According to a new congressional report acquired by Wired’s Danger Room, unmanned aircraft now account for 31 percent of all military aircraft.
In 2005, only five percent of military aircraft were robots, a report by the Congressional Research Service notes. Barely seven years later, the military has 7,494 drones. Total number of old school, manned aircraft: 10,767 planes.
A small sliver of those nearly 7,500 drones gets all of the attention. The military owns 161 Predators and Reapers, the Predator’s bigger, better-armed brother.
Manned aircraft still get 92 percent of the Pentagon’s aircraft procurement money. Still, since 2001, the military has spent $26 billion on drones, the report finds.
The drones are also getting safer to operate. Drone crashes get a lot of attention; 38 Predators and Reapers have crashed in Iraq and Afghanistan thus far. But the congressional report finds that the Predator, for instance, has only 7.5 accidents per 100,000 hours of flight, down from 20 accidents over that time in 2005 — meaning it’s now got an accident rate comparable to a (manned) F-16.
Drones are bandwidth hogs: a single Global Hawk requires 500 megabytes per second worth of bandwidth, the report finds, which is “500 percent of the total bandwidth of the entire U.S. military used during the 1991 Gulf War.” And it also notes that a lot of future spy missions might go not to drones, but to the increasing number of giant blimps and aerostats, some of which can carry way more sensors and cameras.
Congressional Research Service reports typically aren’t public. But Wired embedded it here.
Source: Wired : Danger Room