Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the whole idea of manned fighter jets antiquated?

And if this tech isn't dated already, the Pentagon plans to still be using these jets in 2065. (http://online.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-looks-to-lower-costs...)

I don't see a strong reason the Air Force should be investing so much in fighter jets and not focusing on drone technology.

He mentions dogfights, do those even happen anymore? Why participate in a manned dogfight when you can simply send drones -- and if they are shot down, send one more, or one hundred more.

The U.S. military is always fighting the last war. In this case, they aren't even fighting the last several wars, but are still locked into Cold War, pre-drone thinking.

View on HN

> Isn't the whole idea of manned fighter jets antiquated?

Probably not for quite awhile. Issues of lethality aside, the electronics aren't there yet. In Afghanistan, there were long waits to get downlink bandwidth to get video back from UAV's. We're nowhere near the point where we can maintain effective communications with a squadron of drones big enough to do real damage, and the "automated killer drone AI" isn't close yet either.

Yes, the Air Force needs to anticipate the future, but I think the future is a bit further away than you think. If they're planning on using these until 2065, they might start designing drone replacements in say 2045. That's only 30 years away, and probably not a bad ballpark estimate for how long it'll take to get this technology to the point where you can start really relying on it for offensive capability. It sounds like a long time from now, but the F-22 RFP process was started just about thirty years ago.

> and the "automated killer drone AI" isn't close yet either.

Now there's a terrifying prospect. Is this actually something we should expect to see any time soon? My understanding has been that, films aside, "AI" software is nowhere near the point where we might run a drone that can kill on it

We are pretty close to driving a car, we have beat human facial recognition, we have very good weapons aiming.

Tying it up to something with a very, very low false positive kill rate is the hard part, but we are very close with a lot of the components.

It doesn't have to have weapons control, even. If it's limited to an "AI scout" role it could just loiter around, find potential targets and flag them for a human operator. If the targets are reviewed to be valuable enough you could take manual control and fly an assault mission.

Things like this already exist in various forms and the U.S. government isn't too happy when our 'friends' try to sell some of them: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06...

The whole process of command and control, targeting, ROE, etc. is incredibly complex and far from easy. Drone's will do more and more, but I'm definitely not a fan of Hunter-Killers on the loose. Two of the fixed-wing losses during the opening of OIF were blue-on-blue Patriot shoot downs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_shootdowns_and...

Those are things that are doable with pattern matching and big datasets. We're no closer to situational awareness than we ever were. Note we have self-driving cars that have precise databases describing the area they're driving through.

As long as they don't kill anyone outside the supposed target areas, I don't see much objection coming from the military procurement people.

Maybe we could think up a middle ground: let's have a manned "commander plane" surrounded by a swarm of drones. If the planes are closer to each other, maybe the bandwidth would be less of an issue?

I don't think so. For combat use, the drones would have to fly low and have a range of at least a few dozen miles to be a reasonable offensive weapon.

If the "commander" plane is going to rely on satellite links, they might as well be sitting on the ground. The "commander" plane needs extensive defenses as well; pretty much similar to how AWACS aircraft are protected.

You've just reinvented the air launched cruise missile.

A close cousin of the very popular fire -n- forget missile and the smart bomb.

Something that must be considered is pilots that aren't risking their butts might be a little more ... aggressive with drones. And drones larger than RC planes aren't any lighter or cheaper than manned craft (so you yank out 400 pounds of life support and cockpit, and replace it with 350 pounds of radios, satellite downlinks and computers. "Eh") So this agressiveness could make mission costs somewhat higher.

Drones are nice when you have a permissive environment where the locals don't have a decent air defense system. But otherwise, the current models we have are relatively easy to shoot down. They lack speed, maneuverability, and their operators lack the situational awareness that a pilot would bring to the table.

There are better drones being developed, but they will be expensive and will depend extensively on sat links for communicating between the drone and base station. This will be problematic against a peer foe who can jam radio transmissions.

That's why the US is developing tracked laser communication systems. They are effectively impossible to jam.

Laser is line of sight, limiting your range. And nature has a great way of jamming lasers, called clouds. If you were able to get a decently powered laser in a satellite, it wouldn't be able to control too many aircraft unless it looked like a porcupine. And then it would have to deal with anti-satellite defenses that both China and Russia have spent significant sums on.

