A DT tipper, who prefers to remain anonymous (and who has proffered some pretty good stuff in the past), sent me this little tidbit with his analysis:
The Miniature Air Launched Decoy, a Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN) state-of-the-art, low-cost, modular air– launched programmable flight vehicle, successfully completed government and Raytheon seamless verification team flight testing Jan. 11. This sets the stage for the MALD to enter low-rate initial production (LRIP) later this year.
The testing, which began in June 2007, put the MALD through a series of flight profiles including jettison and powered flight tests from both F-16 and B-52 aircraft. The MALD, which weighs less than 300 pounds and has a range of approximately 500 nautical miles, succeeded in 33 of 35 tests…
“Completion of this flight testing brings the versatile MALD platform one step closer to becoming a staple in the warfighter’s arsenal,” said Harry Schulte, vice president of Raytheon Missile Systems’ Strike product line. “MALD is more than just a decoy — we designed it with modularity in mind to evolve as the warfighter’s needs evolve. We’re ready to get the MALD to LRIP.“
MORE:
The Miniature Air Launched Decoy is a low-cost, air-launched programmable craft that accurately duplicates the combat flight profiles and signatures of U.S. and allied aircraft. In addition to protecting valuable aircraft, MALD offers counter air operations to neutralize, if not destroy, air defense systems that pose a threat to U.S. and allied pilots.
Our DT reader and tipmaster comments:
In addition to the stated benefits, the successful design and implementation of efficient miniture engines will allow the US to perfect swarming techniques, develop aAAV missions (attack atonomous air vehicles) and drive the development of associated information exchange necessary to exploit the application of this technology.
Plus, they are relatively cheap.
Keep ‘em coming boys.
– Christian
{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
freakin sweet! now if only they could put guns on it and use it like the wild weasels of vietnam. that is if anyone is still using SAM sites
Would it operate like the Israeli Harpy?
Finally! A cheap US weapons system! Whoohoo!
They’d probably have MALDs with different roles in each swarm, a la SS-N-19 / P700, in which one or two go higher up to take sensor readings which they share among the swarm, wouldn’t you? Those missile swarms would’t have to be *that* intellingent, check Mark Tilden’s BEAM bots (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Tilden), but rather have insect properties and a set of shared rules / orders.
Still, I remain a fan of Asimov’s three laws and abhor the idea of equipping what is essentially a robot with weapons. One day, not now but one day in the future some over-advanced MALP may decide there is little difference between a human friend and a human enemy. (Que Terminator – The Rise of the Machines.)
Oh dear heavens, where are the good ol’ days when you could take a club to your enemy and bash his head in? “Me good. You bad. Grunt. Bash. End story.”
may the Force be with you,
Pharsalus
———————————————-
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Pharsalus,
Don’t forget the fourth and fifth laws.
“The Fourth Law of Robotics”
The 1974 Lyuben Dilov novel “Icarus’s Way” introduced a Fourth Law of robotics:
A robot must establish its identity as a robot in all cases.
Lyuben Dilov gives reasons for the fourth safeguard in this way: “The last Law has put an end to the expensive aberrations of designers to give psychorobots as humanlike form as possible. And to the resulting misunderstandings…”[25]
In the 1989 tribute anthology, Foundation’s Friends, Harry Harrison wrote a story entitled, simply, “The Fourth Law of Robotics.” In it, a robot rights activist, in an attempt to liberate robots, builds ones equipped with a Fourth Law that states, “A robot must reproduce. As long as such reproduction does not interfere with the First or Second or Third Law.” The robots accomplish the task by building new robots from scratch, who view their creator robots as parental figures.
“The Fifth Law of Robotics”
A robot must know it is a robot
The Fifth Law was introduced by Nikola Kesarovski in his short story “The Fifth Law of Robotics”. The plot revolves around a murder. The forensic investigation found out that the victim was killed by a humaniform robot using a simple hug. The robot directly violated the First and the Fourth Laws by not establishing for itself that it was a robot.
This is exciting news, I’ve been waiting for the swarm, looks like we are getting pretty close. I am by no means an expert, just a amateur geek myself but if anyone is asking “swarm?” here are what I consider to be some pretty helpful (i.e. cool) intro links. The first includes at least two short but sweet videos.
http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/
http://gridswarms.essex.ac.uk/gridswarms/
So, swarm tech has the potential to alter the whole warscape yet again. Since a single missile, say a Patriot, is about as useful against a swarm of weapons platforms as a baseball bat is against a swarm of bees, then the counter-swarm weapon will be either be a cloud (not poison gas, but maybe something that would act like a HEMP cloud) or perhaps high volume fire of small projectiles, or worst case scenario, a nuke.
So, some implications seem to be: 1) US missile defense shield will be LESS useful (I clearly didnt say useLESS) if States (i.e. Russia/China) develop their own swarm tech, and 2) it raises the stakes re: NBC weapons since in my mind, those will be (or weapons along those lines will be) the natural counter-measure to a swarm attack.
And by the way, personally, I think it would be much easier for the Ruskies and the Chinese to develop swarm tech than say stealth or cruise missiles or any other goodies we got that they don’t. Especially if they teamed up on it (not likely), but with Russian mad math and Chinese “en masse small electronic and plastic objects manufacturing infrastructure” brought together . . . . dang!
