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Do we really need manned fighter planes at all? For a trillion dollars, you can overwhelm enemy air defenses with cheap, primitive drones in a saturation attack

Do we really need manned fighter planes at all? For a trillion dollars, you can overwhelm enemy air defenses with cheap, primitive drones in a saturation attack. A tomahawk missile costs about $575k per unit, that lets you buy about 2 million tomahawks for $1 trillion. If you built a drone version that could loiter over an enemy airspace and then attack, sort of a tomahawk version of the Predator, you could buy a hundred thousand of them even if they were 10 million a piece. You could also built UCAV fighters that could out-turn and fly most fighters by avoiding the need for the cockpit overhead and restrictions in g-force. Missiles make 40g turns, and drone airfames have been build to sustain 12-15g turning. Are we spending a trillion dollars because the AirForce has a romantic notion of a human dogfighter in the seat when a guy with a joystick could do the job? Top Gun is a lot less interesting if robots or teleoperation is in play, but do we really that kind of engagement?

nextw33k 11y ago
A pragmatist would say that you are right. However ethics teaches us that you are wrong. Remotely destroying things is not going to help us as a race. Keeping the human in the danger zone helps prevent violence, everybody has something to lose.
- cromwellian 11y ago
  In practice, in recent battles, the US quickly gains air superiority and US fighter pilots face little if any challenge or danger. I'm not sure it's much of prevention. Before manned US fighters enter a war zone, cruise missile attacks, HARM missiles, and stealth bombers usually take out the air defense system and bomb runways. The US really hasn't faced a challenge to air superiority in decades. I'd prefer we find other ways to keep out of war rather than a few hundred pilots at negligible risk.
- cheald 11y ago
  There is a reason that we fight our battles with guns and bombs rather than swords and shields; removing the soldier from danger insofar as is feasible while maintaining combat superiority has been the aim of most all warfare technology developments since the dawn of time. While you can most certainly argue against the ethics of war, if you're going to permit war as a reality of human existence, then I'd say it's quite unethical to insist on waging said war with technologies that put your soldiers at any further risk than necessary. It's not like we aim to fight fair wars.
- Htsthbjig 11y ago
  "However ethics teaches us that you are wrong." Well, there is nothing ethical about war. People in horses killed easily those not in horses. Then people in horses were killed easily with artillery as it improved. The same happened with ships, making boarding unnecessary. You know what they said about tanks when they appeared: they were not ethical. Then planes made possible to shoot someone kilometers away with heavy artillery(that before planes could not see far away). Not ethical at all. Then came air bombers, the nuclear bomb. Today the US kills 10.000 people in Iraq annually with air drones just pushing buttons thousands of miles away. It is already happening on one side. The only difference is when the other side starts using it too. Then we will consider it unethical(after decades using it on others).
  - DanielBMarkham 11y ago
    When the machine gun was invented, Europeans congratulated themselves that they were the only ones with machine guns. After all, such a nasty weapon of mass death wouldn't be something that Europeans would ethically use on other Europeans. That didn't last long.
- notahacker 11y ago
  On a micro level the opposite is true. The worst that's going to happen to a drone operator for not firing first is a reprimand for losing the equipment. On a policymaking level, I can't think of too many air strikes called off from fear of the airmen's lives. Fear of terrorist reprisals, foreign policy debacles and ending up with people on the ground are far bigger issues to be considered which won't go away with drones.
akira2501 11y ago
> For a trillion dollars, you can overwhelm enemy air defenses with cheap, primitive drones in a saturation attack. For a few hundred dollars I can jam your communications channel(s) to the drones. Asymmetric warfare sucks.
- simoncion 11y ago
  And, depending on how your jammer works, I can probably kill it for a few thousand dollars (+- an order of magnitude). Pentagon procurement is a shitshow, but the DoD has many brilliant radio, radar, and signals guys working for them directly, or indirectly.
- kogepathic 11y ago
  > For a few hundred dollars I can jam your communications channel(s) to the drones. The same could be said for manned fighters. Granted, you still have a pilot who's there and capable of making decisions independently of communications. But, I imagine if you threw up enough interference to screw with a drone, you'd probably make some very pretty lights happen on an F-35's radar.
- ObviousScience 11y ago
