These ships likely have a unit cost exceeding $50M (considering that they're drone blimps), however the corresponding jet airliner JSTARS has a unit cost somewhere north of $250M. They're used as battle management and command&control tools, and the military branches will very likely want to keep them out of the hands of civilian LE departments due to all the expensive equipment on-board.
The unit cost of blimps vs rotorcraft is likely lower, especially regarding fuel expenditures, and many LE departments have expressed great interest in all kinds of drone surveillance. I would be surprised if these things weren't deployed in high-threat scenarios in municipalities.
That's wonderful logic except for the fact that the R&D likely cost billions and we are only buying a handful of these things. In fact, in these army projects, the number of final units bought is from experience inversely related to the cost explosion of the project in the R&D department.
Titillating. It's like a Hollywood movie. Giant military blimps hovering over a major US city, silently watching and feeding data to a control center deep in the ground, with corporate logos on the giant blast doors.
In addition to monitor the sky, will these blimps be able to use their sensors to monitor enemy combatants and/or civilians on the ground?
Call me crazy, but when was the last time we were worried about cruise missiles over DC? I realize that the US has less-than-perfect relations with some countries, but the Cold War has been over for quite some time now.
It depends on what you call a cruise missile. We are at the point where anyone can take off the shelf parts and software and make a "drone" [1]. It's a pretty simple matter to modify the software to order the drone to crash into a building, motorcade, or outdoor event. Making an effective payload that can be carried by your small aircraft is another matter.
Also, what's the point of defending only one city from cruise missiles? Unless the enemy has a specific political target, they can cause a lot of destruction elsewhere.
A missile hitting DC is likely more probable now that it was during the depths of the cold war. To another question poised by mapmeld, DC is of significant political and symbolic importance, not to mention the many military agencies involved in the same. A successful strike against the capital would be a huge morale boost for enemies, as 9/11 was.
I have to second what Second_Ender mentioned -- we are at a critical juncture where off-the-shelf components offer rather frightening possibilities. I love technology, but benign videos like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMwSVDVJNWc&feature=youtu.be leave me deeply concerned about the future.
Your "enemies" are currently undermining you economically; wars are dirty old things that have innate outcome risks. Economic domination just keeps on giving. Infact some of that R&D budget might have directly or indirectly gone to them.
I've just seen this talk on Ted about autonomous killer drones, and what drones could mean for the future and democracies, especially if they are automated (for which there are great incentives to happen):
Almost every time I see a really big political event held outside, I wonder if it will be the one that starts a wave of automated drone assassinations. Then again, really big events might have a Centurion C-RAM or two secretly parked nearby.
All the balloons shown in the article's image and embedded video are tethered aerostats rather than drone blimps. If this in fact the same as what's going to be used, these are already in place along the U.S./Mexico border, and have been for almost 20 years.
It's scary that such war-time measures are being taken. It's as if serious aggression was imminent. I think when you need such measures and there's no war going on or imminent, you're doing something seriously wrong.
Second, the capital (especially around the Pentagon) is always covered in missile defenses, as well as every other kind of defense they can think of. Also, not all members of the Cabinet ever meet in one place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designated_survivor and lots of other super-defensive stuff goes on all the time.
Third, it looks like this has mostly been a research project so far, and the D.C. deployment is going to be a way to show it off.
The article is quite explicit about your last point, e.g. this quote:
"[We're] getting away from the Ph.D. engineer types running the system to the 20- or 25-year-old soldier running the system."
"D.C." is also good because it has a lot of airfields, many quite busy. Immediately adjacent are Reagan National; Bolling is now helicopters only, and there are a lot of helicopters flying around (at least a lot flying around Arlington, world HQ for the US military among other things). Further out you get Dulles, BWI and Andrews. So the "blimps" will have a lot to track.
Might actually be a nice way to detect stealth aircraft. Look at the ground from high up, and look for a moving dip in radar returns, where the stealth aircraft is preventing the radar waves from hitting the ground.
For that sort of detection threat, they fly high and at night, which they tend to do anyway since both are safer. ADDED: and I think flying high consumes less fuel.
The US withdrew all combat troops from Iraq and the War on Drugs isn't really a war. I guess you could argus we're waging a cyber war with Iran and China.
That's not counting the nearly 5000 private contractors - we used to call them mercenaries - still in Iraq providing security for various US assets there.
Nor does this consider the USMC contingent guarding the US embassy.
As for the "war on (some) drugs," ask anyone who has had their door kicked in by mistake by police conducting military style raids, I'm sure the victims of such will draw parallels between the currently accepted police actions and military raids in Afghanistan.
As for "cyberwar," the very fact that global communications are being intercepted and catalogued by adjuncts of the US DoD illustrates that cyberwarfare is being perpetrated on many more entities besides "Iran and China."
There are American troops almost everywhere. Robert Kaplan's books "Imperial Grunts" and "Monsoon" detail their current involvement in Columbia, Philippines, Mongolia, Iraq, Afghanistan and stations all around the Indian Ocean.
There's Afghanistan as well, and Pakistan. Drones striking without any warnings.
But this discussion is actually pretty revealing - as the general public we're probably not really aware that the US is at war.
EDIT: And there's also Yemen (via drones).
EDIT 2: If you think about it, this war strategy means 1 thing for sure: we're actually keeping the terrorist threat alive by ourselves (but then again, that's probably b/c too many politicians profit off it).
