Manned fighter to face autonomous drone next year
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
You basically turn cargo aircraft into aircraft carriers.
https://i.redd.it/4deoeuq9e4m21.png
Drones are the game's main theme and it's great.
With his VariEze and Long-EZ designs, which first flew in 1975 and 1979 respectively, Rutan is responsible for helping popularize both the canard configuration and the use of moldless composite construction in the homebuilt aircraft industry.
See https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_s_Q5CI7p5M and https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f7Lu6LEQ0zo for inspiration. I doubt those landings were healthy for the pilot’s back, but for drones, and given half a century or so of technological development, this might work.
You might not even need the grappling hook. ‘Just’ stall the drone at a height of a few meters, and have it fall onto a relatively soft surface. Maybe add a small rocket to soften the landing.
Very easy to beat via even somewhat advanced radioelectronic warfare. Can't coordinate if you can't communicate. This is the Achilles heel of all these "advanced weapons systems" that look so great in the powerpoint slides but are only useful against enemies which don't have any weaponry built after mid-80s.
How do you defeat a drone swarm using frequency agile communications over narrow beams with cheap equipment, such that it's asymmetric in cost?
https://www.voanews.com/europe/russian-mystery-weapon-claim-...
Of course any country not in on it will be far, far, far, far behind. The idea of a drone swarm based air force going up against a less capable foe seems overwhelmingly superior. I'm sure there will be a give and take as people figure out how to disrupt them better, but I also have no reason to think there won't be ways to compensate for a countermeasure after it's understood.
Or we could just, I dunno, stop having so many wars... but I'm kind of at the point where it's obvious enough that every major world power is working on it that I'm not sure what else the US can do.
Not building $1B fighters seems like a good decision all around if there's any other way... that just seems stupid, no offense intended to anyone working on it but it just seems unreasonable on the face of it if you can make hundreds of unmanned drones instead (or pay teachers more of course...).
Imagine a jet flying through a cloud of drones. Maybe most are destroyed. But some work their way into the internal systems, or perhaps into the cockpit itself, and do who knows what.
Also, poor animal.
Drones phone home with location data of base for other ordinance, release biological warfare agents infecting an entire base (or worse), or spread from the infected jet to other vehicles and equipment doing untold billions in damage.
We already have extremely fast autonomous vehicles specifically designed to take down fighters. They are called missiles. Modern missiles already do everything you are listing including cooperation.
As the main weapons of fighter drones will likely be missiles anyway, the drones will probably be mostly glorified missiles carriers allowing reusability of some of the most expensive avionics.
Usually, the hard problem for AI in military application is respecting the rules of engagement. I fully expect a human to still be in the loop for sometimes.
Why not keep drones around for surveillance, for communication, anti-personnel, anti-aircraft, anti-boat, anti-car, signal jammer, take out a cell tower, take out a high tension line, etc...
oh yeah, add contact tracing with an update :)
If you mean having a combination of different specialised drones doing different roles, one of them being carrying sofisticated ordnances to take out fighters then I agree.
If you mean having a multirole drone able to do everything (what would be an AI piloted F25) then I think it doesn't make a lick of sense. Fighters make little sense in modern warfare anyway. The cost/capability ratio just doesn't work especially considering they are only ever going to be used against considerably less advanced opponents as all the nations operating modern fighters could nuke each other.
Regarding AI, my personnal belief is that having a computer assisting a human piloting a group of drones is a more promising avenue than fully autonomous drones but I might be wrong.
That is the opposite from what I'm saying.
For example, all the current F planes are not specialized -- they are all termed multi-role fighters. They have all been treated as a platform and upgraded for more capabilities over time.
I think drones will follow the same path -- glomming on capabilities instead of becoming more specialized.
We will have multi-role drones.
There are examples in media!
Many mechas from the Gundam series use funnels, a form of drone, in order to overwhelm a single enemy or attack multiple ones:
https://youtu.be/qc6ME9S_qps?t=1m5s
Ace Combat 7 features a massive battle against an airborne UAV carrier and its swarm of drones:
https://youtu.be/JQJpRwkXHj4?t=19m50s
Sometimes the entire screen is filled with targets!
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.
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.
When the "Loyal Wingmen" become mature, the F35 can be turned into stealthy AWACS planes, with most ordanance replaced by more electronics and/or more fuel.
I've heard that the future of air-to-air dogfights are more like two enemies in the dark, each with a gun and a flashlight. The first to use the flashlight is likely to be the first to be shot.
Here the flashlight is the active sensors systems, the darkness is the stealth fighter's design, and the gun is the hyper advanced weapons systems.
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.)
"The Alarming Case of the USAF’s Mysteriously Missing Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles"
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/3889/the-alarming-case...
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.
Anyway there are videos of aircraft doing it like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVJWm0lf9v4.
And this one is on a proper runway but illustrates the toughness of Russian/Soviet designs: a landing gear failure where the aircraft was apparently flying again after two or three days
https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a18021/su-27-landing...
Of course the A10 can also use dirt runways.
As I understood, they are mostly targeting planes on the ground, and equipment
Jamming that stops signals to drones is an iffy proposition since it makes the jammer an easy target for anti-radiation and home on jamming capable missiles like the HARM and the AAMRAM.
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.