  > For a few hundred dollars I can jam your communications channel(s) to the drones. Asymmetric warfare sucks. The problem is that once we're talking tens of millions of dollars and up -- no, you can't. We're talking the swarm is likely operating in a shared point-to-point link mode, either using highly directional antennas that are essentially deaf to below, optical links, or (more likely) a mixture of both modes. At 10,000 drones, they likely can form a stable mesh network over the city covering a wide enough area at a few miles in the sky that you're talking about having to run power plants or detonate magnets with high explosives to generate the kind of wattage needed to shout in to the directional communications gear. Jamming a few hobbyist drones is nothing like jamming thousands of military grade drones, and the techniques you think will stop their communications aren't all that effective. However, scanning the area under your bot swarm of amateur attempts to jam the network is probably a great way to target RF engineers in preparation for a ground invasion, and minimize their ability to improvise communications gear once the main communications networks are knocked out. tl;dr: Taking out a $10,000,000+ swarm of military grade weapons isn't the same as disabling a few hobbyist trinkets, and may get you seriously hurt in the process.
colechristensen 11y ago
A big reason for the huge price tag and many delays has to do with the very broken military acquisition process. It's a mess, a huge problem that not many people have much insight into and fewer posses the real motivation and capability to change. You can make a fairly valid parallel can be made with web designers and bad clients. You start off with a clear goal and reasonable costs and deliverables, and through iteration after iteration of needless revisions, terrible requests, and changed requirements you end up with a clown hat, a fart button, all in comic sans at 10x the original estimate. --- Nobody wants to dogfight – the F-35 wasn't designed for it and modern strategy has nothing to do with it. You destroy the enemy with smart missiles long before either of you sees the other – F35 stealth is designed to delay detection as long as possible. This report takes the test completely out of context. It wasn't a wargame between A and B, it was a very specific situation under severe restrictions used to test the boundaries of the F-35's role. A real wargame would end with both sides never getting within miles. Not understanding the context of why the test was done leads to real misunderstanding. ---- As for drones - it is true they have a huge future, but they aren't the only solution. Modern air superiority battles are as much about stealth and electronic warfare as anything else. If your entire enemy is remote-controlled robots, your real target becomes the communications. There is very real value to having a human in the theater of battle – many of the strengths of the F-35 revolve around it as a platform for the interaction of many different communications, intelligence, and weapons assets ... the pilot is the command and control center for a whole network of activity which is much more resilient than remote control satellite RC planes and missiles. Dog fighting only happens when absolutely everything else fails and both sides can bring each other into the stone age of point-and-shoot flying. --- In a real war with a competent enemy, the first target (if we aren't all erased in a nuclear inferno) is going to be communications satellites. Remember that a significant portion of how America fights battles is winning wars on paper so nobody ever thinks it's a good idea to start a real one, and by that I mean a war against a competent enemy playing at the same level – not regional conflicts and proxy wars like we've been fighting since WWII.
- rwallace 11y ago
  It's perfectly reasonable to say that in the future, human pilots won't be dogfighting, that's the job of missiles and drones, the human's job is to exercise tactical control close enough to not need satellite links. But in that case, if the F-35's real job is to serve as a sort of fast, stealthy Awacs, then surely it shouldn't incur all the compromises inherent in building a plane that looks like it was supposed to replace the F-16?
netcan 11y ago
It's hard to know these thing unless someone tries it, but probably not. Air defences are difficult to overwhelm. Gaza/Hamas recently tried to overwhelm Israeli missile defence with primitive rockets with very no success. The rockets were very primitive but had the advantage of a short range, which is harder to defend against. OTOH, the intercepting missiles cost orders of magnitude more than the offensive rockets, so it might be possible to drain the ammunition supply. "loiter over an enemy airspace" is only possible if you already have aerial control. Overall, armies are conservative. It's dangerous to try and build a strategy around fighting styles that have never been tried at scale. It's probably worth researching though.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > OTOH, the intercepting missiles cost orders of magnitude more than the offensive rockets, so it might be possible to drain the ammunition supply. This is the key, I think. As long as you can pound your enemy with cheap hardware forcing him to use up his more expensive one, you're actually successful in your attack - you're bleeding out their economy.
  - obsurveyor 11y ago
    Israel's rocket defense system, the one used to stop the attacks mentioned in the parent post is really good at being frugal in which rockets it shoots down. It doesn't just try to shoot down every rocket coming at it, it plots them and prioritizes ones that will most likely hit valuable or populated targets. It lets the ones that are going to land in empty fields go, since the risk and damage is minimal.
whatusername 11y ago
Pretty much... https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/cheap-drones/ https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/cheap-drones/

