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Comment by danjac | Hacker News Reader

> But I can't really see much benefit to that

Look at the recent Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to see how much UAVs are a game-changer:

https://www.csis.org/analysis/air-and-missile-war-nagorno-ka...

But how do you translate that into hitting something going Mach 1 at 40k feet? A UAV capable of attacking a jet can exist. My point is that it would need to be a fully capable aircraft not something that can be produced cheaply and deployed in swarms. There's a lot of space in the sky.

Makes you wonder, is there a time for an unmanned jet?

At some point these jets must be at ground, not ? A swarm of UAVs can do a lot of damage on these situation.

Hence counter-swarm swarms. Either single use, fired from a canister, or with their own little runways, flying low level CAP and ready launch at any time, unsleeping vigilance. Plus a bunch of CIWS (C-RAM), which are very effective despite scaring the fuck out of you as they tear open a portal to hell.

https://youtu.be/AcTXYtB9Lfs

How do you get those UAV's there? The combat radius of a F-35A (without drop tanks or refueling) is 1000km's. If this UAV is going to travel 1000km's then it's going to be quite big, expensive, and likely easy pickings for defending F-35's. If it's carried by something then that something too would be an easy target and would probably need to be escorted by something which would fight said fighter jets.

It's just really not that simple.

They can be produced cheaply because all of the life support, human facing controls, and armoring aren't included. This reduces weight which shrinks the airframe and reduces operational costs significantly.

The largest cost for a fighter is its engine, followed by radar and weaponry. The cost for including a human is a nit. And there isn't any armor in modern fighters. The A-10 has titanium , but fighter jets don't pack anything like that.

There's dollar cost, and then there's political cost. A pilot shot down and killed or captured is a political liability and military planners have to take that into account when deploying manned aircraft vs drones.

Agreed, but that doesn't mean that an autonomous aircraft will be cheap simply because it lacks a pilot. The cost for a Global Hawk is north of $250M, and it sure isn't a fighter bomber.

The drone swarm concept is irrelevant to the high and fast fight, but very relevant to infantry and armour. Of course HN is getting it confused. '3D printed jets!' they cry.

However smart jets will be a thing, as evidenced by the Boeing Loyal Wingman program (awful name). The uninhabited jet will push further into the engagement envelope, pull higher Gs, risk SAM lock-on to take out the SAM, fly in the dust like Tornados used to. And it will get task guidance from the X band data link from a human piloted jet. But that UAV will likely be as expensive as a regular jet (more including development cost of AI tech, retrofitting remote control into other jets).

Swarms of loitering munitions make sense in countering mobile SAM sites, as the Syrians/Russians (in Syria) and Emiratis(in Libya) are finding out -- so many Pantsir-S (SA-22) point defence systems destroyed by Turkish drones. So how long before S-400 systems (long range AAAD) get eaten?

The failure of Pantsir in Libya has been fascinating. One has to wonder if it's a failure in design/tech or in training and operations? Same with the drones that were used with impunity in Nagorno-Karabakh. I also wonder if the Russian's have been hyping their SAM systems too much. Not that they're not formidable, but they often seem to make their A2AD systems sound impenetrable.

If you're flying an Apache and you crest a hill and there's a ZSU or an SA-9 on the other side that is a brown pants situation. Obviously you try everything possible to avoid that engagement envelope. But with a drone it is feasible to push harder.

It's possible that the Pantsir-S export firmware isn't as good, but being totally spanked can't be good for export sales. The Turkish drones (eg Bayraktar TB2) have the indigenous KORAL EW system for both sensing and jamming, and given the platform SWaP constraints it must be pretty smart, though I don't know how they are preventing algorithm compromise given drones get shot down fairly often. Crypto presumably.

Given the relatively static setup, it is likely that the positions of the SAM sites is heavily compromised via local informants, leakage from cell phones and aerial surveillance. And rather than integrated A2AD it is probably more isolated sites. But still very impressive for a 659kg drone to be able to take them out.

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