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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?
for manned aircraft but realistically we don't need fighter or bomber pilots once we can prove that they can not be taken over by an enemy and that they could operate autonomously when conditions warrant
its no different than convincing the Navy that carriers will be if not already obsolete for most missions. Changing how people feel about something takes longer to catch up to technology than it takes for technology to advance.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Install ejection seats on the remote pilots' chairs would certainly serve as a strong deterrent to unsafe manoeuvres as well as providing a means for a broad range of disciplinary actions.
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.
It's against treaty to put weapons in space... at least out in the open.
Whether it has happened already or not, however...
Why not just go the whole hog and have The Rod from God
(ok, they're not very cost-efficient).
well, in a dogfight, manned aircraft will easily trump remote-piloted aircraft, even with the maneuvability disadvantage. the reason is lag. i've read there is a 2 second delay between a remote operator's input and action by a drone. even assuming technology progresses and that lag is reduced, there are certain physical laws that can't be broken, and a delay is always going to exist. as any gamer knows, lag kills.
there is a world of difference between telling a drone to hit a fixed, stationary target versus piloting an aircraft through a dynamic set of circumstances.
so yeah, if all we ever want to do with our planes is hit-and-runs on stationary targets, then sure, we don't need manned aircraft anymore.
i could live a little longer in this prison
Two words: artificial intelligence.
Let the apocalypse begin.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
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").
A jet could pull 15 g's, out-turning any conventional aircraft, except it would kill the pilot. Is it time to stop spending billions on obsolete aircraft
But the pilot's reaction time would still be the weakest link. Why not link it up to skynet, a super-intelligent network of computers that could react in picoseconds? That has to be the next step, doesn't it?
Yes, a physical pilot prevents the craft from pulling 15Gs.
As others have pointed out, that same fragile bag of fluids is also the component that can't be hacked. Even if pilots are remotely controlling the planes, the tenuous connection between pilot and drone can be interrupted. There is no substitute for having a human in the cockpit, this is particularly true for the times when we're confronted with a technologically advanced opponent.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
There is a reason why Drones can not replace all combat aircraft and that is it. There is not enough bandwidth to control 500 drones with the senors that an F35 has. Until you can solve those problems along with jamming there will always be a need for manned aircraft. Drones are good for lots of things but way too many couch experts over look the command and control problems with replacing all combat aircraft with drones.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
Well, the autonomous operation commands would likely be things like "fly to the location where you are needed and wait for instructions", or "fly a survey grid over this area and take pictures," and "if you lose contact with control, go to altitude XX and circle for 30 minutes waiting for instructions, and if you don't get instructions, fly home and land."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Back in the sixties the us all but abandoned close combat training for fighter pilots, as all would be done with long range missiles. When they got their ass kicked in vietnam, they had to set up programs like SFTI/TOPGUN to regain air supremacy.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
So pilots will soon be able to fight staying at home, while Yahoo employees now must stay at their workplace.
Radar to Rarget, Radar Rreturn, Video Capture, Process, Transmit to Ground Operator, Human Processing and Decision, Transmission of Commands, Actuating of Commands.
Increase for transmission times for distance and relays such as satellites.
Talk about intolerable lag. For a fighter, impossible. For a Ground Strike where the craft is considered highly expendable, sure, maybe, but we already have that.
Then you factor in jamming and such...
Humans still better.
There is a reason we send men to the moon. The value of there observation and ability to adapt and re-task (currently) is far superior to machines. As for unmanned attack aircraft. There is a delay from the remote control site to the plane. That delay both ways says that the ability to pull 15g's to get out of a bad situation probably will present itself too late, or because of the delay you will need that speed of evasion.
Not to mention the de-humanizing effect we have seen already with the video game war where the warrior has no skin in the game. The human equations that should be there as a deterent to war, aren't. That is probably the biggest risk and failing of this direction. Of course those who just want to win and don't care of the cost to the other side, that can engage in riskless carnage, will attract the very people that would naturally be culled out through the process of war. That culling of sociopaths is part of our natural evolution. If you take away their natural predators (man, the other side) then as with all species they will overpopulate and strain and break there ecosystem.
Now the weakest link will be the comm link. Not sure which one I prefer.