Not at all. Missiles are far faster and more maneuverable than aircraft. The only chance a fighter plane has against them is with countermeasures such as chaff and flares as well as electronic countermeasures (ECM). All of these are designed to fill the missile’s tracking and guidance systems. Without them, the plane is helpless against the faster and more maneuverable missile.
Missiles are also far cheaper than aircraft. There’s no need to sustain the life and health of a pilot and no need to carry fuel for return trips. This makes missiles very small and light (and thus cheap) compared to a plane.
It can carry half the fuel (or fly twice as long), doesn't need landing mechanisms, can be made with less focus on durability (just needs to survive one flight). It can be very small and fly low (and subsonic) to avoid detection. It could even land and wait near military airports on top of trees etc.
Basically it would work like movable minefields in air. Denying territory to the enemy planes.
Airborne platforms for both the big launch sensors and the missile launch point have some inherent advantages is all.
Also, it's really hard to set up a SAM a hundred miles into enemy territory - SAM is fundamentally a defensive technology with extremely limited use for air superiority missions.
A thousand years for now, it may be up to Brion Brandd to save this planet... https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2559973349
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.
Why isn’t auto-aim game over here for both sides?
Approach and simply fire missiles at all the spots the plane could be in the next few seconds. Done.
For context, the volume of that sphere is about 164 million cubic metres.
Even if you assume it can't maneuver with complete authority anywhere in that sphere (valid assumption), you could reduce that volume by 75% and still be looking at 40 million cubic metres.
I mean, you're not trying to blanket the entire space, just put things in its way.
EDIT: Or the missiles themselves can just guide themselves based on tracking how their target moves. Then you won't even need many missiles.
That's what many types do nowadays.
No.... Caprica six slept with Baltar who gave her access to the defense mainframe. She modified a version of the new fleet control system with the vulnerability that allowed the cylons to take over the fleet.
Galactica survives because she's a museum ship and would never get the update and was built in a time where computer systems were not networked inside battlestars. Another battlestar (spoilers) survives because it was shut down and getting the upgrades.
You can both be right.
I forget if there was anything special with the computers at that point
(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.
Forgive my poor memory but it was a really cool battle. The Mind explained methodically and gleefully how it found and destroyed a bunch of enemy ships.
Anyway, at some point the human asks a question and the Mind says something along the lines of, “oh, the battle is already over. It only lasted three seconds”.
Maybe someone can help me remember where this happened.
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?
I suspect 'drone' is a catch all term for things that don't have more specific names.
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.
Further, the drone may not necessarily used for combat, it could be used as a decoy.
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.
Macross Plus being much older doesn't attempt to get into AI for the opponent, and instead uses something a little more down to earth at the time which was neural interfaces.
I hope for Maverick's sake aerial combat and chess are two different things.
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.
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.
Combat is a simpler zero sum game, pick and target and destroy.
Based on how AI plays top games right now(Starcraft and Dota), very fast quick reflexes and pin point accuracy of their attacks I think the AI drones are going to crush humans.
Finally the fly boys will realize they're totally outmatched and that the F35 will be our last fighter. In my wildest dreams it gets cancelled and a bunch of smaller defense companies spring up to bring prices way down and competition in the space increases. Then overall defense spending goes down and we get more money for services - while being still being armed to the absolute teeth.
It could be reasonable to have a delivery mechanism for drones that's close to where the action might be (so that the drones can reach the target quickly) but the surviving drones have to go way back somewhere else to land and be refurbished/refueled/rearmed for another mission.
And about the "sizeable contingent". The Ohio class can launch 144 Tomahawks. That is probably enough to suppress the air defences of most countries.
Sorry that I'm picking on these details, it's just people have a tendency to shriek in horror about the future of autonomous weapons, as if we wouldn't be living with them already.
- 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.
Should such technology be created? That's question is above my pay grade. Bad guys could do things like this today so it seems prudent to work on countermeasures.
If the drone does require connectivity to central command, then shouldn’t it be fairly easy to jam this signal?
We can do this all day but I don't think it's helping anything.
If it only has to "live" for a few minutes, you can get a LOT more performance out of it, which is exactly what they're designed around.
But it's a trade-off. You could invest in a (practically) infinite supply of global capable missiles to be launched from the literal center of America, and to get 24 hour coverage you just launch one every 30 minutes. But that's extremely expensive and stupid.
But a missile which is carried to be closer to the battle can be smaller, and cheaper. Then you need some kind of vehicle to get it there. This kind of thing is that vehicle.
Avner Friedman, Differential Games, ISBN 0-471-28049-6.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/nation/2014/11/10/aircraft-ba...
But that isn't even speculation. We know the pilots misunderstood what they were seeing, because the telemetry data refuting their misunderstanding is right there on the recording.
To argue their case though, how often does the target tracking system they were using pick up a bird? They may never have seen it do something like that before, and may not even have known it was possible. Also it's one thing for a knowledgeable expert to calmly review and decode the telemetry data at a desk, but the pilot was a little busy also flying an airplane at the time.
I'm sure US has some kind of secret programme, but I doubt they released the videos showing their own top secret programme. It's much more likely that they released it to throw a bit of a smokescreen and cause their peers like China to expend resources trying to research it. They are releasing some kind of strange patents as well, that seem to be type of pseudoscience which could be a similar play.
Predator - entered service in 1995 25 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predator