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I think we have neither the AI nor the war proof reliable communication to really steer something like a warplane remotely, in a first-world war scenario.

The US could fly its drones with pilots comfortably sat in mainland US because the Taliban had no weapons able to shoot drones down. There was no dog fighting, no anti-satellite weaponry deployed etc.

Another reason is that warplanes are saturated with expensive kit like crazy. Yes the pilot is a major constructional constraint, but the main reason drones are so much cheaper right now is that they just aren’t designed as equally versatile platforms. If you wanted a full-fledged F35 drone replacement, I’m not sure it would be that much cheaper.

A different axis of the question, which came into play in the Azerbaijan-Armenia war recently, is whether we want few super-capable machines or much much more simpler ones. I think the jury is still out, but to me this is the interesting area of development.

Interesting last point. Could be weighted by how each country values their servicemen, ie. culturally, (at the risk of making this political) one american soldier KIA > thousands of iraqis; makes sense that the US would lean towards safety for pilots. Contrasted with say a WW2 russia "defend the motherland" mentality where losses are acceptable.

Interesting, wasn't that one of the objectives of the F-35? Penetrate (or come close enough) enemy airspace, then orchestrate a squadron of smaller, simpler unmanned aircraft and weapons that are sent in through other means with no particular expectation of returning after combat?

Possibly, I haven’t seen that past any conceptual stage (I’m an amateur btw, nothing to do with defence).

The point stands that the shepherd is a lot more complex than the sheep. F-35 is so packed with sensors: multi purpose radar, IR sensors, I believe there are radio receivers throughout the airframe, turning the whole thing into a phased array receiver. It has sophisticated software and hardware to orchestrate it all. You can configure it to shoot down enemy planes, fight air defences, bomb targets, I’m guessing shoot at ships etc. It can do it all while maintaining stealth and remaining in the air for hours (with aerial refuelling).

This is much fancier than any drone can do right now.

Dogfights are pretty rare these days. Most air combat between planes revolves about launching & dodging air to air missiles that are fired from beyond visual range, and dealing with surface to air missiles while doing so. Shooting planes down with an actual gun in an actual dog fight is mostly reserved for countries that don't have modern planes (i.e. anything newer than half a century).

Fighter planes do have a few remaining roles. They are delivery vehicles for cheaper missiles and bombs to take out smaller ground targets or lighting up targets for missiles/bombs that are launched from far away. The longer range missiles (e.g. cruise missiles) are more expensive. An additional role would be reconnaissance even though most of that is probably done by satellites and drones these days. Then there is the job of escorting bigger, more vulnerable planes like bombers or just generally patrolling areas of interest (which could be done by drones as well). And finally there's the psychological warfare factor where flying them over the enemy has a demoralizing effect.

Basically a missile is an autonomous drone that happens to destroy on impact. Missiles have a few advantages over fighters: they are much faster and maneuverable. And they are disposable by their very nature which means they can go where no pilot would go except when very desperate. And a few disadvantages that mainly boil down to cost and range. The cost is high because they are 1 time use only. The range is limited by fuel and size. Which is why using fighter planes as a launch platform is common.

Autonomous planes aren't particularly hard. It's mostly the price performance that needs attention. Cheap, autonomous drones already exist. Making them bigger and beefing up their abilities is just a matter of time. That's all there's to it. At some point their abilities encompass most of what fighter planes currently do.

> Autonomous planes aren't particularly hard. It's mostly the price performance that needs attention. Cheap, autonomous drones already exist. Making them bigger and beefing up their abilities is just a matter of time. That's all there's to it. At some point their abilities encompass most of what fighter planes currently do.

Currently the allure of drones is that they are very cheap and can perform some missions as well as their big expensive brothers.

If you make a drone that is equally capable as a modern crewed jet, you bear most of the cost anyway. You’ll save something by excluding the pilot, but have to pay for extra (stealth) communication, infrastructure etc.

Maybe we’ll go away from that, have many types of cheap drones that are specialised and disposable. That’s not the case now.

Bear in mind our perception is skewed by the fact that the last N wars were all fought against at least one country far behind in military technology. But NATO et al are really prepping against a war against an equal. Having a cheap plastic drone with a bomb attached at the bottom won’t do.

> But NATO et al are really prepping against a war against an equal. Having a cheap plastic drone with a bomb attached at the bottom won’t do.

Is that premise actually a valid concern though? Last few "wars" have been proxy wars or insurgencies.

Both world wars were preceded by several decades of tensions and also proxy wars between the power blocks. Since nukes are involved this time around, it's in all side's interest to not escalate to a hot war. But missing preparation for the worst case scenario was what went wrong for many participants in previous hot wars.

