Sometimes a technology is so awe-inspiring that the imagination runs away with it — often far, far away from reality. Robots are like that. A lot of big and ultimately unfulfilled promises were made in robotics early on, based on preliminary successes.
– Daniel H. Wilson
The F-35 should be, and almost certainly will be, the last manned strike fighter aircraft the Department of the Navy will ever buy or fly.
– Ray Mabus, Secretary of the Navy
If ever a technology was awe-inspiring, robotics is it. Robots have a long, storied past in literature, dating back at least to the Iliad — and possibly further back depending on your definition of a robot. Robots have long been widely used in the government and commercial sectors — more so now than ever. But as promising as the technology is in a wide range of areas, air combat is not one of them. The Department of Defense’s interest in unmanned weapons and weapons delivery platforms is understandable, but their actual potential for combat operations is the subject of wild hyperbole. Absent technological breakthroughs in machine sensing, artificial cognition, and machine learning, the unmanned aircraft is going to remain a very limited craft indeed. An unmanned replacement for the manned fighter is often believed to be just over the horizon, but the reality is that it is nowhere close and may not even be possible. Combat aircraft that actually have to operate in contested airspace are just the wrapper — it is the aircrew that really matters. An artificial replacement will have to solve three major aviation challenges now readily and regularly surmounted by the human aircrew: basic aviation (flying the aircraft), tactical execution (rapid adaptation of the plan under combat conditions), and weapons employment (shooting the right weapon, at the right target, at the right time, for the right reasons).
Beyond that, an artificial replacement will have to learn and teach the next generation. There are certainly applications for unmanned and autonomous aircraft; a fighter replacement is not yet one of them, and might never be.
The most fundamental challenge in combat aviation is that the mission must be accomplished in a hostile environment that is both changing rapidly and unforgiving of error. There is a simple mental test to determine if the first major technological step (basic aviation) of three has been achieved. When you personally are willing to hop on an unmanned airliner from New York to Edinburgh in the depth of winter, with all of your loved ones and irreplaceable personal treasures, that airplane’s technology will be almost a third of the way there.
A Look Back
The first attempt to make an aircraft unmanned followed the first flight of the Wright Flyer by 15 years. The Kettering Bug was an unmanned biplane designed to carry 180 pounds of explosive into enemy territory. It was shrouded in secrecy, was costly, and tied up development efforts for years after the war. It had questionable military utility to begin with — a cautionary tale that should resonate today. No warfighting technology should be pursued without a deep understanding of its utility in the real world.
I am an experienced fighter aviator, with a reasonable amount of combat time, doing just about every type of combat mission type the Air Force flies with a fighter (excepting nuclear strike). Like many other fighter aviators, I have a monumental ego, an unwavering faith in my own abilities, and a healthy doubt for the assessments made by those who have never flown fighters in combat. The vast majority of people — even in the community of defense experts — lack the experience to make a reasoned judgment about what fighter aircraft do, or more accurately, what the aircrew makes the airplane do. A fighter aircraft is just a tool, and it’s the tool-user that matters. It’s not about the airplane.
There is an awful lot of writing about the benefits of removing a person from the cockpit. Risk to the aviator is one issue. Endurance requirements, airframe size, and other physical limitations are others. Those are real issues, but they miss the point. The aviator is in the airplane because the aviator is necessary for the airplane to be used in combat to its best potential. Warfare is a human enterprise and combat even more so. The reasons for removing humans from the cockpit are offset by the reasons for keeping them in — humans are superior sensors and decision-makers, are the foundation of the combat aviation enterprise, and are a well of aviation knowledge and experience. Aircrew are not perfect, but in a combat environment they are immeasurably better than any other non-organic option.
Unmanned Aircraft
Today’s unmanned aircraft come in two flavors: those that are remotely piloted, like the Predator, and those that are autonomous, like the Tomahawk cruise missile. Remote pilotage requires a two-way communications link to operate the aircraft, often with a time lag (up to three seconds). Our remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs) are employed only in areas where the threat from air defenses and enemy aircraft is practically zero. We call this uncontested airspace. Still, RPAs drop like flies because aviation is an inherently hazardous enterprise that is often too complex for a remote operator to manage successfully. Even in peacetime, the aircrew at the far end of a radio link often has a difficult time determining what is wrong and necessitates corrective action. In combat operations, a pilot at the end of a three-second time lag is in the wrong place, and those communications links are subject to attack.
