5 ms·

There are multiple interesting developments wrapped together here. First, these are intended to be "loyal wingman". They'll be commanded (but not really remote

There are multiple interesting developments wrapped together here. First, these are intended to be "loyal wingman". They'll be commanded (but not really remotely controlled) from manned fighters nearbyish. Presumably, the "shoot authorization" will be delegated down to the pilots. Secondly, the actual unmanned platform (the Kratos Valkyrie) is also part of a program of record for the USMC (US Marine Corps) to act as a partner SEAD (suppression of air defence) vehicle. Thirdly, the "MARS" system chattered about looks to be Airbus' open architecture /system of systems pitch that they were developing for FCAS (the European 6th generation fighter program). MARS and all pitches like it are about ways to make individual platforms as software defined as possible, and to get different platforms/instances to really data/function share as much as possible. If this program goes well, it shows that Airbus' MARS has the flexibility and capability required to just... layer into/ontop of some random other vendor's hardware/software and then "just work". I think it would be major demonstration/validation of the work.

dmix 7mo ago
Why do I get the feeling that the market shifted beneath their feet to drones and these old aircraft companies are using "loyal wingman" to make a half-hearted half-way play between old/new products to stay relevant, which just buys them time to keep selling expensive jets... until pure drone upstarts start eating their lunch. Like when Blackberry tried to make BlackBerry Storm after iPhone and Blockbuster tried to make Blockbuster Online after Netflix. Technology shifts rarely wait for these stodgy middle ground transitionary products to find a market.
- icegreentea2 7mo ago
  Roughly everyone expects the 6th generation fighters (the ones currently in development like F-47) to be the last manned generation. Most observers expect many/most 6th gen fighters to become optionally manned within their life span. The real question is basically - is full autonomy both technically possible and culturally/politically acceptable within 5, 10, or 20 years? Because full autonomy isn't really ready now (or else we wouldn't need hundreds to thousands of drone operators in the Ukraine war). And at least the USAF doesn't think remote control will let them do what they need (which is to fly from Japan to Korea or Taiwan, or Philippines to Taiwan, and contest/control the skies in the face of a basically peer adversary). Because no one knows that answer, everyone (governments, militaries, manufacturers) is hedging, and CCA is part of that hedge.
  - dash2 7mo ago
    > And at least the USAF doesn't think remote control will let them do what they need (which is to fly from Japan to Korea or Taiwan, or Philippines to Taiwan, and contest/control the skies in the face of a basically peer adversary). I mean, they wouldn't think that, would they? It would put their pilots out of a job. But most flying has been done by autopilot long before AI, and even if/when you need a human in the loop, why would you want to put that human in the cockpit rather than safely in Virginia?
  - remarkEon 7mo ago
    I think we are underestimating and/or forgetting that the enemy gets a vote, and remote piloting something from Virginia all the way out to Japan or Korea or Taiwan involves many signals integrity steps along the way. This is to say that you should assume these signals are interrupted and you will not be able to maintain continuous control of the aircraft from whatever datacenter box the "pilot" sits in. That means fully autonomous decision making, functionally for the entire journey, and independent release authorization. >or else we wouldn't need hundreds to thousands of drone operators in the Ukraine war I don't think this is the reason the systems are not fully autonomous right now ("fully autonomous" here meaning that they can complete the kill chain independently, no HITL). Even if we assume it true that the drones are not "good enough" to be at parity with a human operator, if you had an essentially limitless amount of them, would you really waste the manpower on operating them in FPV mode? You would not, you would completely saturate the battlefield with them. Thus, as it was in the beforetimes and ever shall be, logistics wins wars.
    - Dylan16807 7mo ago
      > This is to say that you should assume these signals are interrupted and you will not be able to maintain continuous control of the aircraft from whatever datacenter box the "pilot" sits in. That means fully autonomous decision making, functionally for the entire journey, and independent release authorization. Only if every mission is absolutely critical. If disruptions are rare then you don't need autonomy.
