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Isn't the whole idea of manned fighter jets antiquated? And if this tech isn't dated already, the Pentagon plans to still be using these jets in 2065. (http:/

Isn't the whole idea of manned fighter jets antiquated? And if this tech isn't dated already, the Pentagon plans to still be using these jets in 2065. (http://online.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-looks-to-lower-costs-of-f-35-joint-strike-fighter-program-1402610449 http://online.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-looks-to-lower-costs...) I don't see a strong reason the Air Force should be investing so much in fighter jets and not focusing on drone technology. He mentions dogfights, do those even happen anymore? Why participate in a manned dogfight when you can simply send drones -- and if they are shot down, send one more, or one hundred more. The U.S. military is always fighting the last war. In this case, they aren't even fighting the last several wars, but are still locked into Cold War, pre-drone thinking.

josefresco 12y ago
Drones don't go on bombing runs during an invasion or as a precursor to large troop movements. Drones can't really support ground troops well due to limited ammo (although they can provide eyes in the sky support for long periods of time). Also, the air superiority that these aircraft enable, allows the use of drones, and other ground advantages. So yes, while air-to-air dog fighting is rare (although posturing certainly isn't), it's only one use for these planes.
- Crito 12y ago
  I don't understand why drones must inherently have limited ammunition or bomb payloads. Just make the same big beefy airplane you were going to, but instead of having a human fly it by wire, have a computer fly it by wire. Outfit it with more sensors if necessary, but I suspect modern fighter jets are pretty well decked out in that department already. The only thing I can think of is creative solutions to incoming missiles, but if that really is something that computers cannot currently do, I doubt that will remain the case for long.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    I speculate that drones have limited capacity because drones are purposefully made small. Why? Because smaller means harder to see and shoot down- useful for a drone. They are more disposable than a pilot, but that doesn't mean they are cheap.
    - commandar 12y ago
      Not all drones are small. I had the chance to get a glimpse of an RQ-4 Global Hawk being refurbished for a museum recently. The thing's practically a full size plane. https://www.dropbox.com/s/ve69jkhqxtpppv0/IMG_0608.JPG https://www.dropbox.com/s/ve69jkhqxtpppv0/IMG_0608.JPG That's with the 130ft wings removed.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Isn't it the case that older fighter jets are retro-fitted with remote controls and used as drones for target practice?
    - greedo 12y ago
      Yes, and you used the correct term for them: targets.
stcredzero 12y ago
He mentions dogfights, do those even happen anymore? High G maneuvering to defeat missiles certainly still happens. There is a YouTube F-16 cockpit video of one flight's encounter with a SAM missile trap in the balkans. The F-16 is supremely maneuverable. Sounds like they were desperate and barely made it out. (One plane was hit, IIRC.) EDIT: I remembered wrong. This was the video about an incident over Iraq. Also, it was due to a mistake in mission planning. Drones would be even better at this in many ways. Possibly worse in terms of situational awareness, however, depending on how well integrated the pilot's information is.
- sukuriant 12y ago
  Could you post a link to that YouTube video? sounds awesome.
  - stcredzero 12y ago
    I remembered wrong. It was over Bagdhad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uh4yMAx2UA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uh4yMAx2UA
    - sukuriant 12y ago
      Wow. And in reference to your previous comment, if a drone pilot makes a mistake, we lose money, not lives. Another advantage of the drones.
AmVess 12y ago
Manned aircraft don't become lawn darts when you start jamming radio comms.
- Crito 12y ago
  Why should drones? Even consumer drones that you can pick up today on amazon know how to return to base when they lose communication. Those depend on GPS, but I see no reason why they could not anticipate GPS jamming and incorporate dead reckoning.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
greedo 12y ago
Drones are nice when you have a permissive environment where the locals don't have a decent air defense system. But otherwise, the current models we have are relatively easy to shoot down. They lack speed, maneuverability, and their operators lack the situational awareness that a pilot would bring to the table. There are better drones being developed, but they will be expensive and will depend extensively on sat links for communicating between the drone and base station. This will be problematic against a peer foe who can jam radio transmissions.
