Manned fighter to face autonomous drone next year

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33866/manned-fighter-to-face-an-autonomous-drone-next-year-in-a-sci-fi-movie-like-showdown

by onewhonknocks • 6 years ago

138 182 6 years ago

thedrive.com

ape4• 6 years ago

The drone can take way more G-force.

dghughes• 6 years ago

So can a missile.

baddox• 6 years ago

And missiles tend to fair well in combat against manned aircraft.

analognoise2• 6 years ago

A missile isn't generally reusable - they're designed to operate at a region of performance within their engines that would not even allow for sustained flight.

If it only has to "live" for a few minutes, you can get a LOT more performance out of it, which is exactly what they're designed around.

But it's a trade-off. You could invest in a (practically) infinite supply of global capable missiles to be launched from the literal center of America, and to get 24 hour coverage you just launch one every 30 minutes. But that's extremely expensive and stupid.

But a missile which is carried to be closer to the battle can be smaller, and cheaper. Then you need some kind of vehicle to get it there. This kind of thing is that vehicle.

Etheryte• 6 years ago

Just as a heads up, at least on mobile, the site hijacks your back button.

thepangolino• 6 years ago

Works fine on Safari mobile.

dsun179• 6 years ago

Yes. Hijacked on chrome android.

BatFastard• 6 years ago

Lets just hope the entrenched pilots don't find some way to handicap the drone's ability to keep it "fair". Why the US is spending a trillion dollars on the F-35 program is an exercise in pork politics.

casefields2• 6 years ago

Whatever happens, I bet it ends up like the Millennium Challenge. Contested, with both sides claiming victory with caveats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

analognoise2• 6 years ago

100% think this is the way this is going to go. For a year or two.

Finally the fly boys will realize they're totally outmatched and that the F35 will be our last fighter. In my wildest dreams it gets cancelled and a bunch of smaller defense companies spring up to bring prices way down and competition in the space increases. Then overall defense spending goes down and we get more money for services - while being still being armed to the absolute teeth.

mbrodersen2• 6 years ago

The USAF will do everything in its power to keep human pilots in the loop. It would take a credible opponent (Russia/China) switching to drones and/or a third world oil country putting up a real fight with drones to change that.

arthurcolle2• 6 years ago

Stealth is a 2005 movie that explores this concept. It didn't do too well in the box office but I definitely enjoyed it although the AI is a little forced.

It looks like the drone in question here is the following (quoted from Aerospace Testing International), also mentioned in the linked source:

'The “fighter-sized” 5th Generation Aerial Target (5GAT) is 12.2m (40ft) long, a 7.3m wingspan and a maximum gross weight of 4,350kg (9,600lb). It is designed to be launched and landed using a conventional runway. The drone features two afterburning jet engines and a 95% carbon fiber airframe.' It seems to be designed specifically to stress test our own flights as target practice and doesn't seem like it's actually going to be going into combat anytime soon.

cheschire2• 6 years ago

If you enjoyed that, be sure to check out Macross Plus. The rivalry is between a traditional pilot and pilot who controls using a neural interface. A little less hand wavey than what sci-fi thought AI was 15 years ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macross_Plus

cellularmitosis• 6 years ago

I love how Macross Plus was inspired by the real-life rivalry between Northrop's YF-23 and Lockheed's YF-22, competing in the Advanced Tactical Fighter competition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_YF-23

arthurcolle2• 6 years ago

I have a hard time getting into animated stuff but I'll definitely try to download a decent quality version of it and watch it. Sounds like its right up my alley! Since this was created in 1994 and Stealth was created in 2005, I'm wondering how you arrive at your third sentence! Haha :)

SiempreViernes• 6 years ago

"[AI] would be able to make key decisions faster and more accurately"

That's a statement nobody here will have problems to accept right? I expect nobody can think of any example that makes "more accurately" a problematic claim.

casefields2• 6 years ago

Same stuff we heard with the early self-driving vehicle evangelists. Spoiler. It's much harder than they portrayed.

nbardy• 6 years ago

I don't think that's the case at all with flight vs vehicles. Autonomous driving is complicated because you have to take into account a wide range of scenarios and wide range of human behaviors, and a complex environment to understand. And then make very fuzzy choices on how to react to those scenarios.

