Future Fighters Won't Need Ejection Seats 622
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?"
Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah, no one could ever do that.
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:4, Insightful)
didn't iran make one of our drones think it was landing at our base when instead it landed on theirs with gps spoofing.
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:4, Informative)
didn't iran make one of our drones think it was landing at our base when instead it landed on theirs with gps spoofing.
They claimed to have done so, but personally I'm a little suspicious of anything they claim. Don't forget they've also claimed to have developed a stealth fighter jet and provided pictures of a cheap mock-up, and video of a hobby-size RC model craft as "proof".
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:5, Interesting)
Iran's claim is very suspicious. However, Iran isn't exactly the most technologically-advanced nation out there. This drone stuff only works because all the opponents are decades behind the US technologically, so they have little ability (yet) to block the radio signals needed to keep these aircraft under control. If the US were up against an opponent at the same technological level, such as China, it'd be screwed. Blocking GPS signals is something well beyond the capabilities of some Taliban fighters living in a cave and carrying nothing more advanced than AK47s, however it's well within China's abilities.
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:5, Insightful)
Especially with almost everything being "Made in China".
Re: (Score:3)
Exactly.
Of course, to be fair, not everything is Made in China, such as cutting-edge microprocessors (still made in the USA by Intel), but you don't need absolute cutting-edge tech to deal with drones, and China is more than capable, technologically, of countering them.
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:4, Interesting)
Iran DOES have some pretty brilliant scientists. GPS blocking is one thing, but GPS forgery - I'm not buying that. That's bullshit. I tend to believe the theory that they got a couple of aircraft around the drone, and herded it using it's close-range collision avoidance system. That's why it landed hard.
Re: (Score:3)
Of course; I don't think many people are under the illusion that Iran is a formidable threat, technologically. However, China and Russia are. Your global satellite system is no match for China's anti-satellite missiles.
Re: (Score:3)
Your global satellite system is no match for China's anti-satellite missiles.
Destruction of a satellite isn't going to happen unless it's an all-out shooting war, as the chance for collateral damage to a "friendly" satellite is pretty high. Although there might not be immediate damage, spreading debris in the same orbit height as your own satellites is not good for long-term stability.
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:5, Informative)
IRAN can barely make a coffee maker...
IRAN can certainly make coffee makers.... but it can barely make a company that can be profitable by designing and manufacturing coffee makers.
IRAN is capable of a great deal. It is home to some of the best civil engineers in the world (though fortunately for us, most of them immigrate to the US, given the opportunity). It is no less capable than any other second-tier developed country. Consider that its Human Development Index [wikipedia.org] is similar to that Eastern Europe or Turkey. It's certainly not an OECD advaned economy, but it's not The Congo, either.
Iran's government is overly oppressive, but authoritarianism doesn't preclude economy success (see: China). Iran's economy is mainly held back by an incompetent and inefficient government that cares more about how women dress and face [wikipedia.org] than it does its economic prosperity. The biggest mistake anyone could do, though, is to underestimate them. Never underestimate your adversaries. That's Sun Tzu 101. Some highly-advanced machinery is out of their reach, and certainly they have no environment for world-class companies to form, but the technology and sophistication that their best scientists and engineers can achieve in a well-funded laboratory is a different story.
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, and what happens when the enemy launches a bunch of fighter jets to take out all your drones, which are now flying autonomously and just looking for a target, because communications and GPS are blocked? Your drones are nothing more than cruise missiles at this point. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just launch cruise missiles? The whole point of drones is that you have remote human pilots who can respond to changing mission needs, rather than a fire-and-forget long-range missile, I would assume. If you block communications (and some navigation), you lose that advantage entirely, so there's little point in even having the drones to begin with.
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:5, Interesting)
Drones are cheap, send a 1000. they cost about 5K + Ordinance .
Drones are armed, so they can shoot other aircraft
You do not need GPS to find a location. You know the terrain. We deliver missiles using terrain mapping very effectively now.
Spread spectrum(and other technology) will prevent jamming. I suspect you don't really know much about jamming and military communications.
Drones can stay in the air, carry on board system to respond autonomously to change.