Not sure why this was downvoted.

Unless you happen to have an autonomous reusable spacecraft with significant cross range ability and enough fuel to continuously change orbits.

> Laser is line of sight, limiting your range.

Yes, with current equipment it limits your range to somewhere beyond the orbit of the moon. Yes, we can now keep a laser and a receiver tracked on each other from 300000km away.

> And nature has a great way of jamming lasers, called clouds.

There are wavelengths that are not hampered much by clouds.

> If you were able to get a decently powered laser in a satellite

We can.

> it wouldn't be able to control too many aircraft unless it looked like a porcupine.

... but this is a problem, you'd basically be limited in total bandwidth by count of satellites. Meaning you either need to launch a lot of them, or reduce bandwidth per drone.

Being able to ping the moon with a laser doesn't help with terrestrial systems. Just as radar has a horizon limit, so do laser systems. So if you put this on a controller version of an AWACS, you have to deal with attenuation from clouds/weather, and I think keeping a lock on a maneuvering UCAS might be a challenge.

I'm not talking about pinging the moon, I'm talking about maintaining a link with a maneuvering spacecraft in moon orbit.

So this spacecraft you're linking to makes radical 8g maneuvers, changes direction at a 30s/ roll rate, and can change altitude at will?

I wouldn't trust an autonomous drone in many environments, but air warfare is pretty friendly to AI. And while humans are limited to 9 Gs of acceleration drone aircraft that can turn much more rapidly can and have been built. In the future I expect we'll see gaggles of drone fighters overseen but not piloted from a AWACs far back but still within visual range.

Those drones are still flown by human pilots, remotely. I wonder what the maneuverability limit is with remote piloting. At some point the drone would be able to turn so fast that the human couldn't process the rapidly changing visuals. Maybe the drone pilots will need to be given a simulated "third person view" like a video game in order to keep up.

It's an UX problem. The pilots might need to be given more indirect, goal-oriented interface. Instead of first-person view and direct flight control, they would mark waypoints on situation map and select maneuvering policies, akin to some RTS games.

I think modern wars will be fought by tousands of pro-gamers using something like 3d rts ui.

For example if we have 50 drones doing some task it's stupid to hire 50 people to manage them like pilots. Much better to hire 5 people and give them better ui (construct 360 degree view from all the drones feeds localy and send only the aggregated information.

With current technology, humans can fly in worse weather than drones.

And still human errors seems to be directly involved in the worse crashes (see the AF 2009 flight to Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Human_fa...)

AI isn't anywhere near being able to discriminate against an aircraft that is not exhibiting "aggressive" behavior. How will it work when it needs to visually ID an opponent, or when the opponent is flying aircraft that might be allied? Say our opponent is flying an F-16, or F-15? Lots of those out there, and in militaries that easily could become hostile. IFF is not always reliable, (hence the viz ID requirements).

And creating an autonomous UCAS capable of conducting air to air combat isn't going to be cheap at all. The reason we like drones now is because they have the performance characteristics of a Cessna, and they don't put pilots at risk. To compete in A2A combat, they'll need performance (and avionics) that exceed what our best fighters currently have. That will be buku $$...

It's enough for the drones to be semi-autonomous. The controllers mark detected airplanes as friend/foe manually, and on-board AI does the maneuvering and shooting.

And what happens when the controllers are jammed? Or when they can't detect whether the bogey is friend or foe? The Air Force lost an RQ-170 to the Iranian Air Force because it relied on commlinks that are susceptible to jamming. If the comm links are vulnerable, how will the "controllers mark" the aircraft?

We don't currently have a problem with enemies jamming comms between AWACs and the F-15s or F-22s they direct. The RQ-170 was using a satellite uplink which is a lot easier to mess with than an airplane closer by. Using jamming against combat aircraft is also problematic because jamming platforms are impossible to hide and very vulnerable.

Correct. And that's because we're fighting an opponent that has trouble with high tech, and has limited resources. If we end up in conflict with Russia, or China or another opponent with better capabilities, your links are going to be severely degraded.

Out of interest once they reach a certain level of basic ability wouldn't it be easier to have them in "packs" rather than trying to basically replicate everything a human pilot can do in a single drone?