Combat is a simpler zero sum game, pick and target and destroy.

Based on how AI plays top games right now(Starcraft and Dota), very fast quick reflexes and pin point accuracy of their attacks I think the AI drones are going to crush humans.

blackoil• 6 years ago

IMO the stakes are different. Often quoted is self driving cars must be 10x safer then humans before society accepts them. For drones we'll take 10% worse performance, we are OK to some extant of misfires particularly in a remote village in a 3rd world country. If drones cost 1/10 of a plane it will be a obvious answer for any general.

1e-94• 6 years ago

It seems like an entirely valid statement. AI can certainly make faster decisions than a human and it can utilize accurate 6DoF calculations and multi-sensor fusion that humans can only roughly approximate in an intuitive way during battle. I'm sure there will still be areas where humans will be better, such as analyzing complex visual information or predicting high-level reasoning of an enemy pilot, but I see human-versus-drone encounters as a clear loser for human pilots in the relatively near term.

AnimalMuppet• 6 years ago

Maybe. If an adversary is messing with your information feeds, a human might do better at realizing "wait, that's not right" than an AI.

cheez4• 6 years ago

Any chance these have already been in testing and account for UFO sightings recently declassified?

simonh2• 6 years ago

The recently declassified 'UFO' sightings have been pretty thoroughly debunked as spurious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfhAC2YiYHs&t=986s

cheez4• 6 years ago

hmmm, so trained pilots misclassified a bird?

saberdancer2• 6 years ago

If you are talking about navy videos like tictac and gimbal, those videos are probably showing ordinary things through IR camera which makes it look strange. Gimbal videos is even named "gimbal" as the effect seen in the video is cause due to gimbal rotation.

I'm sure US has some kind of secret programme, but I doubt they released the videos showing their own top secret programme. It's much more likely that they released it to throw a bit of a smokescreen and cause their peers like China to expend resources trying to research it. They are releasing some kind of strange patents as well, that seem to be type of pseudoscience which could be a similar play.

cheez4• 6 years ago

This makes sense.

IdontRememberIt3• 6 years ago

When I am watching Battlestar Galactica or most of the other scifi, I am always puzzled to see that the scenarists never take AI to fully operate a spaceship (piloting during landing/takeoff, firing, targeting enemies, etc).

akiselev• 6 years ago

The series starts right after the Cylons, an artificial intelligence created by humans, destroys several planets. Decades before they fought another war when the machines first rebelled. By the time BSG tolls around, any artificial intelligence is taboo and Adama refuses to even enable digital communication between ship subsystems except in one scenario where they had to hard reset all systems to flush a Cylon virus.

leetcrew• 6 years ago

to add to this, it's implied (or maybe stated explicitly, I forget) that one of the reasons galactica survived the initial attack is because it's an older warship without the sophisticated computer systems of the newer ships. the newer ships were trivially compromised by the cylons.

WrtCdEvrydy2• 6 years ago

Rewatch the mini-series.

the8472• 6 years ago

It's more common in novels and games. But it happens in TV and movies too, take HAL 9000 for example. And you also have to consider that a lot of scifi shows predate deep learning, so it's often referred to as "the computer" instead and AI is reserved for AGI, usually with personality and a humanoid avatar. In TNG the ship computer handled a lot of routines where the crew only provided high level input. It's advanced enough to run realistic holodeck scenarios. Stargate Universe also had a ship that was mostly run by the computer and made decisions that were often inscrutable to the occupants and only made sense in retrospect.

IdontRememberIt3• 6 years ago

Oh, yes, stargate. Some civilisations had interesting level of automation in some episodes.

ghaff3• 6 years ago

As others have noted, BSG specifically has internal story logic which explains why there isn't AI all over the place on the human side. However, more generally, AIs slugging it out, probably over great distances, over timeframes that would probably be very different (both quick and slow) from a human dogfight probably wouldn't be very interesting to viewers relative to essentially WWII dogfights in space.