However, I suppose the future points that way. Next step, as a further method of savings, I suggest outsourcing of piloting to India. Then, after a time, when everybody has unmanned fighters, it'll be seen as a waste to really go to the cost of building the fighters. Wars will be fought virtually in probably the same Indian subcontractor war room, elbowing telecom service personnel and telemarketers. The loser will demolish some buildings and bridges in its own country, and promptly surrender to the winner.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Unless you manage to develop an AI intelligent enough to actually pilot that craft without any outside control, you better can that idea. Else the enemy's jet fighters of the future will be armed with huge arrays of radio jamming equipment. If all that's necessary to shoot down your enemy is to wait for him to point his nose down in a maneuver and then ensure he won't change the attitude before terrain altitude matches aircraft altitude all that will accomplish is to make it heaps cheaper to take out your crafts.
For some odd reason the whole idea reminds me of the German V1s that were "shot down" by English pilots by nudging the wings of those flying bombs with their own, making the former spiral out of control and crash. Why bother wasting ammo if there's way easier, cheaper and also safer ways of getting rid of your enemy? And yes, it was actually safer to perform a pretty dangerous maneuver instead of trying to blow up a bomb stuffed with hundreds of pounds of explosives from a few feet behind it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
When they had the JSF contest between the X-32 (Boeing) and the X-35 (Lockheed Marting), they already saw the handwriting on the wall. A lot of people at those firms fought hard for the contract because they felt that this would be the last big run of manned warplanes, at least for the US (where the big money was). Boeing lost, and as consolation got some tanker contracts, knowing there wouldn't be many big expensive fighter planes for it down the road.
Mind you competition was decided way back in 2001, way before the Predator/Reaper entered our daily lexicon (and even some really bad movies). This has been coming for a while.
Sadly, an American soldiers' live is worth less than an innocent civilian's live, even with the additional money savings.
The soldiers sign that agreement, yes.
No sig today...
Show me a flawless AI and I show you its flaws.
Sadly, AIs are limited in their ability to react to completely alien situations. All you'd have to do is to get that AI into a situation it cannot handle due to a shortcoming of its programming. This ain't some SciFi movie, real AIs are pretty dumb. Especially in the departments "learning" and "improvisation".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's not sad, that's 100% appropriate. Their very existence is to protect civilians.
Because it is not cost effective to put them up there on a just-in-case base. First, putting something into a stable orbit takes HEAPS more fuel than a simple ballistic flight. It's pretty much impossible to service them up there and you still have to spend more fuel to correct the orbit from time to time to compensate for air friction (unless you put them SO far out there that it's even less economic). Then, unless you plan to use them as a first strike weapon, they become very predictable due to their orbit. You pretty much KNOW when they will hit you because they will only be above you during a fairly small time window, unless you're close enough to the equator that a zero inclined equatorial orbiting warhead can hit you (and even then your window is a few minutes every few hours).
I guess that's the main reason your plan wasn't implemented yet. It's cheaper to just fire them when they're needed.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Drones can be hacked. Their signals jammed or spoofed. Their satellites destroyed. Their home bases attacked or infiltrated. They work very well against low tech enemies like Iraq and Afghanistan. Against the Russians or Chinese it would be a different matter, especially when the chips in a drone originate in China. War is an ever-changing game where every move has a countermove. The nice thing about human pilots is that they understand their orders and the underlying reasons for those orders. They can change their minds quickly and use situational information that drones would lack.
I'm not sure that g-force matters all that much in an era of smarter, faster missiles. When was the last real movie-style dogfight?
On the other hand, there is no question that drones are useful and will continue to improve at a rapid pace. Eventually they will replace most of our planes. With longer flight times we might be able to replace half of our aircraft carriers with land-based drones, but the inevitable cost overruns won't magically disappear.
What most folks don't understand is the "lag" time of the remotely piloted devices. Even with a pilot sitting in a chair somewhere the lag time between him moving the joystick to the drone moving is too great for air to air combat. Until that's overcome, pilot's in the airplane are here to stay.
You don't need to be able to control the drone in real-time, the drone can pilot itself and can evade (or attack) air defenses much better than a human operator thousands of miles away can. (if that's not true today, it will be true in a decade or less)
You need the human to review surveillance footage and to do target selection. Once the target is selected, the drone can find and attack it on its own. If it's supporting troops on the ground, the ground troops can do the target selection.