- Tuna-Fish 12y ago
  That's why the US is developing tracked laser communication systems. They are effectively impossible to jam.
  - greedo 12y ago
    Laser is line of sight, limiting your range. And nature has a great way of jamming lasers, called clouds. If you were able to get a decently powered laser in a satellite, it wouldn't be able to control too many aircraft unless it looked like a porcupine. And then it would have to deal with anti-satellite defenses that both China and Russia have spent significant sums on.
    - greedo 12y ago
      Not sure why this was downvoted.
    - Already__Taken 12y ago
      Unless you happen to have an autonomous reusable spacecraft with significant cross range ability and enough fuel to continuously change orbits.
    - Tuna-Fish 12y ago
      > Laser is line of sight, limiting your range. Yes, with current equipment it limits your range to somewhere beyond the orbit of the moon. Yes, we can now keep a laser and a receiver tracked on each other from 300000km away. > And nature has a great way of jamming lasers, called clouds. There are wavelengths that are not hampered much by clouds. > If you were able to get a decently powered laser in a satellite We can. > it wouldn't be able to control too many aircraft unless it looked like a porcupine. ... but this is a problem, you'd basically be limited in total bandwidth by count of satellites. Meaning you either need to launch a lot of them, or reduce bandwidth per drone.
jordan0day 12y ago
> The U.S. military is always fighting the last war. In this case, they aren't even fighting the last several wars, but are still locked into Cold War, pre-drone thinking. I think there's an argument to be made that investment in new fighter jets is potentially an effort to avoid fighting the last (aerial) war. That is, no one expects that the USA will actually get into a war with Russia, China, or one of the other "usual suspects" which has significant air-warfare capability. The existence of sufficiently advanced weaponry (on both sides) helps ensure that such a war won't happen. It's certainly not the biggest motivator avoiding war (who needs motivation to not fight war, anyway?), but enough of these deterrents added up helps keep negotiations civil. All that said, it's probably just the military-industrial complex at work -- why give up multi-billion dollar fighter jet contracts for much more reasonable multi-(tens? hundreds?)-million dollar drone contracts?
anologwintermut 12y ago
Remote controlled drones have limitations due to electronic warfare/jamming (not to mention security, see the one the US lost in Iran). There's also an issue with lag. Actually autonomous ones are as far as I know only good for static targets (effectively they are reusable cruise missiles).Close air support or deciding whether to engage an enemy airplane or not gets tricky.
- robryk 12y ago
  I wonder if someone's trying to make semi-autonomous drones controlled by optical links or very directional radio links.
  - alexeisadeski3 12y ago
    I believe these are already in late testing stages.
- alwaysdoit 12y ago
  Aren't the missiles they fire subject to the same jamming problems?
  - 3327 12y ago
    no most missiles have internal guidance systems. Inertial guidance, preset guidance etc.
  - aeturnum 12y ago
    Depends on the mechanism used by the missile to follow the target. My impression is that most missiles don't have guidance systems that require direct communication after launch,
    - hga 12y ago
      A whole bunch of missiles actually do, like the Sparrow and Standard. The longer range ones really can use it to increase hit probability. Or so I've read is true for the Phoenix and AIM-120 missiles, classed as "fire and forget". and the newest Standard missile uses a AIM-120 derived head with a bigger antenna. And I'm sure still depends on mid-course corrections (for that matter, I've read the current models self-destruct if they doesn't get guidance fairly soon after launch).
josu 12y ago
Don't drones raise many ethical issues? I'm not asking if you agree or disagree with the use of drones in wars, I'm actually asking if there is a debate going on about the use of unmanned vehicles in wars.
- JasonFruit 12y ago
  Wars raise many ethical issues. I'm surprised there isn't a debate going on about the use of manned vehicles in wars.
baddox 12y ago
> The U.S. military is always fighting the last war. In this case, they aren't even fighting the last several wars, but are still locked into Cold War, pre-drone thinking. Where are you getting that idea? What other countries use drone warfare? As far as I can, it was the CIA that started the whole drone strike campaign, and I'm not aware of other countries that use it consistently.
- jfoutz 12y ago
