Commanche alternatives?

"Chad Irby" wrote in message
m...
In article ,
"Keith Willshaw" wrote:

"Chad Irby" wrote in message
m...
In article ,
"Keith Willshaw" wrote:

"Rune Børsjø" wrote in message
...
How the hell is gonna tell friendly from enemy? Civilian from
combatant? The only thing it'll be good for is knocking out armor.
Attack helos still present a flexibility and presence that you
can't
get out of a glorified model airplane kit.

You havent heard of IFF I take it

You mean like the IFF that fails from time to time, or that can be
spoofed and jammed quite easily?

You have some of the following problems:

IFF jammed, UCAV won't shoot.
IFF jammed, UCAV shoots down anything in front of it.

Attack helos dont go in much for air to air combat as I recall

But if you're using autonomous UCAVs, they have to be able to detect
incoming threats, and decide which ground targets to hit. Therefore,
you either have IFF or a very restrictive set of rules of engagement
that the machine won't be able to break. Since a part of the "new"
battlefield is going to be IFF for ground forces, that's going to be an
issue, too. Restricting the question to air-to-air is a mistake.

For UCAV & CAS perhaps the solution is giving out laser
designators to the ground units and making that mark the *only*
target of interest to the UCAV.
Lot's of details of course: "code for the day" in the mark, reject
the mark if two or more examples can be seen in seperate areas, etc.