.. to transport living persons at 15G+, just put the person in foam, then put foam inside the person. See Iain M. Banks.
"It's against treaty to put weapons in space... at least out in the open."
It's not a weapon if you just lost some... let's call it ballast.
I'd read somewhere about how much cheaper drones are than pilot based fighter craft. However fully sized fighter craft are more flexible in combat in some ways while drones are more flexible in others.
So what does this tell us when we put it into practice. Using the wholly made up economic factor of 5 drones to one pilot driven top notch fighter, who wins the following scenario?
1 modern top tier fighter jet with a nice jamming suite -vs- 5 drones forced to fight without signal from home base/pilots?
If the answer is not the drones, then this is premature. If a human driven fighter can maintain vigil and keep the skies clear of drones, then the doctrine will not work against actual militaries and is only effective against those unable to resist drone projected force.
If the answer is that the drones will win, then it's time to get serious about the topic.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
Frequency hopping is a wonderful method of defeating jamming. The amount of power required to overwhelm the in-use frequency and every other possible frequency is practically impossible to manage. Jamming stations also make wonderful targets for anti-radiation munitions. So keep your manned jets - they'll only be shot out of the skies by other countries' drones which can out-manoeuvre them at the drop of a hat.
if you have a 300 ms latency?
I'm just guessing here but I'd assume what they are referring to is lightweight drones, not full sized aircraft. A drone has a substantially lower mass to structural support ratio one would guess, making far higher G maneuvers possible.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
Question from a military novice: what purpose does "dogfighting" serve in modern combat?
no text
Unless we jam transmissions so that you can't control your drones in the target area. At that point throwing more drones at the problem isn't going to fix it.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The Battle of Britain, and the Korean War would tend to disagree with your assessment. Pilot skill is far more important.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Maybe it's time to stop spending billions on obsolete wars.
Sig?
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
Here's the thing: Drones are fine until the EM spectrum goes to hell in a hand basket which will happen almost instantly when you're fighting an sophisticated enemy. An designed in the 60s EA-6 could probably bring down a whole squadron of drones or at least render them useless. But drones are the flavor of the month so lets waste a few billion on them.
"Technology.....the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Max Firsch
There's always jamming. Drones can't fly without a signal from their controller, and controllers can't fly the drones without a return signal from the drone. Frequency-hopping makes jamming harder, but one thing works against it: distance. The jammers on a competing fighter are a lot closer than the drone's base, and since signal strength varies as the square of distance the jammers can put more power on target easier than the base can. To give you an example you can try, think about how loudly you'd need to talk to drown out someone yelling from half a mile away.
And then there's situational awareness. Think for a minute about the relatively small screens drone pilots have to watch the camera feeds on, and the relatively low resolution of the video. They show only a very small cone in the direction the camera's facing. That's fine for a ground-attack drone, but a fighter pilot has to be watching virtually an entire sphere. It'll be very easy for a stealthy opposing fighter to sneak up on a drone from a direction the drone's pilot isn't watching. And even if the pilot does see the incoming enemy, he may not identify that speck of static in the image as an enemy fighter. To top it off, once an enemy launches a missile the drone pilot's going to have a very hard time scanning and locating the missile track to start evading. The camera doesn't pan fast enough, doesn't show a wide enough area and doesn't have a high enough resolution to nail down the missile in the few seconds the pilot has to start evading.
Before we start deploying drone fighters, they need to go through Red Flag first. Take them out to the range and put them in a real dogfight against real pilots who aren't required to abide by artificial restrictions on what they can do (beyond "don't bend the bird"). When they can hold their own there, then they're ready for the battlefield.
Pike suspects that the F-35 Lightning II, now under development by Lockheed Martin, might be 'the last fighter with an ejector seat...
...And I'd put lots of money on his suspicion being incorrect.
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.
to shoot down drones.
it's true that over the last 30 years, the prominence of dogfights in modern warfare declined for a variety of reasons (think of the kind of wars we were engaged in) but if there were a good reason to have them (say, manned aircraft were awesome at shooting down dimwitted, agile-but-slow-to-respond drones) then the practice would rise again.
i could live a little longer in this prison
The military that has a bigger fleet of better-performing aircraft will win.
The military that can afford to launch a thousand $100,000 missiles at every $200,000,000 fighter will win.
