As a former military member and trained pilot of both the Hunter and Shadow 200 TUAV UAVs for the US Army, I believe you're slightly misinformed.
There are different types of UAVs "drones" for a more buzzword-y term, for different uses. The bigger boys such as the Predator, Global Hawk, etc use satellite navigation. There is most definitely a "lag" of sorts for those types of UAVs. The Shadow and the Hunter however, are line of sight. It limits their range severely (I got one out to 166km from the control station), but they are just as dangerous, albeit smaller and with less endurance for extended missions. It doesn't matter, they are cheap and you can launch lots of them :)
I've got 480 combat flight hours from Operation Iraqi Freedom II, from 2003-2004. We CONSTANTLY were targeting moving things and never had any real issues with it. You just use the right drone for the mission at hand. The military has dozens of different types of drones, but only the bigger ones make the news on a regular basis. The Shadow is being phased out for those types of missions in favor of the MQ-1C Gray Eagle.
Now for air/air stuff, they call those UCAS (lookup the X45-B / X47-B), the tech is still fledgling enough to need another 5-10 years before it will ever become a reality. On that, there simply isn't good enough software... yet.
The crux of the issue seems to be electronic warfare / jamming though, correct?
UAVs are great against opponents with limited electronic warfare capabilities, but wouldn't they lack credibility against China or Russia? They'd simply jam them and that'd be that, yes?
Honestly, jamming a system where all of the communication happens over frequency hopping radio is very very difficult. Normally speaking, the command links are encrypted (they were for sure with the Shadow) and the video links are unencrypted. Video is starting to be encrypted now that hardware crypto acceleration is more prevalent, but in general, it isn't as big of a problem as you'd think. Now UAVs that are on satellites have a lot less spectrum to use compared to LOS (like of sight) UAVs which can use the entire RF spectrum should they choose to.
Blocking the entire RF spectrum all at the same time is possible, but unbelievably difficult. When you're hopping a random # of MHZ every few dozen microseconds, it is super tricky.
Thanks for the link. I was in Iraq when Task Force kicked down the door and found this stuff. Didn't realize it was declassified. An amazing example of incompetence and under estimating your enemy. Don't bother encrypting your video feeds?!? Oh, they'll never figure it out. I often joke that the U.S. Military is just slightly less incompetent than everyone else. Stuff like this makes me laugh at conspiracy theorists who postulate that the U.S. Government was responsible for 9/11. We can't even have the default setting for secret video feeds in a war zone be encrypted, but we can organize a massive conspiracy. Spend a day in an organization where you're hoping the decisions of your superiors don't get you killed and you quickly realize the omnipotent puppet master is no where to be found.
As I understand it, that's so you can show them to anyone quickly; if encrypted, various security issues are invoked.
It was considered to be an acceptable trade off because the greater part of their usefulness is so ephemeral. On the other hand, an adversary who routinely monitors them could figure out a lot of things about our general methods.
It was a bit of both actually. We had this thing called an RVT (Remote Video Terminal) which was essentially a badass hardened laptop encased in steel running a lightly modified Redhat Linux 9 that attached to a small directional antenna. You could send 1 UAV operator who was trained in the RVT down to an Infantry TOC (Tactical Operations Center). He could hook it up and have it find the UAV in the sky and then show video to the infantry commander live. Yes it could be encrypted but the issue was that the bandwidth requirements of high res video + encryption were too great for the current hardware. Again, I believe that has been solved now that the tech has gotten much better, but I've not been in the military since 2005.
It's interesting that this statement could be true and at the same time every satellite and cable box in the US and in so many other countries routinely receives encrypted video, and a big portion of those receive HD. The SD version of the ones in the US went on line in 1996.
There are different types of UAVs "drones" for a more buzzword-y term, for different uses. The bigger boys such as the Predator, Global Hawk, etc use satellite navigation. There is most definitely a "lag" of sorts for those types of UAVs. The Shadow and the Hunter however, are line of sight. It limits their range severely (I got one out to 166km from the control station), but they are just as dangerous, albeit smaller and with less endurance for extended missions. It doesn't matter, they are cheap and you can launch lots of them :)
I've got 480 combat flight hours from Operation Iraqi Freedom II, from 2003-2004. We CONSTANTLY were targeting moving things and never had any real issues with it. You just use the right drone for the mission at hand. The military has dozens of different types of drones, but only the bigger ones make the news on a regular basis. The Shadow is being phased out for those types of missions in favor of the MQ-1C Gray Eagle.
Now for air/air stuff, they call those UCAS (lookup the X45-B / X47-B), the tech is still fledgling enough to need another 5-10 years before it will ever become a reality. On that, there simply isn't good enough software... yet.