(And, in general, some version of WWII combat (plus lasers, etc.) is still the model for most SF--even when it's not very deliberately aping it as in the case of Star Wars.

doctor_eval2• 6 years ago

There was a scene in one of the culture novels (I can’t remember now but maybe Excession?) where a ship Mind narrates the progress of a battle to a human onboard.

Forgive my poor memory but it was a really cool battle. The Mind explained methodically and gleefully how it found and destroyed a bunch of enemy ships.

Anyway, at some point the human asks a question and the Mind says something along the lines of, “oh, the battle is already over. It only lasted three seconds”.

Maybe someone can help me remember where this happened.

mbrodersen2• 6 years ago

AI's fighting it out while the human crew does nothing is not compelling drama. That's why Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. etc. all have 2nd World War style fighting going on. To get a more realistic idea of what future battles will be like, you need to read Ian M. Banks. In his books, humans are (correctly) too slow and fragile to do any fighting.

tim333• 6 years ago

Sci-fi is mostly about human entertainment and AI on AI battles just aren't as relatable. Consider something like chess, it used to be quite a drama in the human battles for world champion whereas computer vs computer is a bit meh. The trouble with human vs AI is it tends to be one sided on way or the other.

IdontRememberIt3• 6 years ago

Actually, drama/soap opera is the part I am not a fan in scifi. I had pain watching Netflix's star trek and see the hero of the saga crying 10 minutes per episode... But I understand, it is here to target a broader audience.

MrTortoise• 6 years ago

most one sided fights ever. Just look at G forces.

drone could have higher max speeds, higher max acceleration. fighter was designed ... what 20 years ago?

Cost of drone? Cost of loss of either? total cost of ownership is vastly different.

There is real cause to be very afraid.

cheeze2• 6 years ago

Yeah. I have no idea how a human would compete at all with g-forces alone. Add the fact that you no longer have to design a plane around a human and that definitely gives you a pretty hefty advantage against an f18

chongli2• 6 years ago

Why even put the drone in a fighter? Just put it in a SAM. AI-based guidance system with a multitude of sensors that’s been trained to defeat countermeasures. Seems difficult for a pilot to do much against that.

airstrike• 6 years ago

On the flip side, once both sides are just robots, the cost of lives is also vastly different...

A thousand years for now, it may be up to Brion Brandd to save this planet... https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2559973349

devdas• 6 years ago

Or the robots will evolve.

na853• 6 years ago

Load factor (g force) is actually a small percentage of what makes an effective air to air weapon system such as a fighter jet.

It turns out that the faster, higher aircraft has the advantage. If you have speed, you can deny your better-turning adversary an opportunity to engage you, and you thus dictate the terms of the engagement. If you find yourself on equal footing as a bandit, you can simply climb away at the enemy's maximum level speed and he will be unable to catch you.

Additionally, BVR missiles in particular benefit from a high initial launch velocity so they can use their finite delta-V budget to maximize range and closure with the target.

G Force tolerance only matters if you're in the air combat equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth.

Methinks these trials coming up will not be fair: a human can continue making good decisions in a non permissive electromagnetic/cyber battle space whereas a drone cannot. Air combat tactics will have to evolve but I don't think we will see drones defeating piloted fighters (in actual combat) in my lifetime. Perhaps if there's a watershed moment in AI but we aren't there yet.

EGreg3• 6 years ago

I kind of don’t get it

Why isn’t auto-aim game over here for both sides?

Approach and simply fire missiles at all the spots the plane could be in the next few seconds. Done.

Zenst2• 6 years ago

If it's like early AI logic, fly as high as possible, say 40km which turns out is a higher flight ceiling than the attacker in many instances. But the key was the missiles had a ceiling hight of say 20 km, though if launched at 40km, they would still work upon targets flying upwards and the AI logic wouldn't think of them as a threat as those missiles don't work above 20km. Though that means they can climb to that height. Also means if they fire a missile, it won't climb to hit you. Great tactic using the limitations of the missiles to your advantage.