I've heard the communication argument but I'm not convinced since the F-35 itself is sold as the "connected platform" which is supposed to be constantly communicating with the base and the troops on the ground and have complete situation awareness thanks to that integrated communications.

If F-35 can stay connected, so can the drones.

Drones also have the inherent advantage to do manoeuvres way beyond of what human can do or withstand, they don't carry the human and the devices that are made to keep it alive and in control.

F-35 is also know for not flying that well, it's not really a dog fight machine and the scenarios where the plane is supposed to excel are stealth operation, remote intelligence gathering, launching missiles way before visual contact etc anyway. I don't see why drones can't do any of that.

USA uses drones for decades.

> The first known U.S. drone strike in Yemen was November 3, 2002 (killing al-Qaeda operative Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi)

Sure, US is one of major drone developers and users.

I’m not sure you can push that much two-way bandwidth without compromising stealth; it’s one way to push information to the jet, or exchange little nuggets or he other way, but actually steering the thing remotely would make you totally visible to any radar.

Plus, if you could disable an enemy airforce by destroying the infrastructure, that’s an uncomfortably simple way to ground them. An F35 can operate successfully in total radio silence if need be.

I believe there's no fundamental reason to have drones communicate %100 of the time and receive high fidelity inputs, even consumer drones are quite capable to fly without precise controls from the pilot.

These days, a sub 1000$ consumer drone can follow targets, execute pre-determined tasks, navigate around obstacles and fly back home safely when the communication is lost.

Right, but it's not doing all this while trying to dodge SAM missiles, avoid radars, push the envelope of what it's capable aerodynamically, continuously evaluate a dynamic situation, identify the actual goal (it could be moving, hiding etc.), yada yada yada. Also, losing an aircraft, crewed or not, is further liability - ideally you want to scramble the debris before the enemy can get to it to recover whatever intelligence remains.

The months and years that military pilots spend in training is not just "driving license", but how to best operate a sophisticated destruction machine.

Comparing military jets to the capabilities of commercial drones is massively missing the point of the actual challenges of airborne warfare.

These probably aren't unsolvable problems, I'm not saying we can never replace crewed jets with drones, there are just fundamental reasons why this isn't happening right now.

Of course, drones are not a drop-in replacement for fighter jets with pilots but IMHO drones are inherently superior on most aspects and the shortcomings are solvable problems.

A bit like, Archers having some advantages over rifles but overall rifles being vay superior making archers irrelevant.

It's a great analogy actually. See here for example: https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/01/12/89319/the-puzzli...

Firearms took over bows in Europe around 16th century. But they have been around for far longer, as early as 13th century, possibly much earlier too. Even when firearms took over, they were in many ways inferior to bows. The crucial difference was that they required less skill to operate, so much easier from a general logistical point of view. Training longbowmen in medieval England was a whole massive social project.

So even being the long-term solution doesn't make something the right solution right now, the time gap until it takes over can be very long, and even once it is the right solution, it might not be due to actual technical superiority (at least not initially) but rather wider strategic considerations.

And just to stem the thought, this wasn't because people in the past were stoopid, humans have always devoted a huge amount of skill, cunning and attention to warmongering. Technological progress in military technology was always rapid (if likely slower than today), we just don't see it that way, since one bow kinda looks the same as another to us - but could be an enormous advantage.

There's also a lot of confusion due to the overloaded use of the term 'drone'

Drone could mean remotely piloted $4M Predator firing $140,000 a piece Hellfire missiles

But drone could also mean mass-produced, battery operated quadcopters delivering small scale explosives over the distance of a few kilometers or less (or perform recon). Sometimes deployed in swarms, flying low. Not necessarily remote controlled

Those are two very different military capabilities. The important impact of the kamikaze-drones is that it strongly favors the side with the stronger and more vertically integrated manufacturing base

> Though Turkey has a sizeable engineering capacity, it's not a rich country.

Well, to add a small clarification to this, you probably mean not rich compared to the US. Turkey, even with its current economic crisis, is still a top 20 world economy, a member of OECD and last I checked, just a couple steps behind Korea in GDP. You mostly don’t get to train and retain engineers capable of a world-leading drone program without some accumulated wealth.

Korea has a significantly higher per capita GDP and Turkey is in a full blown currency crisis. In terms of societal capacity the two economies aren't comparable.

Not to contradict you to the economic stability but Turkey is capable of having both an economic crisis and the economic and educational and manufacturing capacity to deploy innovative UAV. In fact, it's military spending might be propping up many parts of the economy.

Iran is an economic basketcase. You think they have no capacity for research and development? Israel doesn't agree.

But for developing military systems, GDP matters more than GDP per capita. Turkey is a big country.

To be clear, by a couple steps I meant couple steps in the world top economies list. I wasn’t implying comparable GDP, though Turkey shouldn’t be too far on that either.

