5 thoughts on “Navy Leadership Successfully Defends Itself Against Its Greatest Threat”
Those killer drone prototypes—Boeing’s X-45 and Northrop’s X-47—both sported a single engine and a futuristic diamond-shaped wing around 40 feet in span. And they surprised their developers in early tests. Guided by a combination of human controllers and their own sensors and internal algorithms, the drones proved they could swiftly penetrate enemy defenses.
Small in size, they were hard for the enemy to detect at first. And flying in “swarms” of multiple drones, once detected they could absorb enemy fire, sacrificing a few individual machines as they fought their way to the target.
And since the drones didn’t rely on a human pilot with perishable cockpit skills, the military could mostly keep them in storage until a war broke out. The robots’ operators would maintain their own control skills using computer simulations and the occasional live flight. Eliminating the need for constant training sorties would save many billions of dollars a year, the logic went.
Effectiveness, efficiency—those were the killer drones’ selling points. But the robot warplanes apparently threatened the pilot-centric cultures of the Air Force and the Navy’s aviation arm. So it should have come as no surprise when, in 2006, the military canceled the killer drone effort.
In the words of noted pacifist Dwight D Eisenhower: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
Are we to expect the Navy will put fighter pilots, future admirals, out to pasture? And jerbs! What is the galley slave union position on this?.
<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Greek_Galleys.jpg" width="275">
But then the Navy will have fewer drones than they did in 1812!!!!!!!!!
In the words of noted pacifist Dwight D Eisenhower: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
"We need to kill an Admiral from time to time, to encourage the others" – Voltaire