Also, as alluded to in the post, there will be delivery drones, and fighter drones. So we will have aircraft do 15 G Turns designed to take out enemy aircraft. Send 100.
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think you understand how communications are "blocked". It's not like the enemy puts up some sort of magical barrier that keeps radio waves from going to their destination; what they do is flood every wavelength they can reach with noise, making it so the drones can't hear the base station.
The problem with that is it makes whatever's doing the blocking a huge target - it's literally like putting up a huge glowing sign saying "blow me up, I'm a military asset". That sort of blocking would only last as long as it takes to blow up its location with whatever artillery you have handy.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah but a radio transmitter capable of overpowering the weak GPS signal in a massive radius costs hundreds. A HARM missile designed to destroy that transmitter costs close to a million.
Re: (Score:3)
Ok, and what happens when the enemy launches a bunch of fighter jets to take out all your drones, which are now flying autonomously and just looking for a target, because communications and GPS are blocked? Your drones are nothing more than cruise missiles at this point.
Nope, not correct. Autonomous fighters would have to be able to make "human-like" decisions about the threat environment, friend versus foe, etc. The AI for that isn't all that hard, also consider that BVR IFF is already handled by electronics. Our 50+ mile range missiles are useless if we can't fire them BVR.
With just a few cameras, one could provide spherical coverage around a pilotless F-35, not to mention the radar, FLIR, and missile detection sensors. Unlike a human pilot, the AI would essentially cont
Re: (Score:3)
Government projects = lowest bidder
Lowest bidder > we don't need no stinkin security
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:5, Informative)
No, you are totally incorrect. Humphreys spoofed a commercial, civilian drone, using the unencrypted civilian GPS channel. The military uses a private GPS channel that is secure and encrypted and has not been hacked or spoofed. In addition, the newest GPS satellites modulate the signal in such a way (called M-code) as to further prevent spoofing (the edges of the square waveforms are peaks with troughs in the middle of the waveform, making it harder to overlay one signal onto another, so the receiver is actually looking at the shape of the waveform and not just the raw digital data it encodes by each peak and trough- or something like that).
Humphreys: Sure. Well GPS spoofing takes advantage of the fact that the civilian GPS signals, as you mentioned, are unencrypted and unauthenticated; so, whereas the military GPS signals have an encryption code overlaid on them, the civilian ones do not and never have.
We did so by purchasing our own drone. No one would lend us a drone because they knew it was going to be a risky endeavor and we generated fictitious GPS signals, captured the drone and brought it down.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/aerospace/aviation/-drones-and-gps-spoofing-redux [ieee.org]
And from your own link:
"Hacking a UAV by GPS spoofing is but one expression of a larger problem: insecure civil GPS technology has over the last two decades been absorbed deeply into critical systems within our national infrastructure," Humphries told the subcommittee in his testimony. "Besides UAVs, civil GPS spoofing also presents a danger to manned aircraft, maritime craft, communications systems, banking and finance institutions, and the national power grid."
What he demonstrated has absolutely nothing to do with military at all. He's raising awareness to the risks of controlling important, life-or-death type hardware with unsecured civilian GPS.
Re: (Score:3)
Just send a strong signal that trashes the military channels so that it falls back to civilian, which can then be spoofed.
Re: (Score:3)
Depends on how good that hack is. See that skyline? Nooo, that's not New York, that's Tehran, dear AI.
Re: (Score:3)
It's not the sign that makes your house secure.
It's the dog.
Re: (Score:3)
That's all fine and well, however if you block GPS over the entire conflict zone, then these aircraft will be useless for any missions within that zone. If you engineer them right, maybe you won't have to worry too much about someone taking them over, but without GPS in the conflict zone where you're trying to use them, they're effectively flying blind. The whole problem with these aircraft is that they rely on radio signals such as GPS for guidance and command and control. Blocking radio signals is not
Re: (Score:3)
Fortunately, there has been a working alternative [wikipedia.org] to GPS in military aircraft, and it's been around for quite a few decades now.
While accuracy can drift wildly over time (unless it has *huge* gyros, like the monster set that the B-52 carries), for short and medium-duration sorties they're quite serviceable as a backup - especially when chained to terrain-mapping/recognition.
