Should Future Fighter Be Like a Bomber? Groundbreaking CSBA Study | Hacker News Reader

Should Future Fighter Be Like a Bomber? Groundbreaking CSBA Study

breakingdefense.com

27 pointshackuser38 comments

I'm writing a sci-fi novel about a future war between Canada and the United States which mostly takes place between their fighter planes. For plot reasons all planes are required to have a human pilot (as per international treaty), but it seems preposterous that you'd have anything other than remote-controlled or AI controlled airborne machines in the future.

Having to carry a human creates a huge number of constraints. You can't maneuver as quickly due to G-forces, you can't make the fighters small, you can't have them hide-in-wait on the ground for days or weeks at a time. Human reaction time isn't as good, and humans can't coordinate with as many other pilots as a computer can. Pilots are also expensive to maintain.

Anyway, just some thoughts. I'm not an expert on the topic, which is why the novel is going to be a romance which just happens to be set in the future.

If computer-controlled aircraft have the advantages of high maneuverability, small size, fast reactions, and disposability, what do you get if you turn the knobs on all of those up to 11, and then fit the simplest possible kill mechanism? A very effective AI controlled airborne machine that already exists - called a missile!

The only question is how you get the missiles to the battle (because being small makes it hard to make them long-ranged), and how you get slow-but-powerful human brains and large-aperture sensors near enough to them to make effective use of them.

So far, we've got two ways of doing this. Firstly, by slinging missiles beneath manned fighter aircraft which carry the brains, and sending those out along with airborne early warning aircraft which carry the sensors (and more brains). Secondly, by fitting them to warships big enough to carry plenty of brains and radars themselves. The aircraft have the advantage of speed (and altitude, if that matters), whereas the ships have the advantage of range (and a few other things).

This battleplane idea can be seen as either converging the fighters and AEW aircraft, or as transferring some of the attributes of the warships to the fighters.

Alternatively, the idea could be seen as converging reality with a 1987 techno-thriller:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_the_Old_Dog

So one unintended consequence of SpaceX is that we might end up with missiles that can land, wait, and relaunch themselves when needed.

Yeah, but they'll be constantly posting pictures of themselves on Instagram, so they won't be hard to avoid.

Planes are just airborne aircraft carriers for the kamakaze drones that we call missiles?

Neat! What if the treaty didn't stipulate that the "pilot" must pilot the craft - the purpose of the human was to ensure that the "human cost" of war remained at a reasonable level as to thwart senseless violence. Seems like an interesting exploration - who would the "pilots" be, and what (if anything) would they be expected to do while in the craft?

Hi! Yes, I should have clarified, that's exactly what the treaty was about. In the novel the "pilots" aren't given any command of the plane at all, it is computer controlled with the objectives transmitted from central command.

The pilot can play games or watch TV on the fighter's computer but can't send communications since the radio transmissions might help pinpoint its location. So it's a very boring job most of the time with occasional roller-coaster moments of terror.

My story tells what happens to one pilot whose plane is damaged during a sortie over Canada and the computer runs out of commands, causing her to suddenly have to control the aircraft.

I'd definitely be interested in reading this. Do you have a mailing list or anything so I can find out when it's available?

Cool! Good luck with your book - would be happy to read an advance copy when you have it. :-)

Sounds like actual warfare.

Star Trek had an episode where two planets were fighting. All the attacks were carried out on a computer, then the computed casualties were rounded up and killed in real life. It saved actually damaging infrastructure and wasting resources to build real weapons. There was a human cost, but because war was no longer violent, the people preferred to keep fighting instead of looking for peace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon

It seems to me that the entire concept of air war is designed around a presumption of human pilots. That you can only have a limited number of aircraft that have to be very capable. This rules still seems to apply to drones, even though they could be made cheap enough to be expendable. At that point a drone is just a very cheap missile and the more you have the better.

Is 1 fighter/bomber aircraft more useful than 10,000 single use drones? Only if you are flying from a secure base; and any serious adversary will try and prevent that. Lets hope we only ever have to fight people in pick up trucks with those billion dollar fighters.

For a lot of things, there's no substitute for getting a decent quantity of high explosives to the target. A tiny, expendable drone won't be able to carry a 500lb bomb.

Range is another consideration. As you shrink aircraft, their range generally shrinks too. Your 10,000 single-use drones probably won't be able to fly across the Pacific.

Smaller, cheaper, and more numerous may well be better, but it's all relative.

