ISR and business as usual

[Entropy]

Ken,

Predator was a joint program under DARO until it reached LRIP and the program was managed by the Navy, not the Army. Your link is incorrect. I'll troll my link archive for sourcing tomorrow if you wish.

As for the Warrior, it and the USAF Predator will be merged and managed as a joint program starting this October.

The rated / non-rated pilot debate will be an interesting one to watch. Each side has some good and not-so-good arguments but I think better technology will eventually favor the Army viewpoint. This actually has bearing on the topic of this thread - had the USAF gone with non-rated pilots back in the 1990's, there likely wouldn't be a shortage now. This is the primary reason the Army has chosen to use NCO's - they simply don't have enough pilots to fly the 500 Predator/Warriors they want to buy. If the Army had a pilot surplus, they'd probably be using them instead.

Oh, and during Vietnam the Air Force ran a quite large and secret UAV program called Firefly that flew almost 3500 missions of various types including real-time data-link video. Unfortunately, the program died after the war from the hostility of the pilot mafia as well as the program's extreme secrecy. Still, what the Air Force has historically done with UAV's goes way beyond the "playing" done by the Army.