Friday, April 27, 2007
Turf
Richard Fernandez of The Belmont Club writes about a turf battle erupting between the various services over the control of aerial drones (click through for the links):
A high stakes battle in the skies between USAF and the other services for control of unmanned aerial vehicles is in full swing. Former Spook looks at the Air Force's claim to be the "executive agent" for all "medium- and high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles across the U.S. military." RofaSix smells a plot. Congress has entered the debate to fight Homeland Security's corner. Defense Industry Daily notes that the clash is partly cultural. The Air Force insists that all UAV operators, even if they are sitting at video terminals, must be rated pilots but the Army says this nonsense, pointing out that the best Army UAV operator in Iraq was trained as a cook.
On the basis of exactly one data point, I think the Army is right. Four years ago our au pair was a young Canadian woman. Her boyfriend Scott was that rarest of men, an active duty Canadian soldier. His "trade" (as they call it in his army) was the artillery, but he was being trained to operate UAVs in preparation for his looming deployment to Afghanistan. I asked Scott how difficult it was to learn, and he said that the Canadians, at least, had an incentive system that focused the mind: If you lost a drone, you had to go with the extraction team to retrieve it.
The last thing we need is featherbedding in the middle of a war.
1 Comments:
By 
Purple Avenger, at
Fri Apr 27, 11:18:00 PM:
Thousands of people successfully fly R/C planes without military pilot training.
A large chunk of pilot training is useless for a UAV operator - that being emergency procedures.