nextw33k 11y ago

A pragmatist would say that you are right. However ethics teaches us that you are wrong. Remotely destroying things is not going to help us as a race. Keeping the human in the danger zone helps prevent violence, everybody has something to lose.

cromwellian 11y ago
In practice, in recent battles, the US quickly gains air superiority and US fighter pilots face little if any challenge or danger. I'm not sure it's much of prevention. Before manned US fighters enter a war zone, cruise missile attacks, HARM missiles, and stealth bombers usually take out the air defense system and bomb runways. The US really hasn't faced a challenge to air superiority in decades. I'd prefer we find other ways to keep out of war rather than a few hundred pilots at negligible risk.
cheald 11y ago
There is a reason that we fight our battles with guns and bombs rather than swords and shields; removing the soldier from danger insofar as is feasible while maintaining combat superiority has been the aim of most all warfare technology developments since the dawn of time. While you can most certainly argue against the ethics of war, if you're going to permit war as a reality of human existence, then I'd say it's quite unethical to insist on waging said war with technologies that put your soldiers at any further risk than necessary. It's not like we aim to fight fair wars.
Htsthbjig 11y ago
"However ethics teaches us that you are wrong." Well, there is nothing ethical about war. People in horses killed easily those not in horses. Then people in horses were killed easily with artillery as it improved. The same happened with ships, making boarding unnecessary. You know what they said about tanks when they appeared: they were not ethical. Then planes made possible to shoot someone kilometers away with heavy artillery(that before planes could not see far away). Not ethical at all. Then came air bombers, the nuclear bomb. Today the US kills 10.000 people in Iraq annually with air drones just pushing buttons thousands of miles away. It is already happening on one side. The only difference is when the other side starts using it too. Then we will consider it unethical(after decades using it on others).
- DanielBMarkham 11y ago
  When the machine gun was invented, Europeans congratulated themselves that they were the only ones with machine guns. After all, such a nasty weapon of mass death wouldn't be something that Europeans would ethically use on other Europeans. That didn't last long.
notahacker 11y ago
On a micro level the opposite is true. The worst that's going to happen to a drone operator for not firing first is a reprimand for losing the equipment. On a policymaking level, I can't think of too many air strikes called off from fear of the airmen's lives. Fear of terrorist reprisals, foreign policy debacles and ending up with people on the ground are far bigger issues to be considered which won't go away with drones.

akira2501 11y ago

> For a trillion dollars, you can overwhelm enemy air defenses with cheap, primitive drones in a saturation attack. For a few hundred dollars I can jam your communications channel(s) to the drones. Asymmetric warfare sucks.

simoncion 11y ago
And, depending on how your jammer works, I can probably kill it for a few thousand dollars (+- an order of magnitude). Pentagon procurement is a shitshow, but the DoD has many brilliant radio, radar, and signals guys working for them directly, or indirectly.
kogepathic 11y ago
> For a few hundred dollars I can jam your communications channel(s) to the drones. The same could be said for manned fighters. Granted, you still have a pilot who's there and capable of making decisions independently of communications. But, I imagine if you threw up enough interference to screw with a drone, you'd probably make some very pretty lights happen on an F-35's radar.
ObviousScience 11y ago
> For a few hundred dollars I can jam your communications channel(s) to the drones. Asymmetric warfare sucks. The problem is that once we're talking tens of millions of dollars and up -- no, you can't. We're talking the swarm is likely operating in a shared point-to-point link mode, either using highly directional antennas that are essentially deaf to below, optical links, or (more likely) a mixture of both modes. At 10,000 drones, they likely can form a stable mesh network over the city covering a wide enough area at a few miles in the sky that you're talking about having to run power plants or detonate magnets with high explosives to generate the kind of wattage needed to shout in to the directional communications gear. Jamming a few hobbyist drones is nothing like jamming thousands of military grade drones, and the techniques you think will stop their communications aren't all that effective. However, scanning the area under your bot swarm of amateur attempts to jam the network is probably a great way to target RF engineers in preparation for a ground invasion, and minimize their ability to improvise communications gear once the main communications networks are knocked out. tl;dr: Taking out a $10,000,000+ swarm of military grade weapons isn't the same as disabling a few hobbyist trinkets, and may get you seriously hurt in the process.