If you have a "pack" of drones big enough that a single enemy combat aircraft can't take them all down at once then if an enemy aircraft were to fire on a drone in the "pack" it could automatically be designated an enemy and be hunted by the remainder?

> AI isn't anywhere near being able to discriminate against an aircraft that is not exhibiting "aggressive" behavior. How will it work when it needs to visually ID an opponent, or when the opponent is flying aircraft that might be allied?

What will you do when the enemy sends up unmanned autonomous aircraft that ignore these niceties and shoot down all your manned fighters?

I'm not dismissing the legitimate problems you raise, but we need to prepare for war, which almost by definition is the absence of rules, such as distinguishing military from civilian targets.

EDIT: Also of interest, if an autonomous fighter shoots down a civilian aircraft, is it a war crime? Mistakes happen in war that aren't crimes. And if it is, who goes to jail?

If the enemey's autonomous aircraft can't discriminate between friend and foe effectively, then when you launch a swarm of them, they'll all fratricide each other. It's a fundamental requirement that they be able to differentiate between friend and foe.

> If the enemey's autonomous aircraft can't discriminate between friend and foe effectively, then when you launch a swarm of them, they'll all fratricide each other. It's a fundamental requirement that they be able to differentiate between friend and foe.

I would guess that identifying your own teammates is much easier than distinguishing strangers who are combatant from non-combatant, and among combatants distinguishing allies from enemies.

Also, suicidal autonomous aircraft are common, in the form of missiles. If these more intelligent missiles kill the enemy, it doesn't matter if they kill each other too (beyond the financial loss). Maybe you give each a 'kill area', in which they are instructed to kill everything, and spread them out enough that they don't overlap too much.

>buku

Completely off topic, but did you mean the French beaucoup to imply the phrase "Lots of money" here?

To a degree he did. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=buku

Oh cool. Didn't realize it was considered a word by itself. I guess it can be considered slang since it's on urban dictionary.

Yeah, maybe it isn't easy to make the AI distinguish "aggressive behaviour", or even do good visual ID. But how's this for a use case: Simply declare a restricted airspace, where every plane needs to have transponder replying correctly to some challenge-response authentication protocol. Distribute transponders to allies. Tell about zone in the evening news, so that everyone knows. Then program drones to shoot down anything that doesn't respond correctly. I'm pretty sure that it's a lot cheaper to design and build drone with same performance characteristics as top A2A fighter, there's so much that you don't have to worry about: human rating everything (you don't have to make so damn sure that everything works without the hitch first time), all the control systems that you have to build the pilot an interface to (radar, etc.), the cocpit.. I'm sure those will easily pay for developing a competitive fighting-AI.

He mentions dogfights, do those even happen anymore?

High G maneuvering to defeat missiles certainly still happens. There is a YouTube F-16 cockpit video of one flight's encounter with a SAM missile trap in the balkans. The F-16 is supremely maneuverable. Sounds like they were desperate and barely made it out. (One plane was hit, IIRC.)

EDIT: I remembered wrong. This was the video about an incident over Iraq. Also, it was due to a mistake in mission planning.

Drones would be even better at this in many ways. Possibly worse in terms of situational awareness, however, depending on how well integrated the pilot's information is.

Could you post a link to that YouTube video? sounds awesome.

I remembered wrong. It was over Bagdhad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uh4yMAx2UA

Wow.

And in reference to your previous comment, if a drone pilot makes a mistake, we lose money, not lives. Another advantage of the drones.

Remote controlled drones have limitations due to electronic warfare/jamming (not to mention security, see the one the US lost in Iran). There's also an issue with lag.

Actually autonomous ones are as far as I know only good for static targets (effectively they are reusable cruise missiles).Close air support or deciding whether to engage an enemy airplane or not gets tricky.

I wonder if someone's trying to make semi-autonomous drones controlled by optical links or very directional radio links.

I believe these are already in late testing stages.

Aren't the missiles they fire subject to the same jamming problems?

no most missiles have internal guidance systems. Inertial guidance, preset guidance etc.

Depends on the mechanism used by the missile to follow the target. My impression is that most missiles don't have guidance systems that require direct communication after launch,

A whole bunch of missiles actually do, like the Sparrow and Standard.

