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Saw an interesting video on the military channel a couple of years back that pointed out something important about these super powerful, super fast, super expen
by hpoe 6y ago
Saw an interesting video on the military channel a couple of years back that pointed out something important about these super powerful, super fast, super expensive aircraft.
You'd be better off from a cost perspective running a swarm of hundreds of drone strapped with explosives, only one of them needs to get lucky to disable a multi-million dollar plane and the drones themselves can be pretty cheap.
- kaiju0 6y agoUsing numbers to overwhelm a weapons system and pop the unkillable machine
- nickff 6y agoThis is a very old idea, which has never fulfilled its promise; the best modern example may be that of the 'Jeune Ecole'.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoFry: "I heard one time you single-handedly defeated a horde of rampaging somethings in the something something system" Brannigan: "Killbots? A trifle. It was simply a matter of outsmarting them." Fry: "Wow, I never would've thought of that." Brannigan: "You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down. Kif, show them the medal I won."
- kcb 6y ago> You'd be better off from a cost perspective running a swarm of hundreds of drone strapped with explosives, only one of them needs to get lucky to disable a multi-million dollar plane and the drones themselves can be pretty cheap. Have you not just described an anti-air missile?
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoNo. The anti-air missile doesn't have the "hundreds of" element. Also, drones are far slower than a missile, and even far slower than the airplane they're trying to target.
- uncoder0 6y agoYeah, why wouldn't an f22 for example just turn and run from these drones at nearly mach 2.
- dmoy 6y agoIt would do exactly that
- viraptor 6y agoWe're already very much in a theoretical territory, but: Given small size, how do you detect a swarm? Hovering cubes would be ignorable noise to radars. At f22 flight speeds, you can't exactly manoeuver around them. If you knew where the plane is headed, the question could become: can you create a wide enough curtain ahead of time that can home in on the incoming plane? Chasing is not needed that way.
- baddox 6y agoIf you knew exactly where the plane is headed then, yeah, the drones might work.
- sliken 6y agoSure, and if you know exactly where a plane is headed than a anti-air missle, anti-air gun, or plane with radically less speed/agility would be fine as well. So that's a big if.
- nradov 6y agoThere's no way to put up that many drones at 40K feet. It's just impossible regardless of cost per unit. The sky is a big place.
- zkms 6y ago> Have you not just described an anti-air missile? Yes, but a loitering anti-air missile.
- qppo 6y agoI don't see how that's functionally different than SAM on the back of a truck or on someone's shoulder.
- jpollock 6y agoYou can use a lot of cheap, refillable energy to get the missile up to altitude. Otherwise, you need a bigger rocket on the back of every missile.
- dredmorbius 6y agoTrucks tend not to deploy at 1,000 knots regardless of terrain over a 1,000 mi range.
- dodobirdlord 6y agoYea, but a missile can be lighter, move faster, and carry more explosives if it doesn’t have to fly itself into a loitering position and instead gets hauled around by a big reusable multi-missile sensor platform.
- sundvor 6y agoBest of both worlds: Drone platforms carrying anti air missiles? :) Just for fun, and I have no qualifications whatsoever, but the Aim 9 comes in at 188 pounds (85.3 kg), add say 20kg for a release mount? (just guessing), so might be doable. Might need something more upmarket than a Griff 300 (max altitude 1000m - see https://www.dronetechplanet.com/the-griff-300-review-drone-that-can-lift-500-pounds/ https://www.dronetechplanet.com/the-griff-300-review-drone-t...) but even with that, if you had network of these remotely operated they could pack a hell of a surprise for an unsuspecting pilot (missiles would only go active when released), can be positioned strategically around assets.
- devwastaken 6y agoYou're designing a mini jet at that point, one that has to go faster than it's target yet be maneuverable enough to hit it. Which is pretty much just a smart missile at that point.
- wongarsu 6y agoWe learned in WWII that flak works just fine by exploding close to aircraft, which is much easier than directly hitting them. The same applies to drones. You can have a wall of evenly spaced drones with explosives. When an aircraft passes all adjacent drones explode, the shockwave damaging the aircraft.
- lumost 6y agoconversely a munition could be designed which destroys the entire drone swarm.
- fatbird 6y agoHow large an area do you need to cover with drones to avoid, say, the F-22 climbing or diving by 10,000 feet? A wall of drones 100 feet apart, covering 10,000 x 10,000 feet, is 100 x 100 drones, or 10,000 drones, which is a wall that's a little under 2 miles by 2 miles. That's a lot of drones to cover very little area, and they have to each carry enough explosive to create a shockwave that might damage the plane. Moreover, this is a one-shot weapon. Once something sets it off (like a plane-like drone), there's a big gap in the wall. The idea of saturating an area with explosive drones has a scaling problem that would probably make it cost-prohibitive quite quickly.
