Fighter Pilots Face A Dismal Future
strategypage.com
strategypage.com
In a combat aircraft the advantages for getting rid of the pilot are numerous: less weight & volume for the pilot and their associated support kit, eliminating the pilot allows for plane geometries that are just not possible with a human onboard, eliminating the pilot enables maneuvers that would turn a pilot to jelly, etc. The pilot is probably the most expensive component of a combat aircraft. Eliminating the pilot opens up new mission profiles (e.g. you don't have to worry too much about the aircraft getting back to base.)
For a commercial aircraft the benefits of going unmanned are not as pronounced and in some cases are non-existent. In addition to the lack of benefits, you introduce additional costs related to liability (you can always blame pilot error for a problem, but if there is no pilot then it is the airlines fault for either not maintaining the system properly or for selecting the system in the first place) and the fact that passengers are not going to trust this system anytime soon.
The impediments are almost completely social, but the benefits are so slight that it does not make much sense to bother aiming for completely unmanned. What you are going to see (and in fact what has been happening for years now) is the increasing automation of cockpit tasks. There will always be a human being "at the controls" for the forseeable future, but what that actually means and how much active control they are exercising is going to be slowly changing.
Great observation. The primary advantage I saw (reduced pilot errors, responsible now for ~3/4 of all aviation accidents) is a liability for the airline and the manufacturer.
"Learn how hackers can bring down planes into buildings at 5"
When I moved from Vancouver to San Francisco I found it completely bizarre that they required Drivers for BART. It took me a couple years to get over that.
That reminds me of the 'Soft Walls' concept for fencing aircraft to where they belong:
http://softwalls.eecs.berkeley.edu/
It's like DRM for flight routes!
I think this is a common misperception. I believe the operational risk is that manuevers above 6g (varying on pilot and G-suit) reduces blood flow to the brain (by forcing it into the legs) and cause a blackout. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-LOC Blackouts, even for a few seconds, can be devastating in the middle of a dogfight. I believe there is software in modern fighter jets for just when pilots blackout but I can't find it on google right now.
It's got to exist on the web somewhere :-)
Unless something like this happens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232 . Then there's absolutely no replacement for a human being or three in the cockpit, and the public and the FAA know it. A pilot's salary or two is not too much to pay to protect the lives of several hundred people once in a while, even if it's otherwise unnecessary.
The military believes it, too, and the jets they fly have a higher likelihood of encountering life or death situations such as having pieces shot off and needing to get home. While there may not be pilots in the jets in the next generation, they'll be flying them for a while yet, and commanding them for a long time. The battlefield is too difficult, complex, and important for anything else. Once someone gives the order to drop a bomb, they'll trust software to execute the order efficiently and correctly. But it's going to be a human being giving the order for a long time. Possibly forever.
There are some jobs that won't be done by software until it can pass a Turing test. Software may be able to do the job in the vast majority of cases, and in some societies that may be good enough. Socially speaking, in this society, it isn't.
Radar guided missiles are easily defeated with modern ECM. Despite what the salesmen will tell you, in a real fight you have to get in and knife the f*&kers.
The same happens with remotely piloted vehicles. If you ever go up against even a modestly sophisticated adversary they will show phenomenal pluck and ingenuity. See serbian downing of an F-117 for an example.
Human pilots will be needed for some time to avoid having your toys fall out of the sky or stolen and used against you.
It was true back then, too - it was a good 25 years between when aircraft carriers were invented in WW1 and when they sank their first vessel at Coral Sea. But new technology opens up new tactics and new economies of scale that can fundamentally change the rules of battle.
What if you didn't care about having your toys fall out of the sky, for example? Make them so cheap that you can literally blanket the sky with them. Send up thousands of computer-piloted missile-aircraft. If they get shot down, who cares? If they shoot each other down, who cares? If they get stolen by the enemy and used to shoot down your own missile-craft...well, that's what was happening before anyway.
But you could throw up a curtain so dense and so shifting that it's impossible for anything to fly through them. And that's exactly what a potential adversary of the U.S. wants: nullify American air power so the f#&kers on the ground can knife our guys. It doesn't matter if they shoot down 10 of their own missile-craft for every one of ours. If they can put up 100x as many, that still equals no aircraft in the sky for Uncle Sam.
There was a recent wargame that followed a strategy much like this, except that instead of computer-controlled aircraft it used human-controlled small boats launching cruise missiles (that other automated-pilot air weapon):
There are a few details on http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htada/articles/20051121.asp...
First a primer on websites reporting military/intelligence affairs: two sites that occupy the ends of the credibility spectrum, http://smallwarsjournal.com and http://www.debka.com.
