The F-16 seems to have a maximum endurance of 3-4 hours, so I’m pretty sure its average mission is less than 12 hours.
My understanding was that Rolf’s argument depended on the ratio personnel:plane, not on the ratio personnel:flight hour; the latter is more relevant for reconnaissance, ground attack against hidden targets, or potentially for strikes at range, whereas the former is more relevant for air superiority or short range strikes.
The actual US armed forces are a few million. 5% would be a much better estimate. This aside, you are ignoring that “lethal autonomy” is nowhere near the same thing as “operational autonomy”. A Predator drone requires more people to run it—fuelling, arming, polishing the paint—than a fighter aircraft does.
If you are getting >6x more flight-hours out of a drone for 6x for an increased man power of <2x—even if you keep the manpower constant and shrink the size of the fleet to compensate for that <2x manpower penalty, you’ve still got a new fleet which is somewhere around 6x more lethal. Or you could take the tradeoff even further and have an equally lethal fleet with a small fraction of the total manpower, because each drone goes so much further than its equivalent. So a drone fleet off similar lethality does have more operational autonomy!
That’s why per flight hour costs matter—because ultimately, the entire point of having these airplanes is to fly them.
The F-16 seems to have a maximum endurance of 3-4 hours, so I’m pretty sure its average mission is less than 12 hours.
My understanding was that Rolf’s argument depended on the ratio personnel:plane, not on the ratio personnel:flight hour; the latter is more relevant for reconnaissance, ground attack against hidden targets, or potentially for strikes at range, whereas the former is more relevant for air superiority or short range strikes.
I don’t think it saves Rolf’s point:
If you are getting >6x more flight-hours out of a drone for 6x for an increased man power of <2x—even if you keep the manpower constant and shrink the size of the fleet to compensate for that <2x manpower penalty, you’ve still got a new fleet which is somewhere around 6x more lethal. Or you could take the tradeoff even further and have an equally lethal fleet with a small fraction of the total manpower, because each drone goes so much further than its equivalent. So a drone fleet off similar lethality does have more operational autonomy!
That’s why per flight hour costs matter—because ultimately, the entire point of having these airplanes is to fly them.