Things like that will be were a pilot will have an early edge, pushing those limits by fully understanding the mechanics of those limits and how they play out. Be that pushing a sonic boom shockwave to effect a small pursing drone. Those for unmanned autonomous system will be the achilles heal in much the same way early Chess AI was able to be beaten by humans thru not doing the obvious most logical move.

But if they want to tune AI for autonomous system, then doing a FTP simulator game, running the NPC drones on a server will get you lots of unique free testing and tuning of that AI done. Be much cheaper and we get a cool game to play.

spullara• 6 years ago

That doesn't sound like an AI at all. Sounds like poorly written static rules created by a human who doesn't understand what they are doing.

nitrogen• 6 years ago

The goalpost of what is considered "intelligent" just keeps moving.

Zenst2• 6 years ago

Maybe, though AI start of somewhere and will it think the missile can fly higher than it thought and change that or learn that launch altitude comes into play. But will always be some hard coded stuff, though the prospect of a drone learning the laws of physics does intrigue me.

amphitoky• 6 years ago

got more info on those chess games?

esmi• 6 years ago

It used to be fairly straightforward to beat a chess engine... in the 80s. https://www.chess.com/blog/FangBo/how-to-beat-an-80s-chess-c...

ourmandave• 6 years ago

I've seen a lot of AlphaZero chess replays where a move seems weak. But when you run the lines it's a really sneaky trap or very strong combo.

I hope for Maverick's sake aerial combat and chess are two different things.

Jugurtha• 6 years ago

I guess they'll be very careful with the objective function, not to produce a Kamikaze drone:

- Drone: Less than $10 million.

- Fighter: Almost $100 million and human on board.

It's not far stretched to treat the drone as a new type of missile. Air-to-Air, Air-to-Surface, Surface-to-Surface, Surface-to-Air, and the new generation: Anywhere-to-Anywhere missile.

saltedonion2• 6 years ago

I don’t see how this will work in a real battle. If the ai is fully self contained with no communication to central command, then it’s like a dumb missile. Once you press fire, you’ve lost control.

If the drone does require connectivity to central command, then shouldn’t it be fairly easy to jam this signal?

varjag• 6 years ago

Radio spectrum is vast, and you need to focus your jammer energy on the narrow bands used in actual communication. Frequency hopping makes that non-trivial, and that's before you consider directed beams and satellite uplinks.

saltedonion2• 6 years ago

Very interesting

stoneman24• 6 years ago

In addition to frequency hopping, there are spread spectrum techniques to smear the signal across a wider range of frequencies with lower energy in each frequency. Once asked permission to switch on military radio on a project, the answer was “go ahead, we’ll never notice”

_0ffh5• 6 years ago

That was really just a question of time. Wait a few decades, and see the first warships specialised for carrying drones and missiles (which are essentially kamikaze drones) exclusively.

rrmm3• 6 years ago

They have them basically just missile frigates with new dispensers.

_0ffh5• 6 years ago

They will probably need a runway, for landing at least.

krisoft2• 6 years ago

No need to wait decades, we have them. They are called missile destroyers. Look at the Arleigh Burke-class, or the converted Ohio-class submarines.

_0ffh5• 6 years ago

Those are too small for a sizeable contingent of drones the size of small fighter jets. I was thinking along the lines of small aircraft carriers.

nostrademons• 6 years ago

Why specialize them? If SpaceX can land a rocket on a drone-ship, the next step would be to land a drone inside a 20-foot shipping container. Then every container ship becomes an aircraft carrier, capable of carrying thousands of drones. The merchantmen become their own escorts.

nmstoker• 6 years ago

Presumably designers are just scratching the surface jettisoning all sorts of current design assumptions that could be removed based on differences in the acceptability of loss, ability to work cooperatively and handle inhuman conditions. You can position the control systems differently, split some of them up, strengthen the airframe by binning almost everything from the cockpit & getting rid of landing gear completely. The gear adds weight and breaks holes in the structure and it's dead weight during most of the key operational tasks - instead use a cooperating "lander" drone to help it land and the risk of that failing isn't as serious without humans. The ability to act with coordination across a group of drones that the article mentions will be hard to beat unless you use a similar array of drones. Seems like the pilot in the plane can't last much longer. Now we just need to see if the budgets involved bring this into being faster than self driving cars!

dfsegoat• 6 years ago

Re: ditching landing gear, As I understand it, the Gremlins UAV swarm platform uses a ‘live capture’ system from to launch/recover from a C130 - no gear.

