Keeping it Cheap and Keeping it Real With UAVs

Posted on: May. 10th, 2004 || Source: strategypage.com | E-mail Article | Print Article

UAVs (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles) are a hot item in the United States Department of Defense, and the brass are trying to address some of the problems that come with such success. The major problem is that there are more than a dozen UAV models in use, and even more in development.



There is lots of overlap in capabilities. This means that some services are scraping by with older, less capable models (like the Army’s Hunter), while another service has a better model of the same class (like the Air Force Predator.) So the Department of Defense is encouraging (and may order) the services to adopt the best model of each class and standardize on it. This means a lot of wasted development money would instead go towards buying more UAVs, which the troops are anxious to get.

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