The first is a forum for junior military officers and professional analysts for discussing tactics and strategy. The articles all have by-lines, mostly by Captains and Majors (i.e. recently promoted Captains). The editorial board is made up of professionals. You will never read any classified information here. You may read some good war stories, but mostly you will read professional treatments of modern tactics by professionals for professionals.
On the other extreme many consider debka a conduit for the Mossad. Good luck separating the information from the disinformation on this site, but the articles can be a good read, if you can deal with the wilderness of mirrors.
In between these extremes keep in mind that intelligence analysis is about connecting the dots. Even the professionals seldom know anything for sure, and sources and means of gathering information are usually more important than any individual datum. If it makes it to print (or html), there’s probably a reason.
So where does this leave http://www.strategypage.com ? Let’s look at the staff bios on the about us page. Of the four "staff" exactly one has any military/intelligence background at all. "...author (over 20 books), wargame designer (over 100 designed and publisher of over 500), defense advisor (since the 1970s), pundit (since the 1970s) and general troublemaker. Served in the US Army artillery (1961-64) as a Spec/4." His website, http://www.jimdunnigan.com , lists some of his books, and more bio info including "Various Department of Defense and State Department agencies called on me to give lectures or just have a chat." I guess that was his "defense advisor" gig. He’s certainly a dedicated amateur. If luck had broken his way a little better, perhaps he could have been Tom Clancy. There’s also a handy "write for us" page. If you write well enough and don’t make any flaming technical errors, you can make some coin.
In short, I don’t think this site would even attract placing any real disinformation. So how about the article itself?
First, no by-line.
Secondly the protagonist’s name, "Zoltan". Sure sounds made up to me, but that’s just my opinion.
The way the piece is put together has the feel of a composite, somebody who did some research and threw this story together. If a real reporter got the real story from a real Colonel (and covered up his identity with a pseudonym) he could have written for a more prestigious publication or wire service and made better money. Still...not entirely implausible.
For now I’m sticking to my theory of the shoot-down only because accounts I read right after the incident described the wreckage of the aircraft landing largely intact (a little hard to believe since the fuselage is composite) with bullet holes and, if I recall correctly, the pilot ejected and survived (a little less likely after a missile strike). Hence my belief in heavy machine gun fire from a pursuit aircraft. Also the Russians really wanted to get their hands on one of these babies, even a crashed specimen. So it’s easy to imagine their risking an agent inside NATO to pull this off.
Reading this stuff on the web is not like reading hacking tips. The background is more important than the foreground, and you can never be sure.
I understand your point about the background of the website. However, in this case I thought it was a fairly well known story, and there are quite a number of other accounts.
eg: ""At times, they acted like amateurs," Dani said, listing some ways the Serbs managed to breach NATO communications security, including eavesdropping on pilots' conversations with AWACS surveillance planes.
"I personally listened to their pilots' conversations, learning about their routes and bombing plans," Dani said."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-10-26-serbSerbian-st...
And:
"A network of spies and observers would report F-117A takeoffs from Italy’s Aviano Air Base. Coupling this intelligence with tweaked radars, the Serbians fired several surface-to-air missiles almost blindly, hoping for a hit."
http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2008/04/airforce_nighthawk...
I thought that it was shot down by SAM missiles was generally accepted. The NATO spy part was more interesting, because there was reasonable support for the Serbs within some parts of NATO, so that isn't out of the question.
The "people listening for aircraft" theory makes a lot of sense, too, though - it's easy, and it's been proven to work before.
(Also, Zoltan is a reasonably common Hungarian name: http://www.google.com.au/search?q=name+Zoltan or http://nameberry.com/babyname/Zoltan - as you are no doubt aware, Hungarian names are quite common is some parts of the former Yugoslavia, and Zoltan Danni is of Hungarian decent)
US air superiority is a system that includes AWACS (enabling better situational awareness), GPS (enabling JDAM/SDB for example), tankers, and a constellation of factors other than "mano a mano" with bullets. UAVs are already an integral part of the mix.
Today planes can take off and land using only software and radio signals, even when the pilot can't, like no visibility when cloudy.
The problem is that computer understanding of the surroundings is NULL. Today there is no software that could understand(well) that there are birds(or small planes) on the way that are going to be eaten by your engines, and damage it.
The only technologies that work are active, like LIDAR, this is going to change, but first on vehicles with less degrees of freedom. Trains(1FD) before ships(2FD) before cars before planes.