Autonomous aircraft are severely limited and often used on one-way missions. The Air Force successfully flew thousands of combat reconnaissance missions over Vietnam, China, and North Korea with fully autonomous, recoverable aircraft called Fireflies in the ‘60s and ‘70s. These aircraft made no decisions and did not fluidly react to conditions — they executed a preprogrammed plan as best they could, given limited navigational aids, and were snatched out of the air by helicopters at the end of the mission. Air vehicle autonomy has advanced little since Vietnam, although navigation certainly has. To replace manned fighters, a fully autonomous — not remotely piloted — aircraft is necessary, and this will remain a showstopper for the foreseeable future.
Basic Aviation
Of the three challenges, basic aviation is the easiest for automation to overcome, but still comes with major challenges that we have been unable to figure out. Autopilots are fairly old technology, and can fly an aircraft from point A to point B. We can also ask the autopilot to avoid fixed objects, terrain, and cooperative aircraft, and possibly to take off and land. Airbus has embraced a computer-centric cockpit architecture in its design philosophy, which in many respects puts the aircrew in the role of a systems monitor. But no Airbus aircraft has ever been asked to do anything more than transport a load of passengers and cargo on a preplanned schedule and route.
One of the greatest limitations with the flight computer is that it cannot rapidly diagnose systems failures and initiate corrective actions. Not everything that goes wrong is indicated by flashing lights or failure codes. Indeed, some system failures can leave an aircraft perfectly airworthy while disabling the onboard processors, or feed false data to the computer. Air France 447 crashed because the air sensors feeding the flight computers froze over and gave false readings. Similarly, there is no shortage of drone mishaps caused by an inability to diagnose a failure mode from instrument readings alone. This summary of an Air Force Mishap Report for an MQ-1 Predator lays out a common story:
On 26 October 2012 MQ-1B tail number 99-3058 departed Jalalabad AB, Afghanistan. At approximately 2200Z, the crew completed their assigned mission and steered towards Jalalabad. Six minutes later the crew received a “Variable Pitch Propeller (VPP) servo high temperature” caution. This message was the first indication of a problem. While attempting to resolve the problem, the pilot momentarily commanded the propeller pitch to an angle that produced reverse thrust, and the prop froze in this position. The pilot shut down the engine to eliminate the reverse thrust and increase the glide distance, which remained insufficient to make it to a suitable landing location. The pilot deliberately crashed the aircraft into empty terrain to avoid potential injuries on the ground.
The Accident Investigation Board (AIB) found the cause of the mishap was a combination of a mechanical failure of the VPP servo motor and unnecessary movements of the propeller pitch control lever. Furthermore, the AIB President found that incorrect and insufficient checklist guidance, reinforced by incorrect simulator training, were substantially contributing factors to the mishap.
In this case, a mechanical failure combined with incorrect checklist guidance and incorrect simulator training resulted in the loss of this RPA. The contributing causes are critical because the checklist for dealing with the problem was wrong. Had this been an autonomous aircraft, the checklist programmed into the computer would likewise have been wrong, and the flight computer’s attempt to remedy the problem would also have been incorrect, likewise resulting in a crash. As it was, a pilot located on the other side of the world was reliant on limited information and set up for failure when he followed procedures that were faulty from the outset.
Humans have an entire sensory system designed to tell them about threats and conditions — one that is effectively impossible to replicate in a machine, even at great expense. I can recall times where cockpit data was incomplete, contradictory, or outright deceptive. Aviators undergo extensive training to teach them how to deal with contingencies, including when aircraft instrumentation is unreliable. A review of published Air Force mishap data will illustrate how difficult it is for unmanned aircraft to fly with minor mechanical problems.