You basically turn cargo aircraft into aircraft carriers.

https://www.darpa.mil/program/gremlins

jointpdf• 6 years ago

My mental image for this is the Protoss Carriers from Starcraft.

dmos62• 6 years ago

Funnily enough, this existed, but it was an airship instead of C130 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_aircraft_carrier

mrec• 6 years ago

See also the XF-85 parasite fighter concept for a manned version.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_XF-85_Goblin

Someone• 6 years ago

Instead of a lander drone a grappling hook and a soft runway might work, too.

See https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_s_Q5CI7p5M and https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f7Lu6LEQ0zo for inspiration. I doubt those landings were healthy for the pilot’s back, but for drones, and given half a century or so of technological development, this might work.

You might not even need the grappling hook. ‘Just’ stall the drone at a height of a few meters, and have it fall onto a relatively soft surface. Maybe add a small rocket to soften the landing.

lowbloodsugar• 6 years ago

It could land on its tail.

m0zg4• 6 years ago

The ability to act with coordination across a group of drones that the article mentions will be hard to beat

Very easy to beat via even somewhat advanced radioelectronic warfare. Can't coordinate if you can't communicate. This is the Achilles heel of all these "advanced weapons systems" that look so great in the powerpoint slides but are only useful against enemies which don't have any weaponry built after mid-80s.

krapht2• 6 years ago

Why are you so confident that communications jamming is easy? The person initiating the communications has all the cards; while the person trying to jam is stuck trying to blast power over a constantly shifting comms frequency and come in via an antenna sidelobe.

neltnerb2• 6 years ago

I don't know if it's true or if it works, but the article addresses this by saying that they can go into I guess non-networked mode where no one, not even the operators, can contact it. If it gets certain conditions it will send out a message, but otherwise it's that level of autonomy they're assuming.

shostack2• 6 years ago

I'm curious what will come about with different sizes. I'll bet a lot of people think of this in the context of quadcopters up to predator drones. I'm in the middle of The Diamond Age and all I can think of is the drones so small you can't see them.

Imagine a jet flying through a cloud of drones. Maybe most are destroyed. But some work their way into the internal systems, or perhaps into the cockpit itself, and do who knows what.

renewiltord• 6 years ago

Judging by current aircraft, maybe all the drone does is release a life-size swan into the jet engine.

GhostVII2• 6 years ago

I don't think a cloud of drones would be much more effective than the missiles we already have. Unless they are completely undetectable, they would be far easier to avoid than a missile.

brmgb3• 6 years ago

I'm still very sceptical about autonomous drone as fighters.

We already have extremely fast autonomous vehicles specifically designed to take down fighters. They are called missiles. Modern missiles already do everything you are listing including cooperation.

As the main weapons of fighter drones will likely be missiles anyway, the drones will probably be mostly glorified missiles carriers allowing reusability of some of the most expensive avionics.

Usually, the hard problem for AI in military application is respecting the rules of engagement. I fully expect a human to still be in the loop for sometimes.

m4632• 6 years ago

I think this is going to go like the smartphone, which has assimilated every other consumer electronic device. (music player, camera, video, ebook reader, fitness tracker, etc)

Why not keep drones around for surveillance, for communication, anti-personnel, anti-aircraft, anti-boat, anti-car, signal jammer, take out a cell tower, take out a high tension line, etc...

oh yeah, add contact tracing with an update :)

7thaccount• 6 years ago

My only concern is with drones being hacked and turned against the deployer.

JadoJodo• 6 years ago

I have to wonder when it will switch to small, inexpensive drones instead of the larger, jet-type ones. Imagine fighting against a swarm of 10,000 drones (each with a small explosive, EMP, etc). Similar to the Fire Bats[0] in WWII.

