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All that might turn out to be irrelevant as the drones prove detrimental in a warfare. With the advancements in AI in recent years, it will probably get harder
by mrtksn 3y ago
All that might turn out to be irrelevant as the drones prove detrimental in a warfare.
With the advancements in AI in recent years, it will probably get harder and harder to justify carrying a biological being and all the support systems onboard. At some point, a warplane capabilities might become irrelevant and the only important aspect would the the implications of carrying a solder onboard and making the downing of the device much more politically significant than downing a drone.
- njarboe 3y agoI believe the F-35 software is designed to allow it to be sort of a forward base for controlling a large number of drones.
- brobdingnagians 3y agoHow do drones get around the issue of communications jamming? I suppose they have some way (autonomous would be one way), but it seems to me that if communications are cut off, having a pilot with human judgement to respond to changing conditions will almost always have some advantage. Although, you could get a pretty advanced autonomous system that responded to changes from a pre-programmed attack plan.
- mrtksn 3y ago> How do drones get around the issue of communications jamming The same way the F-35 does I guess. Besides, it's pretty common for AI systems to overtake human capabilities these days, so when jammed they can just carry on. Sure, they do mistakes but humans do these too and the advantage of not carrying 80kg of fragile human and all the life support systems onboard is quite significant. It makes the thing much cheaper, it removes the need to come back thus doubles the range, it makes the thing smaller thus harder to detect and destroy, it doesn't have to limit its manoeuvres to human levels this makes the thing much more agile.
- ceejayoz 3y ago> The same way the F-35 does I guess. No, because that's in part "let the human pilot make decisions". > Besides, it's pretty common for AI systems to overtake human capabilities these days... Not in the realm of "should I shoot that thing?" sort of decisions.
- mrtksn 3y agolet the human pilot make decisions == let the machine make decisions It's not like pilots are making political decisions. They pilot and shoot predefined targets, avoid hostile actions. AI is capable of doing this. > Not in the realm of "should I shoot that thing?" sort of decisions. On the contrary, AI is very capable of making that decision. There are no philosophical dilemmas or children in the skies and even if there were we are at the point where we can tell the device not shoot children. There will be mistakes but human pilots makes mistakes too.
- ceejayoz 3y agoMilitary pilots absolutely make all sorts of decisions, like "that looks like a civilian target, maybe I have incorrect info" or "a little kid just ran into the target area" or "the controller says I just shot at friendlies". I would not currently trust an AI to handle those very well. What would an AI have done in this situation? What should it have done? "Russian pilot deliberately fired missiles at a Royal Air Force surveillance plane in international airspace over the Black Sea last year": https://apnews.com/article/uk-russia-fighter-jet-missile-black-sea-7e6c04c10d1e6035d01c01ca595ccb6e https://apnews.com/article/uk-russia-fighter-jet-missile-bla...
- mrtksn 3y agoAI can absolutely say "that looks like a civilian target, maybe I have incorrect info" or "a little kid just ran into the target area" or "the controller says I just shot at friendlies". What makes you think that AI can't incorporate those into decision making? Pilots do these through instruments anyway.
- darknavi 3y agoKill Decision by Daniel Suarez is a great book (great in audio book form!) about autonomous drones and comms blackouts.
- SkyMarshal 3y agoCan you give us a TLDR what it says about comms blackouts and jamming?
- fragmede 3y agoThe book talks about how they serve multiple purposes. They can be used to hinder enemy operations, mask one's own activities, or isolate units to force them into pre-defined roles. Increasing reliance on digital and wireless communications in warfare can thus be viewed as a double-edged sword, offering advantages but also creating new vulnerabilities.
- mschuster91 3y ago> How do drones get around the issue of communications jamming? For one, by making it harder to jam in the first place. Starlink with its extremely directional antennas is a good example - an opponent would need an equally massive fleet of satellites or high-altitude ECM planes to jam it, and the latter ones can easily be targeted by anti-radar rockets. This is why the US government has been pushing insane amounts of money into SpaceX... Starlink is the future of interconnected wars.
- pjc50 3y agoSpaceX is not fully under operational control of the US government, if some of the reports from Twitter about geofencing are to be believed.
- _ea1k 3y agoI have yet to see a credible report of them denying a US government request.
- kristjansson 3y agoBig big big big difference between "they usually do what we ask" and "we have operational authority over this system, and can court martial anyone that impedes its operation"
- JetSpiegel 3y agoIsn't everyone with the root password a US Citizen? Last time I checked SpaceX's job opening, a US clearance was required.
- mschuster91 3y agoAssuming that the US ever enters any war directly, guess what their first action will be: take Musk out of the picture, deal with the legalities later on.