IANAEE, but we don't have perfect electromagnetic shielding yet, and more and more of our warefare is relying on technology. Is it not unreasonable to assume that the countermeasures for remote drones would be just blasting as my em radiation into the spectrum as possible to jam their control signals, or short them outright with a focused EMP if they had autonomous capabilities?
Especially since the blast radius of an EMP weapon doesn't have to be particualrly large to be effective and travels through air quite well.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
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.
But in that case, couldn't drones overwhelm the enemy by sheer force of numbers, even if each individual drone was inferior to a manned fighter jet? After all, the whole point of drones is that our soldiers don't die when they get shot down.
I seem to recall reading in a history of WWII that the U.S. tanks were inferior to German tanks, but we produced so many more of them (for our own troops and the other Allies) that the Nazis just couldn't keep up. Any idea if that was correct? If so, it seems the same principle might apply here.
First to the ones who think this is a problem because 'Dogfighting is obsolete'. Please see the craptastic example of Mr. McNamara on that one - lesson is still relevant.
Second: My father is a Vietnam era fighter jock, and at 75 is the last living member of his squadron. They are all dying early, frequently from complications arising from their internal organs bouncing off their ribs - where no G suit could help them. Were they pulling 15G? No...they were doing tight 8G turns followed by just enough time for the plane to stabilize before pulling 8G turns in the opposite direction in order to dodge SAMs with an aggregate 16G turn done *just* slow enough to not take the wings off their planes. So long as missiles are shot at manned planes, this 'dogfighting' move will be required for anyone who wants to see their family again.
So...speaking as someone watching fighter vet's bodies crumble, Hell Yeah! Bring on the UAVs right now!
In practise, fighter plane has to "see" the enemy plane in order to to attack it. If radar is jammed and optical sensors are blinded by using laser, the drones might lose even against World War II fighter planes. On theory, you could use laser to blind fighter pilot as well, although there is a treaty against deliberately causing permanent blindness using laser.
As a drone guy myself, I love drones. Throughout my career I've designed, built, tested, simulated and built training systems for them. Just love them. I just don't think they'll be a viable air-to-air solution for at least another 25 years. I remember wanting to be a fighter pilot in my high school and college years and reading about it, everyone seemed to emphasize the pilot's situational awareness, and how it makes all the difference in air-to-air combat. This was in the days of the next generation fighters where designers were starting to focus on pilot overload with all the sophisticated systems they were having to manage in addition to flying the plane and shooting down the enemy. The 2-way datalink requirements to support that level of SA in an unmanned fighter are just not there yet, as far as I see the current state of the art. And frankly, I'm not aware of a whole lot of R&D to explore what it's going to take to get a man-in-the-loop unmanned fighter to provide that level of SA to a remote pilot. The links themselves can be pretty fickle. You can't maneuver a UAV too fast or you'll lose the datalink. Predator operators eventually have to learn how to maneuver properly to avoid satlink loss and how to deal with having to wait for the bird to regain its bearings and restore the link. I can't see how to keep a satlink going during air-to-air combat maneuvering with current datalink technology.
There are clear advantages of getting the pilot out of the cockpit, but the technology and sensor fusion isn't there to make them fully autonomous, which is the only foreseeable way to deal with the lag and bandwidth issue that precludes man-in-the-loop dogfighting today. The life support systems on a fighter plane weigh as much as a Predator and we would pretty much have to replace that weight with sensors, datalink support equipment and necessary redundant systems. And when start talking autonomous then we're going to argue about ethics, so either way, it's not going to happen any time soon. Consider how long it took the FAA to get past the point of having meetings about when they were going to have meetings. So the man-in-the-loop approach is the closest one, in my opinion. I might not be up to speed on newer technologies and research, but I'd say for now, let's do the R&D and deal with the datalink issues and 1) quantify the bandwidth, lag and maneuvering requirements and 2) see how we can satisfy those requirements and what technologies can be evolved to deal with the current limitations.
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
1) This all assumes that we won't just have fully autonomous aircraft. In a few decades the planes will completely fly themselves and we'll just have someone remotely tell them what they're allowed to kill (same as we do now actually). They won't need any more connectivity than our pilots do today.