Incidentally, this basic scenario already played out for strategic nuclear bombing. The "drones" there are ballistic missiles, and they gradually supplanted manned bombers in large part because they were cheaper. (Being able to launch on short notice and extremely difficult to intercept were factors too, of course.) Manned nuclear bombers still exist, but are very much secondary to ICBMs now. But note that ICBMs, while quite a bit smaller and cheaper than a B-52 or B-2, are still gigantic and expensive compared to just about anything civilian scale.

To add to the article: Per one study by some leading defense thinkers, Vietnam is the last time the U.S. had a large number of air-to-air encounters. There, 80% of encounters had been decided before the loser had a chance to defend themselves. The authors conclude that situational awareness is key. [1]

[1] http://csbaonline.org/publications/2007/03/six-decades-of-gu...

Sounds very much like the original concept for the F-111: a large aircraft with long range and large payload, which can do both air-to-ground, and beyond-visual-range air combat. Maybe the time is finally ripe.

Back then this was proposed top-down (by McNamara), and both the Air Force and the Navy hated the idea. I wonder what they will think this time around.

I was just thinking this.. "sounds like the F-111 all over again"

Hmmm, it's not clear that "a database of “over 1,450 air-to-air victories” around the world from 1965 to the present" can really help us understand a world that is infested with aerial drones. A supermegabomber might well carry enough missiles to drop scores of fighters before they even see it. What can it do about a cloud of thousands of tiny autonomous jet-intake-seeking drones? Even if it can see them, it can only disable a particular percentage. Then one drone finds a jet intake and the supermegabomber is a sitting duck.

For the wars that will be fought in the very near future, a bigger plane is mostly a bigger target.

A tiny drone won't have very good sensors so they can't find the plane. And if you know where the plane is you should send a missile instead of waiting for a drone to find a jet intake.

Directed energy weapons will be have an increasing role in protecting aircraft.

Kinda reminds me of Flight of the Old Dog - in that case it was 80's high-tech stuffed in to a B-52, giving it 'escort' capabilities...

As many have pointed out, this type of air-to-air platform may make sense for knocking out our current opposition, but when that opposition is all drones?

That's the real game changer - a drone wouldn't even have to 'launch' a missile, you could build one with a secondary impulse engine that would turn it in to a missile. Have dozens/hundreds flying on-station in high-efficiency/high-boredom flight paths, all controlled over-the-horizon, or from a standoff AWACs stop platform 100s of miles away.

The potential impact on naval warfare may be even greater...

Also, there hasn't been a full scale war with modern military technology in decades. So nobody really knows what actually works and what just sounds good in theory.

In short, they want a bomb truck that can lurk and loiter, it will carry missiles, the missiles will be more maneuverable than any manned fighter.

Going to be a hard sell for a "Top Gun" culture of fighter jocks at the pentagon.

Bright article for once.

But, such a shame people don't understand what survival to the fittest means.

Bombers/planes are expensive. Some people think that if you are rich then having expensive toys is good. Less people are able to buy them so you should win the wars against almost all poor countries.

Right, it is a basic asymmetric situation. Survival to the fittest, is about using your advantage.

Well, how expensive is it in a poor country to build and destroy an expensive plane?

Stealth plane are stealth. They tend to absorb waves. Thus if you have a distributed grid of electromagnetic emitters you probably have a very cheap radar very efficient for detecting stealth plane. Once you have a vector, shooting a plane that has a given cone of future is quite trivial.

Well, that is called a mobile network. I am no genius, but I see a potential for reverting the assymetry. Ok, maybe I am wrong. But, war is assymetric. If you can invest 1% of the sum in military expense compared to your ennemy to defeat him, then you win in much more cases.

The fighter vs missile is known since they droped the MACH 4 plane studies (dassault).

The point about war is we can't prepare for it because we never know how it will look like.

My stupid opinion is: it is better to avoid war, and invest the saved money in education of fine citizens that will be smart in face of a new situation called war so that we may survive.

But one can also build very expensive planes... that can be defeated with very small cheap education.

I think I could actually evaluate the price it would cost for building this radar in one year (and quite a lot of cash for asking people that knows more than me) and give and exact amount of money for building it. And one more year for asserving missile on the target. And this means that we can know the cost of this idea for a fraction of the cost of the F35. Which at my experience means that it might cost just an order of magnitude more than the money to evaluate.

Which still means that I am amazed at how much money we spend on expensive weapons that one can defeat with far less money.