The Netherlands has an annual budget of 300 billion but the military gets less than 2% of that.

Ofcourse should global security ever deteriorate the EU can potentially field an army as large and advanced as any in the world. The cold war was not won by the US alone. But every cent spent on missiles can't go to healthcare or education.

The "investment" is the whole point of the F-35 program. Any military capability it provides is a distant second. We are lucky that it can (often) take off and land at all.

F-35 has subcontracts let in every state, making it organizationally impossible to de-fund. Another similar program is SLS.

This is definitional for "the military industrial complex" -the most vivid example I have ever seen is manufacturers plates on the (now upgraded) Buenos Aires subway. The cars were made by an Argentinian airforce factory.

It's also one of the principle theses of "monopoly capital" by Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran

The Saturn V was also built this way.

The question of usability is highly dependent on how far up a ladder of escalation a given conflict goes up to.

I imagine weapon systems like the F35 are intended for a higher level of conflict and deterrent than the new lower hybrid-war conflicts we're seeing taking place right now. In those cheap home-grown drones can be useful but must rely on satellites and other infrastructure which at a higher level of escalation would be under attack.

I'm certain they've done quite a bit of homework on these choices.

What I find interesting is how something like the F35 is more meant for asymmetrical warfare. If a real war were to break out I imagine something like the A35 Warthog and other such aircraft being rapidly manufactured and delivered to battlegrounds.

But it's all just, like, my opinion man.

Is the F35 the american Maginot line though ? As a French Im keenly aware of over investment in traditional defense when war changes shape.

Never trust them to have done their homework, trust your enemy to have done more and alreay made your strategy obsolete.

Well, I’m located here in Poland and from our perspective it would seem “they” have already done their homework. They’re using a strategy in which the US/NATO doesn’t even get to use those super-weapons because no open war has even been declared (and probably won’t be). Instead it’s this state of emergency, refugee stand-offs, strategic natural-gas pipeline construction, infiltration, proxies and media manipulation etc. A hybrid-war. However, even just the fact that your opponent is not willing to escalate from words/espionage up to actual violence based on the strange high-tech wizardry you might/might-not have is a pretty good outcome.

The Maginot Line is an interesting example. Sure, it functions as the defining joke of WW2 - they just walked around it. But one can imagine other side purposes for building such infrastructure before a war. For instance, just forcing your enemy to declare war against your neighbors (to pass through their territory) could already be seen as a pretty good payoff/deterrent. Or maybe having a large labor force capable of building similar infrastructure based on the experience from building that Maginot line might have been seen as valuable. Hell, maybe it was more about “jobs” and keeping the populace “loyal”. Again - I don’t know the details of the Maginot Line or that history but what I’m getting at is that there are so many unknown factors and results that might be at work behind the curtain that it’s very hard to say.

Coming back to the F35 I’m just wondering how they measure the expertise and loyalty of the people who have to know how to design, manufacture and build these things. Engineers are theoretically free to work where they like - so it is of strategic importance to keep them happy and keep them occupied and making progress. Maybe this could be something happening that we don’t know about? A significant amount of money has been pumped into the project, but that money doesn’t just disappear. It goes into a huge strategically crucial supply chain. It might just be worth the political loss off face to keep that healthy and operative.

The Maginot Line worked exactly as (ultimately, but not initially[*] --- the plan changed mid-construction) intended. The intent was to force Germany through Belgium.

Note that the role of a fortification is not only to help defend against an attack, but also to try to discourage an attack against it in the first place (instead forcing the enemy to attack through a different point; makes the attacks more predictable, which translates to higher concentrations of defensive forces --- bonus points if there are natural choke points or such).

Ultimately, Germany was left with two options for an advance, so France had to guess which one. What happened was that France guessed wrong (IIRC, they didn't at all expect a German armored assault through the rough terrain & forests near Ardennes), and the rest, as they say, is history.

[*] The initial plan was to fortify the Belgian border, too, but this was adapted to a "France helping Belgium defend against Germany" plan, after Belgium's protests that it would simply get "sacrificed" if the Maginot line was fully reinforced in the north. I've a sneaking suspicion that France wasn't quite ready to honor this quasi-defensive-plan, but that's a different topic.

The drones turkey is using and F35's are in completely different class of usage, they're not comparable.

We don't have the ability to field highly survivable drones into enemy territory remotely just yet, we still need humans for the time being.

The US has a comprehensive drone program and 'lots of drones' to fulfill the kinds of missions the Turkey drones were operating.

Despite their success with modern drone technology, they are insistent on trying to buy flying junk like the F35 and now the F16. Clearly their military brass is full of boneheads as well. Seems like a universal attribute or a job requirement.