2) Air-Air dogfighting is dead. This isn't 1986. Now it's just a matter of how far out you can get a missile lock using AESA/IRST. 50 nautical miles? 100? It's all about who can hit who with beyond-visual-range missiles now.
Thats why you shoud make all your drones totally autonomous on a self healing network, preferably coordinated centrally. Of course the complexity would require some sort of AI to manage it all, but I am sure that would be trival to create.
There already exist unmanned aircraft which are designed to bring down fighters. They're called SAMS.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
GO, it's not only one of the oldest board games known to man. It's the future of warfare...
***
That is right folks, the future is to hack entire armies and airforces and turn them on your opponent. Who will then hack the same units and cause them to turn back against you.
Watch as units across the World Board suddenly flip sides.
***
Yup, brilliantly dumb idea folks...
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.
You've got an interesting delusional architecture here. Hang on, I've got Ray Kurzweil on the phone. He's interested in your ideas about machines spontaneously becoming sentient.
Okay, but don't complain about a fact that even in a world where the military was managed and utilized ideally would still be true.
The enemies of Democracy are
Unless we jam transmissions so that you can't control your drones in the target area. At that point throwing more drones at the problem isn't going to fix it.
Unless the drones are preprogrammed with their targets, and no matter how much you jam them, you can't stop them. Program a couple drones to target sources of jamming and that can take care of the jamming problem.
Typical primitive Abrahamic deity, always waving your rod around, wanting to smite things. (ok, Zeus would fit that characterization, too...)
And protip for those posts below saying it's cost ineffective -- not if you're mining asteroids for the raw material. oops, did I just say that out loud?!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Lol. You think the U2 and SR-71 only flew within the boundaries of treaty legal space? :D
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Or they currently don't make any plane to support 15g manoeuvres because no pilot can handle that stress. Tale out the pilot, and you can design it to survive whatever you like (can afford) with the materials you have available.
Oh yeah, like no innocent civilian life was ever taken out by some jerk piloting a drone from an office seat 10000 miles away. Please.
I'm not saying that US soldiers are not making sacrifices or that they're not being sent into harm's way. They deserve respect.
We're talking about drones here. The US is using plenty of them to direct so-called "targeted strikes" on presumed terrorist groups. Which often turn out to be just families living next door.
Hey, would you mind if Pakistan or China sent out a few drones to hunt criminals on US ground, and accidentally killed civilians instead ? Oh, I thought so.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Worst case scenario: Skynet goes operational without all the nuclear post-apocalyptic drama.
Even if the drones did go berserk, wouldn't they all eventually run out of fuel and crash? Sure, it could cause a ton of damage, but there would be limits to how much.
Except that you need the infrastructure and logistics capability to launch a thousand missiles. That's *not* cheap or easy
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
If I'm not mistaken, the whole point of maneuverability is to get behind the enemy aircraft so you can shoot it from behind. So why not make a plane that can shoot missiles backward?
It's that simple.
you had me at #!
And how do you plan on making this world "safer" when all the bad guys are using weapons to KILL YOU?
A. Give them all $25,000 / year to not kill us. And go learn a productive skill. And stop abusing their women.
B. Or just hire 10,000,000 sluts to give everyone blowjobs. That might require a crash cloning program to keep the gender ratios at the right level...
C. Establish free pot / hash / heroin dispensaries in troubled areas.
There's a myriad of potential solutions that don't involve expensive killing people or blowing things up[*] if you put your mind to it.
[*] granted, blowing things up is cool. But most of the time, it's a destructive process with no productive result.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Any kind of autonomous attack decision is abuseable in itsself for propaganda purposes. All the defender need do is place their radio jammer in a school. Signal out, drone jammed, counterattack launched, and by the next morning news channels around the world are running the story of how the US air force slaughtered hundreds of innocent children in a bungled attack.
ur also assuming a one on one fight...a swarm of a dozen small drones could easily overwhelm a single larger plane...even with some latency (all planes have some partial autonomy).
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Goose: "Eject, eject, eject!!!" Sorry, couldn't resist.
If maneuverability and high-G turns are still an advantage for fighter jets, then the imposed on those drones by having the pilots sitting on the other side of the globe would result in a tactical disadvantage. We've learned from game streaming (Gaikai, OnLive) that this lag can be significant boon (even with good network equipment) as the speed of light cannot be cheated.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
Any kind of autonomous attack decision is abuseable in itsself for propaganda purposes. All the defender need do is place their radio jammer in a school. Signal out, drone jammed, counterattack launched, and by the next morning news channels around the world are running the story of how the US air force slaughtered hundreds of innocent children in a bungled attack.
