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Future Fighters Won't Need Ejection Seats
Dr. Tom writes "The U.S. has deployed more than 11,000 military drones, up from fewer than 200 in 2002. They carry out a wide variety of missions while saving money and American lives. Within a generation they could replace most manned military aircraft, says John Pike, a defense expert at the think tank GlobalSecurity.org. Pike suspects that the F-35 Lightning II, now under development by Lockheed Martin, might be 'the last fighter with an ejector seat, and might get converted into a drone itself.' The weakest link is the pilot. A jet could pull 15 Gs, out-turning any conventional aircraft, except it would kill the pilot. Is it time to stop spending billions on obsolete aircraft?"
Nah, no one could ever do that.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
People in the military need to be injured or killed in war, to remind everyone that it is fucking terrible and that no one should *want* to do it.
If the current drone craze takes off, the Navy aircraft carrier will be far from obsolete. Those drones need somewhere to refuel and reload, and an aircraft carrier is the easiest thing to keep in theatre.
once we can prove that they can not be taken over by an enemy
Any system can be hacked. Having humans directly in the loop is the basic Wargames lesson.
they could operate autonomously when conditions warrant
And that is exactly what these drones should NEVER be allowed to do. And that's the basic Terminator lesson.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
It is time to stop spending billions on military weapons in general; sadly weapon is the world's largest trading goods. If all that money had been spent more wisely the world could have been a much safer and better place.
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
You're assuming that the drones will never be autonomous in a situation that requires low latency. While a human pilot may have better ingenuity and unpredictability in a dogfight, he cannot physically react faster than a computer. Connect that computer to the right sensors, and you'll have a system ready to fly an airframe capable of doing turns that will turn any human pilot into red jelly.
Any system can be hacked. Having humans directly in the loop is the basic Wargames lesson. ...
And that is exactly what these drones should NEVER be allowed to do. And that's the basic Terminator lesson.
Because our military should really be basing decisions on fictional movies.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Drones can be effective, don't get me wrong, and they're getting more advanced all the time. However, anything that is controlled remotely can be jammed. You either have to create a control suite that can respond to a variety of situations or pray that you have constant contact with the aircraft. A local pilot, however, cannot be jammed.
I remember a discussion once about this sort of problem: One model of fighter jet (I forget which) was capable of performing maneuvers that would cause the pilot to black out. The initial response was to lock down the controls to physically prevent the pilot from initiating any such maneuver, but then it cropped up that there were times when the restricted controls were a hindrance (during landing maneuvers or bad weather, something like that). So, they went back to the drawing board, and one idea was that the pilot could initiate a pre-programmed blackout-maneuver, but the designers couldn't agree on what to do AFTER that. What sort of flying pattern should it default to?
And, as I understand, the idea that modern dogfighting amounts to launching missiles ouside of visible range is a fallacy, that was one of the factors leading to the founding of the Top Gun training academy. Wasn't there at least one fighter initially designed with just missiles that was retrofitted or redesigned to carry a machine gun?
Then there's the immersion. Fighter pilots can feel their aircraft, they know how it's moving. You don't get the same feeling from a joystick and readout displays. Possibly you could put them in one of those omni-rotational spheres similar to how amusement parks make you feel like you're on a rollercoaster by simply tilting your seat, but that would also seem rather excessive.
Because our military should really be basing decisions on fictional movies.
Well-written fiction often speaks to real-world concerns. George Orwell's 1984 was also fictional, but it was and is taken seriously as a cautionary tale, and rightly so.
Sure, it's unlikely that an evil sentient computer will declare nuclear war on humanity, but one reason why the Terminator films are so popular is that they address real-world anxieties about how our lives are increasingly dominated by technology. It's perfectly reasonable to ask whether bad consequences could result from taking humans out of the loop, especially on military decisions.
Imagine any conventional object up in the sky. A sitting duck for your laser, right? Even mach 10 is pretty much stationary compared to 3e8 m/s.
But what if that autonomous drone is flying 2 feet off the ground using its inhumanly fast reaction time and 36g turning capability to fly at that altitude--i.e., it's below the horizon until it's right on top of your laser facility.
Drones could survive battlefield lasers, maybe: piloted jets, not so much.
--PM
You don't intentionally go up there to dogfight.
A dogfight is what happens when two opposing forces merge, and the initial round of beyond visual range missiles don't kill everyone, which is relatively common - as both guys are in a game of chicken where they want to wait as long as posisble to launch so the missile has the maximum amount of energy for turning when it gets close so the fighter can't evade it, but they don't want the other guy to launch first. So typically they may launch pretty early and the missile has no energy left to turn by the time it gets to the other guy.
As to why fighters are up there in the first place? To stop the other guys bombing you, and to protect your bombers and other assets, typically.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Disclaimer: IAAP (I Am A Pilot), and the AC is right.
For example, that 2,250 lb (max. takeoff load) MQ-1 Predator effectively becomes 33,750 lbs at 15Gs.
Not sure what this mass to structural support thing is that you're talking about, but unless we're talking about model airplanes those forces would rip any real air frame apart.
Aldous Huxley had it more right then George Orwell: distract the people with luxuries and short term goals, at the expense of long-term freedoms. That said, his dystopia was arguably not one: it wasn't like those who brooked changed were murdered or imprisoned or tortured - they were just discredited and lavished with benefits, but ultimately kept irrelevant.