- greedo 6y agoAnd don't forget that these drones are going to need some sort of targeting system that works against stealth aircraft. Oh and they either need really good AI or some communications channel that will be jammed to death.
- nickff 6y agoYou're still describing missiles; most missiles use blast pressure and shrapnel, only a few are hit-to-kill.
- Nasrudith 6y agoThe funny thing is that for a long time the opposite applied to fighter planes post WW2 - a more advanced one could take down entire airwings of older planes as the tech dominated so well and spam wasn't the answer. Of course drones lack the biological limits on G-Force and the economic scales and factors like pilot deaths mean the situations are not identical. The real question to be answered is probably one of "expendible drones vs premium super drones" long term as the age old battle of quality vs quantity.
- ashtonkem 6y agoArguably that’s what a missile is.
- nradov 6y agoAny drone that can operate with reasonable endurance at the same altitude as those super powerful, super fast, super expensive aircraft will not be cheap. An MQ-9 is somewhat cheaper than a manned fighter, but not by orders of magnitude. If you're going to use the drone in an A2A role then it needs a powerful radar for accurate targeting. Targeting from other platforms using data links is possible in theory, but in practice only works in a narrow set of ideal conditions. Modern radars and other sensors are themselves super expensive.
- greedo 6y agoAnd an MQ-9 is incredibly slow, can't maneuver worth a damn, and requires clear communication to control it. I don't understand why this question keeps coming up every time drones are in a news article. Sure something like Loyal Wingman might pan out, but the idea that swarms of cheap drones are going to be able to target something that's stealthy, operating at 50K, and around Mach 2 is just a fantasy.
- spideymans 6y agoBy the same principle, a small and inexperienced navy can effectively harass and perhaps even the defeat the US navy with a swarm of small boats https://gcaptain.com/can-u-s-navy-defeat-swarm-attacks/ https://gcaptain.com/can-u-s-navy-defeat-swarm-attacks/
- ceejayoz 6y agoI wouldn't be shocked if the Navy's eventual counter tactic to that is a bunch of drones on every ship.
- nostrademons 6y agoIn the limit, we get rid of navies and stick swarms of drones in 40-ft shipping containers, and then just sail container ships with 10K+ drones aboard around.
- nradov 6y agoAnd where are the sensors?
- nostrademons 6y agoPresumably on slow high-flying drones (think like a U-2) or on a balloon. For drones that go under 30 mph you can actually solar-power them, letting them stay aloft indefinitely. I'd expect to see a shift toward more visual and IR sensors as well, to combat stealth technologies. Modern ultra-HD cameras + image recognition algorithms are a lot more sensitive than human eyes are, and you can field many more drones than AWACS aircraft with much less cost of a loss, letting you bring the relevant detection platforms in closer.
- nradov 6y agoVisual and IR sensors don't work well in bad weather. Modern cameras have superior resolution to human eyes but dynamic range is still worse. Solar powered drones don't have the power or payload to handle useful radars. For that mission you need something like an RQ-4, which is roughly equivalent to a U-2 in performance and just as expensive.
- tyingq 6y agoSomewhat related... "There has been only one dogfight involving a U.S. aircraft in the last 20 years: in 2017, a U.S. Navy pilot shot down a Syrian fighter." [1] So you have to wonder a bit how much time is worth investing in that aspect of these planes. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/duels-among-the-clouds-11565878829 https://www.wsj.com/articles/duels-among-the-clouds-11565878...
- hoorayimhelping 6y agoThe A part of the F/A 18 means Attack. Usually Attack aircraft are capable of close air support, which is a huge and integral part of our military tactics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_air_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_air_support Without close air support, troops on the ground can't overwhelm enemies with firepower. Without air superiority, we don't provide close air support. Our strategy dictates air superiority to enable our tactics of close air support. The reason there's only been one dogfight in the past 20 years is not because these fighters aren't effective, or because they're a relic of the past. It's that they're too effective. We own the sky and nobody is capable of challenging us.
- tyingq 6y agoThat's what I was getting at. Dogfighting ("that aspect") isn't all that useful for the US.
- coredog64 6y agoI don’t think that’s quite true. In a post Cold War world, the assumption is that it’s pointless to engage NATO forces in air-to-air combat due to the level of capability. That calculus is different where combatants are more closely matched (e.g. India and Pakistan), or it may change as opponents improve their capabilities.
