Comments on: MALD Paves Way for Swarm Ops

By: mesa bookkeeping

mesa bookkeeping — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:11:15 +0000

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.

By: elp

elp — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:27:36 +0000

Kind of off topic: Will the USN still use TALD (ADM-141)?

By: NTV

NTV — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:24:49 +0000

> 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.

By: Rix

Rix — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:24:12 +0000

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.

By: freefallingbomb

freefallingbomb — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 06:49:38 +0000

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.

By: demophilus

demophilus — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 04:44:33 +0000

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.

By: Schwer

Schwer — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 01:12:26 +0000

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.

By: Rip

Rip — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:25:32 +0000

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.

By: Vercingetorix

Vercingetorix — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:36:36 +0000

Macross, that is the hotness. Sign me up. I want my Valkeryie, PRONTO!

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:12:13 +0000

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.