I fully appreciate that in the Western world, the concept of a fully autonomous fighter will meet with serious ethical and political challenges. However, I do feel that the Chinese or Russians, having autocratic centralised governments, will simply deploy them without a second thought.
I’m such a geek - writing that just made me think of Civilisation, and how that would be expressed as the Americans not having “Autonomous Drones” in their tech tree.
Pilots and training are just another cost input to military planners. If it was feasible and cheaper to pursue sheer numbers over capability they’d pursue that, but it doesn’t necessarily work like that when you transition to total war.
They already did that to some extent trying to replace the expensive but superior f22 with a cheaper f35. The jack of all trades usually proves a false economy, but they were obviously at that point in the cycle when they try it. But carrier plus vtol really should have promoted a more critical and historical appraisal than what it got from the politicians.
Are you guys talking remotely piloted or autonomous drones? Can’t imagine there being any opposition in western democracies to remotely piloted drones considering they’re already killing people through out the world. But it’s probably a non event anyway, as it’s a planning decision, which generally aren’t democratic matters anyway.
How much does having a pilot affect the design of an aircraft versus not having one? IMO if you want a plane to carry bombs at Mach 2.0 using stealth it’s still going to cost a shitload. And having a pilot is not going to affect the basic design much, especially as the size of the plane gets bigger and bigger. OTOH if all you want the plane to do is carry a camera, then yeah it’s going to make a big difference.
Eh, I actually think the Russians and Chinese might have second thoughts too about fully autonomous aircraft. They love control, and no one really understands the degree of control, or lack thereof, we might have over a fully autonomous weapon system (BOLO!).
And drones that could engage strike aircraft, and be more than just advanced contemporary missiles, would have to be fully autonomous. I think it’s certainly possible, but they’d also have to be cheaper than other alternatives. Yes, not risking pilots is important, but it’s a trade off. Pilots give you enormous flexibility, while autonomous systems don’t, and if the drone costs nearly as much as the manned aircraft, the trade-offs start to look a lot less interesting.
Don’t forget, too, that military organizations love control. No air force will willingly trade human control/operation for autonomous drones in roles that are their traditional bread and butter, I think.
This is a case where the problem is partly technical, partly psychological, partly ethical, and partly political, as well as partly economic. The brutal short and tall of it is, right now, the costs across the board aren’t worth it for most air forces. Trading lives for results and keeping control and power trumps any technocratic impulses to automate, and in the West, where the lure of no pilots at risk is strong, there is a correspondingly strong push back on autonomous AIs for ethical and control reasons. In parts of the world where they don’t factor in the human cost as much, the technical issues and the problems of control (if it’s an autonomous system, anyone can program it to support a coup, for example) come into play.
This is as much a human issue as an engineering issue I think.
I feel like drones would quickly become unusable if an all out war started. I mean, they’re super nice to have when we’re fighting terrorists who have no capability to take out our satellites / communications equipment / etc. But Russia / China can jam, have anti-satellite weaponry, can bomb our command and control network, etc. Your drones are useless if you can’t maintain the remote connection to fly them. And I don’t think anyone is even close to letting a fully autonomous aircraft with no remote human control on the loose.
Some of this reminds me of some of the stuff regarding various technologies from David Brinn’s “Uplift” series.Specifically the carbon coating that the streaker gets put on it at one point.
The discussion reminds me of Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy with its combat wasp drones.
http://www.silentphoenix.co.uk/confed/Articles/article_combat_wasps.html
You could have a half-way house that works basically like a fancy Counter-Strike aimbot. You have a manned plane, with a switch that the pilot controls that shunts control of the plane to an AI with superhuman capabilities and response time, but the pilot can toggle it off whenever they want to and take full control. With a pilot in the loop you could also have only partial control given to the AI - maybe movement and targeting go to the AI but the pilot has to choose whether to fire weapons. Now, you don’t get to pull off any crazy meatbag squishing maneuovres, but you also reduce the chance of the plane going rogue. It could also be useful if you had a mix of drones and manned planes - the AI could act like an advanced autopilot if the pilot needed to play real-life Homeworld and order his drone swarm around.
Obviously, putting a pilot and an AI in a plane is both the most expensive option and a jack of all trades master of none trade off that satisfies no one, but hey, it’s the F-35 thread!
Well, in many cases this is actually how modern combat aircraft work already.
Even going back to the F-16, the airframe itself is inherently unstable from an aerodynamic perspective. This allows the aircraft to be much more nimble, but would make it very difficult to fly by manual control. In order to reap the benefits of the aerodynamic instability, it was the first aircraft to use a computerized flight control system, where the pilot’s control input is fed into a computer which determines what to actually do with the control surfaces of the aircraft to achieve the desired maneuver.
Now, I guess you’re talking about more of the cognitive decision making of the aircraft and automating that, but I’m not really sure how much benefit you’d gain there, as fighter pilots tend to already kind of possess super-human reflexes and perception capabilities. They’ve done vision tests that suggest that combat pilots had the ability to perceive more “frames” cognitively from a vision perspective.
The biggest advantage of not having a pilot in the aircraft, would be not having to have all of the interface equipment for the pilot to control the aircraft, and as Shiva said, allowing the aircraft to maneuver in ways that were not bound by G-force limitations on a human body. Modern aircraft are already capable of making maneuers which the airframe itself can handle in terms of stress, but which are prohibited by the fact that a human in the aircraft will black or red-out from the forces on their body.
DARPA needs to figure out how to clone John Boyd so we can get him back to designing planes and running procurement projects.
Oops, have to ground some due to the slight niggle of their fuel tanks peeling:
And rumor has it that one spent about two weeks in a hangar in Ohio recently after metal was found in the oil after an airshow. It had digested it’s own oil pump. But I don’t have a link for that.
< insert a ball of living rage >
Norwegian pilot says “nothing to see here, move along, F-35 teething is expected.”
They have a fix coming for breaking pilot’s necks during ejection too! Pretty soon the planes will almost be functional. So long as it isn’t raining or cold or dark or anything. Pity they will have to fire 3 AMRAAMs to score a hit these days, but I suppose they carry 4, so what the hell… Maybe they will use callsign Fox-9 for a triple launch.
What’s a few hundred billion between friends? Nothing to see here.
“Fire one million.”—Zorg
Hilarious. Maybe escort the F-35s with F-16s?
They won’t have to fire any… see the successful live test of F-35/Aegis integration a couple of weeks ago? Seems a bit of a sales puff-piece but cool nonetheless. :)
For the low, low cost of over 500 Arleigh Burke’s and counting we almost have something! Maybe.