Presumably designers are just scratching the surface jettisoning all sorts of current design assumptions that could be removed based on differences in the acceptability of loss, ability to work cooperatively and handle inhuman conditions. You can position the control systems differently, split some of them up, strengthen the airframe by binning almost everything from the cockpit & getting rid of landing gear completely. The gear adds weight and breaks holes in the structure and it's dead weight during most of the key operational tasks - instead use a cooperating "lander" drone to help it land and the risk of that failing isn't as serious without humans. The ability to act with coordination across a group of drones that the article mentions will be hard to beat unless you use a similar array of drones. Seems like the pilot in the plane can't last much longer. Now we just need to see if the budgets involved bring this into being faster than self driving cars!
I have to wonder when it will switch to small, inexpensive drones instead of the larger, jet-type ones. Imagine fighting against a swarm of 10,000 drones (each with a small explosive, EMP, etc). Similar to the Fire Bats[0] in WWII.
I don't really get the hype/fear surrounding drone warfare, at least not when it comes to combat. It sounds super scary to have these drones that can outperform pilots, until you realize that guided missiles are already able to destroy pretty much anything from tens of kilometers away already. It doesn't matter if pilots are slower than drones when they are able to fire off missiles before the drone even detects them.
The main benefit of drones is surveillance imo, since they can just circle an area for hours. For combat I think we will have pilots for the foreseeable future, they can react more quickly and have a better view of the situation than a drone operator. Also I would imagine having a pilot can also be useful if you don't want other countries shooting down your planes (or if you want to start a conflict) - Iran would have been much more resistant to shooting down a US predator drone if it was a manned aircraft instead. I don't really know though.
The key to understanding where aerial warfare is going is understanding that next generation fighter jets aren't meant to be soldiers, they're generals.
What do I mean by that? What I mean is that most of the time, the F-35's purpose is not to go up against MiGs or other foreign fighters. The F-35 is a flying eye-in-the-sky that can scan surfaces, oceans, mountains, etc. to identify and classify targets. It has ordinance to take out those targets, but that's secondary to its main mission of basically being a one-man Google Maps team.
Could the F-35 get into a dogfight? Sure, but a lot would have to fail for that situation to ever happen - given its sensor suite it should be able to detect and fire upon an enemy fighter before it is ever in visual sight.
You can also tell this intention from the way pilots are trained: they must first reach the rank of Officer and learn abstract combat tactics in a classroom setting before they ever step foot in an aircraft. This is not by mistake.
Personally I think the future is squadrons of autonomous drones assisting human pilots. You come in with an F-35 and a dozen Predator drones and send in the drones to do your dirty work (close air support, recon, remote bombing, etc.) while you command the battlefield and drop a few guided bombs 40,000 feet up.
No one cares about the capabilities of the aircraft when they think about autonomous drones in warfare. People care about who, or what, is doing the decision making with regard to when to fire. If you remove a human from the decision process (or, more accurately, you rely on developers and ML models to make the decision years beforehand) you're circumventing an important part of the ethics of warfare. Ultimately most people want there to be an accountable human behind the decision to kill someone.
The main difference between a missiles tens or hundreds of kilometers away and a drone with a missile is the flight time. A lot of things can happen even if you fly at the speed Mach 1 or about 0.3km/s. If we assume 50km away, it means targets has 3 minutes to do something which turn the attack from great to terrible.
Consider the potential defense a swarm of drones equipped with various countermeasures could be against those missiles. They could be deployed quickly from a ground station or any cargo vehicle; possibly even from an eighteen wheeler if they were made small enough, and certainly something like a C-130 as someone else pointed out. I'm not clear on the effectiveness of anti-missle systems like the Iron Dome but I doubt there's anything that could to that kind of air defense from a platform that mobile and of such a small form-factor. You could even use a tower as a station in an urban setting and just drop them out the windows and crank up the engines midair. You could have an air-defense tower every few blocks.