colechristensen 11y ago

A big reason for the huge price tag and many delays has to do with the very broken military acquisition process. It's a mess, a huge problem that not many people have much insight into and fewer posses the real motivation and capability to change. You can make a fairly valid parallel can be made with web designers and bad clients. You start off with a clear goal and reasonable costs and deliverables, and through iteration after iteration of needless revisions, terrible requests, and changed requirements you end up with a clown hat, a fart button, all in comic sans at 10x the original estimate. --- Nobody wants to dogfight – the F-35 wasn't designed for it and modern strategy has nothing to do with it. You destroy the enemy with smart missiles long before either of you sees the other – F35 stealth is designed to delay detection as long as possible. This report takes the test completely out of context. It wasn't a wargame between A and B, it was a very specific situation under severe restrictions used to test the boundaries of the F-35's role. A real wargame would end with both sides never getting within miles. Not understanding the context of why the test was done leads to real misunderstanding. ---- As for drones - it is true they have a huge future, but they aren't the only solution. Modern air superiority battles are as much about stealth and electronic warfare as anything else. If your entire enemy is remote-controlled robots, your real target becomes the communications. There is very real value to having a human in the theater of battle – many of the strengths of the F-35 revolve around it as a platform for the interaction of many different communications, intelligence, and weapons assets ... the pilot is the command and control center for a whole network of activity which is much more resilient than remote control satellite RC planes and missiles. Dog fighting only happens when absolutely everything else fails and both sides can bring each other into the stone age of point-and-shoot flying. --- In a real war with a competent enemy, the first target (if we aren't all erased in a nuclear inferno) is going to be communications satellites. Remember that a significant portion of how America fights battles is winning wars on paper so nobody ever thinks it's a good idea to start a real one, and by that I mean a war against a competent enemy playing at the same level – not regional conflicts and proxy wars like we've been fighting since WWII.

rwallace 11y ago
It's perfectly reasonable to say that in the future, human pilots won't be dogfighting, that's the job of missiles and drones, the human's job is to exercise tactical control close enough to not need satellite links. But in that case, if the F-35's real job is to serve as a sort of fast, stealthy Awacs, then surely it shouldn't incur all the compromises inherent in building a plane that looks like it was supposed to replace the F-16?

netcan 11y ago

It's hard to know these thing unless someone tries it, but probably not. Air defences are difficult to overwhelm. Gaza/Hamas recently tried to overwhelm Israeli missile defence with primitive rockets with very no success. The rockets were very primitive but had the advantage of a short range, which is harder to defend against. OTOH, the intercepting missiles cost orders of magnitude more than the offensive rockets, so it might be possible to drain the ammunition supply. "loiter over an enemy airspace" is only possible if you already have aerial control. Overall, armies are conservative. It's dangerous to try and build a strategy around fighting styles that have never been tried at scale. It's probably worth researching though.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
> OTOH, the intercepting missiles cost orders of magnitude more than the offensive rockets, so it might be possible to drain the ammunition supply. This is the key, I think. As long as you can pound your enemy with cheap hardware forcing him to use up his more expensive one, you're actually successful in your attack - you're bleeding out their economy.
- obsurveyor 11y ago
  Israel's rocket defense system, the one used to stop the attacks mentioned in the parent post is really good at being frugal in which rockets it shoots down. It doesn't just try to shoot down every rocket coming at it, it plots them and prioritizes ones that will most likely hit valuable or populated targets. It lets the ones that are going to land in empty fields go, since the risk and damage is minimal.

whatusername 11y ago

Pretty much... https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/cheap-drones/ https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/cheap-drones/