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I've alluded to this in other comments and also in the one you're responding to, but I'll spell it out: the goal is not to shoot down the F-22. The goal is to

I've alluded to this in other comments and also in the one you're responding to, but I'll spell it out: the goal is not to shoot down the F-22. The goal is to control the battlefield. So you're covering that 1 sq km with 1000 drones, or maybe up to about 20 sq km with 20,000 drones. The rest of the F-22's range and service ceiling, you don't care about. You let them fly around all they want. If they want to go fly around at 50,000 feet at Mach 2, have fun. An F-22 is basically harmless to a drone: it can shoot down 12 drones with its 12 AA missiles, each of which costs > $1M, about 1000x what a drone costs. There's no pilot in a drone whose life is sacred, and there're plenty more drones where they came from. You only need to engage the F-22 if they're coming down to engage ground forces. But then they need to fly through the swarm, at a huge risk to the airplane and pilot, and the swarm can react to put as many pieces of plastic in the F-22's path as possible. If the F-22 stays up at 50K feet and drops precision-guided weapons from 30 miles away, they lose the attrition war to the drone swarm. A drone can very accurately put a bullet into each infantryman and a shaped charge on top of every tank with little resistance, unless the enemy is itself fielding autonomous drones. An F-22 can put 8 SDBs on 8 targets. Which is more efficient?

credit_guy 6y ago
The thing is, F22 has radar, it can see a swarm of 20000 drones. What do you do if it just turns around and comes back 3 hours later? How many times can you have 20000 drones take off and reach 50000 feet altitude? These drones don't burn any fuel at all?
- Redshark 6y ago
  Good point, it would require a massive charging operation somewhere in the vicinity of the battlefield since it can be assumed that these drones don't have that a particularly good deployment range. Whereas it is possible to have some jets parked on an aircraft carrier a couple hundred miles away, able of reaching the target within minutes. Much more flexibility there...
meheleventyone 6y ago
Why not just use AA vehicles on the ground?
sfifs 6y ago
Well.. dumb bombs dropped from high altitude attain a terminal velocity of almost Mach 1. I suppose SDBs would be somewhat slower but probably not by much. So it's going to be interesting to see how such a diffuse swarm doing a hundred or so kmph could execute area denial against such an attack unless you have sophisticated radar and real time compute and target vectoring. Even more difficult if the attack consists of air to surface missiles instead (anti radar would be the first wave). I wouldn't accept such odds on defense. Sure simple small drones can attack ground targets but that's a different problem from area denial to air superiority fighters and it assumes you already have a ground presence (ie. insurgency ISIS style) to get within range where you minimize risk of detection and flight time. If detected, an ISIS style drone can be shot down with a rifle. Again I'm not saying pilotless attack / defence is not going to come - it obviously will. I'm saying it probably won't be the tens of thousands of cheap drones approach for the reasons above - it will be faster, more expensive drones which will be a significant fraction of manned aircraft cost.

credit_guy 6y ago

The thing is, F22 has radar, it can see a swarm of 20000 drones. What do you do if it just turns around and comes back 3 hours later? How many times can you have 20000 drones take off and reach 50000 feet altitude? These drones don't burn any fuel at all?

Redshark 6y ago
Good point, it would require a massive charging operation somewhere in the vicinity of the battlefield since it can be assumed that these drones don't have that a particularly good deployment range. Whereas it is possible to have some jets parked on an aircraft carrier a couple hundred miles away, able of reaching the target within minutes. Much more flexibility there...

meheleventyone 6y ago

Why not just use AA vehicles on the ground?

sfifs 6y ago

Well.. dumb bombs dropped from high altitude attain a terminal velocity of almost Mach 1. I suppose SDBs would be somewhat slower but probably not by much. So it's going to be interesting to see how such a diffuse swarm doing a hundred or so kmph could execute area denial against such an attack unless you have sophisticated radar and real time compute and target vectoring. Even more difficult if the attack consists of air to surface missiles instead (anti radar would be the first wave). I wouldn't accept such odds on defense. Sure simple small drones can attack ground targets but that's a different problem from area denial to air superiority fighters and it assumes you already have a ground presence (ie. insurgency ISIS style) to get within range where you minimize risk of detection and flight time. If detected, an ISIS style drone can be shot down with a rifle. Again I'm not saying pilotless attack / defence is not going to come - it obviously will. I'm saying it probably won't be the tens of thousands of cheap drones approach for the reasons above - it will be faster, more expensive drones which will be a significant fraction of manned aircraft cost.