{"id":25437,"date":"2016-05-06T18:03:09","date_gmt":"2016-05-07T01:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/air-force-wants-swarms-of-small-kamikaze-drones-to-defeat-missiles"},"modified":"2017-06-04T20:00:37","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T03:00:37","slug":"air-force-wants-swarms-of-small-kamikaze-drones-to-defeat-missiles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/air-force-wants-swarms-of-small-kamikaze-drones-to-defeat-missiles","title":{"rendered":"Air Force wants swarms of small \u2018kamikaze\u2019 drones to defeat missiles"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Nice; let\u2019s hope they hit the right target.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI need a stealth bomber that\u2019s going to get close, and then it\u2019s going to drop a whole bunch of smalls \u2013 some are decoys, some are jammers, some are [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] looking for where the SAMs are. Some of them are kamikaze airplanes that are going to kamikaze into those SAMs, and they\u2019re cheap. You have maybe 100 or 1,000 surface-to-air missiles, but we\u2019re going to hit you with 10,000 smalls, not 10,000 MQ-9s. That\u2019s why we want smalls.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

SAMs stands for \u201cSurface-to-Air Missile,\u201d and they\u2019re one of the reasons that the Air Force has invested so much in stealth technology over the years: if a missile can\u2019t see a plane, it can\u2019t hit it. The problem is that the economics don\u2019t quite work that way: it\u2019s easier to make a new, better missile than it is to make an existing airplane even stealthier, and modern Air Force fighters serve for around 30 years each\u2014longer if they\u2019re bombers. Missiles are generally cheaper than airplanes, so anyone who wants to protect against aerial attack just needs to invest in a lot of missiles.<\/p>\n

\"f-22
\nUS Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Corey Hook <\/a>As stealthy as planes can be, missiles can always be made to find them.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nice; let\u2019s hope they hit the right target. \u201cI need a stealth bomber that\u2019s going to get close, and then it\u2019s going to drop a whole bunch of smalls \u2013 some are decoys, some are jammers, some are [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] looking for where the SAMs are. Some of them are kamikaze airplanes that [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":395,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1488,39,9,47,1511],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drones","category-economics","category-military","category-neuroscience","category-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/395"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25437"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67564,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25437\/revisions\/67564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}