Tactical Execution
A combat mission involves more than flying to coordinates and releasing a weapon. We can build a system that is a reusable cruise missile, useful only for dropping weapons on fixed targets. Building a system that can handle all of the tasks and coordination involved in a dynamic combat mission will require technological leaps that may not be possible. The successful accomplishment of the mission is the responsibility of every crewmember, led by the flight lead. Command at the strike package level is typically in the hands of the mission commander, a fighter, or bomber aviator flying the mission who deals with delays, changes, and plan shifts on the fly. Subordinate flight leads and individual aircrew will execute based on the mission commander’s intentions, without micromanagement. Sometimes mission accomplishment happens under the most trying conditions. A summary of one such event, drawn from the citations awarded to the airmen involved, dates from Vietnam:
On 8 February 1968, Hornet flight streaked low over North Vietnam. The two F-4D Phantoms were on their way to the airfield at Phuc Yen. Two days earlier, three IL-28 Beagle bombers had attempted to bomb US positions around Khe Sanh — a rare foray into South Vietnam. The commander of 7th Air Force wanted those bombers destroyed ASAP, and the previous day’s strike had been called off for clouds, which extended all the way to 300 feet from the surface. Capt. John Corder and Capt. Tracey Dorsett were in the lead jet of a lonely, unsupported flight, armed with cluster bombs, smoking across the rice paddies at 600 knots and as low as thirty feet. Phuc Yen was heavily defended; yesterday Capt. Corder had assessed the chances of losing at least one of the two Phantoms at 100 percent.
One minute out, the lead Phantom was hit. Part of the left wing was shot off, the left engine seized up, both fire lights illuminated, and Capt. Corder was wounded. Their airspeed dropped from 600 knots to 180, barely above landing speed and too slow for the cluster bombs to be effective. The wingman inadvertently pulled into the clouds and had to abort the attack. It was all down to two 20-something fighter aviators in a crippled aircraft. Capts. Corder and Dorsett pressed the attack, using the jettison button to drop the weapons and fuel tanks from the left wing on top of the first bomber. Circling the airfield, still under fire, they spotted the second bomber, made a second attack run, and jettisoned their remaining weapons, racks and air to air missiles from an altitude of 40 feet, just 19 feet above the Beagle’s tail. Both bombers were disabled. Limping away from the airfield, they flew to Laos before ejecting. Both were rescued, and awarded the Air Force Cross.
Someday, a machine might be able to accomplish that mission. More likely, the mission would be aborted because no conceivable level of programming would enable a robot to accomplish that mission in that fashion.
The need to modify the plan in flight is a common event, although not to the extreme level outlined above. Times change often, targets change occasionally, aircraft “fall out,” systems fail, the weather interferes — these events are routine. There is a pre-briefed “fallout plan,” which can be modified in real time. An acceptable “risk level” is briefed along with current rules of engagement and the basic execution plan. But the execution plan is just that — a common foundation from which to depart. There are no discrete events that a machine might accept as programming parameters. Audibles are expected to be called inflight based on changing conditions — not based on the conditions that might be anticipated before takeoff. Aircrew are not organic computers programmed at launch to execute a preplanned routine. In over 150 combat missions over ten deployments in six named operations, I have never actually seen an American aircrew abort a mission because the risk level exceeded the briefed limits, but I have seen them pull off high risk tasks and make it look easy, although it most assuredly was not.
Weapons Employment
Aircrew are the “fighter” in “fighter aircraft.” They are also a fully integrated sensor system, a marvelous biological processor, a communications node, and — most importantly — a living, learning being that can make good decisions on incomplete information and predict likely outcomes in real time. They tend to not be personally risk-averse and are experienced in working as a team. For many missions, including all counterair and some missions such as armed reconnaissance and Close Air Support (CAS), the aircrew have to detect, identify, and engage moving targets which emerge during the mission, often in proximity to friendlies or neutrals and at some substantial risk to themselves. Assessing and mitigating risk is a uniquely human trait. Unlike machines, aircrew can estimate likely consequences beyond the next decision tree, including “strategic consequences” borne from tactical actions. Combat video from ALLIED FORCE illustrates one such case:
On 17 April 1999, two F-15E Strike Eagles, Callsign CUDA 91 and 92, were tasked to attack an AN/TPS-63 mobile early warning radar located in Serbia. The aircraft carried AGM-130, a standoff weapon that is actually remotely flown by the weapons system officer (WSO) in the F-15E, who uses the infra-red sensor in the nose of the weapon to detect the target. CUDA 91, flown by two captains (Phoenix and Spidey) from the 494th Fighter Squadron, launched on coordinates provided by the Air Operations Center. As the weapon approached the suspected target location, the crew had not yet acquired the TPS-63. At 12 seconds from impact, the picture became clearer. “Looks like a tower. That’s a tower, dude, that’s a tower.” “Tower?” “Nah, that’s a church, dude.” “What’s that right there?” Three seconds out, the WSO makes the call: “I’m ditching in this field” and steers the weapon into an empty field several hundred meters away. In a mere nine seconds, the aircrew identified an unexpected object, scanned the surroundings, and made the decision to ditch the weapon in as safe a manner as possible. Postflight review of the tape revealed no object that could be positively identified as a radar, but the profile of a Serbian Orthodox church was unmistakable.
