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USAF’s Missing Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (2016)
- moh_maya 7y agoThe article is from 2016. A lot has changed since then..
- DuskStar 7y agoHow many stealthy UCAVs are flying publicly? As far as I'm aware the answer is still 0. (Well, 1 if you count the XQ-58 Valkyrie [0], which has flown twice) 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratos_XQ-58_Valkyrie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratos_XQ-58_Valkyrie
- wafflesraccoon 7y agoI was under the impression that there are a few stealth UAVs being operated currently.The Sentinel comes to mind and I think both China and Russia have working prototypes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_RQ-170_Sentinel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_RQ-170_Sentine... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Okhotnik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Okhotnik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CASC_Rainbow#CH-7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CASC_Rainbow#CH-7
- DuskStar 7y agoThe RQ-170 is a stealth UAV, but not a UCAV - it's unarmed. The other two aren't US, and so are more 'worrying' than 'reassuring' when it comes to figuring out where the US's stealth UCAVs are.
- adolph 7y agoThe article speaks to the RQ-170, introduced 9 years before the article and is one of your links. The idea is that the Air Force abruptly pulled out of a join effort with the Navy and didn’t seem to have an alternative. What happened? Does the AF have something else that is not public or did the manned aircraft program see UCAV as threat to eliminate?
- woodandsteel 7y agoAnd you are not going to tell us about it or give us any links to read. But you think we still should believe you. All that makes me think that things actually have not changed, but you don't want to admit it, and so you are claiming they have changed. But perhaps I am mistaken about that.
- inflatableDodo 7y ago>While the future looked blindingly bright for UCAVs, against all logic, the great UCAV revolution would be buried without explanation, and with it the promise of an operational and devestating unmanned swarm. Oh look, another lovely article from the Global Non-Denominational Death Cult.
- knolax 7y agoWell there are clearly multiple denominations of this death cult. How else would each denomination justify their funding, if not to prevent the wrong denomination from making offerings.
- inflatableDodo 7y agoYes, but between them they have set up a global non-denominational cooperative for organising multi-denominational meetups and activities, such as the biannual sacrificial beach party.
- darkpuma 7y agoFor monkeys, we're pretty damn clever aren't we? The lesser apes don't make war nearly so complicated.
- inflatableDodo 7y agoAnd they already have their unmanned swarms completely operational.
- ceejayoz 7y agoThe F-117's retirement is cited as evidence of a secret UCAV, but I was under the impression that the B-2 made it obsolete anyways.
- cptskippy 7y agoAccording to the article, the B-2 is of limited availability so while it could fulfill the mission parameters, it cannot meet the demand.
- blackflame7000 7y agoThe Airforce wanted the stealth of the B2 with the speed of the B1 so Northrop built the B21.
- greedo 7y agoI'm pretty sure that the B-21 won't have the speed of the Bone... Wrong airframe design, fewer engines, need for stealth, etc etc.
- jandrese 7y agoThe B-2s problem is that it was obsolete before it was even built. Long range strategic stealth bombing isn't really a useful mission profile in a world with ICBMs or even ship launched cruise missiles.
- ceejayoz 7y agoIt lets you surprise an enemy like Libya with 80 JDAMs. For the cost of about one of those cruise missiles ($25k/JDAM versus $1.4m Tomahawks), and a lot less likely to be intercepted by air defenses.
- jandrese 7y agoYeah, but you need to add in the cost of the B2 per flight hour on top of that. It's hard to argue a cost savings with anything related to the B2 program.
- michannne 7y agoWow, was just reading this article after reading the one about SAPs. I don't have much of any knowledge on aerospace engineering or what the Air Force/Navy have planned for our skies, but it's still a crazy thought that they'd abandon that kind of tech. I understand the upper echelons of governments get really bureaucratic but a lot of the times their decisions are incredibly simplistic, a program like this could be abandoned just because the top rung shift focus to intelligence gathering, any platform that doesn't fit that purpose or can easily be made to fit that purpose gets the axe, despite how useful it may be in the future. All boils down to money eventually. I'm really interested in what the "next phase" of aviation combat will be, or if there even will be a next phase. It's possible some organization would create a weapon that would physically disrupt any vehicle or object flying through a certain patch of sky - that may push us into a air-to-groud laser or smart-guided weapon age to counter those kinds of measures, and also means air vehicles will need serious intel platforms to get around them. We also may see vehicles that can transition from air to sea and retain full combative power, anything in the skies that can't float at that point goes the way of the do-do, no matter how intelligent it's systems are, so maybe the USAF is waiting until it's clear what will work for the next 50 years, while other branches invest UCAV technology. *air-to-ground, not ground-to-air
- nitrogen 7y agoThough I'd much prefer to have advances in the technology of diplomacy than that of war, I think having a number of semi-autonomous small drones in formation flight around a manned aircraft makes more sense than AI drones. The drone swarm could detect the attacks you describe destructively if needed, so the pilot can dodge.