- 3y ago
- pjc50 3y agoThe plane-sized drones are capable of some autonomous operation. It may or may not be possible to spoof that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid... The smaller drones are not usually autonomous. See the Starlink alleged incident. Inertial guidance is popular but very expensive to do accurately with laser gyros. I'm surprised there haven't been more "terrain following" systems. There's probably always going to be a continuum between manned and unmanned platforms, and a discussion about SEAD.
- lostlogin 3y ago> See the Starlink alleged incident. Ukraine says it happened and Musk does too - is ‘alleged’ needed?
- t0mas88 3y agoDepends on your definition of expensive. In comparison with other military hardware, inertial navigation systems aren't that expensive. They're also used in large numbers in civil aviation.
- ethbr1 3y ago> How do drones get around the issue of communications jamming? AESA derivatives as bidirectional communication devices seem like they will render jamming a lot less effective. Simply by virtue of being able to pump radar levels of power into communication. And current trends seem to be converging on flocks of drones, of which one or two can be specialized with uplink. Or simply babysat by stealthy HALE platforms like the RQ-180. You'll have to blanket an area with ungodly amounts of energy to fully jam point-to-point, highly directional links, especially for close range hops.
- vGPU 3y agoCan’t jam every frequency.
- salawat 3y agoHold my beer, and volunteer to pay the power bill. You say that as if it isn't incredibly easy to do to the point we have entire enforcement orgs built around trying to keep people from unintentiinally doing just that.
- vGPU 3y agoOk, let me clarify - can’t jam every potential drone frequency without taking out your own coms and giving the operator cancer.
- wongarsu 3y agoThe F-35 was designed with the capability to be later converted to remote operation, turning it into a drone (they call it a remotely piloted aircraft). Of course whether the F-35 platform makes sense for that role is a different question. There are probably great niches for a drone F-35 (e.g. targeting anti-air installations), but Ukraine shows that having lots of $1000-$100,000 drones might be more valuable on the battlefield than one $75,000,000 drone.
- dr-detroit 3y ago[dead]
- nradov 3y agoThe cheap drones work well in Ukraine where the adversaries are locked into attrition fights with largely static positions at short ranges. But those drones lack the range, speed, and sensors necessary to be effective in a potential conflict with China around the first island chain. The US military is currently pivoting to focus on that scenario.
- wongarsu 3y agoIf you're trying to defend the beaches of Taiwan or the Philippines, cheap drones sound like a great asset. If you're trying to project power into Chinese mainland less so. A big reason why the US will continue to prefer drones measured in tons instead of grams is that cheap drones are most useful when you have boots on the ground, which the US likes to avoid. But with the budgets available it's not like they have to choose between F-35 sized drones and Dji Mini sized drones, they can just get both.
- yetanotherloss 3y agoThe Loyal Wingman concept seems to lend itself to small squadrons of f35 and f15ex command planes managing much larger groups of drones that are actively running radars and using AESA arrays for command and control. Those drones seem to look more like cheaper loitering weapons platforms than F35s but who knows what happens when the other side isn't so stupid.
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago> > All that might turn out to be irrelevant as the drones prove detrimental in a warfare. I highly doubt it. At least I hope so. Nobody dreams of becoming a drone pilot. At the end of the day it's a cubicle job.
- weard_beard 3y agoAny job you can do with an Xbox controller is someone’s dream job
- iancmceachern 3y agoI mean maybe. Maybe they view it a a job with a lot of the upside but none of the safety downsides of rocketing around the earth at 1000 miles an hour half a world away from home...
- XorNot 3y agoDrones operating in the fighter plane envelope are going to be basically the same plane. Which the US is wholly aware of given the "Loyal Wingman" program, which the F-35 is designed to work with: commanding unmanned fighters/aircraft as support or missile trucks if what have you
- imtringued 3y agoThis is one of the things I never understood. "Cheap drones" is a code word for Chinese made quadrocopter toys. Military drones will be fixed wing and have combustion engines. Suddenly things start getting expensive and you can no longer have a million plastic toys for the price of one F35, you'll get 3 reapers or maybe a dozen "Wingmen". The closest analog would be converting cessnas. Half a million dollars plus drone kit = 1 million dollar bomber => 75 bombers or one F-35. At that price point one might start thinking about sending the bombers first (to deplete air defenses), then the F-35s...
- DanHulton 3y agoThe big "advancements in AI" in recent years have all been around LLMs, and there's really no way I want one of those driving a jet. And even aside from that, self-driving cars still regularly are observed to make stupid mistakes. When warplanes start making stupid mistakes, the consequences are going to be a lot more dire.
- BoorishBears 3y agoThey've been in transformer models... which we've seen bring SOTA image segmentation that would have taken millions of dollars and armies of researchers to match become widely available https://segment-anything.com/ https://segment-anything.com/ 'Advancements in AI' have reached a point where they can affect everything from your smartphone to a box of cereal.