      - 7mo ago
- ironhaven 7mo ago
  Manned-Unmanned teaming is not a new concept created in the last couple months to placate fighter pilots in the age of ai. With 5th generation fighter using datalink they to use the active radar in far away AWAC planes for targeting so the stealth fighter can get closer to the enemy without breaking cover by turning on active radar. If you can outsource the radar on a jet it is not a huge leap in logic to put the very hot missiles onto a unmanned aircraft. All of these concepts where written up 20 years ago by both china and the US
  - dmix 7mo ago
    > With 5th generation fighter using datalink they to use the active radar in far away AWAC planes for targeting so the stealth fighter can get closer to the enemy without breaking cover by turning on active radar. What benefit does a human pilot offer in this case? Are going to be using their eyes to track their location or see a Chinese fighter jet launching a standoff antiair missile at them? Drones can do AWACS and deep sensor roles, with a pilot and sensor operators far away from the planes. > All of these concepts where written up 20 years ago by both china and the US Defense contractors and the gov planners are often the same group of people, the same small community, there's not that many vendors. They show up at defence trade shows and see what industry is offering them. They tend to stick with the same big safe companies that change slowly. Bold ideas are infrequent. The smaller countries can take those risks easier than America.
- budman1 7mo ago
  mistakes in A/A combat can have serious repercussions. not only loss of expensive air vehicles, but things like civilian airliners. 'loyal wingman' gives the kill / no kill decision to an Air Force officer. And having the decision maker geographically close eliminates jamming, delays, and the requirements to have a satellite infrastructure (like is required for Predator UAV's). i hope we never assign a piece of code, AI or not, to be the decision maker.
  - jacquesm 7mo ago
    > i hope we never assign a piece of code, AI or not, to be the decision maker. This is already a past station, just not at Airbus.
    - esseph 7mo ago
      Yes, we are ~4-5 years into AI kill-chains now, though maybe only 1-3 with full autonomy.
      - nradov 7mo ago
        You haven't been paying attention. We are at least 47 years into AI kill chains. https://www.vp4association.com/aircraft-information-2/32-2/mk-60-captor-mine/ https://www.vp4association.com/aircraft-information-2/32-2/m...
        jacquesm 7mo ago
        That's not really what they meant. They meant that the weapon is guided by software that decides which targets to pick and autonomously makes that decision without a human in the loop. The device seeks you instead of you going to it. A landmine has no friend-or-foe-or-noncombatant decision engine, it will kill you or maim you just like it will kill or maim the guy that laid it or any other passer by.
        nradov 7mo ago
- mikkupikku 7mo ago
  My read is that the "loyal wingman" thing is a ploy to get around all the pilots / expilots in Air Force brass who might otherwise gatekeep anything they think is a threat to the careers of human pilots. These people want the Air Force to be about hotshots flying planes; this is part of the reason the US spun off the space stuff, because Air Force brass is institutionally incapable of taking anything other than manned flight seriously.
  - rustyhancock 7mo ago
    Really loyal wingmen are just an extension of jets. Ultimately a carrier strike group could achieve many of the missions a F35 can through cruise missiles, ballistic missiles etc. What an F35 provides is a sensory platform deep into enemy airspace. But with the F35 being very expensive, and required to stay silent in RF to maintain stealth it's further desirable to have a loyal wingman out there. The whole thing becomes one large sensor network with th added weapons. It makes most sense in a near adversary situation and as it stands that particular scenario is why the F22 is not exported.
- generic92034 7mo ago
  You expect drones to replace civil passenger aircraft any time soon?
