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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?
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.
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.
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
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").
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
That's not sad, that's 100% appropriate. Their very existence is to protect civilians.
Any system can be hacked. Having humans directly in the loop is the basic Wargames lesson.
and humans can be hacked also.
or if you want a movie reference to back this up, how about humans can also defect on their own with large war machines...that is the basic Hunt for Red October lesson
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.
Yes, but it's actually preferable if the cruise missile doesn't come back.
if you have a 300 ms latency?
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.
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."
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
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.
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.