If a pilot can recognize a school and avoid it, a drone can do the same thing.
You comment assumes that the software/firmware can be uploaded in-flight, or that the plane is connected to a network routinely that could be hacked and new software/firmware uploaded. The flight control systems are generally going to be controlled by microcontrollers running on firmware that rarely gets updated. Qualifying a change in that firmware, even one line of code, is a big deal, since a mistake can cause the plane to crash. So those systems are rarely updated, meaning that they rarely get connected to an outside system. Thus, no infection vector. I'm talking about aircraft that are in service; during roll-out, like what the F22 and F35 are currently in, updates are no doubt more frequent.
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
Im sure that in the year 2513 there will still be talk of Spam and "Root Kits" of course it may be by historians but...
UPS/FedEx will have drones delivering cargo before the DOD has drones with no Human In The Loop
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
It's straining the limits of computer vision algorithms today just determining if the target is a building.
where the drone tucks in behind the airplane it's following. If the decision is made to shoot it down, the operator hits the "fire" button, and the drone locks on and fires.
Given sufficient computer power there's no need for the operator to be actually controlling flight surfaces, rather they would give higher-level instructions.
Back in the day, radar jammers attracted unwanted attention. air to ground anti-jamming missiles are relatively low cost. There are counter measures, like randomly shutting down the jammers, but there are counter measures to that as well.
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
Considering the benefits that unmanned drones offer for the price, we can afford to lose a few at the cost of $4.5 million per. A $161 airplane + pilot, not so much.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
What becomes of man when machines experience all in mankind's place
We're going to see semi-autonomous fighter aircraft. The F-35, at $236 million per unit, is just too expensive to deploy in quantity. Autonomous landing and autonomous refueling have already been demonstrated for the F-16. The F-16's targeting system is already partly automatic. It's not far away. Even if manned aircraft are better in combat, there won't be enough of them.
There will be a remote operator, but their job will be to decide what to kill. They'll turn on Master Arm, select a target, and pull a trigger. Then the computers will take over.
Another possibility is the autonomous wingman. Some planes have pilots, but they're the squadron leaders. The rest are autonomous. This is very likely to happen soon, since DoD has been testing it for about ten years.
No kidding. It's like people think the military doesn't know what "recon" is. I mean, duh.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
You just don't get it, do you? The point isn't the weapons system, it's the expenditure.
he's suing over his ip in the1957 defense white paper (you know back when the UK had a real aviation industry) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957_Defence_White_Paper.
Computers can process more information and react more quickly than human pilots.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
They also said, Surface-to-Air missiles are going to make fighters obsolete
They also said, robots are going to make soldiers obsolete.
You know what, we have to find the "they" make them stop making insane predictions.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...the drone goes autonomous once the human controller acquires a target? Latency becomes a non-issue. Once the target's destroyed, the drone reverts to human control until another target is acquired. I assume a human pilot's situational awareness would be superior, but the drone's maneuverability might be enough to compensate. Assuming a drone would cost a fraction of a manned aircraft, especially once you include the cost of training the pilot, you could field a lot more drones. I would think their superior numbers combined with their agility would more than compensate for the lack of a human in the cockpit. I'm by no means an expert here, just interested in your thoughts.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
"I hate bleeding as much as you do. If I can fight a war without bleeding, I damn well will." -- Chuck Yeager
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
"The weakest link is the pilot." Physically but not morally.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
+++ATH0
LOAD "SKYNET", 8, 1
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
So, in the future, we will simply be shifting countermeasures in air-to-air and surface to air missiles from explosive warheads to EMP devices? Ground based or airborne microwave emitters? When we start putting so much sensitive electronics in automated drone aircraft, it is no longer necessary to physically disable or destroy the aircraft with explosive missiles - Now you only need to fry a handful of chips the size of a postage stamp to achieve the same net result - disabled aircraft falling out of the sky.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
When all your planes are unmanned, losing one or two isn't nearly as important.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
Air-to-air (aka A.C.M., air combat maneuvering... dogfighting) is a whole different ballgame than air-to-ground (aka mud pounding, dropping bombs on grunts). Targets on the ground are stationary or very close to it. They're always below you and they do not change position in the 3rd dimension.