This example illustrates another reality of weapons employment — sometimes the planned target isn’t there. Hitting the wrong target can have significant effects on the conduct and outcome of a conflict. The implications of hitting a Serbian church with a 2000-lb. general-purpose warhead were worked through in real time. The aircrew not only determined that they could not find the assigned target, but identified what they could find and assessed the consequences. It is likely that had they found the radar system in close proximity to the church, they would have ditched the weapon anyway, because the consequences of hitting the church overrode the positive consequences of hitting the radar. This is not a reasonable expectation for a machine, but a routine demand we place upon fighter aircrew.
The Enterprise
The final issue that needs to be addressed is the fighter aviation enterprise. The truly irreplaceable role that the fighter aviator plays is in the accumulation of experience and knowledge, and the transfer of lessons learned to the next generation. No unmanned airplane is going to land, debrief its mistakes, and tell stories at the bar afterward. I know about the Phuc Yen strike because Maj. Gen. John Corder told me and a bunch of other Phantom Phlyers about it over dinner one night. John Corder knew that he could fly a burning aircraft as long as the flight controls held together because by then it was well known that Phantoms, unlike Thunderchiefs, did not explode without warning after taking battle damage. They just burned. That piece of knowledge, not found in any technical or tactical manual, entered our bags of tricks through word of mouth.
Similarly, I know about Phoenix and Spidey’s weapon ditch because I was one of the many aircrew in the weapons shop who reviewed the tape, hoping that we could tell if there was actually a radar system there or if this was simply a monumental foul-up by our own command and control. That debrief paid off on a mission I led two weeks later when our entire flight of four aircraft found a church in the crosshairs and again ditched the weapons. Forewarned, a second 4-ship in the same strike package found “a POV (personally-owned vehicle) and a busload of nuns” at their target location and brought their weapons home. Every generation of fighter aviators has built on the often-painful lessons learned by the previous generation, and every generation has passed down its own lessons.
If you have no fighter aviators, you have no fighter aviation. In order to have an effective unmanned fighter, aircrew functions have to be replicated by a machine. In order to have a fighter aviation enterprise, all of the staff, design, developmental, and training tasks that underpin that enterprise need experienced aviators. It is scary to think that DoD could be one bad program mistake and half a generation away from throwing away a century of accumulated fighter aviation experience.
Wrap up
The future of fighter aviation might someday include autonomous or semi-autonomous combat aircraft. The use of unmanned “consort” aircraft that act as very literal wingmen for manned aircraft is nearly within our technological grasp. But those wingmen will not be an adequate replacement for a real wingman; the aviator is too important to both fighter operations and the fighter enterprise. Any air arm which actually contemplates replacing its manned fighters with unmanned ones is surrendering to a technological fantasy and abandoning the ranks of countries which can generate effective combat airpower. Today, no credible aviation expert will advocate the widespread introduction of unmanned airliners, which do little more than fly gingerly from one point to another. To attempt to make the leap to unmanned fighters would be a triumph of misplaced faith in technology over experience, disregarding the fact that combat aviation is substantially more complex than commercial aviation. Meeting the challenges of tactical execution and weapons employment, and maintaining the ability to learn and improve the fighter aviation enterprise are essential ingredients and remain entirely human endeavors. The leap to unmanned fighter aviation will be a long and challenging effort that is some distance in the future. When an unmanned airliner is a safe and reliable transport vehicle, we’ll be almost a third of the way there.
Col. Mike “Starbaby” Pietrucha was an instructor electronic warfare officer in the F-4G Wild Weasel and the F-15E, Strike Eagle, amassing 156 combat missions over 10 combat deployments and sharing credit for 2.5 SAM kills with free-fall munitions in Iraq and Serbia. As an irregular warfare operations officer, Colonel Pietrucha has two additional combat deployments in the company of U.S. Army infantry, combat engineer, and military police units in Iraq and Afghanistan. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Air Force or the U.S. government.