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:4, Insightful)
That's all fine and well, however if you block GPS over the entire conflict zone, then these aircraft will be useless for any missions within that zone.
I know it's normal on Slashdot for "five minute experts" to just assume that reasearchers who work in some speciality for a living have never thought of problems that occured to the poster in five minutes of thought, but c'mon, don't be silly.
Yes, of course these (and the other problems in this thread) are known issues. Yes, of course, the military has thrown billions of dollars at very smart researchers for decades to overcome them. No, of course they won't tell the public what the fallbacks are.
Now, in the more general case, sure: a drone isn't very useful if it doesn't have good coms with it's pilot. Given EW dominance, a human pilot is going to win. But you might be surprised at the ideas the military has come up with to maintain signal. The simplest, of course, are HARM missiles [wikipedia.org], which will put a quick end to any jamming that relies on simply "flooding the zone". But short of overwhelming power output, it's quite difficult to actually jam a signal between an airborn endpoint and a satellite endpoint by using a ground-based emitter - it's really easy to use directional shielding, antennas, and so on. And any active jamming from the air will be quite short lived.
OTOH, there will certainly be a new generation of anti-drone jamming weapons, but then it's not like the military isn't used to the idea of an "arms race".
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:5, Funny)
Yes of course, the USA military switched to military-grade frequencies and waveforms that nobody else on the planet can use.
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:5, Interesting)
7/12/2021 API news : 3500 american civilians were killed today in a NYC protest by a software glitch from an aerial drone. The President expressed sadness that this glitch caused so many lives lost. This has been the 4th drone glitch to cause civilian casualties. But Homeland security still maintains that they are needed to "ensure the safety of the Americans against terrorism."
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:4, Insightful)
How could this go wrong?
I am not a security expert. There is so much wrong with this idea I can't even start to get my head around the ramifications. April 1 came early this year.
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:4, Insightful)
Half of those apply to current fighters with people too.
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:4, Insightful)
Nah, no one could ever do that.
Having a piloted plane doesn't eliminate the risk of hacking. If someone can hack the control system for a drone, they can do the same thing to an F-35. The pilot has little (or no) control if the computer doesn't want him to.
The F-117 stealth fighter was said to be so aerodynamically unstable that it was unflyable without computer assistance.
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a big difference - even on a computerized plane, all the inputs come from somewhere aboard the plane. You can't log in and tell it to bomb somewhere else. Drones are remotely controlled by design.
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:4, Informative)
There's a big difference - even on a computerized plane, all the inputs come from somewhere aboard the plane. You can't log in and tell it to bomb somewhere else. Drones are remotely controlled by design.
Except that the outputs come from the computer, so if you can get your software onto the computer (don't forget that hackers already stole 1 TB of design plans for the F-35 - and that's just the known breach, who knows what else they may have), then you can make the plane fly anywhere you want, regardless of what the pilot wants.
Re: (Score:3)
It would be a lot harder to hack in an entire autopilot/weapon deployment system for something which relies on humans than it would be to just use the existing framework which would exist for the drones. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it would be an order of magnitude more difficult because you're now doing something the original designers never intended.
The original designers never envisioned an autopilot on military aircraft? Autopilots are good enough now that they can even autoland on carriers.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
It's straining the limits of computer vision algorithms today just determining if the target is a building.
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:4, Insightful)
" A jet could pull 15 g's, out-turning any conventional aircraft"
Whys is that an advantage?
Aren't high-G turns already obsolete (along with 'dogfighting')?
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:5, Informative)
Aren't high-G turns already obsolete (along with 'dogfighting')?
They're only obsolete because the weapons have evolved to make it so. The pilot can't take a 28g sharp turn to avoid an incoming missile, so chaff and other deterrence systems were developped so that the pilot can take a turn they can survive. I doubt he was suggesting that such systems be abandoned entirely, but making an aircraft that can take a hard turn like that in addition to having ECM/chaff could only improve things. Until laser and other energy weapons that can't be dodged are the norm, it's unlikely that agility will ever become a non-issue in designing a fighter.