[0] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bat_bomb

jonas21• 6 years ago

There was a discussion on HN a few days ago about classifying autonomous drone swarms as WMD:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23423240

redis_mlc2• 6 years ago

Militaries use cluster bombs and area artillery, so that ship sailed decades ago.

throw12346512342• 6 years ago

Never. Those things will get burnt by laser weapons if they are too small to be efficiently targeted by cannons and missiles. They also won't have range, payload for missiles with range, etc.

kevin_thibedeau• 6 years ago

They can be useful for other roles. Surveillance, ECM, flying in formation and coordinating to simulate a larger aircraft, tricking passive radar sites to go active, etc.

matheusmoreira2• 6 years ago

Imagine fighting against a swarm of 10,000 drones

There are examples in media!

Many mechas from the Gundam series use funnels, a form of drone, in order to overwhelm a single enemy or attack multiple ones:

https://youtu.be/qc6ME9S_qps?t=1m5s

Ace Combat 7 features a massive battle against an airborne UAV carrier and its swarm of drones:

https://youtu.be/JQJpRwkXHj4?t=19m50s

Sometimes the entire screen is filled with targets!

EGreg3• 6 years ago

No need to imagine

Fiction: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA

Reality:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ndFKUKHfuM0

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BF1sJjk66rU

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20799148/darpa-drones-robo...

sillypuddy• 6 years ago

Aren't they just rockets at some point?

ww520• 6 years ago

Would an airship based carrier hosting dozens of drones cruising at high altitude become a reality?

ceejayoz• 6 years ago

It's being explored.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/nation/2014/11/10/aircraft-ba...

adamfeldman• 6 years ago

Lots of great content on this blog. Relevant here:

"The Alarming Case of the USAF’s Mysteriously Missing Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles"

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/3889/the-alarming-case...

blarg1• 6 years ago

Fascinating!

TheSpiceIsLife2• 6 years ago

What’s the difference between a Tomahawk cruise missile and a drone?

Tomahawk is already (2015) available with reconnaissance camera and loiter mode.

Is the distinction that drone can return to base, or otherwise land and be reused?

Eridrus• 6 years ago

A tomahawk is not an anti-air weapon.

TheSpiceIsLife2• 6 years ago

That can't be the defining feature.

I suspect 'drone' is a catch all term for things that don't have more specific names.

nordsieck• 6 years ago

What’s the difference between a Tomahawk cruise missile and a drone?

With human pilots, there is a bright line separating aircraft and missiles (although even that line wasn't completely firm - see Kamikazi attacks). Taking the pilot out of the equation, that line dissolves into a gradient.

Is the distinction that drone can return to base, or otherwise land and be reused?

That's probably the most useful distinction.

1e-94• 6 years ago

A Tomahawk is a drone, just not the kind discussed in this article. A Tomahawk is subsonic missile designed to attack land and sea targets. The drone they are talking about here would be able to attack land, sea, and air targets. It would be vastly more maneuverable, faster, reusable, have AI specific to air-to-air combat, and I assume it would have greater versatility in selection of its munitions during an engagement.

kosmischemusik• 6 years ago

The Tomahawk is intended for a single target whereas a drone would be able to have multiple engagements.

Further, the drone may not necessarily used for combat, it could be used as a decoy.

throwaway2873912• 6 years ago

Is this incredibly obvious or did I miss the part where they specified the rules of the game? I assume they're not actually going to have the drone fire actual missiles at the manned fighter...right?

1e-94• 6 years ago

Hits can be simulated.

throwaway2873912• 6 years ago

So it's basically laser tag in the sky? Neat. Is it more or less a perfect simulation or is it just enough to get an idea?

pcstl• 6 years ago

Seems interesting, but all I can think of right now is the video game Ace Combat 7.

xwdv2• 6 years ago

It will be great if in the future war is simply a function of how much money you’re willing to spend to destroy a target. Probably not much anyone can do to defend against a swarm of drones that never gets tired, never misses targets and doesn’t even care about death.

nanna2• 6 years ago

This would be catastrophic. The fear of death has at least curtailed fighting.

xwdv2• 6 years ago

Some of our fiercest enemies don't fear death anymore, they yearn for it, to be with their God. Let's set up the meeting.

phkahler• 6 years ago

This sounds like a really cool project to work on. I dont think beating a human will be terribly difficult. Ground targets? Easy for fixed targets at known location.

