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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.
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
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.
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."
Fair disclosure, I may be a bit biased here: I work with unmanned aircraft systems on a day-to-day basis. That being said, all of what I'm about to share with you is all publicly available knowledge via wikipedia or shows on the various Discovery Networks...
"Remotely piloted" UASes are ALREADY semi-autonomous. Many of them already don't allow any sort of direct control input from the operator, only taking directives such as "Fly to this point", "orbit this location", or "engage this target" via a point-and-click interface. There are already WORKING systems that make use of autonomous cooperation between multiple units to ensure target coverage for surveillance, or decide which unit will deploy its ordinance for a selected target. UASes have already engaged moving ground targets from beyond visual range via guided missiles, as well.
With all that in mind, yes, I'd say the tech is already there. We don't have (to my knowledge) any UASes currently carrying AIM-9s or AIM-120s and attempting to engage airborne targets, but I think that's more a result of the Fighter Mafia being in charge of the USAF than a lack of technical capability.
As others have said, air-to-air combat has been reduced to push button, beyond-visual-range engagements already. Heck, with newer aircraft they can engage targets not even visible on their own sensors, with the missiles being guided by satellite or AWACS or what have you. When the missile is being fired by a button push from a controller sitting at a RADAR screen somewhere, what does it matter if a manned or unmanned aircraft is carrying it?
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them