  The argument goes, if you want to win the next air war, you should use drones. lots of drones. Air to air combat is all missiles, and each of those missiles is half a million dollars. Now, I'm not aware of an autonomous drone that can shoot down an f-22 with a missile, but it seems like a solvable technical challenge, especially if you're willing to throw a trillion dollars at the problem. So anyway, for each f-22 send up 7 drones. one for each missile, and one to survive to get the kill, as long as the 6 lost drones are cheaper than the f22, you're winning, kinda. Furthermore, pilots are expensive and take time to replace. I doubt there are even 10,000 combat pilots in the world (wag) kill off a few thousand, and the drones are against rookies. All the while, the drone software is improving and getting even tougher to kill. And, the drones should be capable of things that that human pilots just can't accomplish - high g turns for example. Self driving cars aren't better than the best drivers, but they're way above average drivers, eventually the robots will be better. Same with jets. why not start now?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- wahsd 12y ago
  Other countries aren't warmongers that are constantly looking for the next large scale conflict they can use to rationalize irrational levels of spending. No other country has had any kind of conflict where a drone would have provided any advantage. Hell, even our drones are not effective and cause more problems than they are worth. We just like being screwed and bamboozled by the next big thing our military services complex has to sell us. If you have any idea of the consequences and effects of using drones in tactical operations then you would know that if any other country was using them in the way we use them we would be crying foul and trying to passive aggressively shame them for killing innocent civilians.
rayiner 12y ago
> Isn't the whole idea of manned fighter jets antiquated? Probably not for quite awhile. Issues of lethality aside, the electronics aren't there yet. In Afghanistan, there were long waits to get downlink bandwidth to get video back from UAV's. We're nowhere near the point where we can maintain effective communications with a squadron of drones big enough to do real damage, and the "automated killer drone AI" isn't close yet either. Yes, the Air Force needs to anticipate the future, but I think the future is a bit further away than you think. If they're planning on using these until 2065, they might start designing drone replacements in say 2045. That's only 30 years away, and probably not a bad ballpark estimate for how long it'll take to get this technology to the point where you can start really relying on it for offensive capability. It sounds like a long time from now, but the F-22 RFP process was started just about thirty years ago.
- greghinch 12y ago
  > and the "automated killer drone AI" isn't close yet either. Now there's a terrifying prospect. Is this actually something we should expect to see any time soon? My understanding has been that, films aside, "AI" software is nowhere near the point where we might run a drone that can kill on it
  - rbanffy 12y ago
    As long as they don't kill anyone outside the supposed target areas, I don't see much objection coming from the military procurement people.
  - wodenokoto 12y ago
    We are pretty close to driving a car, we have beat human facial recognition, we have very good weapons aiming. Tying it up to something with a very, very low false positive kill rate is the hard part, but we are very close with a lot of the components.
    - akira2501 12y ago
      It doesn't have to have weapons control, even. If it's limited to an "AI scout" role it could just loiter around, find potential targets and flag them for a human operator. If the targets are reviewed to be valuable enough you could take manual control and fly an assault mission.
netcan 12y ago
Maybe. Maybe not. We don't really know unless/until major power fight each other what equipment works, what doesn't and what's irrelevant. The quip about fighting the last war is half true. I think they're aware of it. It's just that fighting the next war is pretty hard.
- hackuser 12y ago
  > The quip about fighting the last war ... ... has become an over-used cliche, the one thing many people know about military planning, and thus it is re-used, like the last wars' stratagems, far beyond its weight or value.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
pjmorris 12y ago
Others are pointing out present issues with drones, but it seems that an airframe that doesn't have to carry a human or human support systems leaves many more degrees of freedom for optimization toward any set of airborne design goals than one saddled by carrying a human. I'd be highly surprised if there weren't air defense drones on drawing boards around the world right now.
redthrowaway 12y ago
Drones can't do air-to-air. The lag alone gives it a lethal handicap.
- eldelshell 12y ago
  Air-to-air combat on today's conditions aren't close combat at all (as Hollywood might want you to believe). Most pilots won't even see their target being taken down by a missile with a 30kms range. By the time a dogfight takes place, most of the aircrafts have been taken down by missiles.