- tyingq 6y agoJust seems like a lot of time and money when spending less would just mean losing more (probably much cheaper) aircraft before you get air superiority.
- hoorayimhelping 6y agoAre drones anywhere near as fast as a missile? In certain situations, an F/A-18 under afterburner can outrun a SAM missile - outrun meaning go fast enough that the missile can't close the distance before it runs out of fuel. How much chance would a drone have of catching it even while not operating under afterburner? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F/A-18_Hornet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F/A-18_Horne... The unclassified ceiling is 50,000 feet, with a 250 m/s climb rate. Could a drone strapped with explosives come anywhere near that level of performance?
- greedo 6y agoDepends on what you mean by drone. Something like Loyal Wingman might, but not the type of drones people are imagining in the replies.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> You'd be better off from a cost perspective running a swarm of hundreds of drone strapped with explosives, only one of them needs to get lucky to disable a multi-million dollar plane and the drones themselves can be pretty cheap. Why do you think fighters carry a bunch of “drones strapped with explosives” (air-to-air missiles) for air-to-air combat? The thing is, when you optimize those, they tend to be comparatively short range and have no loiter time, so it's nice to have something to carry them into an engagement area and, if you need to patrol or escort, it's nice for it to also be something with some loiter time.
- _visgean 6y agoJust checked the wikipedia and it seems that cruise missiles with 2 hours of loitering time have been here for a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loitering_munition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loitering_munition
- corndoge 6y agoVastly different applications; you have to decide in advance to launch a cruise missiles and once launched it cannot RTB
- dragonwriter 6y agoSure, but cruise missiles aren't air-to-air missiles. Loiter time for a drone that intends to ram into a stationary or slow-moving ground target and for one that intends to ram (or nearly, because ABF warheads don't actually rely on impact) a combat aircraft have different required performance envelopes.
- gonzo41 6y agoI think that function's been replaced by hypersonic weapons. The loitering is done via a drone and the engagement is rapid from somewhere far away.
- ebg13 6y ago> Why do you think fighters carry a bunch of “drones strapped with explosives” (air-to-air missiles) for air-to-air combat? They don't typically carry _hundreds_, though. Carrying capacity for air-to-air missiles is pretty low. You get only a few shots.
- javajosh 6y agoThe really cool thing, especially for a ship, would be a dome of drones. They could come back to the ship to recharge and fly out again, and even, depending on weather, travel with the ship. Each one could sense incoming ordinance and move to pre-explode it well before it hit the ship. Of course, this wouldn't work against some things, like heavy kinetic stuff, or really fast stuff. But ordinary missiles? Other drones? Sure.
- afrodc_ 6y agoWhy use drones in this missle defense system your describing? Drones are incredibly slow and missiles are INCREDIBLY fast. If you have the trajectory of the missile enough to put some sort of drone or hard object on it, why not just shoot it. That's what the phalanx missile defense system does.
- javajosh 6y agoWell this is an interesting question, and there's a good answer: because if you make the drone dome dense enough, the drones can be so slow they don't move. So, the less dense you make it, the more they have to move, so there is a nice optimization problem with the lower bound of density given by the speed of the drone, and the upper bound based on cost and complexity. It also matters how big the dome is - you want a big one, but if its too big density goes down again.
- fock 6y agoso let's build armored hulls above our ships. oh, wait...
- VLM 6y agoInteresting thought experiment, a single Arleigh Burke destroyer has 96 vertical launch cells and can trivially be arranged to fire to a time and incoming bearing on a target. So if an enemy ship, perhaps an aircraft carrier, really pissed off a single US destroyer, it can decide to send all hundred supersonic anti-ship missiles in from the same direction at the same instant of arrival, or from every point on the compass, or maybe three directions at once or who knows what kind of crazy four dimensional incoming attack pattern, like waves of ten missiles at a time every second for ten seconds from ten different directions. So how do you distribute your drones so as to soak up a hundred incoming from one direction while not getting sneak attacked by say five from every 30 degrees on the compass at the same time? Its like say you have a Greek Phalanx, that's pretty well defended over a couple hundred feet, but try to use the same one phalanx spread out to defend all one thousand acres of city-state farmland simultaneously and its not going to work out well.
