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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

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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
  - credit_guy 6y ago
    What if a drone holds the flashlight? And when you shoot at the drone you give up your position?
Agnu 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.

nexuist 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
- credit_guy 6y ago
  What if a drone holds the flashlight? And when you shoot at the drone you give up your position?

Agnu 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.