M.McGannon 
matt 
BenK 
Pat 
Adin 
Kevin 
Tuna 
J. Wright 
SGWilson 
Cream 
James B. 
LB 
Magnus 
Clark 
DP 
We’ll have to agree to disagree.
As cool as it is to rehearse for, the dog fighting era is coming to an end. And future ground attack aircraft will simply obey linked targeting commands provided by ground based forward observers or atmospheric/satellite based platforms.
Those pilots presently in training will be the last to have a complete career flying combat airplanes. (Other than B-52 crews who will fly that airframe forever!)
Operationally autonomous machines…like them, hate them, deny their potential…are the future.
Why do you think the dog fighting era is over?
Russia, China, India, South Korea and Japan are all currently testing or have programs to develop next generation aircraft.
There isn’t an Air Force out there that’s not trying to acquire at least the current 4th generation fighters to modernize.
There are only 3-4 active UCAVs programs around the world and only the US and the UK have fielded anything for testing. Russia and China have nothing more than concept models.
I did not see the author make one reference to dogfighting throughout this entire article. I believe his focus was on general aviation/troubleshooting, weapons employment and lessons learned functions.
I strongly disagree; in part because I think the development cycles have now stretched out so far that unless the F-35 program dies in the cradle, the airframe will be in use for nearly a century.
On top of that, so many things change when scales shift. Airplanes are still at roughly the same scale they were from WWI. The plane can’t be smaller than what carries one pilot; the largest bombers can carry a few crewmen. But with drones, manufactured in days rather than decades (like pilots), the vehicles could be 1000x smaller and perhaps thousands of times more numerous. So many things change when scales like that are jumped.
Why do nukes change everything? Because a 1% hit rate, in a 24 hour period, can produce permanent defeat for a civilization. Scale can produce second-order effects which swamp the predicted first-order consequences. We don’t know what happens when drones mature, but I do predict that it won’t look much like the Jedi fighting the droids.
I think you’re dreaming with all theses thousands of small drones business. Lets see, a drone thousands of times smaller than say an F-15. That will get you a few miles of range to drop a couple of M-80’s.
“But with drones, manufactured in days rather than decades (like pilots), the vehicles could be 1000x smaller and perhaps thousands of times more numerous. So many things change when scales like that are jumped.”
–It doesn’t take decades to produce a Fighter Pilot or a Fighter Aircraft
–It also takes more than days to manufacture and unmanned air vehicle at least any that would be used to replace manned fighters. The only thing you’re going to put together in a day are the small hand launched type like the Raven, that’s designed to be used by ground forces.
–1000s of times smaller? Not sure you really understand the scale of manned or unmanned aircraft
That’s the part that people don’t grasp, that have never worked around unmanned aircraft before and have only seen them in movies and video games.
There is a reason the X-47 is still close in size to a manned fighter, because it still needs to have comparable engines to have a decent combat radius, has to be able to carry enough fuel for sustained flight and the most important piece to have the payload capacity to carry munitions. Oh and they have to be durable enough to use for years just like manned fighters. Without those you might as well just build more tomahawk cruise missiles.
Can we build tiny drones, of course, all of the DoD research labs and many of the university labs across the country have made them. Everything from insect size to full size aircraft.
Do you know what all the micro-drones lack? Any utility at all for military use, they’re science experiments, nothing more.
Could, we build a 1000 small drones….of course and they would be the size of toy radio control planes and they would be completely useless to the military for replacing fighters. They have limited range and no payload capacity.
Do you understand how small drones like the RQ-11 Raven are used now?
They’re just big enough to carry a camera, have little range and can be hand launched. They useful only to scout out short distances ahead of an infantry squad.
Too small to carry any munitions,
Unmanned bomber and fighter drones doing everything as the be all, end all without the aid of a human are a pipe dream and are a very long way out. Reconnaissance drones are more likely because they don’t have to do much. We are not living in the “Flight of the Old Dog” days with Tin Man suits and advanced weapons.
The issue that I find here is that there’s a pretty large difference between unmanned and autonomous systems. I do agree that there’s a way to go with autonomous systems, although advances might make partial autonomy in limited circumstances beneficial. Additionally, when considering autonomy as a battlefield solution there’s a far greater degree of emotion and philosophy that must go into the decision-making process.