When it comes to air-to-air, remotely piloted aircraft (drones) are going to suck due to lag and visibility issues. Lag you all know about. Visibility issues you wouldn't be familiar with unless you've witnessed air combat or some reasonable facsimile thereof (Air Combat USA, etc). When you're in a high-speed jet fighting another high-speed jet, most of the time your adversary is a TINY DOT. It's not like in the movies. There's a reason why excellent eyesight is a requirement for fighter pilots. To enable a drone pilot to see like a regular pilot, you're gonna need to encircle the virtual cockpit 360 degrees with super-high res displays. Think hundreds of retina iPads stitched together. Now think of the bandwidth requirement for transmitting live video feed for all these displays. Wirelessly. Think of the lag.
You mentioned the drone piloting itself (an autonomous vehicle). That's a scarier thought than a remotely piloted vehicle and probably worries a fighter pilot a lot more. I am not familiar with how advanced autonomous robots have gotten, but based on what I've seen in the past (Asimo, etc) I wouldn't lose sleep over it. However Google is said to be close to a functioning autonomous car so we will have to see.
When the day comes that the Google Car can drive itself to the nearest McDonald's, pull into the parking lot and look for an available spot, and if the lot is full, pull out onto the street, drive around and look for a street-parking space, and parallel park itself, and do all this as well as or better than a human driver can, I would say autonomous fighter planes can be done. But not until then.
Why the hell should something that breaks the lock of a terminally closing incoming anti-air missile, thus saving the unit, be consider "obsolete"? That's like saying that dodging a mugger's knife is obsolete these days. Sure, if you want to end up dead...?
The whole point of drones is that you're not putting your own soldiers at risk, so you don't care if it gets shot down. That only costs money, and the military has as much of that as it wants.
Having a drone shot down may lead to a failed mission. Losing a drone is one less available for the next mission, increasing the likelihood of that mission failing. Modern weapon systems tend to be slow to manufacture. We are unlikely to see a major industrial ramp up like in WW2, more likely what we have on day 1 is all that we will have for the duration.
A spinning turbine acts much like a gyroscope. Sudden changes in direction tend to cause them to tear themselves apart. You push on a spinning gyro and it tries to move 90 deg. from the direction it's being pushed.
This caused major problems when they started putting terrain following radar in jet fighters and turbines in tanks.
... spending billions of dollars on aircraft that are less functional, less effective, and 10 times as costly as their predecessors.
Instead of selling the military Iron Man suits so you could fly a pilot without a plane, the military is flying planes without pilots.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Bombers that can carry loads of bombs but evade at high-Gs make sense. And anti-bomber fighters that will kill anything in the sky that does not emit the correct friend or foe signal also make sense to counter high-G bombers.
People are making this about fighters and ejection seats. But I think this is about bombers and air defense against those.
Meh...time was, planes weren't going to need guns, either. I mean, after all, planes were too fast and maneuverable to be able to aim a cannon, and a missle will be able to do everything a gun could do and more, so why put the weight and expense in? Turned out, they were wrong.
The problem is that the price of aircraft riese soo much. In the end there will be one country, one plane. Anything more will be too expensive.
the arms race worked in the past when the US was THE economic super power. That might not be the way to go, there are more economic superpowers rising these days. Russia has oil, Asia has a rising economy, us has depts.
But before robotic figher aircraft are a reality, there needs to be a in between platform for the next 15 years. you will have to develop that or loose the arms race.
Numbers always beats a superior pilot. You can be Baron von Richthofen, but if you're outnumbered 10:1, you're screwed. I suspect a good drone can be made tons cheaper than a piloted aircraft, and perhaps even piloted automatically should there be a break in communications. Plus a drone can outperform in pulling Gs than a real pilot. A good fighter with a good pilot will still be screwed if he is surrounded and outgunned.
...the drone goes autonomous once the human controller acquires a target? Latency becomes a non-issue. Once the target's destroyed, the drone reverts to human control until another target is acquired. I assume a human pilot's situational awareness would be superior, but the drone's maneuverability might be enough to compensate. Assuming a drone would cost a fraction of a manned aircraft, especially once you include the cost of training the pilot, you could field a lot more drones. I would think their superior numbers combined with their agility would more than compensate for the lack of a human in the cockpit. I'm by no means an expert here, just interested in your thoughts.