josefresco 12y ago

Drones don't go on bombing runs during an invasion or as a precursor to large troop movements. Drones can't really support ground troops well due to limited ammo (although they can provide eyes in the sky support for long periods of time). Also, the air superiority that these aircraft enable, allows the use of drones, and other ground advantages. So yes, while air-to-air dog fighting is rare (although posturing certainly isn't), it's only one use for these planes.

Crito 12y ago
I don't understand why drones must inherently have limited ammunition or bomb payloads. Just make the same big beefy airplane you were going to, but instead of having a human fly it by wire, have a computer fly it by wire. Outfit it with more sensors if necessary, but I suspect modern fighter jets are pretty well decked out in that department already. The only thing I can think of is creative solutions to incoming missiles, but if that really is something that computers cannot currently do, I doubt that will remain the case for long.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  I speculate that drones have limited capacity because drones are purposefully made small. Why? Because smaller means harder to see and shoot down- useful for a drone. They are more disposable than a pilot, but that doesn't mean they are cheap.
  - commandar 12y ago
    Not all drones are small. I had the chance to get a glimpse of an RQ-4 Global Hawk being refurbished for a museum recently. The thing's practically a full size plane. https://www.dropbox.com/s/ve69jkhqxtpppv0/IMG_0608.JPG https://www.dropbox.com/s/ve69jkhqxtpppv0/IMG_0608.JPG That's with the 130ft wings removed.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Isn't it the case that older fighter jets are retro-fitted with remote controls and used as drones for target practice?
  - greedo 12y ago
    Yes, and you used the correct term for them: targets.

stcredzero 12y ago

He mentions dogfights, do those even happen anymore? High G maneuvering to defeat missiles certainly still happens. There is a YouTube F-16 cockpit video of one flight's encounter with a SAM missile trap in the balkans. The F-16 is supremely maneuverable. Sounds like they were desperate and barely made it out. (One plane was hit, IIRC.) EDIT: I remembered wrong. This was the video about an incident over Iraq. Also, it was due to a mistake in mission planning. Drones would be even better at this in many ways. Possibly worse in terms of situational awareness, however, depending on how well integrated the pilot's information is.

sukuriant 12y ago
Could you post a link to that YouTube video? sounds awesome.
- stcredzero 12y ago
  I remembered wrong. It was over Bagdhad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uh4yMAx2UA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uh4yMAx2UA
  - sukuriant 12y ago
    Wow. And in reference to your previous comment, if a drone pilot makes a mistake, we lose money, not lives. Another advantage of the drones.

AmVess 12y ago

Manned aircraft don't become lawn darts when you start jamming radio comms.

Crito 12y ago
Why should drones? Even consumer drones that you can pick up today on amazon know how to return to base when they lose communication. Those depend on GPS, but I see no reason why they could not anticipate GPS jamming and incorporate dead reckoning.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

greedo 12y ago

Drones are nice when you have a permissive environment where the locals don't have a decent air defense system. But otherwise, the current models we have are relatively easy to shoot down. They lack speed, maneuverability, and their operators lack the situational awareness that a pilot would bring to the table. There are better drones being developed, but they will be expensive and will depend extensively on sat links for communicating between the drone and base station. This will be problematic against a peer foe who can jam radio transmissions.