The platform I think will decide future air superiority is actually fairly well evidenced here.

There definitely will be a need for high-performance/agile aircraft, but I don't know that it will be the traditional fighter pilot. The main reason is that the presence of a pilot creates an inherent limitation in performance - you have to protect a sack of meat/bones/blood from G-forces, etc.

With that in mind, I could see missiles that are extremely maneuverable and could spend a long amount of time tracking and eventually destroying a target (such as an enemy fighter plane).

At a higher level, one of the most interesting weapons of the cold war was the Phoenix missile. Designed for the A-12 (precursor to the SR-71), it was high-Mach missile that would launch, go to high altitude, power off and then lance down from above into the target. F-14's carried the missiles and were quite capable of removing a large number of targets at well beyond visual range (a "standoff" missile iirc). The biggest limitation was that the missiles required constant illumination by the fighters for their targeting solutions, which meant an opposing flight could attempt to close the distance to their own range before the missiles struck (or escape the terminal envelope).

While I'm a bit out of date on current AAM tech, I think we'll probably see missiles capable of this same type of performance but at even greater ranges and altitudes. A larger standoff-fighter that is capable of extremely high-altitudes (90k+ feet) that can loiter there could conceivably carry a large number of missiles well away from the threat zone - over an international border for instance - while still having target/kill capability.

500-mile range AAM anyone? Fascinating stuff.

AIM-54 was a Navy only project, not an A-12 armament. Perhaps you're conflating it with the AIM-47? The Phoenix is a natural derivative of the Falcon, but still a distinct system.

Fun trivia: in 1980 there was a study about modifying existing SR-71s to carry AIM-54s, to shoot down Soviet AWACS planes. It never went anywhere, but it sounds pretty bad-ass.

http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,3780.0...

Great link. I'm surprised that this was contemplated as I've always thought the Moss and Mainstay were considered crappy AWACs. It's also interesting that the Foxbat wasn't considered a threat to this mission. This also gives a lot of insight into the role of the F-22 should we fight a near-peer opponent.

Didn't know that distinction - thanks!

I feel like this is an obvious "duh" followed by "that doesn't go far enough." I feel like the real question is "do we need fighters or bombers at all?" Seems like we would just want delivery platforms for guided missiles since dogfighting is to air combat as the line infantry is to ground combat.

For the same cost, maybe we should develop a few generations of unmanned fighters? Perhaps even hypersonic unmanned fighters? Hopefully, some of the R&D will make its way into the civilian sector. Defense projects ar incredibly expensive. I'd like to get more return on that investment.

e.g NY to Tokyo in 4 hours by 2035.

How about Brussels to Sydney in about 4.6 hours?

http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/lapcat.html

JFK-NRT is 6745 miles, BRU-SYD is 10398 - although the Reaction Engines plan would be to go the long way round to avoid bothering people with the noise, a distance of 10097 miles.

Generations of hypersonic unmanned fighters required: zero!

Sure, I've been following hypersonic flight for at least a decade.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet

We'll get there eventually. Have the DoD spend $1 trillion on development over a decade and we'll get there faster.

Note that the F-35 is already barking up this tree.

John Boyd is probably rolling in his grave.

bullshit. you always need visual confirmation of your target by a human. no matter what foe-friendly system you implement, it's down to visual range ID. you simply can't do this better than strapping someone in a fighter. you can't do this without high power to weight ratio and tight turning radius for dog fighting scenarios.

we are seeing revitalization of McNamara's failed Standardization policy in all fighter. The very fact that completely different plan designs came out for different theaters and purposes show this. A-10 for low flying, heavy, armor shelled plane. Tomcat that withstands naval capatapults and fly long range with good fuel efficiency (variable swept wings), and eventually the Hornet vs. using naval F-16 or F-15

> bullshit. you always need visual confirmation of your target by a human.

That would rule out the Phoenix missile, and yet it was built, and the Iranians of all people used it to considerable effect against Iraqi aircraft in the 1980s.

well I don't know about that since operational history from Iran tends to be shaky in credibility. I mean they have no training and maintenance capabilities after the revolution when the American technician sabatoged the Tomcats as well as critical parts.

Even the two times the Phoenix missile was fired they both failed. Not sure how a completely cut off Iranian air force with no spare parts or maintenance knowledge would've been able to fire at Iraqi, an equally incompetent force, my guess is the Iraqi air force actually crashed before the Iranians did.

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