I'd say you're on to something. The economics might favor the autonomous drones over the manned birds if they are robust enough to keep the attrition rate below threshold of acceptability, whatever that works out to be. The part-time MIL (ManInLoop) scenario is feasible, if the sensor fusion and AI is there to get it to achieve the objective of scoring kills and avoiding getting shot down. I assume it will get there eventually and frankly, I think this has a better chance than the global 2-way high-bandwidth datalink that is robust, reliable and resistant to jamming and dynamic maneuvering. Ultimately I think the politics will trump the economics and the bleeding hearts will reduce the numbers of drone fighters during the acquisition process to the point that they will no longer be an attritable asset and the whole equation is busted.
Technologically I think the part-time approach is achievable and might yield good results, but I'd have to hear from a fighter pilot to see how they would feel about relinquishing control and just watching the fight happen. Maybe they would prefer to stay in the fight with another solution to the datalink problem I described in my original post. Maybe a Line-of-sight link between the drone fighter and an airliner full of remote pilots far enough away from the theater might be a solution. It would have to be far enough a way to keep that sitting duck safe, though.
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
From the little I know of modern missile tech, "line of sight" and "far enough away to be safe" are mutually exclusive. But maybe not. I'm thinking of B-17s with fighter escorts. But I doubt even escort drones would be able to intercept missiles. That's one plane I really wouldn't want to be on.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
As others have pointed out, that same fragile bag of fluids is also the component that can't be hacked.
They may not be 'hackable', but they are subvertable - just look at the various pilots who have defected to various places.
I don't read AC A human right
What happens when both sides have stealth, and no one can get missile lock?
Dogfights IMO are visual-range bar-brawlin' GUNFIGHTS. Hell, even with Sidewinders in SE Asia they had to retrofit the Phantoms with cannon pods; when your ROE is eyeballs-on-the-bogey, you're too close in for anything else.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Oops, I should have used a car allegory.
"In the end, you end up with a situation like pitting pro-NACAR team against a bunch of guys that just got their driver's licenses a few months earlier in the Indy 500.
Unless we jam transmissions so that you can't control your drones in the target area. At that point throwing more drones at the problem isn't going to fix it.
Better tell your Prez then, because "throwing more drones at the problem" is *precisely* what he's been doing over the last 4 years (!)
Everyone knows that when you play your two down cards in "Nuclear War" you can't swap them with cards in your hand.
The F-35 is now a down card and has to be there until its turn to come up is played.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
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BT
I feel sorry for the guys flying the drones. Being a drone operator isn't anywhere close to being as sexy as being a fighter pilot.
I heard of one incident where an F-4 briefly took 12 G and the plane didn't feel much better than the pilot did after that but took him home. I'm with ya on the UAV as that kind of stuff ain't really a good thing to put a person into. Although John Stapp took over 40 G in some of the rocket sled tests he did and lived to tell about it but not sure just how good his condition was as over the years.
Only issue with current SAMs is that they are generally fixed position, or slow to move.
Fixed position makes them vulnerable to cruise missiles and the like, or even artillery close to the line. Slow means that they're only in friendly territory - they're a defensive weapon.
If you want to escort a group of bombers you can't do it with SAM sites. Drones on the other hand are a good option. They could have lower radar cross section, and they could close without concern over being shot down.
You could think of a drone like an expendable/reusable first stage for your 1000 mile range SAM site, which launches missiles from runways instead of tubes/rails.
We all know the latter part of the statement is obsolete and untrue.
The American lives saved will be well spent elsewhere in the world where there is oil to liberate.
Also, didn't BBC report that most drone attacks kill civilians? The report was from Pakistan.
So essentially, you have emotionally detached "pilots" shooting down people on the other side of the world. Unless the "pilot" works pro-bono methinks both sides have a net loss, no?
How about investing in diplomacy?
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Realistically, they will detect each other, just a matter of range. Nothing is invisible, and with modern ISRT it doesn't matter how low your radar cross-section (RCS) is, because as long as you generate heat to create thrust, IRST can find you.