The longer range ones really can use it to increase hit probability. Or so I've read is true for the Phoenix and AIM-120 missiles, classed as "fire and forget". and the newest Standard missile uses a AIM-120 derived head with a bigger antenna. And I'm sure still depends on mid-course corrections (for that matter, I've read the current models self-destruct if they doesn't get guidance fairly soon after launch).

The Sparrow and Standard are "semi-active radar homing missiles", meaning that they have a radar seeker head and no emitter. They require an external illumination radar (from the aircraft or launch platform) to light up their target.

The AIM-120 uses a datalink to guide the missile close to the target, after which the missile's internal radar emitter goes active, and the missile locks onto the nearest target that it finds. This is because the radar on the missile is not nearly as powerful as the radar on the aircraft. So it's not truly a "fire and forget" missile, at least if a high probability of kill is desired. I believe the Phoenix is similar.

Per what I've read elsewhere, and the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_missile), for long range attack the Phoenix has a rather unique flight profile, it climbs to 80,000 or so feet and cruises there, then dives down. Per the article, at 11 miles it activates its radar, and I'll bet given the distance and its bigger size, bigger antenna, it gets a bigger view than the AIM-120. Still, it has the capability of and uses course corrections from its plane.

I believe the Phoenix usually falls off its plane (the F-14) directly into the ocean. The Tomcat pilots then RTB to the bar and tell each other how great they are. The Phoenix is the Yugo to the AMMRAM's Ferrari. They are different generations of weapons.

Nope. Missiles are usually fire-and-forget. They are autonomous. Can you ram their radar? Maybe, but many have visual and heat sensors as well. If you want to see something scary today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fcx8Xke9It4

Fire-and-forget does not mean that you can just launch a missile and it will do its own thing. The missile still needs to be guided to the general vicinity of the target before it can do its job.

It is in the general vicinity in air-to-air combat. I'm not talking about cruise missiles here.

Since most engagements are going to be at beyond visual range, they might as well be cruise missiles.

How many cheap, disposable, locally-networked drone-bombs could you make for the price of an F-35? How many could you make by spending 1% of the $1Tr tag the F-35 program has cost?

Manned planes are the cavalry of the 21st century. They're glamorous and dashing, but also insanely high maintenance.

On-board AI will only get better. And you only need one kill from a disposable unit to take out a manually-flown enemy.

> On-board AI will only get better.

The fact that this terrifies so few people terrifies me.

Careful ... that's a dangerous line of reasoning ...

Pretty soon, some one will ask "how many teachers could we hire" or "how many roads could we fix" for the price of "the war" ...

or maybe how many families could get full health insurance ....

As a former military member and trained pilot of both the Hunter and Shadow 200 TUAV UAVs for the US Army, I believe you're slightly misinformed.

There are different types of UAVs "drones" for a more buzzword-y term, for different uses. The bigger boys such as the Predator, Global Hawk, etc use satellite navigation. There is most definitely a "lag" of sorts for those types of UAVs. The Shadow and the Hunter however, are line of sight. It limits their range severely (I got one out to 166km from the control station), but they are just as dangerous, albeit smaller and with less endurance for extended missions. It doesn't matter, they are cheap and you can launch lots of them :)

I've got 480 combat flight hours from Operation Iraqi Freedom II, from 2003-2004. We CONSTANTLY were targeting moving things and never had any real issues with it. You just use the right drone for the mission at hand. The military has dozens of different types of drones, but only the bigger ones make the news on a regular basis. The Shadow is being phased out for those types of missions in favor of the MQ-1C Gray Eagle.

Now for air/air stuff, they call those UCAS (lookup the X45-B / X47-B), the tech is still fledgling enough to need another 5-10 years before it will ever become a reality. On that, there simply isn't good enough software... yet.

The crux of the issue seems to be electronic warfare / jamming though, correct?

UAVs are great against opponents with limited electronic warfare capabilities, but wouldn't they lack credibility against China or Russia? They'd simply jam them and that'd be that, yes?

Honestly, jamming a system where all of the communication happens over frequency hopping radio is very very difficult. Normally speaking, the command links are encrypted (they were for sure with the Shadow) and the video links are unencrypted. Video is starting to be encrypted now that hardware crypto acceleration is more prevalent, but in general, it isn't as big of a problem as you'd think. Now UAVs that are on satellites have a lot less spectrum to use compared to LOS (like of sight) UAVs which can use the entire RF spectrum should they choose to.