- LifeLiverTransp 7y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA Remember the APC Bradley
- ohazi 7y agoThis sounds like a worryingly bad idea on many levels. 1. "Such a system could find, fix and finish a target without external direction by a human controller." The fact that human-out-of-the-loop kill decisions is a bad idea should not require further elaboration. 2. "Suddenly, a simulated threat radar activated. The pair of networked UCAVs immediately classified the threat and executed a plan to destroy it based on the position of each X-45 in relation to the target, what weapons were available, what each drone’s fuel load was and the nature of the target itself. The calculations happened in a blink of an eye." Congratulations, now all of the adversarial techniques that make state-of-the-art neural networks fall over will apply to fighter jets as well. Does the system deterministically plan to attack everything it sees that looks like a threat? What about easy threats that show up first, followed by progressively more challenging / fuel-draining threats? Now instead of radar jammers, the signals guys will go back to building elaborate decoy generators. Without a human in the loop, our current autonomous technologies are woefully inadequate for determining whether or not something smells like a trap. Our enemies are going to learn how to knock these things out of the sky with a $200 SDR and a power amp.
- Zenst 7y agoCan't help but recall a relative episode of StarTrek in which an AI computer takes control of the Enterprise and starts targeting friendlies as it classifies them as hostile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Computer
- outworlder 7y agoThis actually reminds me of an episode of Start Trek: Voyager (Dreadnaught). A missile with an advanced AI gets transported to the Delta quadrant in the same way as Voyager was. It was already en-route to a target planet. Obviously it lost lock. It then used what information it had about the planet to find it again. It found it – except it wasn't the same planet, it was a completely innocent one. And set a course. It correctly calculated that the probability of two planets having the exact same parameters was infinitesimally small, so it must be the correct target. It was further unconvinced that it was, in fact, in the Delta quadrant. It also disregarded the orders to shut down, which came from the same engineer who reprogrammed it, believing that she was a rogue agent. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Dreadnought_(episode) https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Dreadnought_(episode)
- sgt101 7y ago14) The USAF has discovered that there are insurmountable problems that have prevented the development of effective autonomous systems. Therefore they have declined to invest in technology that isn't working.
- Shivetya 7y agoI would suggest that manned attack craft are as important to the Air Force as the Carrier is to the Navy. Neither will let go until circumstances outside of their control over Congress forces it.
- greedo 7y agoThe AF probably realized that in a contested environment, drones would be useless. If the Iranians can shoot down a $200M Global Hawk with homebrewed missiles, the Russians and Chinese will have no problem. And if you can't shoot them down, just jam GPS etc. That's how the Iranians captured an RQ-170.
- ben7799 7y agoThis is a fascinating article that is well written and has a lot of interesting information. However it feels like he is falling into the same trap that most of the media falls into constantly, thinking that AI & Software are easy. If he thinks the F-35 was hard to launch with all it's software that's nothing compared to an autonomous combat swarm with all the features he's talking about. You can't rush out stuff that controls machines killing stuff. My guess is he's more of an aviation guy than a software guy so this stuff somehow doesn't seem as hard as it is. He also mentions the USAF has had a lot of black programs but then continues on with the thesis that they're ignoring this as opposed to continuing to develop in the black. Also these swarms will be least effective in the kinds of operations we've been mired in. It's a lot easier to set a swarm in motion with orders to clear the sky in a WW3 scenario than it is to have them try and shoot a particular pickup truck filled with civilian-clothed possible enemy combatants in an urban area in Afghanistan.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoAs long as you've observed the particular pickup truck before IDing it later is actually a very solved problem (like, the exact one, not just make and model). Back when I was an intern I worked on the "old boring currently deployed legacy tech" and it was quite good (probably scary good to some people) and it was using radar signatures. I suspect that the development of that technology combined with recent visual spectrum developments (i.e. cheap good cameras) has made the tech even better. Having the good judgement to not obliterate the truck while it's yielding for a funeral procession is the hard part to do in software. I agree he's underestimating the software complexity. Anyone can built that crap. It takes tons of R&D man hours to refine it into something that actually works and works consistently in the real world.
- stunt 7y agoI think he is talking about decision making abilities. But even stuff you mentioned are too hard to build for a real world military scenario. They have to deal with countless different objects, scenarios, and situations. Too many edge cases to cover and will take ages to adjust and it will be full of human errors. They can build it for simple tasks. Find the best route to go there, bomb that specific target, come back and during your mission deal with a limited set of defense scenarios.
- Causality1 7y agoThe USAF is making the right call as far as I'm concerned. It is breathtakingly easy for hostile actors to manipulate the behavior of UAVs. Hell, Iran stole one by just spoofing its GPS and landing it exactly where they wanted. Giving every hostile nation and hacker the opportunity to find zero-days on a fleet of supersonic aircraft is stupidly reckless.
- doctorRetro 7y agoPardon a nitpick moment. "Boeing’s control software ... was called DICE, or Decision Mission-Control Software." Okay, well, I see where the D and the C in the acronym comes from, but...
- closetohome 7y agoDecision mIssion Control softwarE
- exabrial 7y agoIsn't this the purpose of cruise missiles? Essentially a drone that flies to a target and kaboom.
- chiph 7y agoFormer USAF here, with no knowledge of any of this. My guess is the F-35 program sucked up all the funding for UCAVs.
- craftinator 7y agoIsn't this article pretty much describing reprogrammable ICBM's?
- slang800 7y agoI get the impression that the author vastly overestimates the capabilities of modern software. We don't even have reliable self-driving cars, yet they are hoping for reliable self-flying planes that can decide when and how to kill? Even the task of collecting training data for such a system would be monumental.