However, unmanned yet still under human control is a different case, and one that I disagree with the author on. Yes, there are undoubtedly downsides to a system that’s remotely controlled, particularly for air-to-air combat. However, that is not to say that those downsides outweigh the upsides. Particularly when considering that the downsides primarily exist within a limited range of scenarios, it’s not illogical to think that a far greater weight will be placed on unmanned systems.
Will we have an entirely unmanned, autonomous air service by 2035 or even 2050? I doubt it. That’s not to say that unmanned systems won’t take on a far greater number of roles in missions. Particularly when considering that most of the technology isn’t revolutionary, but evolutionary.
This article seems full of unnamed assumptions, first being that the only way to operate in contested space is to have fighters to protect missions. Just because we can’t (yet) make a RPV or autonomous system that can dogfight as well as a person in a cockpit does NOT mean that we need to continue to make manned fighters.
Several of the examples are also of questionable applicability to the argument, like the reverse thrust mishap report, the Vietnam story about bombers, or the AGM 130 story. The mishap report is a crash that resulted from a mechanical failure, with no evidence provided that a pilot on board would have made the situation better. The Vietnam story is a great story, but offers an ungrounded statement that a drone couldn’t do the same, again with no proof. Maybe a drone could do the exact same thing, it just wouldn’t have a cool story to tell when it got home. And the last story discusses the need for humans in the loop to distinguish targets, but don’t we have that with drones? Again… a story about attack, not dogfights.
Overall, I don’t think this answers the mail for making a convincing argument that we need manned fighters, or manned aircraft in general.
“And the last story discusses the need for humans in the loop to distinguish targets, but don’t we have that with drones? Again… ”
Not for unmanned aircraft, at least not in the Air Force or Army, I can’t speak to how the Navy is going to us the X-47, but for the Predator, Reaper and Warrior, they have crews pilot and sensor operators and they identifying targets.
Starbaby,
As a fellow F-4G EWO (I was in your squadron long ago) and also a Predator guy (one of the first), I’ll say this is a well thought out and written paper. Something for you to ponder though. The examples you use to show that manned aviation is necessary are the extremes of what happens in missions. For the average mission flown nowadays, the problems encountered are either within the ability of autonomous systems to solve, or we are nearly there. The gist of this is whether DoD will decide that missions like those you describe are the outliers; acceptable risks to mission accomplishment and collateral damage (civilian casualties). It seems to me that our current policy with Predator use in Pakistan and Yemen indicate DoD has already moved in that direction.
Good to hear your words again, keep at it…
–Tuna
I do not understand why so many people, including our own military leaders, apparently, are convinced that autonomous armed drones (UCAVs, whatever) are the inevitable future of warfare. The ethical and moral arguments for, and against, have been a hot topic lately (see Foreign Policy, etc.). I am squarely against it.
As the author points out, the problem with RPAs is the lag time which completely negates whatever limited ability to react to contact from another aerial vehicle; whether manned, or not. Three seconds is an eternity in aerial combat. The only way it would work is, you guessed it, if the vehicle was completely autonomous and the human was taken out of the equation altogether.
But the fact that it would not work unless we make it autonomous is definitely not a sufficient justification; it still does not mean we have to do it. Like any other technology, once we make it, the Chinese and the Russians are going to copy it and then we will be screwed, because the Russians and Chinese don’t give a damn about collateral damage to civilians or the Geneva Convention. Their robots won’t be programmed to distinguish, like ours will. Plus, as we have learned during the past year, the Russians have a WAY BETTER electronic warfare capability than ours, which means that our RPAs, UCAVs, or whatever we are calling them now, will probably steer themselves straight into the ground with the flip of a switch.
J. Wright,
You say “Like any other technology, once we make it, the Chinese and the Russians are going to copy it and then we will be screwed, because the Russians and Chinese don’t give a damn about collateral damage to civilians or the Geneva Convention.”
My question to you is this. What makes you think that the Russians and Chinese, or anyone else, will wait for us to make it and copy it? One of the considerations that will probably eventually drive us toward autonomous systems such as those we are discussing is that our potential adversaries will likely not be constrained in their development, even if we are.
In addition, much of the enabling technology for these systems comes from our commercial sector, not military research. That is pretty hard to stop.