  - eszed 7mo ago
    I think GP's point is more relevant than your question implies. The vast majority of civilian flights could be flown entirely autonomously right now. (I'm not close enough to the aviation industry to make a confident guess, but +90% wouldn't surprise me.) Humans are there to take (decision or control) over when something goes off the happy path - in fact, pilots are encouraged / required to hand-fly landings that could be done automatically in order to keep their skills current. Obviously no one would accept even a 0.01% crash rate for civilian flights, so we're many orders of magnitude of improvement away from replacing pilots in that sector. Military calculations are very different. Every military asset - most definitely including humans - is disposable, and all wars are (in some dimension) wars of attrition. Holding mission success constant, when the cost x capability x ability to manufacture for autonomous platforms becomes cheaper than all that plus training / replacement cost of human pilots, then human pilots will disappear. The logic of war being what it is, I expect HITL decision-making to very quickly be dropped as soon as it is seen to be retarding the progress of a cheaper option.
    - generic92034 7mo ago
      That is why I was talking about civil aircraft. With the waiting list for those aircraft Airbus can stay relevant for a very long time.
    - rkomorn 7mo ago
      > The vast majority of civilian flights could be flown entirely autonomously right now. This is extremely dependent on your definition of "autonomously" because at the moment they are not at all approaching autonomy. At best, they'd be automatic, in the most rote way.
      - eszed 7mo ago
        That's true. It'd be more accurate to say that the planes are capable, but that a lot about how the air transport system is organized would have to change to take full advantage of that - which we don't want/need to do, because an "automatic" system is too brittle, so we'd want skilled pilots on board, anyway.
- numpad0 7mo ago
  Those low-cost drones are just a fad. Fiber optic TV guided exploding thing is literally the oldest kind of anti-tank missiles. Russian winged cruise missiles are even older, early cold war kinds of stuff. It just so happens that none of Ukraine, Russia, Iran etc has air dominance nor proper war time production capacities, and so they must resort to substituting military equipment with remixes of AliExpress stuffs. Just in the invasion in Iran we all saw Apache handling drones with ease. They can probably put on the minigun or even microgun on an MQ-9, which is a drone, but not like the ones discussed here. Or someone might realize a turret on a Super Tucano is cheaper than the Reaper ground control trailer. My point is, Ukraine and Russia throwing drones at each others is not a sure sign that that's the war of the future.
  - jcfrei 7mo ago
    The war in Iran proves the opposite: It is actually the future. The US could easily establish air dominance over Iran, yet it can't stop their military from launching smaller drones both in the air and at sea. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed and air power alone seems unlikely to fix the situation. If you want to effectively eliminate an opponent nowadays you need an army of drones - the economics don't work out if you are only fielding expensive ships, planes and missiles. And regarding your point that an Apache can easily shoot down a drone: Roughly 9/10 drones in the Russia Ukraine frontline get shot down and the remaining 10% make up for about 80% of the casualties (rest being mostly artillery and mines).
    - pjc50 7mo ago
      Exactly. "An Apache can shoot down a drone" is like "Tiger tanks were better than Shermans": the relative numbers of each matter.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 7mo ago
      Right - the relative cost matters very much. A Shahed drone costs $20K each. The Patriot missile interceptor costs $4 Mil each. And the inevitable result is that the interceptors run out first https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-war-israel-tells-us-its-running-low-missile-interceptors https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-war-israel-tells-us-... https://www.economist.com/international/2026/03/13/gulf-states-are-burning-through-interceptors https://www.economist.com/international/2026/03/13/gulf-stat... https://bsky.app/profile/mekka.mekka-tech.com/post/3mgrvx5grf22r https://bsky.app/profile/mekka.mekka-tech.com/post/3mgrvx5gr... The only lasting solution to low-cost drone attacks is low-cost defences. Ukraine knows this. The US apparently does not yet. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/10/what-are-the-ukrainian-drone-interceptors-sent-to-counter-iranian-attacks https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/10/what-are-the-ukrain... But the end result is not "low-cost drones are just a fad." it's drones vs. more drones vs. yet more drones.
