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“Fighter Jet Era has Passed”


sgtmike74

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I'm not 100% confident that Mr Musk really knows what he's talking about on this one. The reality is that a modern day fighter is an inherently expensive weapons system. By the time you put together a high performance airframe with modern propulsion, signature reduction measures, sensors, countermeasures and data sharing capability you have an aircraft that is worth tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars before a pilot ever gets near it. There seems to be this myth that dispensing with the pilot will somehow make combat aircraft cheap and expendable...

 

The real question to me is whether we trust AI to control such an expensive asset en masse, and how much more effective an AI in the "driver's seat" would be (if at all). Personally I'm not sure the technology has matured to the point that we would trust it with such valuable hardware (and the destructive capability it provides) or that there would be a significant benefit in doing so.


Edited by Boogieman
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I think it's funny people keep talking about g limits like that's allthat matters. You cannot ''pull gs as much and long as you want''. That's a ridiculous thing to say. Have you forgotten about T/W, aerodynamics, and structural limitations? Those things don't disappear juat because it's a robot, it's not magic ffs.

 

A jet isn't going to pull 20-30gs without snapping the wings off or breaking the spine, and isn't going to do it for more than a few seconds even if it could without losing all its energy, at which point it's a sitting duck again like anything. A MISSILE can do that because it's a tube with tiny low drag control fins taking a very short one way trip, and we all know how that's how you defeat a missile, anyway! Gs won't outrun a prox fused missile anyway, you can't ''out turn'' a large ball of shrapnel.

 

I just see a lot of ill informed people imagining invincible terminators and cheesy scifi nonsense, totally disregarding like... physics and stuff @@

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Yeah... that's the problem with using jets that need to serve a ~30 year service life - you can't just abuse them with insane amounts of G because there's no pilot onboard - you actually have to take care of the airframe too.

 

Even if you could develop an AI controlled aircraft capable of pulling sustained double digit G loads at will, I'm not sure how much of an advantage that would actually be in the grand scheme of things...

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Most of you are thinking about replacing the pilot with AI. This is not how such a vehicle will look like. It will be designed from the ground up without a pilot, and to operate in a whole eco system specifically designed to support such vehicles. This is NOT an F-35 with AI. A 100 million $ machine without a pilot is sheer stupidity.

 

Once the human life is out of the equation the whole paradigm changes. The standards of safety go way way down. You can afford to lose some vehicles as part of the mission design. Instead of 1 100 million $ jet, you send 5 smaller jets that carry 1/5 of the ordnance. They have a much higher chance to complete the mission and overall survivability increase due to saturation of the defenses. A smaller plane carrying 1/5 of the payload and specifically designed for it can reach significantly higher structural limitations. This is how you produce vehicles capable of un precedented maneuvers, not by keeping the same airframe and replacing the pilot with something that does not faint.

“Mosquitoes fly, but flies don’t Mosquito” :pilotfly:

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There is no problem to produce an airframe than can pull 20G. Current airframes cannot because there was no need for it. Had they been designed to withstand 20G but then limited to 9G because of the pilot, that would have been over-engineering, which is not a good thing.

 

In any case, the need to be able to pull 20 G is vanishing. Drones will not dogfight using fixed cannons, and will not rely on maneuvers to dodge missiles - that trick gets less and less effective as missiles improve. Even on top of that, using drones to shoot down other drones is generally inefficient.

“Mosquitoes fly, but flies don’t Mosquito” :pilotfly:

- Geoffrey de Havilland.

 

... well, he could have said it!

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I think the future for autonomy in air forces at least in the near future is in non-combat roles. Tankers, AEW, EW warfare and deception etc.

 

There's not much point making stealthy jets like Raptors or F-35s if they're gonna light the sky with radar anyway, so I can see autonomous drones flying with stealth aircraft to be their eyes.

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Has anyone been following the "loyal wingman" programs?

 

They couple a human manned fighter, or bomber, with a flight of Drones that can perform screening, act as a missile truck, or engage threats.

 

A neat combination of Human/AI that can work together, complimenting each other.

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Yeah, I don’t know if US has loyal wingmen they don’t talk about currently or Russia is actually closer to deployment with their S-70 Okhotnik. Kindve weird how newcomer Kratos is the new darling of the Pentagon.