The only hope for your point of view is a treaty agreed upon by all the major players outlawing the development, manufacture, and deployment of these systems. But in your own words, since our potential adversaries “…don’t give a damn about…the Geneva Convention.”, then they would be unlikely to abide by such a treaty, even if signed.
Tuna,
I agree with your counter-point, but I would also add that even if we are responding to a development project initiated by either Russia or China, that also does not mean that we have to develop one of our own, out of some desire for parity. I wish that I could articulate this better than “it’s just wrong,” but that’s essentially how I feel about it.
I’m an Army veteran; I’ve taken fire from an enemy which was doing everything it could to avoid risk, exploit holes in ROE, and avoid even the possibility of counter-fire, and my opinions on the subject of “autonomy” as the natural evolution and ultimate achievement of all of the above, are probably clouded by my experience. I have more to say on this subject, but I’m going to keep my mouth shut for now.
Regards,
J. Wright
J. Wright,
You approach is a rational and ethical one that I’ve heard debated before and read quite a bit about. There are good reasons to be worried about autonomous systems that are used in a offensive lethal manner (“killer robots”). However, that said, I am concerned about the speed of combat and the threat posed by a peer or a near peer adversary. I hope you are right and that we can do the ethical thing and not use these weapons. I fear you are not, and expect that the other side of the ethical coin, doing everything you can to safeguard the lives of your own troops/people, will require us to give in to the tyranny of speed and use these systems in the future. For some background, I was a Wild Weasel EWO, and I was a plank owner in the Predator program in the mid-90s.
Time will tell, and I expect I’ll be quite a bit older when this comes about.
Death is a by-product of war, but preventing the death of non-combatants or friendly forces is, and has always been, the combat aviator’s highest priority. I can’t speak for other services, but one of USAF’s biggest problems is the burnout rate of it’s remotely piloted aircraft and sensor operators.
Any combat aviator will tell you there is no substitute for a set of Mk-1 eyeballs in the target area, sweating bullets, with the training and experience to make snap decisions to either take or save lives.
Politicians and scientists have been predicting the demise of manned combat aircraft ever since Hemingway wrote about “the robot war” (V-1 and V-2 rockets) during WWII. It hasn’t happened yet, and I agree with the author that it won’t happen anytime soon.
So unless you’ve been there and done that, all you unmanned aircraft fanboys and girls should go back to your video games.
No apologies for political incorrectness – its just another myth.
“… preventing the death of non-combatants or friendly forces is, and has always been, the combat aviator’s highest priority.”
False. The combat aviators highest priority is winning war. I would like to point out that civilian casualties in war ARE NOT illegal. Yes, they should be avoided, and yes, they are terrible, but they are not against the Law of Armed Conflict. It is illegal to deliberately target civilians, but that is a very important distinction. Just look at historical norms for combat aviation. Carpet bombing through towns was common practice, so you can’t possibly say that prevention civilian casualties was the highest priority.
Additionally, this is a subset of the mindset that is probably part of the reason for the burnout experienced by many Air Force aircrew. The micro management, positive control, and ridiculous restrictions placed upon aircrew in the Air Force, when compared to other services, is shocking. After dealing with the Air Force and seeing the difference in how they operate compared with the Navy, I’m also of the opinion that there isn’t enough money in the world to compensate for the amount of annoyance that those dudes have to deal with.
CREAM
Manned vs. Unmanned is not an hard single-choice decision. There will always be a place for humans in combat, but there is also a large and growing area where unmanned and/or fully autonomous systems can outperform any human.
There will come a day when we field a largely-autonomous fighter that can fly faster, higher, and further than the manned equivalent, and pull Gs that would easily kill a human. They won’t command themselves, they will likely function as attack dogs for a manned aircraft, but there will be a huge market for lethal drones.
If a bird strike can take out a full size plane, then why cant a drone the size of a sparrow? Stop thinking of a shooting platform. A swarm of a hundred or a thousand drones, dropped or launched from bombers or fighter-bombers, at an enemy’s fighter, or group of fighters, could take out engines anyway. Kinetic or small explosive warheads, heat seeking or laser guided. I’m not an electronics nor aviation expert, but it seems to me that something like that would work. Three second delay wouldn’t matter if a swarm was after a plane. LB
LB,
That is a good imaginative approach for taking out larger airborne platforms, flying at higher speeds or using turbofan engines. Kudos. Of course, the bomber or fighter dropping your mini- or micro-UAVs has to get there in the first place, right?