Put me down now as saying loud and clear, swarmtech will be revolutionary (5th gen?) and the Big States will all have massive swarms relatively soon (what I mean is Stealth is nearly 20 years old and no one else is flying it, that won’t be the case with swarm).
Thanks for putting up with my rant :) .
The Patriot missile would still be useful, it would just have a different warhead, like a small Fuel Air Bomb, or something….
@ USMCmapper: Too true. Thought I’d keep it simple. Kudos to you, though…
What about a swarm of mini Sidewinder missiles? Short-range ones (see me piss off BVR-advocates ;), so you could fire 30 AA missiles at an enemy plane in stead of just 2. (Someone Macross fan? Heheh.)
Kudos to Raytheon and the engineers that designed and built this thing.
“What about a swarm of mini Sidewinder missiles? Short-range ones (see me piss off BVR-advocates ;), so you could fire 30 AA missiles at an enemy plane in stead of just 2. (Someone Macross fan? Heheh.)”
Posted by: Pharsalus at February 28, 2008 11:27 AM
YES, a Macross plug!! Now that’s the kind of SWARM I’d like to see.
Schwer,
An intercontinental swarm that travels fast enough to require the US missile shield to shoot it down? That’s a long ways off.
Remember, unmanned or not, jet engines cost money. The more capable you make your “swarm”, the more expensive it will be. No one can afford to blacken the skies with robots.
Macross, that is the hotness. Sign me up. I want my Valkeryie, PRONTO!
At this point you need a truck to get the swarm sufficiently close to the target set.
The defense has to move out to kill the trucks.
Crass — Good point about the air burst, I could see that . . . but then having swarm in your arsenal forces the enemy to have to increase # of missles deployed in order to defend against the B2 or the swarm.
Brian — I hear that, and think u are right, perhaps transatlantic/transpacific swarms are way off.
But, I do think blackened sky of swarming bots crossing from Russia into Europe or China into Japan or Europe into Russia is pretty conceivable.
A major point behind swarms is many many cheap cheap instead of 1 very big very expensive platform or a handful of plain vanilla expensive platforms. 100 waves of a 6000 platform strong swarm at 2000 dollars per platform could be purchased for 1.2 billion. So could one B2, and when IT crashes and burns, the whole thing goes up in smoke. Not so with a swarm, that could be 60% destroyed and still 40% as deadly, and here comes wave #2, then wave 3, eventually wave 99 . . . and then you throw Lanchesters Equations into the mix and I’m still liking the potential of swarm a lot.
Course, good diplomacy and sound foreign policy is more cost effective and less bloody and fewer civilians get killed, I guess I shouldn’t hesitate to point that out too.
Dunno if it still pertains, but way back, MALD had a companion program — the Miniature Air Launched Interceptor. IIRC, that was a pretty interesting program, too.
If large swarms are REUSABLE instead of just being meant as a single, expendable wave, then I don’t know
1) how they should be constantly maintenained (refueled, repaired) during a war: At thousands of airports, land bases and aircraft carriers (“drone carriers”) ??
and
2) how are they supposed to carry out regime change on the ground afterwards? Are marshalling land-robots even fish-net-proof, lasso-proof or ditch-proof? Can ship convoys carrying and unloading heavy equipment (which is indispensable to occupy a defeated country) safely depend on escorting underwater swarms to protect them always 100 % against attacking underwater SWARMS ?
Should large swarms become too effective at any stage against all mobile weapons and fixed installations at the surface, then there is a great probability that swarms will LOWER the nuclear threshold incredibly. Swarms will always be limited in their efficiency against all buried targets anyway (alias: Everything is). But the “Deep” is more powerful than anything at the surface or above it. Some countries might be so terrified by a swarms’ (perceived) effectiveness and by their inability to start a swarm production of their own, that they (reasonably, decently, excusably) opt to acquire a few well-protected, well-hidden, well-camouflaged nuclear weapons instead, maybe even hiding them in other countries. Meaning that they will hold every swarm-toting country’s population as a hostage against a swarm attack. After a single massive swarm attack that obliterates a country’s entire conventional military forces in a few minutes, the attacking country’s civilian population is dying too, mechanically. Thus, as I already said before, the population of any swarm-fielding country is in greater danger of suddenly disappearing than any other. Makes perfect sense to me: The closer we edge technically, materially and finantially to actually conquering the whole World, the more undiscriminating we have to react against any nation even trying.
Why not add a small warhead to the front? Then you have a decoy which couldn’t be countered. If, that is, you want to soak up enemy missiles, the best insurance would be to make something the enemy couldn’t ignore even if they knew it was a decoy.
> Plus, they are relatively cheap
Yeah, a few years ago the JSF was “relatively” cheap too.
AS Brian points out, the more functionality you add, the more these things are going to cost.
Kind of off topic: Will the USN still use TALD (ADM-141)?
Face it, the aircraft put forth by Northrop/Grumman outperformed it’s competitor on 4 out of 5 of the critical performance/capability criteria set out by the USAF. Add into the picture Boeing’s misconduct in regards to this competition a few years ago, and the end result is that Boeing got what it had coming to it.