Tuna-Fish 12y ago
That's why the US is developing tracked laser communication systems. They are effectively impossible to jam.
- greedo 12y ago
  Laser is line of sight, limiting your range. And nature has a great way of jamming lasers, called clouds. If you were able to get a decently powered laser in a satellite, it wouldn't be able to control too many aircraft unless it looked like a porcupine. And then it would have to deal with anti-satellite defenses that both China and Russia have spent significant sums on.
  - greedo 12y ago
    Not sure why this was downvoted.
  - Already__Taken 12y ago
    Unless you happen to have an autonomous reusable spacecraft with significant cross range ability and enough fuel to continuously change orbits.
  - Tuna-Fish 12y ago
    > Laser is line of sight, limiting your range. Yes, with current equipment it limits your range to somewhere beyond the orbit of the moon. Yes, we can now keep a laser and a receiver tracked on each other from 300000km away. > And nature has a great way of jamming lasers, called clouds. There are wavelengths that are not hampered much by clouds. > If you were able to get a decently powered laser in a satellite We can. > it wouldn't be able to control too many aircraft unless it looked like a porcupine. ... but this is a problem, you'd basically be limited in total bandwidth by count of satellites. Meaning you either need to launch a lot of them, or reduce bandwidth per drone.

jordan0day 12y ago

> The U.S. military is always fighting the last war. In this case, they aren't even fighting the last several wars, but are still locked into Cold War, pre-drone thinking. I think there's an argument to be made that investment in new fighter jets is potentially an effort to avoid fighting the last (aerial) war. That is, no one expects that the USA will actually get into a war with Russia, China, or one of the other "usual suspects" which has significant air-warfare capability. The existence of sufficiently advanced weaponry (on both sides) helps ensure that such a war won't happen. It's certainly not the biggest motivator avoiding war (who needs motivation to not fight war, anyway?), but enough of these deterrents added up helps keep negotiations civil. All that said, it's probably just the military-industrial complex at work -- why give up multi-billion dollar fighter jet contracts for much more reasonable multi-(tens? hundreds?)-million dollar drone contracts?

anologwintermut 12y ago

Remote controlled drones have limitations due to electronic warfare/jamming (not to mention security, see the one the US lost in Iran). There's also an issue with lag. Actually autonomous ones are as far as I know only good for static targets (effectively they are reusable cruise missiles).Close air support or deciding whether to engage an enemy airplane or not gets tricky.

robryk 12y ago
I wonder if someone's trying to make semi-autonomous drones controlled by optical links or very directional radio links.
- alexeisadeski3 12y ago
  I believe these are already in late testing stages.
alwaysdoit 12y ago
Aren't the missiles they fire subject to the same jamming problems?
- 3327 12y ago
  no most missiles have internal guidance systems. Inertial guidance, preset guidance etc.
- aeturnum 12y ago
  Depends on the mechanism used by the missile to follow the target. My impression is that most missiles don't have guidance systems that require direct communication after launch,
  - hga 12y ago
    A whole bunch of missiles actually do, like the Sparrow and Standard. The longer range ones really can use it to increase hit probability. Or so I've read is true for the Phoenix and AIM-120 missiles, classed as "fire and forget". and the newest Standard missile uses a AIM-120 derived head with a bigger antenna. And I'm sure still depends on mid-course corrections (for that matter, I've read the current models self-destruct if they doesn't get guidance fairly soon after launch).

josu 12y ago

Don't drones raise many ethical issues? I'm not asking if you agree or disagree with the use of drones in wars, I'm actually asking if there is a debate going on about the use of unmanned vehicles in wars.

JasonFruit 12y ago
Wars raise many ethical issues. I'm surprised there isn't a debate going on about the use of manned vehicles in wars.

baddox 12y ago

> The U.S. military is always fighting the last war. In this case, they aren't even fighting the last several wars, but are still locked into Cold War, pre-drone thinking. Where are you getting that idea? What other countries use drone warfare? As far as I can, it was the CIA that started the whole drone strike campaign, and I'm not aware of other countries that use it consistently.