- GuB-42 7mo ago
  One argument is that fighter airplanes are becoming more like airborne control centers than actual fighters. You don't get the same level of situational awareness from a remote controlled drone camera than from inside a cockpit. And if you look at the F-35, what is often put forward is its stealth and communication capabilities. Radars, electronic warfare, etc... that's what's important, and yes, having a human in the loop is important too. These planes can dogfight too, but ideally, they shouldn't, but they still have to be able to defend themselves when things go wrong. Drones like they have in Ukraine are more like cheap missiles, they don't compete against fighter jets, and they can't do anything to them once they have taken off.

dmix 7mo ago

Why do I get the feeling that the market shifted beneath their feet to drones and these old aircraft companies are using "loyal wingman" to make a half-hearted half-way play between old/new products to stay relevant, which just buys them time to keep selling expensive jets... until pure drone upstarts start eating their lunch. Like when Blackberry tried to make BlackBerry Storm after iPhone and Blockbuster tried to make Blockbuster Online after Netflix. Technology shifts rarely wait for these stodgy middle ground transitionary products to find a market.

icegreentea2 7mo ago
Roughly everyone expects the 6th generation fighters (the ones currently in development like F-47) to be the last manned generation. Most observers expect many/most 6th gen fighters to become optionally manned within their life span. The real question is basically - is full autonomy both technically possible and culturally/politically acceptable within 5, 10, or 20 years? Because full autonomy isn't really ready now (or else we wouldn't need hundreds to thousands of drone operators in the Ukraine war). And at least the USAF doesn't think remote control will let them do what they need (which is to fly from Japan to Korea or Taiwan, or Philippines to Taiwan, and contest/control the skies in the face of a basically peer adversary). Because no one knows that answer, everyone (governments, militaries, manufacturers) is hedging, and CCA is part of that hedge.
- dash2 7mo ago
  > And at least the USAF doesn't think remote control will let them do what they need (which is to fly from Japan to Korea or Taiwan, or Philippines to Taiwan, and contest/control the skies in the face of a basically peer adversary). I mean, they wouldn't think that, would they? It would put their pilots out of a job. But most flying has been done by autopilot long before AI, and even if/when you need a human in the loop, why would you want to put that human in the cockpit rather than safely in Virginia?
- remarkEon 7mo ago
  I think we are underestimating and/or forgetting that the enemy gets a vote, and remote piloting something from Virginia all the way out to Japan or Korea or Taiwan involves many signals integrity steps along the way. This is to say that you should assume these signals are interrupted and you will not be able to maintain continuous control of the aircraft from whatever datacenter box the "pilot" sits in. That means fully autonomous decision making, functionally for the entire journey, and independent release authorization. >or else we wouldn't need hundreds to thousands of drone operators in the Ukraine war I don't think this is the reason the systems are not fully autonomous right now ("fully autonomous" here meaning that they can complete the kill chain independently, no HITL). Even if we assume it true that the drones are not "good enough" to be at parity with a human operator, if you had an essentially limitless amount of them, would you really waste the manpower on operating them in FPV mode? You would not, you would completely saturate the battlefield with them. Thus, as it was in the beforetimes and ever shall be, logistics wins wars.
  - Dylan16807 7mo ago
    > This is to say that you should assume these signals are interrupted and you will not be able to maintain continuous control of the aircraft from whatever datacenter box the "pilot" sits in. That means fully autonomous decision making, functionally for the entire journey, and independent release authorization. Only if every mission is absolutely critical. If disruptions are rare then you don't need autonomy.