It might seem minor but shifts like this have the potential to give one combatant a meaningful edge against an opponent lacking the same capabilities. Imo, even as a purely defensive tool this will allow much smaller entities to maintain control over their space against aggressive neighbors. Miniaturization of computers and automated weaponry reduces the space/resource requirements to maintain a state-like monopoly on violence within that space. I see this all as being firmly in the same trend as the increasing availability and power of biological engineering equipment and techniques and the increasing risk posed by locally-embodied/concerned AGI. These all have wildly varying threat profiles and difficulties with determining likely timelines but you get my point.
I never even got into possible offensive uses of these drones but one of my nightmares is matroska drones, C-130, to these (which can deal with other airforces and large ground forces,) to hunt-and-kill quadracopters to little single-serving shaped-charge drones. You can't nuke a city because of insurmountable optics but enough people were able to stomach large-lascale bombing of cities within the last 20 years that I would not be surprised at all if this kind of force was used to neutralize a city by bringing to fruition the promise of "precise bombing" and actually only killing the people and destroying the structures you mean to. It's a brand new WMD.
And even if I'm totally off base this is great sci-fi.
Edit: Bullshit punctuation to trim one word (and then add this note and actually make it a good deal longer, nice.)
1. Kaftar has all fancy jet fighters from Russians, and Egyptians. $50m apiece, tear Turkish drones left, and right.
2. The government has Turkish drones, $2m apiece. By the time Kaftar's Mig inflicts a single loss, a swarm of 5 drones already bombed that Mig's airfield to smithereens.
Government forces can expend all of their drones to get an enemy airfield, and they would still win the trade.
So 5 drones big ones which will be sub sonic - lets say so 5x 500kg - you might do some damage - but not that much - and who Is painting the targets for the drones
Yeah. I have no idea how a human would compete at all with g-forces alone. Add the fact that you no longer have to design a plane around a human and that definitely gives you a pretty hefty advantage against an f18
Load factor (g force) is actually a small percentage of what makes an effective air to air weapon system such as a fighter jet.
It turns out that the faster, higher aircraft has the advantage. If you have speed, you can deny your better-turning adversary an opportunity to engage you, and you thus dictate the terms of the engagement. If you find yourself on equal footing as a bandit, you can simply climb away at the enemy's maximum level speed and he will be unable to catch you.
Additionally, BVR missiles in particular benefit from a high initial launch velocity so they can use their finite delta-V budget to maximize range and closure with the target.
G Force tolerance only matters if you're in the air combat equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth.
Methinks these trials coming up will not be fair: a human can continue making good decisions in a non permissive electromagnetic/cyber battle space whereas a drone cannot. Air combat tactics will have to evolve but I don't think we will see drones defeating piloted fighters (in actual combat) in my lifetime. Perhaps if there's a watershed moment in AI but we aren't there yet.
When I am watching Battlestar Galactica or most of the other scifi, I am always puzzled to see that the scenarists never take AI to fully operate a spaceship (piloting during landing/takeoff, firing, targeting enemies, etc).
The series starts right after the Cylons, an artificial intelligence created by humans, destroys several planets. Decades before they fought another war when the machines first rebelled. By the time BSG tolls around, any artificial intelligence is taboo and Adama refuses to even enable digital communication between ship subsystems except in one scenario where they had to hard reset all systems to flush a Cylon virus.
It's more common in novels and games. But it happens in TV and movies too, take HAL 9000 for example. And you also have to consider that a lot of scifi shows predate deep learning, so it's often referred to as "the computer" instead and AI is reserved for AGI, usually with personality and a humanoid avatar.
In TNG the ship computer handled a lot of routines where the crew only provided high level input. It's advanced enough to run realistic holodeck scenarios.
Stargate Universe also had a ship that was mostly run by the computer and made decisions that were often inscrutable to the occupants and only made sense in retrospect.
As others have noted, BSG specifically has internal story logic which explains why there isn't AI all over the place on the human side. However, more generally, AIs slugging it out, probably over great distances, over timeframes that would probably be very different (both quick and slow) from a human dogfight probably wouldn't be very interesting to viewers relative to essentially WWII dogfights in space.
(And, in general, some version of WWII combat (plus lasers, etc.) is still the model for most SF--even when it's not very deliberately aping it as in the case of Star Wars.
