USAF’s Missing Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (2016)

This sounds like a worryingly bad idea on many levels.

1. "Such a system could find, fix and finish a target without external direction by a human controller."

The fact that human-out-of-the-loop kill decisions is a bad idea should not require further elaboration.

2. "Suddenly, a simulated threat radar activated. The pair of networked UCAVs immediately classified the threat and executed a plan to destroy it based on the position of each X-45 in relation to the target, what weapons were available, what each drone’s fuel load was and the nature of the target itself. The calculations happened in a blink of an eye."

Congratulations, now all of the adversarial techniques that make state-of-the-art neural networks fall over will apply to fighter jets as well. Does the system deterministically plan to attack everything it sees that looks like a threat? What about easy threats that show up first, followed by progressively more challenging / fuel-draining threats? Now instead of radar jammers, the signals guys will go back to building elaborate decoy generators.

Without a human in the loop, our current autonomous technologies are woefully inadequate for determining whether or not something smells like a trap. Our enemies are going to learn how to knock these things out of the sky with a $200 SDR and a power amp.

This is a fascinating article that is well written and has a lot of interesting information.

However it feels like he is falling into the same trap that most of the media falls into constantly, thinking that AI & Software are easy.

If he thinks the F-35 was hard to launch with all it's software that's nothing compared to an autonomous combat swarm with all the features he's talking about. You can't rush out stuff that controls machines killing stuff.

My guess is he's more of an aviation guy than a software guy so this stuff somehow doesn't seem as hard as it is.

He also mentions the USAF has had a lot of black programs but then continues on with the thesis that they're ignoring this as opposed to continuing to develop in the black.

Also these swarms will be least effective in the kinds of operations we've been mired in. It's a lot easier to set a swarm in motion with orders to clear the sky in a WW3 scenario than it is to have them try and shoot a particular pickup truck filled with civilian-clothed possible enemy combatants in an urban area in Afghanistan.

14) The USAF has discovered that there are insurmountable problems that have prevented the development of effective autonomous systems. Therefore they have declined to invest in technology that isn't working.

Former USAF here, with no knowledge of any of this. My guess is the F-35 program sucked up all the funding for UCAVs.

Wow, was just reading this article after reading the one about SAPs. I don't have much of any knowledge on aerospace engineering or what the Air Force/Navy have planned for our skies, but it's still a crazy thought that they'd abandon that kind of tech. I understand the upper echelons of governments get really bureaucratic but a lot of the times their decisions are incredibly simplistic, a program like this could be abandoned just because the top rung shift focus to intelligence gathering, any platform that doesn't fit that purpose or can easily be made to fit that purpose gets the axe, despite how useful it may be in the future. All boils down to money eventually.

I'm really interested in what the "next phase" of aviation combat will be, or if there even will be a next phase. It's possible some organization would create a weapon that would physically disrupt any vehicle or object flying through a certain patch of sky - that may push us into a air-to-groud laser or smart-guided weapon age to counter those kinds of measures, and also means air vehicles will need serious intel platforms to get around them. We also may see vehicles that can transition from air to sea and retain full combative power, anything in the skies that can't float at that point goes the way of the do-do, no matter how intelligent it's systems are, so maybe the USAF is waiting until it's clear what will work for the next 50 years, while other branches invest UCAV technology.

*air-to-ground, not ground-to-air

Pardon a nitpick moment.

"Boeing’s control software ... was called DICE, or Decision Mission-Control Software."

Okay, well, I see where the D and the C in the acronym comes from, but...

The article is from 2016. A lot has changed since then..

The USAF is making the right call as far as I'm concerned. It is breathtakingly easy for hostile actors to manipulate the behavior of UAVs. Hell, Iran stole one by just spoofing its GPS and landing it exactly where they wanted. Giving every hostile nation and hacker the opportunity to find zero-days on a fleet of supersonic aircraft is stupidly reckless.

I get the impression that the author vastly overestimates the capabilities of modern software. We don't even have reliable self-driving cars, yet they are hoping for reliable self-flying planes that can decide when and how to kill? Even the task of collecting training data for such a system would be monumental.

The F-117's retirement is cited as evidence of a secret UCAV, but I was under the impression that the B-2 made it obsolete anyways.

Isn't this article pretty much describing reprogrammable ICBM's?

Isn't this the purpose of cruise missiles? Essentially a drone that flies to a target and kaboom.