You'd be better off from a cost perspective running a swarm of hundreds of drone strapped with explosives, only one of them needs to get lucky to disable a multi-million dollar plane and the drones themselves can be pretty cheap.
Why do you think fighters carry a bunch of “drones strapped with explosives” (air-to-air missiles) for air-to-air combat?
The thing is, when you optimize those, they tend to be comparatively short range and have no loiter time, so it's nice to have something to carry them into an engagement area and, if you need to patrol or escort, it's nice for it to also be something with some loiter time.
They don't typically carry _hundreds_, though. Carrying capacity for air-to-air missiles is pretty low. You get only a few shots.
So just like the famous rocket equation, you'll find that the design space narrows down to drones that are no longer cheap or casually expendable - essentially supersonic capable cruise missiles with loiter times that tend to cost millions of dollars a piece. Certainly cheaper than manned aircraft but not something that can be used in the hundreds casually per engagement.
The other option is of course what's done today - strapping a relatively cheaper air to air missile to an even more expensive but fast and survivable aircraft which brings it to the war zone and gives it kinetic energy at launch.
That was perfectly visible in the recent Syrian Civil War. Once the Russians decided to actively step in the conflict sure that they sent a rocket or two directly from their bases in Southern Russia/Caucasus, but I suspect that was more for propaganda reasons.
Soon enough they set up an air-base for good in Northern Syria (only a few tens of kms away from rebel lines) and they also brought in a battleship (or whatever is called nowadays the ship from which you can send rockets) off the coast of Syria. I'm pretty sure that proved a lot more cost-effective for them.
"Guided missile cruiser/destroyer/frigate" would be more correct terms. Frigates are rarely employed in land-attack missions, and only 2 or 4 countries have cruisers (US + Russia, as well as China and South Korea if you count their respective oversized destroyer classes as cruisers ). There are no battleships in active service in any navy today. The Russians do, however, possess the closest thing: the world's only nuclear-powered guided missile battlecruiser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirov-class_battlecruiser
Later edit: A news article from that same timestamp [2] of Iraq complaining that it hadn’t been warned by the Russians of the latter sending missiles flying over their heads. It also includes a video of the supposed launch.
Later later edit: Here's a (short) Twitter video of one of those missiles flying over Northern Iraq [3]
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-34465425
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/iraq-says-it-was-not-wa...
[3] https://twitter.com/NewsOfIraq_EN/status/668192312497950720
Then when not engaged in air defense, these drones engage in CAS. Taking down fighters is a secondary mission - their real role is to dominate the battlefield, and part of that is by making it so unsafe to enter the airspace above the battlefield that it's futile suicide to try.
This is without factoring that a typical war-fighter could simply shoot through such a passive defence wall from dozens of km away if they really need to and if they are moving at Mach 2, they'll be through the hole before it reforms and because of lack of speed, there's essentially no chase capability once through.
These kinds of ideas while interesting remind me of the Magniot line and we all know how it fared
The rest of the F-22's range and service ceiling, you don't care about. You let them fly around all they want. If they want to go fly around at 50,000 feet at Mach 2, have fun. An F-22 is basically harmless to a drone: it can shoot down 12 drones with its 12 AA missiles, each of which costs > $1M, about 1000x what a drone costs. There's no pilot in a drone whose life is sacred, and there're plenty more drones where they came from.
You only need to engage the F-22 if they're coming down to engage ground forces. But then they need to fly through the swarm, at a huge risk to the airplane and pilot, and the swarm can react to put as many pieces of plastic in the F-22's path as possible.
If the F-22 stays up at 50K feet and drops precision-guided weapons from 30 miles away, they lose the attrition war to the drone swarm. A drone can very accurately put a bullet into each infantryman and a shaped charge on top of every tank with little resistance, unless the enemy is itself fielding autonomous drones. An F-22 can put 8 SDBs on 8 targets. Which is more efficient?
Sure simple small drones can attack ground targets but that's a different problem from area denial to air superiority fighters and it assumes you already have a ground presence (ie. insurgency ISIS style) to get within range where you minimize risk of detection and flight time. If detected, an ISIS style drone can be shot down with a rifle.
Again I'm not saying pilotless attack / defence is not going to come - it obviously will. I'm saying it probably won't be the tens of thousands of cheap drones approach for the reasons above - it will be faster, more expensive drones which will be a significant fraction of manned aircraft cost.
Have you not just described an anti-air missile?
Yes, but a loitering anti-air missile.
Just for fun, and I have no qualifications whatsoever, but the Aim 9 comes in at 188 pounds (85.3 kg), add say 20kg for a release mount? (just guessing), so might be doable.
