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Unmanned (But Armed) Aircraft Experiments In 2001
John Warden, architect of the Gulf war air campaign, believes that by 2025
90% of combat aircraft will be unmanned. Next spring, the first armed
aircraft without pilot,
the X-45A UCAV will make its maiden flight. Replacing the pilot
by a ground controller cuts the price of each unit by two-thirds, and makes it
easier to transport.
The Economist has more, and states 'the decision to fire weapons should be
made by a human, to reduce the risk of "friendly fire."' This is not logical:
Since the planes can be networked and thus know each other's relative positions,
preventing friendly fire is a much simpler problem than the visual recognition
required to determine what to shoot at, unless you don't mind hitting
non-military targets. I wonder what Asimov would think.
Please, learn something before you spew your nonsence. First some background on me. I work on the computer program that runs on AWACS. I have seen what the system can do. The F-22 will not run any active systems when on an attack run. All of the detection is left up to us (awacs). and the radar system on it sucks, its only an plainer two pass (hard to explain).
And IFF is used by every single airplane in the air, not just NATO.
Sanchi
"They said we couldn't do it [Athlon]... but we built it, we shipped it... and we didn't have to recall it." Rich Heye
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
From what I've read about modern military history, the goal of war is not to kill people, it is to destroy the combat effectiveness of the enemy's forces.
This kind of thinking is the reason why the U.S. military can't beat a truly committed enemy. It doesn't help that their idea of "combat effectiveness" is hopelessly self-referential (combat effectiveness is the ability to reduce combat effectiveness of an enemy).
The goal of war is to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women. Even uneducated barbarians know that.
All kidding aside, war is a means, not a goal. Was is the way you get something you want when nothing else will work. Principles like "we should avoid civilian casualties" and "a tank is worth more than a handgun" are not absolute.
The U.S. military works from several basic assumptions that hamstring them in many situations (and are forced on them by the "CNN factor"): they are trying to help the civilians in the area, their enemy is an evil dictator whose people hate him, and they want the area to be peaceful. These assumptions often conflict with, and even contradict, the only possible logical purposes of their attacks, leading to confusion and apparent incompetence.
It is very dangerous to have such sweeping absolutes out in the open for all your enemies to see and exploit. People in more than one area that has not profited from their interaction with the U.S. have compared the American military, with their submarines, stealth planes, and nightfighting gear, to vampires. The analogy is a very appropriate one, not only because their strange-seeming motivations and their terrifying night-attack tactics, but because they are invulnerable to the normal, direct methods of attack and must be fought according to bizarre and seemingly arbitrary rules that make them curiously easy for most to ward off, if not kill.
However, with no chance of a seriously damaging defeat near home ground, the American military will doubtless remain complacently ignorant of how they are perceived, and in particular, how well their limitations are understood.
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If you think about this device, and what its mission is, it isn't very far off from a cruise missle, except that it doesn't blow itself up when it completes its mission. It comes back to fight another day. Cruise missles suffer from the same vulnerabilites, they've got multiple navigation sources (GPS, inertial, landmarks), and sat. communications, where they can be re-targeted if needed.
The first such mission envisioned is the suppression of enemy air defenses.
I think that this means the ground based, anti-aircraft installations (guns, missles, radar) The airframe is a pretty stealthy design, which is right for going against that sort of target. That type of mission is the most dangerous for a human pilot. I'm sure Congress likes it, since if one of them goes down in combat, they don't have to tell their constituents that they are sending their children to death in some far off country.
I would think air-air combat is a much harder problem, but it would be very good to take the human out of the loop- The plane could then do continuous hi-G turns, both positive and negative, stuff that would knock out a human in seconds.
You have done a real bang-up job on the software design, but would you mind posting the implementation?
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The US Government has avoided or gotten pressured out of a lot of wars because American Soldiers were dying. Each technology designed to fight a battle without putting men on the field or in the sky will help move a political impediment to war.
Most people would consider this a bad thing.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
It would be pretty hard to distinguish a simulation from a real battle then, wouldn't it? I won't ruin the ending for people who haven't read the book, but this brought to memory Orson Scott Card's book, a boy named Ender, and his training at battle school.
In this (slightly heavy handed) story, the superpowers' computers battle each other, with fully automated weapons. Humans have become reliant on computers to do simple maths; why bother learning it when everyone has a computer?
But the military want a way to beat the enemy's computer weapons; it's too costly to put larger and larger computers in the weapons. So, they re-invent the idea of doing maths on paper (a shocking concept to those assembled, and they name it 'graphitics'), and with it the 'manned missile'.
Full story can be found at this site.
The concern with friendly fire isn't about allied aircraft -- you're correct that we alrady have decent friend-or-foe identification beacons on friendly aircraft to prevent us accidentally downing an allied plane.
The primary concern in frind-or-foe is in ground forces that have no such beacons, nor do they really have any way of carrying such.
The reason we lost so many forces to friendly fire during the Gulf War is that our ground forces were moving so quickly that they were frequently AHEAD of the official friend/foe demarcation. They were pushing so aggresively into Iraqi territory that they were mistaken by allied aircraft as thus being Iraqui forces and fired upon.
In almost every case the mistake was recongnized immediately, but of course once the Hellfire is launched it does little good to realize it was a friendly tank.