Blocking the entire RF spectrum all at the same time is possible, but unbelievably difficult. When you're hopping a random # of MHZ every few dozen microseconds, it is super tricky.

and the video links are unencrypted.

I guess that was what was behind the story of insurgents grabbing drone video feeds.

Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB126102247889095011

Thanks for the link. I was in Iraq when Task Force kicked down the door and found this stuff. Didn't realize it was declassified. An amazing example of incompetence and under estimating your enemy. Don't bother encrypting your video feeds?!? Oh, they'll never figure it out. I often joke that the U.S. Military is just slightly less incompetent than everyone else. Stuff like this makes me laugh at conspiracy theorists who postulate that the U.S. Government was responsible for 9/11. We can't even have the default setting for secret video feeds in a war zone be encrypted, but we can organize a massive conspiracy. Spend a day in an organization where you're hoping the decisions of your superiors don't get you killed and you quickly realize the omnipotent puppet master is no where to be found.

"the video links are unencrypted"

As I understand it, that's so you can show them to anyone quickly; if encrypted, various security issues are invoked.

It was considered to be an acceptable trade off because the greater part of their usefulness is so ephemeral. On the other hand, an adversary who routinely monitors them could figure out a lot of things about our general methods.

It was a bit of both actually. We had this thing called an RVT (Remote Video Terminal) which was essentially a badass hardened laptop encased in steel running a lightly modified Redhat Linux 9 that attached to a small directional antenna. You could send 1 UAV operator who was trained in the RVT down to an Infantry TOC (Tactical Operations Center). He could hook it up and have it find the UAV in the sky and then show video to the infantry commander live. Yes it could be encrypted but the issue was that the bandwidth requirements of high res video + encryption were too great for the current hardware. Again, I believe that has been solved now that the tech has gotten much better, but I've not been in the military since 2005.

It's interesting that this statement could be true and at the same time every satellite and cable box in the US and in so many other countries routinely receives encrypted video, and a big portion of those receive HD. The SD version of the ones in the US went on line in 1996.

> The U.S. military is always fighting the last war. In this case, they aren't even fighting the last several wars, but are still locked into Cold War, pre-drone thinking.

I think there's an argument to be made that investment in new fighter jets is potentially an effort to avoid fighting the last (aerial) war.

That is, no one expects that the USA will actually get into a war with Russia, China, or one of the other "usual suspects" which has significant air-warfare capability. The existence of sufficiently advanced weaponry (on both sides) helps ensure that such a war won't happen.

It's certainly not the biggest motivator avoiding war (who needs motivation to not fight war, anyway?), but enough of these deterrents added up helps keep negotiations civil.

All that said, it's probably just the military-industrial complex at work -- why give up multi-billion dollar fighter jet contracts for much more reasonable multi-(tens? hundreds?)-million dollar drone contracts?

Drones don't go on bombing runs during an invasion or as a precursor to large troop movements. Drones can't really support ground troops well due to limited ammo (although they can provide eyes in the sky support for long periods of time).

Also, the air superiority that these aircraft enable, allows the use of drones, and other ground advantages.

So yes, while air-to-air dog fighting is rare (although posturing certainly isn't), it's only one use for these planes.

I don't understand why drones must inherently have limited ammunition or bomb payloads. Just make the same big beefy airplane you were going to, but instead of having a human fly it by wire, have a computer fly it by wire. Outfit it with more sensors if necessary, but I suspect modern fighter jets are pretty well decked out in that department already.

The only thing I can think of is creative solutions to incoming missiles, but if that really is something that computers cannot currently do, I doubt that will remain the case for long.

I speculate that drones have limited capacity because drones are purposefully made small. Why? Because smaller means harder to see and shoot down- useful for a drone. They are more disposable than a pilot, but that doesn't mean they are cheap.

Not all drones are small. I had the chance to get a glimpse of an RQ-4 Global Hawk being refurbished for a museum recently. The thing's practically a full size plane.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ve69jkhqxtpppv0/IMG_0608.JPG

That's with the 130ft wings removed.

Isn't it the case that older fighter jets are retro-fitted with remote controls and used as drones for target practice?

Yes, and you used the correct term for them: targets.