Might need something more upmarket than a Griff 300 (max altitude 1000m - see https://www.dronetechplanet.com/the-griff-300-review-drone-t...) but even with that, if you had network of these remotely operated they could pack a hell of a surprise for an unsuspecting pilot (missiles would only go active when released), can be positioned strategically around assets.
Also, drones are far slower than a missile, and even far slower than the airplane they're trying to target.
No one's using tactical nukes against a drone swarm.
The Genie anti-air nuclear rocket [1] was designed to take out soviet bombers, in a time when guided missiles were too immature to provide the required precision. A more modern guided nuclear anti-air missile (with features such as PAL security and tritium boosted fission for a higher / dialable yield) would probably work quite nicely for reducing swarm density.
The way I see it, we're probably headed towards a cold (at minimum) war between sino-russia et. al. and the western allies, so (in the absence of something more effective) tactical nuclear weapons to counter aircraft swarms will become more tolerable as tensions continue to rise - far better to use one to take out a drone swarm and cause drama than risk losing an air wing (or something else that interferes with force projection). Hopefully I'm wrong though.
If you can develop a drone swarm that can totally own an airspace then chances are you can develop drones that can beat them.
If a drone swarm proves lethal to a multi million dollar aircraft of ship, tactical nuke could be a suitable response.
Unlikely, sure, I'm just saying though....
Airwar is not about who shoots more planes, it's about who will blow up enemy's airbases first.
Animated example of a convoy getting hit by lasers:
Live example:
Energy dissipation of a laser in atmo is going to require crazy amounts of energy to go even a moderate distance, so either those lasers are being fired from something really close to the airfield, or else you've got some S.H.I.E.L.D style flying aircraft carrier thing.
A weapon without munitions, is a useless weapon, even if it costs $300M a pop. A war is won by a soldier, and lost by a logistics officer.
The maximum what a few fit men can load very slowly, unassisted is 250kg, and usually only 100kg by a single man. Gravity fed refueling is also quite time consuming.
Since we're being realistic, you could use the launcher I sketched out as an elementary school student. It had missile tubes on every surface, including around the wheels.
Why do we have air-superiority fighters? It's to shoot down any aircraft that might be harassing our ground units, and to ensure that our own CAS/attack aircraft can freely harass their ground units without opposition. An F-22 with an air-superiority loadout is pretty much useless in the ground war. So just let it fly around, and if it shoots down 8 drones with its 8 missiles, big deal. There's hundreds more where those came from. Meanwhile any aircraft that are actively strafing, cluster-bombing, etc. the ground forces have to fly straight through the drone swarm, with likely pretty cataclysmic results.
Now which of these mission profiles can destroy an infantry company more cost-effectively? The JDAM may blow up a vehicle plus any infantrymen around it at the cost of $20K. The drone can individually target each infantryman with a bullet from a range of ~50-100 ft, for perhaps 100 kills for a $1000 drone, and it can be tactically controlled by other infantrymen on the ground, with instantaneous communication, to respond exactly where it's needed and avoid friendly fire.
If drones are going to be used for CAS, then they need a control channel or Skynet AI. Any control channel in use will depend on LOS, and will be jammed to oblivion in a real war.
I think there's an impedance mismatch between some folks who assume "countering" an F-22 or B-1B means shooting it down, and others who assume "countering" it means making it cost-ineffective to achieve your strategic aims. For the latter folk, having your manned aircraft constantly plink away at your forces and shoot down your drones is still mission-accomplished as long as your drones are doing a lot more damage than your forces are receiving.
The aircraft-carrier vs. battleship debate is again relevant. The two times that an aircraft carrier and a battleship got into a direct fight (HMS Glorious vs. Scharnorst, and USS Gambier Bay vs. IJN Yamato), the aircraft carrier got reamed, and sunk in short order. But this didn't matter, because aircraft carriers and battleships almost never got into direct fights. There was Pearl Harbor, Taranto, and Malaya before the belligerents realized that sinking battleships was pointless, and then there was Sibuyan Sea and Okinawa when there were no more targets left. In between were a long string of carrier vs. carrier battles where the battleships were used as AA escorts or moved to shore bombardment & convoy escort duties. Similarly, why bother countering a few smart bombs when your drone swarm terminates every enemy soldier on the battlefield within an hour and makes any attempt at interference suicidal for manned aircraft?
If you knew where the plane is headed, the question could become: can you create a wide enough curtain ahead of time that can home in on the incoming plane? Chasing is not needed that way.