As much as we trust in technology the truth remains that we really have no 100% effective way of knowing exactly where friendly and enemy troops are int he heat of battle -- which is why, ultimately, we HAVE to rely on humans to make the call. if an aircraft's IFF is damaged that doesn't excuse our shooting it down, and the same goes for tanks.
Some of the fault belongs in the fact that our armed forces (like moth other government agencies) are decentralized -- the Army doesn't necessarily know exactly what the Air Force is doing, and vice versa. Of course they cooperate, and they are getting much better, but even within the Army you had most of the friendly fire due to simple inability to notify the Army air units that the Army ground units were progressing as quickly as they were. Picking individual tanks out of a skirmish would be an exercise in futility if there was not a human to make the call.
That said, the real advantage to unmanned craft is that they no longer have to keep within the physical constraints of safety for the pilot -- they can pull 15-G turns without a problem, and don't have to be designed to incorporate safety equipment or a feild of view for human eyes. They can be designed to be essentially disposable, perfectly aerodynamic, lighter, highly maneuverable, and with a minimal radar signature...
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
G-forces. At this day and age, the true limit of a fighter's performance isn't engine power or structural integrity: it's how many Gs the pilot can stand. Even with the best pressure suits, a UCAV has an obvious advantage.
PIO (Pilot Induced Oscillation): if you're gonna pull any tricky aerodynamics like the X-45 does (inverted swept wing, stealth profile) you need dynamically unstable aircraft. The problem with unstable designs in fighters is usually that the pilot overcompensates flight corrections --i.e., the resolution of the human is much lower than the resolution that the flight corrections must be made; in essence, the pilot is correcting the aircraft at a lag. Modern control systems of course correct for this already --by trying to determine what the pilot *wants* to do, rather than what he's putting in the stick-- but with higher Gs (and thus higher speeds) the human is the weak link.
Weight, of course. If I remember my Design courses correctly, the extra systems for the pilot account for about 20%-25% of a fighter's Take Off Gross Weight: armor plating, cockpit controls, air conditioning, etc. Weight is an aircraft's Number 1 limiting design factor.
OTOH there is one huge disadvantage to a UCAV: in a dog-fight, or whenever human perception is needed to reduce the decision tree to something manageable, they will always (well, for the next few decades anyway) be outmanned. Pun intended.
Recall the "conflict" (it wasn't formally a "war") in the Persian Gulf and the lavish media coverage fawning over the tricked-out American arsenal of depleted uranium, ship-launched cruise missiles and so-called "smart bombs."
I was in high school at the time, and remember well the glossy graphics in the corporate press extolling the efficiency of "fire-and-forget" rockets.
Later came a few insightful (but quickly forgotten) editorials criticizing America's "video game mentality" of combat.
Perhaps automated weapon systems are more efficient than those manned by humans. Maybe they'll even cut down on "friendly" casualties, and, in the long run, shave some dollars off of our bloated defense budget.
What really concerns me ain't efficiency, or cost savings. It's accountability. I think many fail to realize that war -- whether conducted with knives or napalm, whether hand-to-hand or computerized -- is about killing. Smart bombs and fire-and-forget missiles abstract killing to a small blip on a phosphorescent screen far removed from the actual event.
Unmanned flying gunships, I'm afraid, are a step in the wrong direction.
Sincerely,
Vergil
Insects and Grafitti Photos
All this talk about intercepting or spoofing control signals is ridiculous.
If electronic infiltration were even a remote possibility with computer pilots it would be almost as doable with real ones, since a human pilot gets targetting info, terrain maps, base and target locations, and mission objectives from ground or satellite locations already.
Of course there is the human element of trust in calling the enemy "charlie" or naming different jets with various adjective/animal/number triplets, but that is just another type of encryption, really. It can't always be cracked by computers (as long as they're still failing the turing test) but enemy humans can crack it pretty well.
A human pilot could of course just use visual imput to complete the mission and get home if he had some reason to doubt ground or satellite info. But so could a computer pilot! If the checksums or codewords or protocols are a bit fishy, of if it sees one ally attacking another, the computer plane can go manual override and just do its own thing. Of course this creates the possibility for a Dr. Strangelove scenario, but the movie shows that humans don't do much good against that.
Personally I plan on getting on the robots' good side now so they'll let me live to do their menial chores once they take over.
The HARM can be used in different ways. You can fire it off a platform such as the F-4G Wild Weasel. In this case, the EWO (Electronics Warfare Officer) selects a threat, hands that threat to the HARM, and sends the HARM on its way.
But the HARM also carries its own threat table and can be sent after a target with little direction. In this case, a threat is identified in a general area and the HARM is fired. The HARM then looks for threats, identifies the highest priority threat according to its internal table, and then goes after that threat.
These kinds of abilities allow a HARM to be used with platforms not otherwise especially equiped for Wild Weasel missions. It also allows for more creative functions. A pilot can "pickle over the horizon" and send a HARM after a known target without coming in range themselves. And by extending a HARM's fuel capacity, it can "hunt" for an extended period of time awaiting threat radars to power up after hiding from the Wild Weasel aircraft.
Vicous stuff.
The sobering part comes from a few rare reports during the Gulf War. There were reports of "near misses" with HARM missles by friendly surface forces. The theory is that the HARMs mis-identified friendly radar or communications systems as a threat in its internal threat table.