Randaly comments on Near-Term Risk: Killer Robots a Threat to Freedom and Democracy - Less Wrong

10 Post author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 06:28AM

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Comment author: gwern 16 June 2013 01:14:57AM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure that's comparing apples and oranges. From the citation for the Predator figure:

About 168 people are needed to keep a single Predator aloft for 24 hours, according to the Air Force. The larger Global Hawk surveillance drone requires 300 people. In contrast, an F-16 fighter aircraft needs fewer than 100 people per mission.

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:

In addition to having lower operating costs per flight hour, specialized unmanned aircraft systems can reduce flight hours for fighter aircraft

Comment author: Randaly 16 June 2013 04:06:39AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: gwern 16 June 2013 05:05:27PM 0 points [-]

I don't think it saves Rolf's point:

The actual US armed forces are a few million. 5% would be a much better estimate. This aside, you are ignoring that "lethal autonomy" is nowhere near the same thing as "operational autonomy". A Predator drone requires more people to run it - fuelling, arming, polishing the paint - than a fighter aircraft does.

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.

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