Plus, the kind of small drone you’re describing can’t operate at the altitude of a fighter jet. As the air thins out you need a lot of speed to keep sufficient oxygen flowing into the jets, and non-jet aircraft can’t operate. So unless the drones are going to be blimps, a drone that can climb to fighter jet altitude is going to be pretty big and look a lot like a fighter jet.
So that's a big if.
There's no reason either of these needs to be true. A missile with an active control channel is a drone, and another class of military drones is regular manned aircraft converted for remote and/or autonomous operation, like the QF-16. A purpose built air-to-air combat drone could have a wide range of potential performance envelopes, but would almost certainly both have speed and maneuvering advantages over any manned aircraft it was expected to target (quite possibly a lot less range, though.)
They do if you buy enough of them.
While I do not believe I am at liberty to provide details (even lo so many years later), I was witness to the first use of (arguably) VR to prototype and introduce a new weapons platform into a combined arms battlefield simulation. The short version is that on Monday morning, despite all the deep thinking done by smart people about how this would all work out, none of us came close to predicting what turned out to be the net effects of the new system as seen by Friday. I was there in my capacity as a nerd simply to keep the blinking lights blinking (vs the capacity of a combat domain expert), but watching the whole thing unfold was a mind-blowing demonstration of the "Law of Unanticipated Consequences."
None of us are as smart as we think we are. We are no smarter than our adversaries. The world is more complex than either of us can know.
If you're going to use the drone in an A2A role then it needs a powerful radar for accurate targeting. Targeting from other platforms using data links is possible in theory, but in practice only works in a narrow set of ideal conditions. Modern radars and other sensors are themselves super expensive.
"There has been only one dogfight involving a U.S. aircraft in the last 20 years: in 2017, a U.S. Navy pilot shot down a Syrian fighter." [1]
So you have to wonder a bit how much time is worth investing in that aspect of these planes.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/duels-among-the-clouds-11565878...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_air_support
Without close air support, troops on the ground can't overwhelm enemies with firepower. Without air superiority, we don't provide close air support. Our strategy dictates air superiority to enable our tactics of close air support.
The reason there's only been one dogfight in the past 20 years is not because these fighters aren't effective, or because they're a relic of the past. It's that they're too effective. We own the sky and nobody is capable of challenging us.
As for other countries: it’s still in your geopolitical interests to have countries who aren’t allies using your gear - not just for the money - but because it means you already know their weaknesses and you can sell them nerfed “export editions” to ensure you have technical superiority and to lock them in to buying parts, accessories, training, and upgrades (and successors!) from your own nations’ defence contractors and you can saturate a market that your geopolitical rivals (Russia, PRC, Iran, etc) would otherwise have access to, thus weakening their sphere-of-influence.
For a recent example of it going wrong, see the S-400 sale to Turkey.
Arms sales are an ugly thing - but if NATO states didn’t sell arms to Saudi Arabia, Libya, Turkey, etc what would the alternative be?
Education and health care?
I wish - I really do :/
When countries set their budgets for the year - they'll set aside, say, 15% for defense - if their DoD reports to the cabinet that none of the superpowers will sell them new toys then that government's cabinet is not going to suddenly craft a new budget and divert that money that would have gone to new fighter-planes or small-arms to other civilian areas - that money will certainly stay with their military who will find some creative use for it.
...and that's the best-case scenario - for a country that isn't expecting hostilities.
What I meant by that was that if NATO doesn't sell to a third-world (using the strict/classical definition of "third-world") nation who is looking to buy arms then a rival power or superpower will - they may even give-away some amount of arms gratis to sweeten the deal and to "thank" the country for leaving or even reconsidering the NATO/OEDC sphere-of-influence - obviously Russia isn't the Soviet Union and they don't have the same expansionist goals, but I believe we're seeing the PRC making its moves. The PRC hasn't yet fired-up its export economy for defence gear yet - but I believe it's inevitable.
I stress that I don't want to start-up any Sinophobic sentiment - but what I'm seeing the PRC do is exactly the same thing I'd expect to see from any rising superpower looking to preserve their unending explosive economic growth... history doesn't exactly repeat itelf, but it often rhymes: the PRC wants influence, apparently to benefit itself (and I am concerned about the signs of Han ethnonationalism being the motivation behind their foreign and domestic policy objectives - and the PRC doesn't stand for the same principles I do) - I'm concerned where it will end-up. So if it means having to sell arms to countries (as part of an socio-economic-military package) to keep them in NATO+OEDC (which _generally_ value the things that I value) with the view of keeping them out of the PRC's SoI then that's something I'll have to accept.