    - 7mo ago
ironhaven 7mo ago
Manned-Unmanned teaming is not a new concept created in the last couple months to placate fighter pilots in the age of ai. With 5th generation fighter using datalink they to use the active radar in far away AWAC planes for targeting so the stealth fighter can get closer to the enemy without breaking cover by turning on active radar. If you can outsource the radar on a jet it is not a huge leap in logic to put the very hot missiles onto a unmanned aircraft. All of these concepts where written up 20 years ago by both china and the US
- dmix 7mo ago
  > With 5th generation fighter using datalink they to use the active radar in far away AWAC planes for targeting so the stealth fighter can get closer to the enemy without breaking cover by turning on active radar. What benefit does a human pilot offer in this case? Are going to be using their eyes to track their location or see a Chinese fighter jet launching a standoff antiair missile at them? Drones can do AWACS and deep sensor roles, with a pilot and sensor operators far away from the planes. > All of these concepts where written up 20 years ago by both china and the US Defense contractors and the gov planners are often the same group of people, the same small community, there's not that many vendors. They show up at defence trade shows and see what industry is offering them. They tend to stick with the same big safe companies that change slowly. Bold ideas are infrequent. The smaller countries can take those risks easier than America.
budman1 7mo ago
mistakes in A/A combat can have serious repercussions. not only loss of expensive air vehicles, but things like civilian airliners. 'loyal wingman' gives the kill / no kill decision to an Air Force officer. And having the decision maker geographically close eliminates jamming, delays, and the requirements to have a satellite infrastructure (like is required for Predator UAV's). i hope we never assign a piece of code, AI or not, to be the decision maker.
- jacquesm 7mo ago
  > i hope we never assign a piece of code, AI or not, to be the decision maker. This is already a past station, just not at Airbus.
  - esseph 7mo ago
    Yes, we are ~4-5 years into AI kill-chains now, though maybe only 1-3 with full autonomy.
    - nradov 7mo ago
      You haven't been paying attention. We are at least 47 years into AI kill chains. https://www.vp4association.com/aircraft-information-2/32-2/mk-60-captor-mine/ https://www.vp4association.com/aircraft-information-2/32-2/m...
      - jacquesm 7mo ago
        That's not really what they meant. They meant that the weapon is guided by software that decides which targets to pick and autonomously makes that decision without a human in the loop. The device seeks you instead of you going to it. A landmine has no friend-or-foe-or-noncombatant decision engine, it will kill you or maim you just like it will kill or maim the guy that laid it or any other passer by.
        nradov 7mo ago
mikkupikku 7mo ago
My read is that the "loyal wingman" thing is a ploy to get around all the pilots / expilots in Air Force brass who might otherwise gatekeep anything they think is a threat to the careers of human pilots. These people want the Air Force to be about hotshots flying planes; this is part of the reason the US spun off the space stuff, because Air Force brass is institutionally incapable of taking anything other than manned flight seriously.
- rustyhancock 7mo ago
  Really loyal wingmen are just an extension of jets. Ultimately a carrier strike group could achieve many of the missions a F35 can through cruise missiles, ballistic missiles etc. What an F35 provides is a sensory platform deep into enemy airspace. But with the F35 being very expensive, and required to stay silent in RF to maintain stealth it's further desirable to have a loyal wingman out there. The whole thing becomes one large sensor network with th added weapons. It makes most sense in a near adversary situation and as it stands that particular scenario is why the F22 is not exported.
generic92034 7mo ago
You expect drones to replace civil passenger aircraft any time soon?
- eszed 7mo ago
  I think GP's point is more relevant than your question implies. The vast majority of civilian flights could be flown entirely autonomously right now. (I'm not close enough to the aviation industry to make a confident guess, but +90% wouldn't surprise me.) Humans are there to take (decision or control) over when something goes off the happy path - in fact, pilots are encouraged / required to hand-fly landings that could be done automatically in order to keep their skills current. Obviously no one would accept even a 0.01% crash rate for civilian flights, so we're many orders of magnitude of improvement away from replacing pilots in that sector. Military calculations are very different. Every military asset - most definitely including humans - is disposable, and all wars are (in some dimension) wars of attrition. Holding mission success constant, when the cost x capability x ability to manufacture for autonomous platforms becomes cheaper than all that plus training / replacement cost of human pilots, then human pilots will disappear. The logic of war being what it is, I expect HITL decision-making to very quickly be dropped as soon as it is seen to be retarding the progress of a cheaper option.
