Medusa's Mirror: Stepping Forward to Look Back Future UAV Design Implicationsfrom the 21st Century Battlefield

摘要

This paper intends to explore the differences between a general purpose and afunctional design approach, and will attempt to answer the question of which of these approaches will best serve the needs of the services on the twenty-first century battlefield. Currently, UAVs are seen in the Army as generic intelligence gathering devices which can be tailored to the mission at hand. Fielding a general purpose UAV retains a certain amount of flexibility in the way that we have initially integrated the UAV concept Another possible alternative is to build functionally specific UAV designs, each for a different purpose.