And separate from the technical merits of how bad the F35 and F16 is the only country that has placed arms embargoes on Turkey is the US. And the US openly arms terrorists in northern Syria with weaponry to bomb and attack Turkey. And their military STILL want to buy F16s from the US. Either they are real real dumb or financially incentivized. To paraphrase and mangle Hanlons razor don’t ascribe to stupidity what can be explained by corruption.

Maybe they want to buy a few so to improve the relations with US and NATO? Many believe that Turkey bought S-400 for political reasons(to fix the problems with Russia after downing a Russian warplane back in 2015) and not to really use them.

Historically, Turkey's primary rival is Russia.

Whatever the reason is, I don't like the "If the people in power must know what are they doing" mentality. Many times they don't or do it for way different reasons than the apparent one.

Turkey is also developing its own fighter, with support from the UK.

The only open enemy of Turkey is the US. The US has been covertly arming terrorists against Turkey since Kissinger. Since Obama they have been openly arming terrorists against Turkey. Russia may not be an ally but Turkeys enemy has always been the US since Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

> It seems to me, the 5th gen plane projects are like trying to breed the next gen horses instead of developing the automobiles.

Absolutely not. This isn't an either/or prospect. The USAF employs plenty of drones and DoD and DARPA fund plenty of development of newer and better drones, while also funding manned aircraft improvements.

And AOL had 1.5 Million paying Dial-up subscribers by 2015[0]. Just because someone does something doesn't really imply that they are utilising their resources the best way possible.

[0]https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/aol-1point5-million-people-s...

Can drones achieve air superiority?

> Does anyone knows what's the argument to use manned planes over drones anyway?

Several reasons,

Up until now as far as I am aware there has never been a drone used in an air to air combat role in an actual conflict. There is research happening on this but it appears no one has a combat ready system. The fact appears to be that the technology is just not there yet to allow unmanned aircraft to perform an air combat role. It might not even be a technology but a cost thing, drones are cheap because they lack all the technology required for that role, they are essentially light attack aircraft, they are less like an F-16 and more like a Super Tucano, subsonic with very limited payload and no radar. The primary costs of a figher jet are related to the capabilities required for the air to air combat role, maneuverability, super sonic speed, a large radar, stealth capabilities, and missile and radar warning systems. If you tried to build drone with these characteristics you would end up with a price tag similar to a modern jet.

They are incredibly susceptible to electronic warfare [1][2].

> Turkey, which is kicked out if the F-35 program for political reasons, demonstrated huge success in battle through it's home grown drone programs.

While true you have to take into account that in all these conflicts the drones operated in a virtually uncontested airspace. The air forces of Armenia, Syria, and Libya were comprised of a few strike aircraft. The Armenian air force had available 12 Su-25[3], the Syrian insurgents targeted by Turkey had no air force, and I could not find any sources but I would bet Haftar's air-force could not have more than 20 fighter jets. The effectiveness of drones against a peer with the capability to run 24/7 air superiority missions is still questionable. Certainly a large drone force like Turkeys is a significant force multiplier that can incur outweigh costs and casualties to an opponent but not in itself sufficient to fight against an opponent with a modern air force.

In all these cases the deciding factor was not the fact the aircraft were unmanned but the fact there were aircraft with precision weapons. If Azerbaijan had 50 F-16s or A-10s the result would have likely been the same albeit at a much higher cost. Unmanned aircraft in my opinion up until now don't present a radically new proposition they merely make large scale air strike capabilities available to states that could otherwise not afford them.

> F-35's were supposed to be the stealth weapons who were to be able to penetrate Russia made air defences etc, but Turkey proved in Syria that relatively cheap drones can do just that. Before the Turkish drones, only Israel was able to hit a Russian made air defence system and that was done when it wasn't operational at that moment. During the conflicts between Azerbaijan-Armenia, Syria, Libya the Turkish made drones hunted down multiple such system and provided very impressive footage of the action.

The US air force has flown suppression of enemy air defense missions in almost all the conflicts it fought since Vietnam always against Russian made air defenses[4]. The role of the F-35 is not a new one it's just they needed an new airplane for that role[5].

> It seems to me, the 5th gen plane projects are like trying to breed the next gen horses instead of developing the automobiles.

I guess you are referring to all the loyal wingman projects that are around. I think they are being conservative given that a bet on the wrong horse would be catastrophic for them. Their approach gives them all the benefits with very little risk, they get an expendable platform, with long endurance, the characteristics of a drone, along with increased situational awareness, immediacy, and a guarantee that a successful electronic attack won't result in the complete annihilation of their force.

[1] https://eurasiantimes.com/russia-shot-down-a-total-of-nine-t... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Air_Force#Aircraft [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppression_of_Enemy_Air_Defen... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Weasel#Current