Expendable Remotely Piloted Vehicles for Strategic Offensive ...

diverted 75 percent of its B-29s away from strategic missions to knock outkamikaze bases. The US Strategic Bombing Survey noted that “kamikazeattacks wrought such damage that, had they been sustained with greaterpower or concentrations, they might have forced the US to withdraw or reviseits strategic plans.” 3 While the United States will not pursue developmentof kamikaze aircraft, an expendable RPV is feasible.In terms of eliciting emotion, people simply do not view manned and unmannedsystems alike. At air shows manned aircraft, not UAVs, draw thecrowds. Within air and space museums, visitors can usually find UAVshanging from the ceiling up and away from the main exhibits. At the Parisair show in 1995, a reviewer used the term cult classics to describe aircraftwithout pilots:Away from the main displays . . . there was a subtler succès d’estime: an oddlookingspecies of machines that appealed mostly to a small band of aficionados.These aircraft may never be crowd-pullers: they do not have the big-dollarcharm of blockbusters, and they are not star vehicles. As the crowds watchingthe stunts outside know, pilots are the true stars of flight—and these are aircraftwithout pilots. 4When manned aerial “firsts” are performed, people remember (and evenrevere) both the pilot and aircraft involved. Achievements by unmannedaircraft attract hardly any attention. For example, upon crossing the AtlanticOcean, Charles Lindbergh and his Spirit of St. Louis earned a prominentplace in aviation history. On the other hand, very few people areaware of the unmanned B-17 that USAAF researchers remotely pilotedfrom Hawaii to California. They accomplished this feat as part of RPVradar and television control experiments conducted in the early 1940s. 5The crash or downing of manned aircraft is typically front-page news. Amajor international incident can result if the aircraft shot down was in violationof foreign airspace. On the other hand, “if an intruder aircraft, shotdown over a foreign nation, contains no human crew, even the formalitiesof a diplomatic protest are seldom observed.” 6 When a manned aircraft islost in exceptional circumstances, particularly a conflict, it can be thefocus of major media attention. An example of this was the shootdown ofUSAF Capt Scott F. O’Grady over Serb-held territory in Bosnia on 2 June1995. News reports continued throughout the year of his efforts to evadecapture for six days and his subsequent rescue by US Marines (with NATOair support).According to the GAO, military aircraft crashes cost DOD more than $1billion per year; and human error is a factor in 75 percent of thesecrashes. 7 During the first four months of 1996, four F-14 Tomcats andone F/A-18C crashed. The unusually high F-14 loss rate (the first threeoccurred within a single month) caused the news media to focus publicattention on the US Navy and its supersonic fighter. News media reportsespecially highlighted the second and third F-14 losses because they occurredwithin four days of each other. Six months earlier, the loss of twoRPVs, also within four days of each other, was not nearly as newsworthy. 840