AI's fighting it out while the human crew does nothing is not compelling drama. That's why Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. etc. all have 2nd World War style fighting going on. To get a more realistic idea of what future battles will be like, you need to read Ian M. Banks. In his books, humans are (correctly) too slow and fragile to do any fighting.
Sci-fi is mostly about human entertainment and AI on AI battles just aren't as relatable. Consider something like chess, it used to be quite a drama in the human battles for world champion whereas computer vs computer is a bit meh. The trouble with human vs AI is it tends to be one sided on way or the other.
> What’s the difference between a Tomahawk cruise missile and a drone?
With human pilots, there is a bright line separating aircraft and missiles (although even that line wasn't completely firm - see Kamikazi attacks). Taking the pilot out of the equation, that line dissolves into a gradient.
> Is the distinction that drone can return to base, or otherwise land and be reused?
A Tomahawk is a drone, just not the kind discussed in this article. A Tomahawk is subsonic missile designed to attack land and sea targets. The drone they are talking about here would be able to attack land, sea, and air targets. It would be vastly more maneuverable, faster, reusable, have AI specific to air-to-air combat, and I assume it would have greater versatility in selection of its munitions during an engagement.
Stealth is a 2005 movie that explores this concept. It didn't do too well in the box office but I definitely enjoyed it although the AI is a little forced.
It looks like the drone in question here is the following (quoted from Aerospace Testing International), also mentioned in the linked source:
'The “fighter-sized” 5th Generation Aerial Target (5GAT) is 12.2m (40ft) long, a 7.3m wingspan and a maximum gross weight of 4,350kg (9,600lb). It is designed to be launched and landed using a conventional runway. The drone features two afterburning jet engines and a 95% carbon fiber airframe.' It seems to be designed specifically to stress test our own flights as target practice and doesn't seem like it's actually going to be going into combat anytime soon.
If you enjoyed that, be sure to check out Macross Plus. The rivalry is between a traditional pilot and pilot who controls using a neural interface. A little less hand wavey than what sci-fi thought AI was 15 years ago.
If it's like early AI logic, fly as high as possible, say 40km which turns out is a higher flight ceiling than the attacker in many instances. But the key was the missiles had a ceiling hight of say 20 km, though if launched at 40km, they would still work upon targets flying upwards and the AI logic wouldn't think of them as a threat as those missiles don't work above 20km. Though that means they can climb to that height. Also means if they fire a missile, it won't climb to hit you. Great tactic using the limitations of the missiles to your advantage.
Things like that will be were a pilot will have an early edge, pushing those limits by fully understanding the mechanics of those limits and how they play out. Be that pushing a sonic boom shockwave to effect a small pursing drone. Those for unmanned autonomous system will be the achilles heal in much the same way early Chess AI was able to be beaten by humans thru not doing the obvious most logical move.
But if they want to tune AI for autonomous system, then doing a FTP simulator game, running the NPC drones on a server will get you lots of unique free testing and tuning of that AI done. Be much cheaper and we get a cool game to play.
I feel a good or maybe the best way to eke our an edge for the US, China or whoever would be to create a good simulation platform and offer a great SaaS platform, maybe like kerbal space program, and let anyone compete. Then learn from the simualations.
"[AI] would be able to make key decisions faster and more accurately"
That's a statement nobody here will have problems to accept right? I expect nobody can think of any example that makes "more accurately" a problematic claim.
It seems like an entirely valid statement. AI can certainly make faster decisions than a human and it can utilize accurate 6DoF calculations and multi-sensor fusion that humans can only roughly approximate in an intuitive way during battle. I'm sure there will still be areas where humans will be better, such as analyzing complex visual information or predicting high-level reasoning of an enemy pilot, but I see human-versus-drone encounters as a clear loser for human pilots in the relatively near term.
Lets just hope the entrenched pilots don't find some way to handicap the drone's ability to keep it "fair". Why the US is spending a trillion dollars on the F-35 program is an exercise in pork politics.
That was really just a question of time. Wait a few decades, and see the first warships specialised for carrying drones and missiles (which are essentially kamikaze drones) exclusively.