When I think of the SU’s expansionist goals I think of Seven Days to the Rhine rather than territorial gains of convenience - so I apologise for being vague in my original comment.
I know the same argument applies to the PRC: their occupation of the South China Sea is opportunistic and strategic and so is more comparable to Crimea - it’s not like China is invading Vietnam or South Korea with intent to annex them.
The USSR is dead and gone and no one in power in Russia wants it back, save for pensioners who had a better deal back then.
Putin wants the Russian Empire back, which held Poland, the Ukraine, most of the Baltics, etc.
Why be a Premier when you can be a Tzar?
It is weird that we sell F-15s to Saudi Arabia.
[1] Iraq 1 & 2
[2] Yemen
Also the jets sold overseas are generally "export" quality and have downgraded features or require embedded expertise to maintain.
That calculus is different where combatants are more closely matched (e.g. India and Pakistan), or it may change as opponents improve their capabilities.
Also per unit costs are misleading. You can’t easily quadruple Or 10x your number of air bases, number of trained pilots and air crew, number of aircraft carriers to carry all your cheap and cheerful swarm fighters.
A lot of fast jet economics is driven by getting maximum utility out of deployment capacity and support infrastructure that is itself irreducibly expensive.
My takeaway from that data point is that the Syrian military might be very interested in such an investment.
Of course drones lack the biological limits on G-Force and the economic scales and factors like pilot deaths mean the situations are not identical.
The real question to be answered is probably one of "expendible drones vs premium super drones" long term as the age old battle of quality vs quantity.
You can have a wall of evenly spaced drones with explosives. When an aircraft passes all adjacent drones explode, the shockwave damaging the aircraft.
A wall of drones 100 feet apart, covering 10,000 x 10,000 feet, is 100 x 100 drones, or 10,000 drones, which is a wall that's a little under 2 miles by 2 miles. That's a lot of drones to cover very little area, and they have to each carry enough explosive to create a shockwave that might damage the plane.
Moreover, this is a one-shot weapon. Once something sets it off (like a plane-like drone), there's a big gap in the wall. The idea of saturating an area with explosive drones has a scaling problem that would probably make it cost-prohibitive quite quickly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F/A-18_Horne...
The unclassified ceiling is 50,000 feet, with a 250 m/s climb rate. Could a drone strapped with explosives come anywhere near that level of performance?
That discussion about swarms always devolves to "just push human beings near the action before launching the pitbull outta control killer drones" which for the last 30 years has been repeatedly successfully been implemented as modern jet fighters carrying short range sidewinder IR guided missiles, which annoys the people who thought they invented the new idea of explosive drones, little did they know we've been doing that for generations and its unfortunately probably even more expensive than swarms of WWII era P-51s with human pilots.
So if an enemy ship, perhaps an aircraft carrier, really pissed off a single US destroyer, it can decide to send all hundred supersonic anti-ship missiles in from the same direction at the same instant of arrival, or from every point on the compass, or maybe three directions at once or who knows what kind of crazy four dimensional incoming attack pattern, like waves of ten missiles at a time every second for ten seconds from ten different directions. So how do you distribute your drones so as to soak up a hundred incoming from one direction while not getting sneak attacked by say five from every 30 degrees on the compass at the same time?
Its like say you have a Greek Phalanx, that's pretty well defended over a couple hundred feet, but try to use the same one phalanx spread out to defend all one thousand acres of city-state farmland simultaneously and its not going to work out well.
I dont think thats a problem that can be solved today to the exclusion of manned aircrafts. If you are a terrorist it might not matter but for the kind of nation states that can field fighter jets it certainly matter.
Once a war is going on the you can move to a much more aggressive strategy. The US can just declare that any boats within a certain region are subject to summary attack and all shipping should steer clear. Attack aircraft can start sinking these small boats as soon as they leave harbour (or most likely cruise missiles blow them up at anchor).
I'd expect to see a shift toward more visual and IR sensors as well, to combat stealth technologies. Modern ultra-HD cameras + image recognition algorithms are a lot more sensitive than human eyes are, and you can field many more drones than AWACS aircraft with much less cost of a loss, letting you bring the relevant detection platforms in closer.
Sometimes I swear there is a pas de deux going on between these apparent enemies.
Brannigan: "Killbots? A trifle. It was simply a matter of outsmarting them."
Fry: "Wow, I never would've thought of that."
Brannigan: "You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down. Kif, show them the medal I won."
Just fly in at a higher altitude and if there's some there go around them.
Drones carrying air to air missiles might be more challenging.