Regarding light attack aircraft...
A SOCOM general and I got to discuss light attack aircraft in the bar for an hour or so. In a nutshell, the idea is to get combat capability as close to our A-10 and UAVs into the hands of our allies who simply cannot afford any portion of the cost, infrastructure, or training effort required to employ the A-10 or UAVs. To be effective, each predator or larger UAV operated by the USAF requires about 100 people per orbit, 24/7. That's simply not reasonable for a great many of our allies. Hence putting UAV quality sensors and weapons onto a light attack aircraft not much different than the primary and intermediate trainers used by most air forces around the world. Less cost, less infrastructure, less training, and as much combat capability over the battlefield as practical. We're developing these things primarily for our allies, not for widespread adoption by the US armed forces. We'll fly them enough to prove them in combat then provide the planes and advisors to anyone who wants 60% of the capability of an A-10 for 1/100th the cost.
bustr,
Regarding your brief comment about emotional issues, yes there is a bunch of urban legend out there. Here's a personal perspective from been there, done both of those jobs.
A typical deployment for a strike fighter pilot is 3-4 months long. In that time, he'll carry out maybe a dozen strikes. He'll ID the target, blow it up, monitor it for a few minutes to see who shows up or to make sure it's dead, then rtb or go to another tasking.
A typical deployment for a UAV driver lasts 4 straight years with no breaks other than weekends and the usual vacation time. In that time, he'll carry out or witness a couple hundred strikes. He'll spend a week profiling a target, watching him interact with his community, family, friends, children. Then when the target is more than XX meters away from anyone else, the UAV driver will whack him in the head with an anti-tank missile while watching up close and personal with a modern high definition video feed. After the strike, the UAV driver will hang out over the target for up to 8 hours. If it took more than a few minutes for the target (or his associates) to die, he'll witness their last moments. Or minutes. Or hours, bleeding out slowly, holding his guts in with one hand while crawling blindly with the other. Sometimes the first people who show up will be his family or children who the UAV pilot got to know over the previous week's worth of surveillance. Sometimes one of those kids runs into the target area right before the missile impacts, so those follow-on hours involve watching a child die and the beginning of the grieving process of a whole village. Then the UAV driver goes home, plays with his kids if he's lucky enough to be on a day shift, goes to bed, and does it again the next day. For 4+ years.
I was "lucky", my nightmares started after around 8 months on the job and lasted only 2-3 months before my brain settled into a new normal. Then I spent 4 more years watching up to 12 strikes per shift, hunting people and killing them, every day. That old story "the most dangerous game" is far closer to the truth than most people will ever want to believe, except our hunters are doing it several times every day instead of one wayward traveler at a time.
There's a bit of difference in the war experience a modern fighter/bomber pilot has and that of a UAV driver, yes there is. As a fighter pilot, I drove circles around and after a "real" combat deployment, we had maybe 2 dozen strike videos to add to our squadron library. As a UAV driver and ops center director, I watched or participated in that many in live color hi-def video every week or two, for about 5 years.
The caliber of the people being called on to do the UAV role has little to nothing to do with the impact it has on the UAV driver's emotional or mental state. For quite a while, many UAV drivers were pulled into that job directly from operational fighter or bomber assignments. And some of the most hard core stone cold killers I've ever met were the tactical leaders in UAV squadrons. Professional, dedicated, utterly ruthless when it came to hunting, pursuing, and killing those human beings who were their targets.
Somewhat different level of exposure, there. The element of personal risk was reduced from the chance of getting shot down or crashing, to the chance of falling asleep on highway 95 or running into a herd of wild donkeys at 1am and dying in the resulting car crash. In some ways, that made the mental whiplash that much worse since that 45-60 minutes on 95 was the only buffer from the world of the human predator to playing with your kids, kissing your wife good night, and hoping that night's nightmare didn't wake anyone else up, hoping the nightmare wouldn't include the faces of your family on the bodies again, that your own executioner wasn't your own brother this time.
