= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Randaly comments on Near-Term Risk: Killer Robots a Threat to Freedom and Democracy - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (105)
It does? I would've guessed the exact opposite and that the difference would be by a large margin: drones are smaller, eliminate all the equipment necessary to support a human, don't have to be man-rated, and are expected to have drastically less performance in terms of going supersonic or executing high-g maneuvers.
Yes. An F-16 requires 100 support personnel; a Predator 168; a Reaper, 180. Source.
It seems like some but not all of the difference is that manned planes have only a single pilot, whereas UAV's not only have multiple pilots, but also perform much more analysis on recorded data and split the job of piloting up into multiple subtasks for different people, since they are not limited by the need to have only 1 or 2 people controlling the plane.
If I had to guess, some of the remaining difference is probably due to the need to maintain the equipment connecting the pilots to the UAV, in addition to the UAV itself; the most high-profile UAV failure thus far was due to a failure in the connection between the pilots and the UAV.
I'm not sure that's comparing apples and oranges. From the citation for the Predator figure:
I'm not sure how long the average mission for an F-16 is, but if it's less than ~12 hours, then the Predator would seem to have a manpower advantage; and the CRS paper cited also specifically says:
The F-16 seems to have a maximum endurance of 3-4 hours, so I'm pretty sure its average mission is less than 12 hours.
My understanding was that Rolf's argument depended on the ratio personnel:plane, not on the ratio personnel:flight hour; the latter is more relevant for reconnaissance, ground attack against hidden targets, or potentially for strikes at range, whereas the former is more relevant for air superiority or short range strikes.
I don't think it saves Rolf's point:
If you are getting >6x more flight-hours out of a drone for <2x as many people used as compared to its alternative, then by switching a fleet of alternatives entirely to drones, the effectiveness or lethality increases by >6x for an increased man power of <2x - even if you keep the manpower constant and shrink the size of the fleet to compensate for that <2x manpower penalty, you've still got a new fleet which is somewhere around 6x more lethal. Or you could take the tradeoff even further and have an equally lethal fleet with a small fraction of the total manpower, because each drone goes so much further than its equivalent. So a drone fleet off similar lethality does have more operational autonomy!
That's why per flight hour costs matter - because ultimately, the entire point of having these airplanes is to fly them.