Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Reforming Milspace

9 Comments

Coyote Smith is recently retired from the Air Force, and is apparently free to be much less circumspect about his thoughts on the Air Force:

It is easy to understand why the advancement of American space power has stalled under the Air Force. For very reasonable organizational and bureaucratic reasons, space power simply cannot receive the priority it deserves inside the Air Force.

Everything else will be sacrificed for the air power mission. As a matter of culture, this is the right thing to do. Carl Builder, a RAND analyst working a project for the Air Force Chief of Staff, pointed out in the The Icarus Syndrome that space power is a competing faction that air power advocates must hold at bay. The lesson being, no matter how vital space power becomes to the nation, if it is assigned to the Air Force, or any other service or agency, it will always receive short shrift.

It’s not a new problem. We were talking about it in the eighties. But we may finally be approaching a time in which we can finally fix it. I’ll be on a panel in DC on Monday with Coyote to talk about the U. S. Space Guard.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Sort of related: The coming warbot revolution.

9 thoughts on “Reforming Milspace”

  1. If the USAF is beholden to its pilots and fumbling this job, give it to the Navy and the Marines.

    1. I was going to make that suggestion on general principles. Well, give control to the Navy, anyway.

      Admiral Heinlein would approve. 🙂

      1. Heh.

        I’m serious. Why we’re at it, give the A-10s to the Army. The AF doesn’t seem to care about providing ground support then take THAT role away from them too.

  2. I can see it now. We build these lethal warbots that a kid with radio shack parts take down. reprograms and sends them back at us.

    Already the Chinese make most of the worlds electronics.

  4. The RCD author trots out this tired trope:

    An armored vehicle without onboard humans does not need the size or safety features required to keep them alive. It can be made smaller, lighter, and potentially disposable (in relative terms).

    This is, bluntly, a crock of shit that betrays lack of knowledge about how military systems are designed, work, and are used. First, the care and feeding of the meat servos is not really all that significant in the design phase or the production phase; e.g., cockpits cost a fair amount, but so do the high bandwidth beyond line-of-sight data links you need to ship synthetic aperture radar data back to an analyst’s exploitation station (a SAR absolutely churns out data). Second, once you’ve gone to the trouble and expense to design in reusability, you want to get your money’s worth, so you put what are usually expensive sensors and weapons on the vehicle, and you want to get it back. These things quickly become not expendable, because they cost too much. Even a $10+ million dollar Reaper isn’t expendable. The AF is interested in a so-called attritable UAV, but they want it to be barely more expensive than a high-end missile, because if it costs much more than that, it’s too expensive to lose. Third, we already have attritable robots – they’re called missiles.

    I’m a firm believer in the promise of advanced autonomy – I have a fair amount of expertise in the area although it’s not my bread and butter – but where it will shine is in doing complex optimizations of heterogeneous manned and unmanned assets, in real time, across a battlespace, to a level that humans can’t do. The core algorithms exist today at TRL 2 or 3, but figuring out how to make them usable, how to feed them data, etc., is an extraordinarily hard problem. Assist technology like a robot mule, or powered exoskeletons a la Starship Troopers, will be valuable but the problem there is sufficient power density so that they can run as long as the human can. But attritable reusable robots is stupid on steroids.

  5. Coyote shared this vision with me some time ago. <a href="”>This was one of his concepts. Ideally, the system vendor of choice would be ACME. That Coyote. He’s a wily one…

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