This is just fearmongering. Birds, sure, but airplane engines are designed to ingest small birds and for the most part can handle it reasonably well. Small planes still must have a transponder, and TCAS systems will identify and warn of ADS-B signals ("squawk"), even if the smaller plane has not been equipped with a TCAS transceiver.
There is a rule in engineering, never underestimate a 900km/hr projectile. And I have seen myself engines birds test that are mandatory on every turbine.
On the plus side:
- faster response to 911 calls, since UAVs can avoid traffic, and if cheap enough, - less need for police to risk their lives, and consequently On the minus side:
- police become (even more) disconnected from the general - risk of abuse
- risk of (black hat) hackingIt's fun to imagine that somewhere sometime a scrawny geek told a chiseled-jaw pilot "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script"
That may have been my late father's fantasy. He was the lead engineer at Boeing Military for much of the B-52's avionics. He was not a man much given to resentments and anger, but he strongly disliked USAF pilots, and it was clear the other engineers did as well. They apparently are quite the prima donnas, and arrogant in the extreme.
This engineers vs. pilots trope goes back to the days of the space program. Tom Wolfe talked about it in _The Right Stuff_.
I heard an interview with "Wired for War"'s author who claimed that controls for some of these systems are modeled after X-box/PlayStation controls, both to capitalize on the ergonomics research done by console makers and to make it easier for young recruits who are already used to operating them.
Commercial planes use linux for non-critical functions like the in-flight entertainment. I can't think of anything that would be on a fighter plane that would be considered "non-critical" enough to not require a high-integrity system though.
I wouldn't claim it's common or that you'd be likely to see it in a deployed environment, but it's not totally unheard of. Throw Linux & UAV in Google - you'll see what I mean.
I've definitely seen Linux (re?)booting on in-flight entertainment systems.
I see terrorist tactics (blowing up buildings, schools, etc.) as dominating their efforts.
That said, I think that if I were to do a defense startup now, it'd be towards detecting explosives, guns, etc. in large groups of people. If that technology falls behind, war's about to get a whole lot uglier.
Articles like this are interesting, but a little sickening in that they assume that continually increasing defense spending is actually a good idea.
I'd work for Swoopo long before I would work for a defense startup.
Do you honestly believe that? I don't see how it's even possible unless we sedate everyone in some kind of matrix like false utopian state. It's good to dream though.
Once (if) that goes away, Western Europe will either have to pony up for it's own defense, or be held hostage to outside powers with their own agendas (like Russia blackmailing Europe with gas supplies)
I don't see the struggle between national interests going anyway anytime unless and until the nation-state itself is rendered obsolete. People need stuff, and that creates conflict. Different groups of people will need different stuff. And let's not forget ideological problems -- Western Europe isn't exactly a model of social integration.
It only takes one bad actor to make all participants gear up for the potential to use force, and we've found that once geared up, the actual use of force is not far behind.
It's a prisoner's dilemma played out on a global stage. But you'd find the same situation with three thousand guys living in caves somewhere. War is a natural consequence of groups of unique and intelligent humans.
So your nation can be so inept as to not be able to control things inside it's borders (many nations fit this bill). If armed camps build up inside them and attack other countries, guess what? You're at war -- or something so close to war as to be indistinguishable from it.
If you'd like the world to work like some super-big version of your local country, where most conflicts are solved by some civil system, then you're going to have to have popular choice of representatives, mixed local, national, and world control, an independent court system built on something besides treaties, etc. The UN is nowhere near any of that.
There is the theory that democracies only compete via commerce. If you buy into that, then perhaps a world full of democracies would be the most peaceful. But I don't see that happening either any time soon.
It's just a long-shot. A real long-shot. I'd argue that in order to do away with war you would have to do away with 99.999% of the impetus for using violence under any circumstances. It'd be a world of extreme pacifists. Would that be such a great thing? Doesn't chaos -- whether war, sickness, disasters, etc -- contribute to evolution and growth? Do we really want to live in stasis? Or -- to put it in religious terms -- is heaven really such a great thing?
Name one.
I really doubt that. (Well, as long as we limit ourselves to times when there were Homo Sapiens in Europe.)
Also, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory
In any case, it is one thing to have stability in an affluent, post-religion area like Western Europe, quite another to have it worldwide. Many nations in the Mid East, for example, are comparable to medieval Europe - except that if the current regimes fall (as they might well, if oil loses its value) their subjects are more likely to create a Muslim Brotherhood-type regime than a liberal republic.
If peak oil is true, I would predict quite the opposite.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_...
World peace could arise as the result of some extremely democratic/libertarian/scientific worldwide monoculture that agreed on everything but what they were willing to settle with words. I think that an unlikely end to the story, though. The easiest road to world peace is for someone to win. And that's not a happy ending in my book. I'll take war over that. It's nasty, but nowhere near as bad as tyranny.
