And it's more expensive to keep them up there. When a drone shift changes off, I mean, basically the thing can still be in the air and you just have somebody come into the box, you know, and the handoff is instantaneous.

And, you know, what Matt's talking about is exactly right in that you never actually hear the Air Force talk about how many drones they have. They don't talk about how many reapers or predators they have. They talk about what are called combat air patrols. And that's four drones, and it's treated as a single entity because basically that number is what was decided to be the sweet spot in that basically that is the number of drones you need to keep basically one, drone over the target 24-7, you know, seven days, you know, all week long, and also account for

one of them possibly being broken or some other issue. And that's, that's the number you need. And so when they talk about, you know, the number of, when you see these number of so-called caps, that's what they're talking about. They're talking about these four drone groupings that basically allow them to, you know, keep a target under near constant surveillance. Wow, so how long can a drone actually, I mean, an observation of a drone, I don't know whether be it a predator or a global hawk or anything else. I mean, how long do these things actually stay in the air?

And you mentioned the one that could actually be that refueled itself in flight? Is that something that most of them can do? No, no. The refueling capability is new. there was a rumor that the Air Force had modified a number of their super secret RQ-170 stealth drones to be able to refuel in flight. There were some pictures that circulated.

That's uncorroborated, but well within the realm of feasibility, especially since we've seen the Navy do it on their end. And the Navy's refueling system, which involves a dangling hose and a basket, where the drone has to basically meet up with the basket and place the refueling probe into the basket

is a much more complicated procedure than a drone would have to do with an Air Force-style boom refueling mechanism where basically all the drone would have to do would be to stay at one altitude and one position and the boom operator on the tanker could basically point the boom into the drone. It would be a much simpler procedure.

and we already know the complicated procedure can be done. So it's definitely not out of the realm of reason. And it's about, I think right now, it's 42 hours that the fanciest reapers can go without needing refueling. So almost two days of constant flight. And what's Global Hawk's range? Because Global Hawk, the other thing is that these drones, to keep that loiter time, it's usually over shorter distances. but Global Hawk does plus 12 hours sorties a lot, and it's usually over thousands of miles.

Like where you need to base Global Hawks to have them spying on areas, I mean, they don't need to be anywhere near where they're going, and they fly at extremely high altitudes. You know, they have these amazingly long, slender wings. Basically, it is an unmanned equivalent of the U-2 spy plane, which was also basically just a power glider able to basically be very efficient at high altitudes and have really good range

and be really efficient at those ranges. So, I mean, they can be anywhere you need them to be, you know, often. And it's only getting better. It's only, you know, one of these things is that it's only getting better. The other thing I'd like to point out, too, is that they're cheap. They're cheap relative to a lot of the other methods we use to accomplish spying,

and targeted killings. You know, we've been talking a lot about the F-35. We don't really know what the unit cost is, depending on the variance somewhere between $150 million and $350 million, depending on which specific type. And that's the new hotness, the new jet. A predator is $4 million. A Reaper, a little bit fancier, is $17 million.

That's just the equipment, too. Yeah. I mean, that doesn't take any account. out the cost it takes to train the pilots or maintaining any of the infrastructure. I mean, I don't know if you've seen any of these satellite imageries of, you know, the quote unquote drone bases we have around the world, but they are Spartan. You know, they're usually like a hangar and a runway. And because unlike having to have all the people there to fly jets and then maintain that

and then feed the people who fly jets and provide all the other services, etc. I mean, you just, you have a half dozen guys, you have a dozen guys, you have something like that, you know, and they're just making sure the drones work, and then they get them up into the air, and then they pass control via a satellite off to a guy in the box in the United States. It's overwhelmingly cheaper to have a drone force than it is to have, you know, have jets in the air. So, all right, so what would be the argument be at this point for, jets over drones. I mean, that's probably, maybe that's too simplistic, but I, let's see, jets are faster?

Is that right? Right now anyways. But that's not again, that's not a static thing. Right. Okay. So, yeah, so what do you see as the key advantage at this point? I think at least for the foreseeable future,

a person is always going to have better situational awareness than a drone. that's that's one of the reasons why you still have manned spy planes even in the U.S. Air Force service and they keep debating about how many of them they're going to keep combined, you know, compared to how many drones and the rest of it. Again, as things improve, that that could easily change, but at least right now, that's definitely, you know, there are people bring advantages to the table that you can't right now replicate. In speaking to that, Joe, is there, there.

There's lag time between the drone physically seeing the image and it getting back to the pilot, correct? I mean, it's not much, but there is a little bit of lag time. Yeah, and that's always improving, too, and that's a matter of, you know, whenever you might hear the Air Force talking about the need to improve satellite bandwidth. And that's sort of the thing is that, you know, and that's, Matt was talking about this. I mean, you know, the Army had its first surveillance drone in the 50s, but it was basically a, a hobbyist's model plane. You know, it had been designed as a target for anti-aircraft gunners initially.