Should such technology be created? That's question is above my pay grade. Bad guys could do things like this today so it seems prudent to work on countermeasures.

dfilppi• 6 years ago

It doesn't need to be created if you don't mind being dominated by an adversary that does create it.

vpribish• 6 years ago

shouldn't this have happened about 20 years ago?

gridspy• 6 years ago

Yes, but now we are talking about autonomy

Predator - entered service in 1995 25 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predator

baybal22• 6 years ago

Look how it folds out in Libya:

1. Kaftar has all fancy jet fighters from Russians, and Egyptians. $50m apiece, tear Turkish drones left, and right.

2. The government has Turkish drones, $2m apiece. By the time Kaftar's Mig inflicts a single loss, a swarm of 5 drones already bombed that Mig's airfield to smithereens.

Government forces can expend all of their drones to get an enemy airfield, and they would still win the trade.

redis_mlc2• 6 years ago

FYI: Most Russian military aircraft don't need much of an airfield - grass or gravel is fine.

steelbrain• 6 years ago

Source?

rimliu• 6 years ago

АН-2 is not exactly a military aircraft.

C1sc0cat2• 6 years ago

So 5 drones big ones which will be sub sonic - lets say so 5x 500kg - you might do some damage - but not that much - and who Is painting the targets for the drones

baybal22• 6 years ago

A single 100kg bomb, well placed, will do the airstrip, making it unusable from hours, to days.

As I understood, they are mostly targeting planes on the ground, and equipment

foxyv• 6 years ago

Satellite imagery of the location yields LAT/LONG coordinates that are then used for INS/GPS guided bombs. No need to paint an un-moving target nowadays. Also, if the electronic signals environment allows it, drone operators can use FLIR/TV guided munitions like Mavericks and Hellfires or buddy-lase using a targeting pod.

Jamming that stops signals to drones is an iffy proposition since it makes the jammer an easy target for anti-radiation and home on jamming capable missiles like the HARM and the AAMRAM.

yters• 6 years ago

Soon all our future wars will be fought by eight year old script kiddies controlling robots over the internet.

golem14• 6 years ago

I feel a good or maybe the best way to eke our an edge for the US, China or whoever would be to create a good simulation platform and offer a great SaaS platform, maybe like kerbal space program, and let anyone compete. Then learn from the simualations.

hindsightbias• 6 years ago

They can just do what the Navy did. Get it carrier qualified and turn it into a tanker.

graycat• 6 years ago

At least the one-on-one case of that battle is supposed to be a special case of differential games from R. Issacs and as in

Avner Friedman, Differential Games, ISBN 0-471-28049-6.

GhostVII2• 6 years ago

I don't really get the hype/fear surrounding drone warfare, at least not when it comes to combat. It sounds super scary to have these drones that can outperform pilots, until you realize that guided missiles are already able to destroy pretty much anything from tens of kilometers away already. It doesn't matter if pilots are slower than drones when they are able to fire off missiles before the drone even detects them.

The main benefit of drones is surveillance imo, since they can just circle an area for hours. For combat I think we will have pilots for the foreseeable future, they can react more quickly and have a better view of the situation than a drone operator. Also I would imagine having a pilot can also be useful if you don't want other countries shooting down your planes (or if you want to start a conflict) - Iran would have been much more resistant to shooting down a US predator drone if it was a manned aircraft instead. I don't really know though.

nexuist• 6 years ago

The key to understanding where aerial warfare is going is understanding that next generation fighter jets aren't meant to be soldiers, they're generals.

What do I mean by that? What I mean is that most of the time, the F-35's purpose is not to go up against MiGs or other foreign fighters. The F-35 is a flying eye-in-the-sky that can scan surfaces, oceans, mountains, etc. to identify and classify targets. It has ordinance to take out those targets, but that's secondary to its main mission of basically being a one-man Google Maps team.