Why specialize them? If SpaceX can land a rocket on a drone-ship, the next step would be to land a drone inside a 20-foot shipping container. Then every container ship becomes an aircraft carrier, capable of carrying thousands of drones. The merchantmen become their own escorts.
I guess they'll be very careful with the objective function, not to produce a Kamikaze drone:
- Drone: Less than $10 million.
- Fighter: Almost $100 million and human on board.
It's not far stretched to treat the drone as a new type of missile. Air-to-Air, Air-to-Surface, Surface-to-Surface, Surface-to-Air, and the new generation: Anywhere-to-Anywhere missile.
[+] [-] nmstoker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JadoJodo|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bat_bomb
[+] [-] GhostVII|5 years ago|reply
The main benefit of drones is surveillance imo, since they can just circle an area for hours. For combat I think we will have pilots for the foreseeable future, they can react more quickly and have a better view of the situation than a drone operator. Also I would imagine having a pilot can also be useful if you don't want other countries shooting down your planes (or if you want to start a conflict) - Iran would have been much more resistant to shooting down a US predator drone if it was a manned aircraft instead. I don't really know though.
[+] [-] nexuist|5 years ago|reply
What do I mean by that? What I mean is that most of the time, the F-35's purpose is not to go up against MiGs or other foreign fighters. The F-35 is a flying eye-in-the-sky that can scan surfaces, oceans, mountains, etc. to identify and classify targets. It has ordinance to take out those targets, but that's secondary to its main mission of basically being a one-man Google Maps team.
Could the F-35 get into a dogfight? Sure, but a lot would have to fail for that situation to ever happen - given its sensor suite it should be able to detect and fire upon an enemy fighter before it is ever in visual sight.
You can also tell this intention from the way pilots are trained: they must first reach the rank of Officer and learn abstract combat tactics in a classroom setting before they ever step foot in an aircraft. This is not by mistake.
Personally I think the future is squadrons of autonomous drones assisting human pilots. You come in with an F-35 and a dozen Predator drones and send in the drones to do your dirty work (close air support, recon, remote bombing, etc.) while you command the battlefield and drop a few guided bombs 40,000 feet up.
[+] [-] onion2k|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belorn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Agnu|5 years ago|reply
It might seem minor but shifts like this have the potential to give one combatant a meaningful edge against an opponent lacking the same capabilities. Imo, even as a purely defensive tool this will allow much smaller entities to maintain control over their space against aggressive neighbors. Miniaturization of computers and automated weaponry reduces the space/resource requirements to maintain a state-like monopoly on violence within that space. I see this all as being firmly in the same trend as the increasing availability and power of biological engineering equipment and techniques and the increasing risk posed by locally-embodied/concerned AGI. These all have wildly varying threat profiles and difficulties with determining likely timelines but you get my point.
I never even got into possible offensive uses of these drones but one of my nightmares is matroska drones, C-130, to these (which can deal with other airforces and large ground forces,) to hunt-and-kill quadracopters to little single-serving shaped-charge drones. You can't nuke a city because of insurmountable optics but enough people were able to stomach large-lascale bombing of cities within the last 20 years that I would not be surprised at all if this kind of force was used to neutralize a city by bringing to fruition the promise of "precise bombing" and actually only killing the people and destroying the structures you mean to. It's a brand new WMD.
And even if I'm totally off base this is great sci-fi.
Edit: Bullshit punctuation to trim one word (and then add this note and actually make it a good deal longer, nice.)
[+] [-] adamfeldman|5 years ago|reply
"The Alarming Case of the USAF’s Mysteriously Missing Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles"
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/3889/the-alarming-case...
[+] [-] blarg1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baybal2|5 years ago|reply
1. Kaftar has all fancy jet fighters from Russians, and Egyptians. $50m apiece, tear Turkish drones left, and right.
2. The government has Turkish drones, $2m apiece. By the time Kaftar's Mig inflicts a single loss, a swarm of 5 drones already bombed that Mig's airfield to smithereens.
Government forces can expend all of their drones to get an enemy airfield, and they would still win the trade.