This approach won’t address aircraft less prone to catastrophic bird strikes (When I flew the F-4, with a turbojet vs turbofan engine, we took sparrows down the intake and spit them out the back–more thrust!).
This approach also doesn’t provide a weapons platform that can penetrate enemy airspace and take out ground targets.
Nonetheless, a good idea. Swarms of smaller UAVs is an area of active research.
“dropped or launched from bombers or fighter-bombers, at an enemy’s fighter, or group of fighters, could take out engines anyway. Kinetic or small explosive warheads, heat seeking or laser guided.”
Sounds almost like one of these: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/AIM-9L_DF-ST-82-10199.jpg
Or do you mean that they should be recoverable if they miss their target?
Some of the more experienced F-35 tacticians envision exactly that – holding in the rear of the battlespace and controlling swarms of RPAs to overwhelm enemy air and ground forces. That’s a good scenario considering, as one RAND study concluded, it ( the F-35) “can’t turn, can’t run, can’t climb”. The recent “test” engagement between a clean F-35 and an F-16 with two external tanks came to the same conclusion.
But yes, there will always be a place for unmanned air vehicles in current and future conflicts.
Better hope we don’t run out, because our near-peer adversaries are building cheaper versions of our platinum-plated F-22/35s quicker and in much greater numbers.
Wow, if these are the best arguments manned aviation can offer against unmanned fighter aircraft you are in deep trouble. Reminiscing old missions and saying “See? A machine can’t do that!” firstly shows no understanding of current technological developments (or even achievements, there are so many examples from other fields I don’t even know where to begin). Secondly it vastly overstates creativity as a human-only capability (and how much of it is required for flying missions) while it trivializes evidence to the contrary.
Basic flying and Weapons employment are easy targets for full automation. This article reads very much like written by someone a generation or so behind on aviation views (such as there being a difference in Airbus and Boeing’s autopilot sanctification). Especially BVR combat (on which the USAF has bet big) lends itself well to automation. Detection & identification occur at distances that are beyond the ranges of human senses and follow a strict ID-matrix. And even BFM and ACM, mostly about the exchange of kinetic and potential energy, are not beyond the reach of a machine. In fact going through TTPs shows a highly scripted approach to both ACM and BVR (this means it lends itself well to if/else programming).
Target identification, especially the discrimination of valid and invalid targets, in air-to-ground operations in a restrictive ROE environment (say Afghanistan) is the Achilles heel for unmanned fighters right now. Not the fact the unmanned fighter wouldn’t come up with dropping fuel tanks to destroy a target.
And finally, the point that Mike completely misses is that using an unmanned system for a certain mission changes the mission itself. The objective remains the same, but the TTP will not. An unmanned aircraft is not a drop-in replacement. If it is to be employed in a manner that lets it use its full potential the execution of a mission will not be a step by step mirror version of a human flying that mission. Just like using a self-driving car will fundamentally change the way we look at transportation, so will the use of autonomous fighter aircraft fundamentally change the way we look at air combat. Whether or not we want to pursuit such weapons is an entirely different matter with ethical considerations being the strongest argument against it. Not human hubris claiming we are such unique snowflakes that a machine could never take our job.
There’s also some things unmanned aircraft, even simple ones, could do that manned don’t do as well.
For instance, in the “damaged strike aircraft drop fuel tanks to kill the bomber” scenario, a drone or robot could instead simply crash into the target on the ground.
So don’t neglect the ability for drones or robots to press on and routinely sacrifice themselves when the mission is more valuable than the airframe. Or, likewise, the ability of planners to send drones or robots on missions that would be deemed too risky.
Also, the calculus may change. A manned strike mission may be deemed too risky to perform without massive support from escorts, defense suppression, stand-off jammers, tankers, etc. A drone mission sent without this may have a lower chance of survival, but may still have a reasonable chance of success, particular if you can maintain a much higher mission tempo due to the lack of need for all the supporting resources that would otherwise be tasked to ensure valuable crews come back alive.
(Yes, it costs the drone aircraft – but that’s what happened in the manned aircraft’s case as well, as the crew had to eject.)