jfoutz 12y ago
The argument goes, if you want to win the next air war, you should use drones. lots of drones. Air to air combat is all missiles, and each of those missiles is half a million dollars. Now, I'm not aware of an autonomous drone that can shoot down an f-22 with a missile, but it seems like a solvable technical challenge, especially if you're willing to throw a trillion dollars at the problem. So anyway, for each f-22 send up 7 drones. one for each missile, and one to survive to get the kill, as long as the 6 lost drones are cheaper than the f22, you're winning, kinda. Furthermore, pilots are expensive and take time to replace. I doubt there are even 10,000 combat pilots in the world (wag) kill off a few thousand, and the drones are against rookies. All the while, the drone software is improving and getting even tougher to kill. And, the drones should be capable of things that that human pilots just can't accomplish - high g turns for example. Self driving cars aren't better than the best drivers, but they're way above average drivers, eventually the robots will be better. Same with jets. why not start now?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
wahsd 12y ago
Other countries aren't warmongers that are constantly looking for the next large scale conflict they can use to rationalize irrational levels of spending. No other country has had any kind of conflict where a drone would have provided any advantage. Hell, even our drones are not effective and cause more problems than they are worth. We just like being screwed and bamboozled by the next big thing our military services complex has to sell us. If you have any idea of the consequences and effects of using drones in tactical operations then you would know that if any other country was using them in the way we use them we would be crying foul and trying to passive aggressively shame them for killing innocent civilians.

rayiner 12y ago

> Isn't the whole idea of manned fighter jets antiquated? Probably not for quite awhile. Issues of lethality aside, the electronics aren't there yet. In Afghanistan, there were long waits to get downlink bandwidth to get video back from UAV's. We're nowhere near the point where we can maintain effective communications with a squadron of drones big enough to do real damage, and the "automated killer drone AI" isn't close yet either. Yes, the Air Force needs to anticipate the future, but I think the future is a bit further away than you think. If they're planning on using these until 2065, they might start designing drone replacements in say 2045. That's only 30 years away, and probably not a bad ballpark estimate for how long it'll take to get this technology to the point where you can start really relying on it for offensive capability. It sounds like a long time from now, but the F-22 RFP process was started just about thirty years ago.

greghinch 12y ago
> and the "automated killer drone AI" isn't close yet either. Now there's a terrifying prospect. Is this actually something we should expect to see any time soon? My understanding has been that, films aside, "AI" software is nowhere near the point where we might run a drone that can kill on it
- rbanffy 12y ago
  As long as they don't kill anyone outside the supposed target areas, I don't see much objection coming from the military procurement people.
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  We are pretty close to driving a car, we have beat human facial recognition, we have very good weapons aiming. Tying it up to something with a very, very low false positive kill rate is the hard part, but we are very close with a lot of the components.
  - akira2501 12y ago
    It doesn't have to have weapons control, even. If it's limited to an "AI scout" role it could just loiter around, find potential targets and flag them for a human operator. If the targets are reviewed to be valuable enough you could take manual control and fly an assault mission.

netcan 12y ago

Maybe. Maybe not. We don't really know unless/until major power fight each other what equipment works, what doesn't and what's irrelevant. The quip about fighting the last war is half true. I think they're aware of it. It's just that fighting the next war is pretty hard.

hackuser 12y ago
> The quip about fighting the last war ... ... has become an over-used cliche, the one thing many people know about military planning, and thus it is re-used, like the last wars' stratagems, far beyond its weight or value.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

pjmorris 12y ago

Others are pointing out present issues with drones, but it seems that an airframe that doesn't have to carry a human or human support systems leaves many more degrees of freedom for optimization toward any set of airborne design goals than one saddled by carrying a human. I'd be highly surprised if there weren't air defense drones on drawing boards around the world right now.

redthrowaway 12y ago

Drones can't do air-to-air. The lag alone gives it a lethal handicap.

eldelshell 12y ago
Air-to-air combat on today's conditions aren't close combat at all (as Hollywood might want you to believe). Most pilots won't even see their target being taken down by a missile with a 30kms range. By the time a dogfight takes place, most of the aircrafts have been taken down by missiles.