Hollywood *rarely* gets technical issues right, but the speech in Top Gun where they were talking about pilots becoming reliant on missiles in Korea was actually true, and the basic principle should still be true today. Dogfighting specifically doesn't really happen any more, but the basic evasive agility skills that it's based on are still applicable. That's actually the point of the article, as I understand it: the pilot is, by far, the biggest limiting factor on the agility of aircraft today, and if you can remove the pilot you can make something that's faster, accelerates harder, and is more agile. As others point out, they need to figure out a way to make it unhackable for it to be truly reliable, but that isn't an impossible task.
Re: (Score:3)
When all your planes are unmanned, losing one or two isn't nearly as important.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Aren't high-G turns already obsolete (along with 'dogfighting')?
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...?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:5, Insightful)
Why send up one sophisticated aircraft when you could sent up 10,000 really dumb ones.
Send up a cloud of drones with the expectation that 20% will be sacrificed for defence of the group.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:5, Informative)
High G turns are still and relevant even with BVR combat. However, NO JET can sustain 15G (or even 9 G) either now or in the near future. The peak G loadings fighters are capable of bleed airspeed at a massive rate and are only used briefly for evasion or to point the nose in a hurry for weapons delivery. New, high angle off-boresight missiles will make this less of a problem (you can shoot the guy without pointing the nose at him). There are pilots who can do 10 or 12 G anyhow (see red bull air race).
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:4, Funny)
Missiles go ~mach 8-10.
Please check your Internet connection, your post from 2027 seems to have traveled (will have traveled?) back in time. It's 2013 here and the fastest A-A missiles don't go above Mach 4.5, with some S-A missiles reaching Mach 6.
Re: (Score:3)
I must have been mixing things up with stats I saw for ICBMs. I suppose that though they do travel ~mach 23, you'd have to have some pretty good aim to hit a fighter with an ICBM.
Re:Hope no one hacks our entire Air Force one day (Score:4, Interesting)
I have to think that the ability to do higher G turns results in better missile avoidance capability.
Modern thrust vectored missiles with state of the art sensors will always be able to outmaneuver a fighter, even an unmanned fighter, just like a LearJet will outmaneuver an Airbus 380 or a 747. If you try to outmaneuver an SA10 you will loose. There are modern missiles who have a PK factor of 0.9 against highly agile targets. Maneuvering has its place but it won't save your bacon. You are as good as dead without first class missile launch detectors, RWR sensors, an up-to-date threat library, superior ECM and good decoys/foxers. The best defense is of course to wreck the opposition's surveillance systems and destroy their aircraft and SAMs on the ground while they are blinded but that isn't always as easy as it was in the Gulf Wars, the feasibility and costliness of that approach depends on the potency of the opposition.
Re: (Score:3)
There will always be a physological need (Score:3)
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.
Re:There will always be a physological need (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
When you have a 20 foot long drone that can withstand 20G's of stopping force and 20G's of takeoff force from a relatively short magnetic rail gun, you don't necessarily need a 1000 foot 100,000 ton aircraft carrier to service it.
Re: (Score:3)
But you DO need a 1000 foot 100k ton aircraft carrier to carry the nuclear power plant to run your magnetic rail guns.
An Ohio class nuclear sub is 500 feet long with a 16K ton displacement, so I don't think you need a 100K ton aircraft carrier to have nuclear power.
Besides, I don't think magnetic rail launchers would require nuclear power - you have a few minutes to charge the capacitors before launching the next plane. It's not a continuous fire machine gun. With 2 launchers, you'd have 4 minutes to charge each one while launching aircraft every 2 minutes.
Re:There will always be a physological need (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:There will always be a physological need (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:There will always be a physological need (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:There will always be a physological need (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:There will always be a physological need (Score:5, Informative)
Any system can be hacked. Having humans directly in the loop is the basic Wargames lesson.
and humans can be hacked [wikipedia.org] 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
Re: (Score:3)
You know Wargames and Terminator, but don't know Asimov?
Re: (Score:3)
I can see a time when the operational need for a carrier is diminished if not made obsolete. The psychological need for a carrier may be harder to replace. Parking a carrier 200 miles off the coast of a nation that is acting in an unwanted manner gives that nation pause. It's a form of deterrence that says, "Hey bud...we're watching you.", and can sometimes prevent an escalation of hostility.
Also, it can sometimes increase the level hostility, so...there you go.
