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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 Ta

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.
- rzerowan 7mo ago
  Or more interestingly with the low-earth sat/data network. Seeing as projectssuch as starlink are basically mil in nature with a side of barely profitable civilian use. The whole data centers in space makes more sense. These are not for running cat blogs and video streaming , which is waht they are/will be marketed as. Realworld application will always be a command and control node spanning the globe for the mil use. And as its rolloed out globally can basically provide jammingfree links for the autonomous commands from space.
  - Paradigma11 7mo ago
    How do you defend them?
zarzavat 7mo ago
The reason that FPV drones are so easily disrupted is that they are too light to carry anything more than a radio and fly low. Disrupting the signal for a normal-sized aircraft is much harder. If you're flying at 10s of thousands of feet and have a line of sight to multiple satellites it's going to take some serious weaponry to disrupt that.
- remarkEon 7mo ago
  True. But the next rung up the escalation ladder is of course disrupting the satellites.
  - b112 7mo ago
    I envision them all gone seconds into any large scale war. The G forces are another thing. I wonder why they aren't stsrting wth missle platforms instead. Sure, winged flight has uses, but taking a missle platform, adding small munitions instead of a big bang?
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 7mo ago
      > I wonder why they aren't stsrting wth missle platforms instead Price and ease of manufacture. Missiles are expensive and hard to build.
    - remarkEon 7mo ago
      I'm not sure about this. Space is big and these satellite constellations are getting very large, with lots of redundancy. I know I'm sort of arguing against my previous point, but bear with me for a sec. You'd need an anti-satellite system that either destroys them kinetically (accepting the cost of the debris field) or one that breaks them electronically (an EMP or another device that defeats them electronically). The United States' underlying philosophy on advanced weapons has, for a long time, been precision so I could see the emergence of in-orbit interception & defeat/disable platforms. But you'd need a lot of them for the doctrine to be effective, which means a lot of mass-to-orbit logistics. Adversaries do not have this, so I would expect e.g. PRC to have an alternate strategy of rendering entire orbits unusable or dangerous, which I think is easier. Regarding your missile platform question, there are several companies that already manufacturing loitering munitions, and long-range loitering cruise missiles are on the roadmap, so to speak.
fpoling 7mo ago
FPV drones cannot have powerful GPU yet to enable truly autonomous flight. And the issue is not only weight/energy restrictions, but also cost.
- daymanstep 7mo ago
  You don't need a super powerful GPU to do computer vision. There are cheap small devices that can do it.
- numpad0 7mo ago
  Autonomous flight is significantly easier than autonomous driving. You just fly between points in space, and there's nothing but air inbetween. The ground control handles most of collision avoidance, and if that's not available, it's easily achieved by moving 300ft/100m up or down.
- alex7o 7mo ago
  True, but take into account that plants need to be able to fly/fight with instruments only and without vision. Also dogfights are much rarer now, most people just fling rockets at each other (so you know how much these cost, a b200 seems cheap in comparison)

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.

rzerowan 7mo ago
Or more interestingly with the low-earth sat/data network. Seeing as projectssuch as starlink are basically mil in nature with a side of barely profitable civilian use. The whole data centers in space makes more sense. These are not for running cat blogs and video streaming , which is waht they are/will be marketed as. Realworld application will always be a command and control node spanning the globe for the mil use. And as its rolloed out globally can basically provide jammingfree links for the autonomous commands from space.
- Paradigma11 7mo ago
  How do you defend them?

zarzavat 7mo ago

The reason that FPV drones are so easily disrupted is that they are too light to carry anything more than a radio and fly low. Disrupting the signal for a normal-sized aircraft is much harder. If you're flying at 10s of thousands of feet and have a line of sight to multiple satellites it's going to take some serious weaponry to disrupt that.

remarkEon 7mo ago
True. But the next rung up the escalation ladder is of course disrupting the satellites.
- b112 7mo ago
  I envision them all gone seconds into any large scale war. The G forces are another thing. I wonder why they aren't stsrting wth missle platforms instead. Sure, winged flight has uses, but taking a missle platform, adding small munitions instead of a big bang?
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 7mo ago
    > I wonder why they aren't stsrting wth missle platforms instead Price and ease of manufacture. Missiles are expensive and hard to build.
  - remarkEon 7mo ago
    I'm not sure about this. Space is big and these satellite constellations are getting very large, with lots of redundancy. I know I'm sort of arguing against my previous point, but bear with me for a sec. You'd need an anti-satellite system that either destroys them kinetically (accepting the cost of the debris field) or one that breaks them electronically (an EMP or another device that defeats them electronically). The United States' underlying philosophy on advanced weapons has, for a long time, been precision so I could see the emergence of in-orbit interception & defeat/disable platforms. But you'd need a lot of them for the doctrine to be effective, which means a lot of mass-to-orbit logistics. Adversaries do not have this, so I would expect e.g. PRC to have an alternate strategy of rendering entire orbits unusable or dangerous, which I think is easier. Regarding your missile platform question, there are several companies that already manufacturing loitering munitions, and long-range loitering cruise missiles are on the roadmap, so to speak.

fpoling 7mo ago

FPV drones cannot have powerful GPU yet to enable truly autonomous flight. And the issue is not only weight/energy restrictions, but also cost.

daymanstep 7mo ago
You don't need a super powerful GPU to do computer vision. There are cheap small devices that can do it.
numpad0 7mo ago
Autonomous flight is significantly easier than autonomous driving. You just fly between points in space, and there's nothing but air inbetween. The ground control handles most of collision avoidance, and if that's not available, it's easily achieved by moving 300ft/100m up or down.
alex7o 7mo ago
True, but take into account that plants need to be able to fly/fight with instruments only and without vision. Also dogfights are much rarer now, most people just fling rockets at each other (so you know how much these cost, a b200 seems cheap in comparison)