  - generic92034 7mo ago
    That is why I was talking about civil aircraft. With the waiting list for those aircraft Airbus can stay relevant for a very long time.
  - rkomorn 7mo ago
    > The vast majority of civilian flights could be flown entirely autonomously right now. This is extremely dependent on your definition of "autonomously" because at the moment they are not at all approaching autonomy. At best, they'd be automatic, in the most rote way.
    - eszed 7mo ago
      That's true. It'd be more accurate to say that the planes are capable, but that a lot about how the air transport system is organized would have to change to take full advantage of that - which we don't want/need to do, because an "automatic" system is too brittle, so we'd want skilled pilots on board, anyway.
numpad0 7mo ago
Those low-cost drones are just a fad. Fiber optic TV guided exploding thing is literally the oldest kind of anti-tank missiles. Russian winged cruise missiles are even older, early cold war kinds of stuff. It just so happens that none of Ukraine, Russia, Iran etc has air dominance nor proper war time production capacities, and so they must resort to substituting military equipment with remixes of AliExpress stuffs. Just in the invasion in Iran we all saw Apache handling drones with ease. They can probably put on the minigun or even microgun on an MQ-9, which is a drone, but not like the ones discussed here. Or someone might realize a turret on a Super Tucano is cheaper than the Reaper ground control trailer. My point is, Ukraine and Russia throwing drones at each others is not a sure sign that that's the war of the future.
- jcfrei 7mo ago
  The war in Iran proves the opposite: It is actually the future. The US could easily establish air dominance over Iran, yet it can't stop their military from launching smaller drones both in the air and at sea. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed and air power alone seems unlikely to fix the situation. If you want to effectively eliminate an opponent nowadays you need an army of drones - the economics don't work out if you are only fielding expensive ships, planes and missiles. And regarding your point that an Apache can easily shoot down a drone: Roughly 9/10 drones in the Russia Ukraine frontline get shot down and the remaining 10% make up for about 80% of the casualties (rest being mostly artillery and mines).
  - pjc50 7mo ago
    Exactly. "An Apache can shoot down a drone" is like "Tiger tanks were better than Shermans": the relative numbers of each matter.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 7mo ago
    Right - the relative cost matters very much. A Shahed drone costs $20K each. The Patriot missile interceptor costs $4 Mil each. And the inevitable result is that the interceptors run out first https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-war-israel-tells-us-its-running-low-missile-interceptors https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-war-israel-tells-us-... https://www.economist.com/international/2026/03/13/gulf-states-are-burning-through-interceptors https://www.economist.com/international/2026/03/13/gulf-stat... https://bsky.app/profile/mekka.mekka-tech.com/post/3mgrvx5grf22r https://bsky.app/profile/mekka.mekka-tech.com/post/3mgrvx5gr... The only lasting solution to low-cost drone attacks is low-cost defences. Ukraine knows this. The US apparently does not yet. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/10/what-are-the-ukrainian-drone-interceptors-sent-to-counter-iranian-attacks https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/10/what-are-the-ukrain... But the end result is not "low-cost drones are just a fad." it's drones vs. more drones vs. yet more drones.
GuB-42 7mo ago
One argument is that fighter airplanes are becoming more like airborne control centers than actual fighters. You don't get the same level of situational awareness from a remote controlled drone camera than from inside a cockpit. And if you look at the F-35, what is often put forward is its stealth and communication capabilities. Radars, electronic warfare, etc... that's what's important, and yes, having a human in the loop is important too. These planes can dogfight too, but ideally, they shouldn't, but they still have to be able to defend themselves when things go wrong. Drones like they have in Ukraine are more like cheap missiles, they don't compete against fighter jets, and they can't do anything to them once they have taken off.