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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.
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
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").
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.
That's not sad, that's 100% appropriate. Their very existence is to protect civilians.
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.
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
if you have a 300 ms latency?
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
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.
F-22 would absolutely decimate F-15 and F-18, the previous generation of air-air combat jets. Not even a contest. Those planes would never even see the F-22 on their radar before they were blown out of the air.
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!
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."
Except the ease with which a drone could be hacked is being vastly overstated. It's already unreasonable to think anyone is going to crack an AES encrypted link unless they compromise physical security at an actual military base. Since it's a drone you need to implement the attack in real time as well.
This is roughly the same danger as an adversary getting control of a radio on a military net. Anyone familiar with military protocol will know this - radios with encryption codes keyed in are regarded as having security clearances equivalent to that code. Because a radio with the right encryption codes, under enemy control is practically every bit as dangerous as some hypothetical rogue drone. An enemy with a military radio can call in artillery and air strikes on friendly positions, feed bad intel and misdirect forces etc. They are every bit as dangerous - arguably more dangerous - then a rogue drone. But unlike a drone, radios can be captured because they're carried by people. A drone in the air isn't going to be hacked with any practical attack.
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.
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.
It's straining the limits of computer vision algorithms today just determining if the target is a building.
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.