And then they had put a camera on it, put a regular film camera on it. And it had no range and had to be flown by radio control by guys who could physically see where it was going or fly a pre-programmed route. And then it would basically come and crash

and then they would pick it up and then they would get the film developed. You know, and so, you know, even when you talk about, when you got TV cameras onto things, transmitting that television feed thousands of miles with any speed and at any fidelity,

I mean, that took forever. And, you know, we're starting to finally see that that's a thing that can happen, that kind of streaming feed, and it still requires a ton of bandwidth. And so, you know, that's going to be a thing, again, that's also going to need to improve. They're going to need to basically,

they'll probably be a whole new, generation of satellites to go along with the next generation of drones to handle this bandwidth, or there will be a, you know, the receivers on the ground. You know, something like that will have to handle the immense amount of information that's going back and forth. And that's sometimes, you know, a problem with a drone, you know, that causes drone crashes. You know, if the satellite gives out, the drones often have a pre-programmed sort of emergency protocol, but depending on where it is, that can run out of fuel. There might just be a mountain in the way. All sorts of things can happen.

So that actually leaves your force, if you're really dependent on drones, vulnerable to anyone who can take out your satellites, too. Right? That's a concern. There is a whole sort of cyber war concern, you know, about what would happen for sure. And that speaks to another advantage of always still having that cachet of human pilots at the ready. You know, because that is a really strong concern that you, there are a couple things that, can get knocked out that will destroy the infrastructure

of the drone system. And satellites is one of them. You know, and a person who is getting conflicting or incorrect orders can challenge that or at least be guaranteed to think about it a little bit more. But a drone

that gets, its orders are its orders. It's just going to do it. So, you know, another, which is actually another reason for a greater autonomy, actually. A lot of people say, greater autonomy, you know, it's sort of the Terminator movie is waiting to happen, but there is this hope that

with greater autonomy, basically it prevents the drones from being as susceptible to foul play, because they know what their mission is from the start and they just do it, rather than needing sort of constant commands. That sounds like a really, really

scary way in order to protect us from a security flaw. But in the In a way, it's something that we've been working on for years now. The F-105 Thunder Chief, the sort of pride of the Cold War Air Force, this heavy fighter-bomber thing that could carry nuclear weapons and the rest of it. Because it was designed to basically fly nuclear weapons to the target, it had a radar-assisted

bombing computer inside of it that controlled more or less everything but landing and takeoff. once the pilot took off, he put in the coordinates of where he was going into the computer, and because it was a nuclear bomb, it didn't need to be super accurate. And it basically flew him to the target. It released the bomb. It turned the plane around, and it flew him back. And that, I mean, that's that's 1950s technology. And so, I mean, that was a way of automating the process so that the pilot could just keep an eye out for enemy fighters or something.

You know, if something happened, you had the pilot in the plane to, you know, save the day or what have you, but the process was automated. And this actually was a thing in Vietnam, that there were radar-controlled carpet bombing strikes in places like Laos and in South Vietnam where this radar called Combat SkySpot would direct B-52 bombers basically to the box. And they would just arrive and drop all their bombs and then fly home. And no one was ever really paying attention to what was bulls. low. There wasn't, you know, the bomb damage assessment afterwards was supposed to figure out whether you would actually hit anything. But I mean, it was all, the process was essentially automated. There were people behind the controls of the plane, but the process was automated. Yeah, I mean, this stuff is coming. Like, it's going, it's all going to happen despite people's attempts to stop it. We're just going to be more drones. This, we are just seeing, we are at the beginning of something. Um, uh, and it kind of, it's, it's interesting. Because it's not only the beginning of robot wars, essentially, but the end of an era, I think, with the Air Force's fighter pilots. Yeah, it's going to be a real existential crisis. And we're seeing that already. We're seeing that with the low morale on the drone force and the difficulty they have keeping these guys on the job. And it won't be overnight.

The Air Force is already becoming very fond of, they already don't want you calling them drones. They want you calling them remotely piloted aircraft because that again reinforces that there's an operator involved, highlights the human element. But they're also becoming very fond of so-called pilot-optional ideas, and that future planes will be pilot optional. And the idea would be, of course, that, well, you could keep pilots, you know, in your ranks and they would do piloty things. But if a war broke out and it was too dangerous, well, the plane could fly itself. and you wouldn't really need them. You know, and that's probably going to be a transition that you'll start seeing, and, you know, maybe eventually the Air Force will have the full existential crisis

with pilots not necessarily flying in combat, you know, flying on training missions and keeping up their proficiency, but never actually flying in combat. But that's still years away, and I'm sure no one in the Air Force wants to think about them. Okay. All right. Well, thanks very much. That's an incredible amount. to digest and it's hard to imagine the world without our you know fighter pilots in the skies but anyway thanks once again as always whenever we do this podcast I come go home a little bit more scared than when we started it so that's what we're here for all right well thanks guys we'll

talk soon next time on war college after a decade of double-digit growth in its military spending. China is now the dominant power, regional power, in the Western Pacific.