[+] [-] redis_mlc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] C1sc0cat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrTortoise|5 years ago|reply
drone could have higher max speeds, higher max acceleration. fighter was designed ... what 20 years ago?
Cost of drone? Cost of loss of either? total cost of ownership is vastly different.
There is real cause to be very afraid.
[+] [-] cheeze|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] na85|5 years ago|reply
It turns out that the faster, higher aircraft has the advantage. If you have speed, you can deny your better-turning adversary an opportunity to engage you, and you thus dictate the terms of the engagement. If you find yourself on equal footing as a bandit, you can simply climb away at the enemy's maximum level speed and he will be unable to catch you.
Additionally, BVR missiles in particular benefit from a high initial launch velocity so they can use their finite delta-V budget to maximize range and closure with the target.
G Force tolerance only matters if you're in the air combat equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth.
Methinks these trials coming up will not be fair: a human can continue making good decisions in a non permissive electromagnetic/cyber battle space whereas a drone cannot. Air combat tactics will have to evolve but I don't think we will see drones defeating piloted fighters (in actual combat) in my lifetime. Perhaps if there's a watershed moment in AI but we aren't there yet.
[+] [-] airstrike|5 years ago|reply
A thousand years for now, it may be up to Brion Brandd to save this planet... https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2559973349
[+] [-] IdontRememberIt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akiselev|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the8472|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|5 years ago|reply
(And, in general, some version of WWII combat (plus lasers, etc.) is still the model for most SF--even when it's not very deliberately aping it as in the case of Star Wars.
[+] [-] mbrodersen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tim333|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|5 years ago|reply
Tomahawk is already (2015) available with reconnaissance camera and loiter mode.
Is the distinction that drone can return to base, or otherwise land and be reused?
[+] [-] nordsieck|5 years ago|reply
With human pilots, there is a bright line separating aircraft and missiles (although even that line wasn't completely firm - see Kamikazi attacks). Taking the pilot out of the equation, that line dissolves into a gradient.
> Is the distinction that drone can return to base, or otherwise land and be reused?
That's probably the most useful distinction.
[+] [-] 1e-9|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kosmischemusik|5 years ago|reply
Further, the drone may not necessarily used for combat, it could be used as a decoy.
[+] [-] Eridrus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arthurcolle|5 years ago|reply
It looks like the drone in question here is the following (quoted from Aerospace Testing International), also mentioned in the linked source:
'The “fighter-sized” 5th Generation Aerial Target (5GAT) is 12.2m (40ft) long, a 7.3m wingspan and a maximum gross weight of 4,350kg (9,600lb). It is designed to be launched and landed using a conventional runway. The drone features two afterburning jet engines and a 95% carbon fiber airframe.' It seems to be designed specifically to stress test our own flights as target practice and doesn't seem like it's actually going to be going into combat anytime soon.
[+] [-] cheschire|5 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macross_Plus
[+] [-] ourmandave|5 years ago|reply
I hope for Maverick's sake aerial combat and chess are two different things.
[+] [-] Zenst|5 years ago|reply
Things like that will be were a pilot will have an early edge, pushing those limits by fully understanding the mechanics of those limits and how they play out. Be that pushing a sonic boom shockwave to effect a small pursing drone. Those for unmanned autonomous system will be the achilles heal in much the same way early Chess AI was able to be beaten by humans thru not doing the obvious most logical move.
But if they want to tune AI for autonomous system, then doing a FTP simulator game, running the NPC drones on a server will get you lots of unique free testing and tuning of that AI done. Be much cheaper and we get a cool game to play.
[+] [-] spullara|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] golem14|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SiempreViernes|5 years ago|reply
That's a statement nobody here will have problems to accept right? I expect nobody can think of any example that makes "more accurately" a problematic claim.
[+] [-] 1e-9|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Jugurtha|5 years ago|reply
- Drone: Less than $10 million.
- Fighter: Almost $100 million and human on board.
It's not far stretched to treat the drone as a new type of missile. Air-to-Air, Air-to-Surface, Surface-to-Surface, Surface-to-Air, and the new generation: Anywhere-to-Anywhere missile.