Re:There will always be a physological need (Score:4, Funny)
What's the rush? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: What's the rush? (Score:2)
What a superb idea!
No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
This reminded me of the Star Trek episode (original Shatner-ized series) where the aliens encountered "evolved" to pushbutton war. Basically they just declared you "hit" like Battleship and you were supposed to exterminate yourself. It led to a war that never ended.
Re: (Score:3)
Because the ones making the decision to go to war so often think about the poor folks getting killed...
Re: (Score:3)
Sadly, the ones that could NOT want it (and also have the power to not DO it) are not the same that get shot at. Trust me, if that was only remotely the case, wars would be pretty short and our self absorbed leaders would think twice before starting a never ending war like the one we're in right now.
Re: (Score:3)
And the one's that did fight are now generals and are worried about budgets and pensions, and whose board
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Automated drones are just the culmination of a decades-long trend in the U.S. towards enabling warfare by insulating the bulk of the population from its costs. During WWI and WWII, a universal draft meant that virtually every able-bodied man had to go to war, and those on the home front shared the sacrifice through work requirements, rationing, and higher taxes. In Vietnam, though, affluent Americans were able to avoid any impact of the war on their own families thanks to the college exemption from the draft. This meant that only the working classes bore the brunt of the war. And on the home front, life was far closer to normal than it was during the World Wars – the war was funded through deficit spending, not increased taxes, and there was no rationing. After Vietnam, the draft was ended, so even those Americans who didn't go to college would not be shipped off to the military unless they signed up. The result was that the first Iraq War met with very little opposition, since no one except volunteer soldiers was at any risk at all, and even then casualties were minimal. The longer campaigns in Afghanistan and in the second Iraq War led to additional backlash against the casualties among volunteer soldiers, hence the move to drones. Basically, the American political elites figured out that if Americans don't have to see American soldiers die in war, then they can do whatever they want overseas and no one will try to stop them.
Re: (Score:3)
The human loss requirement is not about preventing the people in the actual war doing bad things. It's about the people they left behind holding the government accountable for their actions and voting them out if they do dumb shit and engage in counter-productive wars for the sake of it.
lag (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:lag (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:lag (Score:4, Informative)
Re:lag (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Better use of money and effort (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Better use of money and effort (Score:4, Insightful)
think more differently for a brighter futar (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
By removing the reasons for the bad guys to want to kill you.
France and Germany opened their borders to allow for free passing without the need for passports in 1985, just 40 years after WWII ended where they were bitter enemies. War between those two countries have been unthinkable for decades. Do you think that is something that can be credited to any military effort or is it because of political and s
Re: (Score:3)
So if Iran was found to have conducted something similar but less drastic than 9/11 against the US
If we consider a nation hostile and are concerned about them launching a 9/11-style attack, the obvious solution is not to let their citizens come into our country. If they don't come here, they can't commit those kind of terrorist acts.
or North Korea blows up a twenty or thirty airliners, the only possible US response is then nuclear annihilation of Iran or North Korea?
What would we do if North Korea did t
Ponder for a split moment (Score:3)
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.
What good is 15g (Score:4, Interesting)
if you have a 300 ms latency?
No (Score:3)
Autonomous jets may even survive laser weaponry (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:3)
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
so what if drones are tomahawk missiles?
I work in this industry (Score:3, Informative)
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.
8+ G's already prematurely kills fighter veterans (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Situational Awareness vs (Lag + Bandwidth Reqs) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Fighters just cost too much. (Score:4, Informative)
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 [dtic.mil]. 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.
Re: (Score:2)
It's against treaty to put weapons in space... at least out in the open.
Whether it has happened already or not, however...
Re: (Score:2)
Why not just go the whole hog and have The Rod from God [wikipedia.org]
(ok, they're not very cost-efficient).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re:strong point is the pilot (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
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 havin
Re: (Score:3)
This seems unlikely. Seeing as how a jammer is a very powerful transmission source, in a combat situation setting all drones to attack jamming signals would quickly lead to said single pilot being blown apart (since 5 drones vs 1 fighter is going to be a losing match).
It's always been the weakness of jamming - you become the most powerful signal source in the area, and a very obvious target for anyone with suitable RDF gear.