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UAV/Drone kills....do they really count?..


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Saw a USAF image yesterday of one of the F-15E StrikeEagle of the 492EFS returning home @ RAF Lakenheath after their 6 month tour flying combat operations over Syria,proudly wearing a green kill star for the shootdown of the Iranian made UAV over Syria back in June.

 

This got me thinking are UAV's classed as legitimate kills nowdays?...I mean the classic shootdowns of Vietnam/Desert Storm/Balkans are pretty much a thing of the past now unless your some poor Syrian Fitter pilot who picked the wrong piece of airspace to be flying through. And i don't recall other Drone shootdown getting kill markings...maybe in this occasion it was just because it was the Sqn Commanding Officer who got the credit.

 

Anyone have any thoughts on this without getting political and taking sides...

And for the sake of the discussion F-15E 97-0219 492EFS Credit USAF.

2017-10-17_12-00-10

 

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Until those drones can shoot back (as a predator allegedly did against an Iraqi MiG-25 a ways back),  there isn’t any reason to be posting flags on jets.  Just silly IMO.  

 

What’s a green star supposed to represent anyway?  

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Well, look at this then re-answer that, 
 

Quote

"On June 8, a U.S. fighter jet shot down another Iranian-made drone that dropped a bomb near forces patrolling the base at Tanf."

http://www.latimes.com/politics/washington/la-na-essential-washington-updates-us-forces-shoot-down-iranian-drone-over-1497972506-htmlstory.html

 

Quote

 

"A U.S. fighter jet Tuesday shot down an armed Iranian drone supporting Syrian government forces in southern Syria, marking the third American air-to-air shoot-down this month.

The armed Shahed-129 drone was destroyed by a U.S. F-15 fighter jet around 12:30 a.m. local time. The drone was approaching a small military base at the Syrian town of Tanf that U.S., British and Norwegian special operations forces use as a staging ground to train and equip rebel groups fighting the Syrian government and Islamic State militants.

The coalition forces "were manning an established combat outpost to the northeast" of the base when the drone flew in, a Pentagon statement said.

The F-15 intercepted the drone and shot it down after the unmanned aircraft failed to divert its course, the statement added."

 

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It depends what you mean by "count".

 

The practice of assessing kills arose in order to work out by how much your side was degrading your enemy's capability.  It was important to know how many aircraft had been shot down, ships sunk etc, to gauge how many were left and how long it might take to win your conflict.  As many pilots might be involved in a battle and might all believe they had shot something down, there was always a risk that five people claiming they'd done so would be misread as five separate kills.  Hence the care taken over debriefing pilots and ensuring that the actual facts came out.  Assigning kills to individual pilots was an inevitable result, with the side-effect of encouraging competition, which boosted both morale and effectiveness.

 

You would, of course, shoot at anything reckoned to be a threat, and not at anything reckoned to be off-limits.  (If you were doing it properly, that is.)

 

So, with all that in mind, a manned aircraft's crew shooting down an unmanned drone definitely counts for intelligence purposes.  The drone will, at the very least, have a reconnaissance capability that you could do without, and it could be armed too.  Even transport aircraft are legitimate targets, as they can be used to carry weapons around.

 

If your air arm wants to continue with ensuring that its intelligence is accurate, it makes sense to carry on with determining true credit for a kill, and with that comes all the stuff about painting kill markings under the cockpit.  So it counts for those purposes too.  You might think that in the sort of warfare under way these days, there couldn't be much doubt about how many aircraft or drones had been shot down.  There aren't exactly waves of the things in the air, and most air arms shoot down nothing at all.  Even the US and UK forces measure the intervals between kills in years.  But there's still an operational value in maintaining the practice as though it were a full-scale war.

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Interesting read:

 

https://balloonstodrones.com/2017/06/26/changing-the-usafs-aerial-kill-criteria/

 

Observation balloons and blimps were considered legitimate targets in World War I and kills granted the same as if an aircraft were shot down. A UAV is essentially a modern day observation device descendant from the balloon so the precedent has kind of been set.  I think unmanned V1's were given kill status as well (although I haven't checked).

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If the criteria for a legitimate kill is protection from the ground or air escort or the ability for the aerial vehicle to shoot back then there are a lot of pilots in all wars who have been credited with illegitimate kills of unarmed,  unarmored, unprotected, and often very slow and lumbering scout planes, sea planes, transport planes, liaison planes, spotter planes, helicopters,  etc etc.

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it's at least 1 more drone than any of us have ever shot down so I'm willing to give credit where credit is due.

 

Besides, comparing the process of shooting down an aircraft in the modern AA missile era to the dog fighting days is not going to be an equivalency. I'd imagine that some of the piloted enemy aircraft that have been shot down these days were no more difficult than the unmanned drones. That's not to detract from what fighter pilots do these days and the dangers they face. That's just pointing out you can't really equate the 2 time periods.

 

Bill

Edited by niart17
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I'm reminded of a certain WW2 USN carrier-based pilot....I forget the specifics, but it was something like, he had ditched twice and been picked up, maybe another on a bad takeoff, but the last two were when he taxied into the plane in front of him during engine runups, totalling both birds....

Whatever the true details were, the running joke was that he was a Japanese Ace. :rolleyes:

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