 

Always surprised how big the S-70 actually is

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Most of you are thinking about replacing the pilot with AI. This is not how such a vehicle will look like. It will be designed from the ground up without a pilot, and to operate in a whole eco system specifically designed to support such vehicles. This is NOT an F-35 with AI. A 100 million $ machine without a pilot is sheer stupidity.

 

Once the human life is out of the equation the whole paradigm changes. The standards of safety go way way down. You can afford to lose some vehicles as part of the mission design. Instead of 1 100 million $ jet, you send 5 smaller jets that carry 1/5 of the ordnance.

 

Granted, but there are still certain requirements that a larger number of more expendable UCAVs won't meet. There comes a point where you still need a platform that can carry a certain minimum payload (eg. multiple 2000lb class weapons) to a certain range, sensors powerful enough to detect/track other VLO aircraft and cue AAMs at useful ranges, ESM gear capable of pinpointing modern air defences, a quality targeting pod to cue air to ground weapons, secure datalinks that can contribute meaningful information to the wider network etc etc. I strongly suspect these things add up to a platform that is neither cheap nor expendable.

 

I think this is why we are seeing the loyal wingman concept play out - the high value combat aircraft with all the expensive gear is manned and acts as a mothership to the cheaper more expendable UAS.


Edited by Boogieman
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I’m curious on what some here may think of this story about Elon Musk.

 

https://www.flightglobal.com/fixed-wing/the-fighter-jet-era-has-passed-elon-musk/137017.article

 

The whole thing sounds like we are heading towards Skynet.

 

What do you see has the pros of an autonomous fighter drone?

 

What do you see as the cons?

 

Where does all of this AI leads to in the next 20 years?

 

What is the military background of Elon Musk ?

Probably not much. So his point of view is pointless, he is advocating for his own business...

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It's just Musky proposing stupid things, again. Much like his hyperloop. This is also absolutely not considering the impact of politics on acquisitions.

 

This isn't the first time this has been said and I doubt it will be the last time. When piloted combat aircraft are a thing of the past, it will be day to be lauded or a day of immense remorse.

 

Hyperloop wasn't his idea anyway, a vacuum tube train system is a no brainer, I watched documentaries about it on Discovery Channel in something like 2004.

 

Elon Musk is a total fraud anyway, stealing the Tesla name, saying one thing and doing another, but mostly a front man for a variety of very rich interests and future-obsessed stockholders who actually run the whole show, those are incredibly obsessed with AI controlling everything, space and going to mars. Then go to mars and leave us alone.

 

The fanboys of Elon Musk don't understand it's all private, it has no meaning for humanity, everything they do will be for their benefit, if they capture comets for mineral mining, it's their property, if they land on mars, it becomes their private property.

 

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/tesla-gets-approval-continue-cutting-down-thousands-trees-build-its-german-gigafactory

 

https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/ntsb-blames-tesla-and-us-regulators-fatal-2018-autopilot-crash

 

https://www.rt.com/business/482188-elon-musk-cobalt-crisis/

Skip to 8:27


Edited by Worrazen

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Yeah, I don’t know if US has loyal wingmen they don’t talk about currently or Russia is actually closer to deployment with their S-70 Okhotnik. Kindve weird how newcomer Kratos is the new darling of the Pentagon.

 

Always surprised how big the S-70 actually is

 

The Okhotnik has some signature return issues, but is a big bird and impressive to say the least. Agreed on Kratos they came up pretty often recently. I will try to find it, but the USAF did a "loyal wingman" type of test with an F-35 and a drone, not sure if a Kratos or not.

 

Australia has really been putting some time into the Loyal Wingman program, and I think it is in partnership with Boeing if I remember correctly.

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It’s just the whole way the UAV/loyal wingman thing died down in obscurity here in the US about 15 years ago with the X-47 UCAV program being the last time we were this close. Makes you wonder how far operational wingman drones are in black projects

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First of all, history teaches us that usually when we try guessing like this about the future, time proves us wrong. Trying to forecast the future can still be interesting, I think.

 

When contemplating the possibility that unmanned aircrafts will replace the manned ones, I wonder what are the possibilities that they will end up attacking the nations who deployed them.

I’m not talking about machine learning letting the machines develop greed and emotional self awareness eventually making them rebelling against humans; I’m talking about the possibility that they could be controlled remotely by the enemy. Unless you completely rely on AI and not put any radio receiver or something similar in them, there must be something that you can use to control them. What if the enemy takes control? Even if they manage to make them land in their territory and take control of them later by tinkering with them on the ground, it would still be quite a problem.

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