US Navy buys Linux to guide drone fleet (The Register)

Posted Jun 12, 2012 14:35 UTC (Tue) by ewan (guest, #5533)
In reply to: US Navy buys Linux to guide drone fleet (The Register) by markhb
Parent article: US Navy buys Linux to guide drone fleet (The Register)

From the article: "can also be fitted 70mm rockets as needed for other missions".

Presumably those are reconnaissance rockets then.

the /rocket/ isn't running Linux

Posted Jun 12, 2012 16:14 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

The drone is a reconnaissance vehicle, the 70mm rocket is a weapon.

It is quite normal for a reconnaissance mission to be armed. Military forces rarely perform reconnaissance missions on targets known to be friendly, that would be pointless. The distinction from an attack is that the primary _goal_ of the mission is to obtain information.

If they just want to blow something up from a long way away they don't need a drone, ballistic missiles have been available for more than half a century.

the /rocket/ isn't running Linux

Posted Jun 12, 2012 16:40 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

The CIA and Military have often retrofired their older "reconnaissance drones" drones to carry out strikes on targets.

Of course nowadays they have have given up the pretense and lies about the planned uses of unmanned drones, so these may really be just for reconnaissance. They have much larger and more powerful drones for carrying a wide variety of ordinance now then they had in the past.

Right now I expect they are aiming to eliminate the need for civilian contractors to handle the drones in a Xbox fashion. Maybe the goal with these is to explore and establish the procedures of more more autonomous craft. So they can reduce the number of operational people needed in large scale sorties. So before with older systems you'd need 20 operators for 10 drones you might get away with 20 operators for 200 or 300 drones.

As far as drones vs cruise missiles; I am sure that drones have a number of advantages over cruise missiles. One of them is, I expect, they can loiter over a area for long periods of time and be used to identify targets before striking. That way when they bomb a residence of 20 or 30 people the lawyers in the State Department and/or the Military can be reasonably sure that at least one of them is a likely target. Since hte drone is weaponized and already in the area you don't have to wait long before the approval process to finished before you carry out the actually attack. Another likely advantage is that larger drones can be used to carry multiple warheads and weapon platforms that will give them more flexibility and multiple strike capabilities that older more primitive cruise missiles lacked. Especially for 'soft targets'. And in addition they are re-usable so the total operational of cost over a period of months or years is much less then with using a long string of big cruise missiles.