Tip to Steve Trimble at the DEW Line for picking this up. Northrop Grumman has issued a comic book to promote Global Hawk, Fire Scout and the UCAV program.

This is not totally new. Rick Kennedy over at GE has a wonderful late-1950s GE comic full of F-104s and B-58s and Convair 990s and other great-or-forgotten aircraft - and at least the comic's wham-pow-zap pre-Roy-Lichtenstein marketing is the height of subtlety compared with Northrop Grumman's "buy our tanker and make thousands of your voters happy" campaign, which makes the Eatanswill election look like Plato's Republic.

But at least that GE comic was accurate. This is more like the one I remember as a kid, that had an F-104 cruising across the Soviet Union at Mach 3.9.

If you're already within direct fire range of the enemy, you might as well pray to Buddha as call for intel from a Global Hawk. Great system, yes; geared for tactical response, no. The Fuzzy Wuzzies will have filleted you before the first email to request satellite bandwidth has been spell-checked.

Mind you, if you are within the mission radius of a ship-launched Fire Scout - the next NG UAS to appear on the scene - it would seem to be overkill to ask for a G-Hawk at all.

And then - moments later, it says here - UCAVs are being shot off the carrier. This is not good. The Northrop Grumman UCAS team has worked very hard to convince the Navy that they do understand the rhythms and pace of carrier operations.

It's only a comic, but... Steve makes the assumption that the comic's pitched at kids, but Ares has often had to explain concepts in terms as simple as this to people in DC or 60 Minutes producers, so there is a possibility that this is aimed at those audiences. Which makes it more embarrassing that whoever did this got it wrong.