- sfifs 6y agoSo proponents of hundreds of cheap drones theory tend to forget that kinetic energy is 1/2mv^2. So Energy required to catch up with a fighter in increases with square of velocity and modern fighters can all supercruise. That energy has to be stored on the drone to be expended which increases mass which increases energy require8d (linearly) and so on. If you need to add loiter time and manoeuvrability, again you need more energy and so mass. So just like the famous rocket equation, you'll find that the design space narrows down to drones that are no longer cheap or casually expendable - essentially supersonic capable cruise missiles with loiter times that tend to cost millions of dollars a piece. Certainly cheaper than manned aircraft but not something that can be used in the hundreds casually per engagement. The other option is of course what's done today - strapping a relatively cheaper air to air missile to an even more expensive but fast and survivable aircraft which brings it to the war zone and gives it kinetic energy at launch.
- nostrademons 6y agoYour tactics change too. Instead of building a drone that can keep up with a fighter, focus on area denial. Throw up tens of thousands of tiny drones into the atmosphere that each travel at say 50 mph (like a model aircraft), and train the AI to put them in the path of anything moving within that airspace. The goal isn't to hit the fighter, it's to make the fighter hit you. Think of a flock of Canada geese over an airport: they're tiny, they move slowly, but they're super unsafe to fly through. Now imagine that instead of trying to get out of the way, the geese try to get in the way - and if you get within 10 miles of one, you may have a Sidewinder on your tail. Then when not engaged in air defense, these drones engage in CAS. Taking down fighters is a secondary mission - their real role is to dominate the battlefield, and part of that is by making it so unsafe to enter the airspace above the battlefield that it's futile suicide to try.
- sfifs 6y agoSo let's do the math for this option. F22 wingspan is about 14m. Let's go easy and say you want a one drone in a square of 30m x 30m ie ~2x the wingspan. To cover 1 sq km, you need ~1000 drones. But the operating ceiling of an f22 is about 18km and the range is about 3000km - so a 1 sq km is not enough as it will simply fly around or over especially if the difference in speeds is over a thousand km/h. So let's say you build a wall 500km wide x 15km high which may make area denial viable - that works out to 7.5 MILLION drones. I doubt the economics of drones that need to fly and loiter 18km high and carry a sidewinder as you say would work out this way - the sky is simply too big. This is without factoring that a typical war-fighter could simply shoot through such a passive defence wall from dozens of km away if they really need to and if they are moving at Mach 2, they'll be through the hole before it reforms and because of lack of speed, there's essentially no chase capability once through. These kinds of ideas while interesting remind me of the Magniot line and we all know how it fared
- msh 6y agoBut you need to make sure that control radio signals are not jammed or that the onboard AI is intelligent enought that it will not target friendly or civilian targets. I dont think thats a problem that can be solved today to the exclusion of manned aircrafts. If you are a terrorist it might not matter but for the kind of nation states that can field fighter jets it certainly matter.
- VLM 6y agoProgramming the drones would be a pain. The wikileak ROE from 2008 was 27 pages long whereas Alexa struggles to converse on the topic of two plus two. Maybe some century we can replace the entire policy generating middle management of the Army with an AI; not any time soon it seems. That discussion about swarms always devolves to "just push human beings near the action before launching the pitbull outta control killer drones" which for the last 30 years has been repeatedly successfully been implemented as modern jet fighters carrying short range sidewinder IR guided missiles, which annoys the people who thought they invented the new idea of explosive drones, little did they know we've been doing that for generations and its unfortunately probably even more expensive than swarms of WWII era P-51s with human pilots.
- jmorrison 6y agoIt appears to be hard to predict the effect of the introduction of even a single weapon/platform into a complex conflict which consists of many, qualitatively different weapons/platforms. One of my career-defining "Aha" moments is described on page 19 of https://www.iitsec.org/-/media/sites/iitsec/link-attachments/iitsec-fellows/2015_fellowpaper_miller.ashx https://www.iitsec.org/-/media/sites/iitsec/link-attachments... in the section entitled "Forward Area Air Defense (FAADS)." While I do not believe I am at liberty to provide details (even lo so many years later), I was witness to the first use of (arguably) VR to prototype and introduce a new weapons platform into a combined arms battlefield simulation. The short version is that on Monday morning, despite all the deep thinking done by smart people about how this would all work out, none of us came close to predicting what turned out to be the net effects of the new system as seen by Friday. I was there in my capacity as a nerd simply to keep the blinking lights blinking (vs the capacity of a combat domain expert), but watching the whole thing unfold was a mind-blowing demonstration of the "Law of Unanticipated Consequences." None of us are as smart as we think we are. We are no smarter than our adversaries. The world is more complex than either of us can know.
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- tim333 6y ago>swarm of hundreds of drone strapped with explosives Just fly in at a higher altitude and if there's some there go around them. Drones carrying air to air missiles might be more challenging.