Could the F-35 get into a dogfight? Sure, but a lot would have to fail for that situation to ever happen - given its sensor suite it should be able to detect and fire upon an enemy fighter before it is ever in visual sight.

You can also tell this intention from the way pilots are trained: they must first reach the rank of Officer and learn abstract combat tactics in a classroom setting before they ever step foot in an aircraft. This is not by mistake.

Personally I think the future is squadrons of autonomous drones assisting human pilots. You come in with an F-35 and a dozen Predator drones and send in the drones to do your dirty work (close air support, recon, remote bombing, etc.) while you command the battlefield and drop a few guided bombs 40,000 feet up.

trashtester• 6 years ago

I remember reading, maybe 10 years ago, that the F35 was designed from the start to have the capicty to lead a drone swarm. Furthermore, there was also a plan for how to remove the pilot from the F35 itself when the AI became strong enough.

When the "Loyal Wingmen" become mature, the F35 can be turned into stealthy AWACS planes, with most ordanance replaced by more electronics and/or more fuel.

Balgair• 6 years ago

Could the F-35 get into a dogfight? Sure, but a lot would have to fail for that situation to ever happen - given its sensor suite it should be able to detect and fire upon an enemy fighter before it is ever in visual sight.

I've heard that the future of air-to-air dogfights are more like two enemies in the dark, each with a gun and a flashlight. The first to use the flashlight is likely to be the first to be shot.

Here the flashlight is the active sensors systems, the darkness is the stealth fighter's design, and the gun is the hyper advanced weapons systems.

Agnu2• 6 years ago

Consider the potential defense a swarm of drones equipped with various countermeasures could be against those missiles. They could be deployed quickly from a ground station or any cargo vehicle; possibly even from an eighteen wheeler if they were made small enough, and certainly something like a C-130 as someone else pointed out. I'm not clear on the effectiveness of anti-missle systems like the Iron Dome but I doubt there's anything that could to that kind of air defense from a platform that mobile and of such a small form-factor. You could even use a tower as a station in an urban setting and just drop them out the windows and crank up the engines midair. You could have an air-defense tower every few blocks.

It might seem minor but shifts like this have the potential to give one combatant a meaningful edge against an opponent lacking the same capabilities. Imo, even as a purely defensive tool this will allow much smaller entities to maintain control over their space against aggressive neighbors. Miniaturization of computers and automated weaponry reduces the space/resource requirements to maintain a state-like monopoly on violence within that space. I see this all as being firmly in the same trend as the increasing availability and power of biological engineering equipment and techniques and the increasing risk posed by locally-embodied/concerned AGI. These all have wildly varying threat profiles and difficulties with determining likely timelines but you get my point.

I never even got into possible offensive uses of these drones but one of my nightmares is matroska drones, C-130, to these (which can deal with other airforces and large ground forces,) to hunt-and-kill quadracopters to little single-serving shaped-charge drones. You can't nuke a city because of insurmountable optics but enough people were able to stomach large-lascale bombing of cities within the last 20 years that I would not be surprised at all if this kind of force was used to neutralize a city by bringing to fruition the promise of "precise bombing" and actually only killing the people and destroying the structures you mean to. It's a brand new WMD.

And even if I'm totally off base this is great sci-fi.

Edit: Bullshit punctuation to trim one word (and then add this note and actually make it a good deal longer, nice.)

onion2k• 6 years ago

No one cares about the capabilities of the aircraft when they think about autonomous drones in warfare. People care about who, or what, is doing the decision making with regard to when to fire. If you remove a human from the decision process (or, more accurately, you rely on developers and ML models to make the decision years beforehand) you're circumventing an important part of the ethics of warfare. Ultimately most people want there to be an accountable human behind the decision to kill someone.

belorn• 6 years ago

The main difference between a missiles tens or hundreds of kilometers away and a drone with a missile is the flight time. A lot of things can happen even if you fly at the speed Mach 1 or about 0.3km/s. If we assume 50km away, it means targets has 3 minutes to do something which turn the attack from great to terrible.

nanna2• 6 years ago

How far off are other countries - China, Russia, any others? - from these kinds of autonomous fighter drones?

Manned fighter to face autonomous drone next year

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