Put another way, there will be war as long as there is crime. I hope that's forever. Living in a society that had actually done what it takes to eliminate crime completely would not be worth it to me. I feel the same way about a world without war.
1) Falkland's war between Argentina and Great Britain in 1982. 2) Greco-Turkish war in Cypress. 3) Indian-Pakistani wars (although this example is stretching it, as US influence in India is quite low) 4) The First and Second Cod War 5) The Turbot War
I can see the courageous absolutism of Gandhi working well on a small scale inspiring others to rebel against the status quo - but against a nation bent on destruction of your own people, say, what then.
What I find intriguing is that in a situation of combat between computer-piloted UAV it is purely technological advance that gives the advantage. That then is dissociating war from direct violence and making technology the battleground rather than military aggression and effective killing.
Sadly I don't believe, for now, that we can end human warring in favour of "robot wars".
You can't extrapolate from Gandhi to a generalized theory of resistance. His strategy worked well against the British Empire at a time that it had already decided that empires were more trouble than they're worth, and besides, we only came here to play cricket anyway. Any other imperial power would simply have shot him.
That's what I said. Worked small scale but won't work large scale = can't extrapolate. Did I miss something?
Policing will probably always be needed, but that is different. The police are not at war with criminals.
It think we do have a chance to end wars once and for all as economies get more interconnected. Traditional geostrategic thinking is obsolete.
Interestingly enough this already happened to the Airforce in the late 60s. Airforce was running manned spy satellite missions, but because of the cost and the danger involved, those missions were being canceled in favor of unmanned satellite missions. So this is basically a repeat for Airforce.
Lawn-motor robots? Perhaps arduino-controlled pistol gun with belt feed bullets?
I am worried about the future ability of a population's to resist a technological tyranny.
If you put all the power the state can muster on one pile and that of the population on another, resistance against the state has been impossible – I would guess – for a few centuries (or more). But that is – again – not how it works. There are other players involved. Parts of the state might not be willing to use all that power. Other states (sometimes with vastly more power) will constrain the ability of the state to use all its power. And so on.
The consequence of all this is that revolutions against tyrannies are possible without firing a single shot or using any violence at all. Even though, just looking at the raw power of the two sides, the state could easily crush the population. Just think of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
No one should consider themselves informed on the subject of robotic tyranny without having read this:
http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/global/the-second-amendm...
"...tell me, how good does a combat robot have to be to kick in your door, spray the house with mace, and hit anything that coughs with a taser until it stops moving and can be encased in spray webbing for later pickup and processing? How goes does a robot have to be to detain anybody who smells like pot? How good does a robot have to be to break up a political demonstration? Not that good. If a robot is good enough to fight wars, its good enough to do political policing. It might not solve crimes, but it can bust heads that protest and capture people who’s position is known and who have been identified as enemies of the state."
I really need some real non-american references to believe in such a thing.
Whether the quality of American pilots was decisive in any of those conflicts is debatable, but the first part is certainly true. Many observers believe the Eurofighter Typhoon to be the most advanced fighter in the world today.
I referenced Top Gun and Beyond in an earlier post: if you can find the video, it goes into this.
If nothing else you'll learn about John Boyd, one hell of a model American.
Pretty amazing stuff. Most missions in Iraq and Afghanistan are flown via satellite from the US, truly remote controlled war. (Submitted it to HN at the time, but it only got 2 points ;))
Navigation also requires a radio signal (unless you can shrink the mechanical inertial guidance system used in submarines to a flyable size; this is not only difficult but would likely raise the cost of the drones to heights extraordinary even by US military standards.)
It was a big deal in Canada in the Late 80s/Early 90s - the United States used to test their (hopefully unarmed) cruise missiles over Canada - presumably we had a terrain profile that was useful to them. Or maybe it was the long stretches of unpopulated environment.
Now consider what your typical iPhone would be capable of doing. (Compass, GPS, Terrain Maps, Camera, Radio Signal...)
Meanwhile the UK govt is cutting Infantry battalions and investing 10s of billions of GBP in Eurofighter and Nimrod. Because the Taliban's airforce and submarine fleet are obviously the biggest threats we face...
Note also that it's only the USAF who require trained pilots to operate UAVs... Everyone else uses automated landing systems (etc) and regular troops fly them. It's one of the featured jobs in the British Army's recruiting campaign, there's a guy with a handset similar to an Xbox controller scouting ahead of his unit as they patrol.
More stuff like this on HN please.
Everyone would have died on a computer plane.