Maybe. Maybe not. We don't really know unless/until major power fight each other what equipment works, what doesn't and what's irrelevant. The quip about fighting the last war is half true. I think they're aware of it. It's just that fighting the next war is pretty hard.

> The quip about fighting the last war ...

... has become an over-used cliche, the one thing many people know about military planning, and thus it is re-used, like the last wars' stratagems, far beyond its weight or value.

Manned aircraft don't become lawn darts when you start jamming radio comms.

Why should drones? Even consumer drones that you can pick up today on amazon know how to return to base when they lose communication. Those depend on GPS, but I see no reason why they could not anticipate GPS jamming and incorporate dead reckoning.

> The U.S. military is always fighting the last war. In this case, they aren't even fighting the last several wars, but are still locked into Cold War, pre-drone thinking.

Where are you getting that idea? What other countries use drone warfare? As far as I can, it was the CIA that started the whole drone strike campaign, and I'm not aware of other countries that use it consistently.

The argument goes, if you want to win the next air war, you should use drones. lots of drones. Air to air combat is all missiles, and each of those missiles is half a million dollars.

Now, I'm not aware of an autonomous drone that can shoot down an f-22 with a missile, but it seems like a solvable technical challenge, especially if you're willing to throw a trillion dollars at the problem.

So anyway, for each f-22 send up 7 drones. one for each missile, and one to survive to get the kill, as long as the 6 lost drones are cheaper than the f22, you're winning, kinda.

Furthermore, pilots are expensive and take time to replace. I doubt there are even 10,000 combat pilots in the world (wag) kill off a few thousand, and the drones are against rookies. All the while, the drone software is improving and getting even tougher to kill. And, the drones should be capable of things that that human pilots just can't accomplish - high g turns for example.

Self driving cars aren't better than the best drivers, but they're way above average drivers, eventually the robots will be better. Same with jets. why not start now?

Other countries aren't warmongers that are constantly looking for the next large scale conflict they can use to rationalize irrational levels of spending.

No other country has had any kind of conflict where a drone would have provided any advantage. Hell, even our drones are not effective and cause more problems than they are worth. We just like being screwed and bamboozled by the next big thing our military services complex has to sell us.

If you have any idea of the consequences and effects of using drones in tactical operations then you would know that if any other country was using them in the way we use them we would be crying foul and trying to passive aggressively shame them for killing innocent civilians.

> What other countries use drone warfare?

This doesn't exactly answer your question, but it is an interesting article along these lines: http://www.economist.com/node/14299496

A few quotes:

"Countries with 'hunter-killer' drones include America, Britain and Israel."

"'Almost all' IDF [Israeli Defense Force] ground operations now have drone support."

"...Estimates that America will spend about 60% of the total [global sales of drones]."

"Following the United States, Israel ranks second in the development and possession of drones, according to those in the industry. The European leaders, trailing Israel, are roughly matched: Britain, France, Germany and Italy. Russia and Spain are not far behind, and nor, say some experts, is China... In total, more than three dozen countries operate UAVs, including Belarus, Colombia, Sri Lanka and Georgia. Some analysts say Georgian armed forces, equipped with Israeli drones, outperformed Russia in aerial intelligence during their brief war in August 2008. (Russia also buys Israeli drones.)"

"Iran builds drones, one of which was shot down over Iraq by American forces in February... Iran has supplied Hizbullah militants in Lebanon with a small fleet of drones, though their usefulness is limited."

Others are pointing out present issues with drones, but it seems that an airframe that doesn't have to carry a human or human support systems leaves many more degrees of freedom for optimization toward any set of airborne design goals than one saddled by carrying a human. I'd be highly surprised if there weren't air defense drones on drawing boards around the world right now.

Don't drones raise many ethical issues?

I'm not asking if you agree or disagree with the use of drones in wars, I'm actually asking if there is a debate going on about the use of unmanned vehicles in wars.

Wars raise many ethical issues. I'm surprised there isn't a debate going on about the use of manned vehicles in wars.

Drones can't do air-to-air. The lag alone gives it a lethal handicap.

Air-to-air combat on today's conditions aren't close combat at all (as Hollywood might want you to believe). Most pilots won't even see their target being taken down by a missile with a 30kms range. By the time a dogfight takes place, most of the aircrafts have been taken down by missiles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com