Light drones and big expensive aircraft will both exist in the future and play separate roles. They also won't interact much, aside from a fighter group spearheading a drone group. A drone swarm is too diffuse to be a worthwhile target for a fighter's weapons, but a fighter is too fast to be engaged by a drone swarm.
Air battles of the future will likely be conceptually similar to air battles today, but with light drones replacing bombers with guided bombs. An initial wave of fighters will contest air superiority. If they achieve it they will use it to launch long-range attacks to disable a small number of anti-drone hard points. Once the way is clear a wave of smaller, slower drones can swarm in and bomb a large number of targets with precision.
Dogfights no longer occur anyway. What matters is early detection.
For a drone (even a swarm of them) to compete with a modern jet fighter, it'll need a reasonably powerful engine and sufficient fuel to keep it up in the air long enough to: seek out and engage the enemy, carry a decent payload, and reach a suitable altitude. That all sounds like a lot of fuel and engine power to me, especially if you're expecting this drone (swarm) to operate outside of the immediate vicinity of the launching area.
I see more potential for drones to act as 'screen' for jet fighters once stealth technology is made irrelevant by advances in radar. I foresee the use of, low cost vehicles that resemble fighters (in the ways that count), but carry minimal ordinance (if any) to keep the costs down. They could also provide auxiliary functionality like electronic warfare and scouting.
I mean you could in theory develop a drone that exploded on impact and operated within a limited area, but you've just re-invented the guided missile, with a little extra smarts.
Use the Sidewinder missiles as an example. You're going to run out of munitions very quickly and be left with far poorer capabilities.
Maybe it could be done defensively over territory you controlled, but the 'drone swarm' in this instance really does just sound like a ground-to-air missile.
The smaller your drone the lower its effective range or loitering time. Therefore a transport vehicle such as a jet has to bring the smaller weapon into effective range. The transport vehicle usually also has much better sensors so that it can effectively search for targets. Guided weapons receive additional targeting data from the transport vehicle even after they have been deployed and are heading toward the target.
When people talk about medium sized "kamikaze drones" that are carrying enough fuel to reach a given far off destination they don't realize that these already exist and are called cruise missiles and tomahawk missiles in particular are quite cheap. For the cost of a F-35 the US can buy 100 tomahawk missiles. I still remember that attack where 60 cruise missiles were launched from a single navy vessel at a military airport in Syria with essentially no risk of counterattack.
Most drones are cheap civilian toys. Military drones have had much greater endurance for decades.
> Therefore a transport vehicle such as a jet has to bring the smaller weapon into effective range.
If you are using short-endurancd drones for some reason (e.g., missiles), the carrier can just be a long-endurance drone.
> When people talk about medium sized "kamikaze drones" that are carrying enough fuel to reach a given far off destination they don't realize that these already exist and are called cruise missiles and tomahawk missiles in particular are quite cheap.
That they already exist and are cheap and effective is proof of the point, not an argument against it.
Maybe that's true of regional militaries.
The US wants to be able to project power - often quite far from bases. The drones you're talking about just don't have much of a range.
I'm not saying they won't be used - I'm sure they will be. But there will also be much larger and more expensive drones as well.
This exists already. Those "drones" are more commonly called surface-to-air missiles.
The limited factor is targeting: as has been well publicized, modern aircraft have been engineered with stealth in mind, which means they need to be quite close to radars before they can be detected.
The solution, which was discovered in Yugoslavia, is to use low frequency radar to detect the stealth aircraft, and wait until they get close enough (defense in depth is necessary here!) before turning on your target grade radar at the last moment.
As you might imagine, this is a difficult and dangerous process, and so has only been successfully accomplished once.
It doesn't stop there. You train one AI, you've trained them all. A minor performance increase instantly upgrades the capability of your entire fleet. An AI that can learn from real world situations will likewise convey that learning to your entire fleet instantly.
They say smart people learn from the mistakes of others, but we often have some trouble applying this. An AI should do better.
Of course, the corollary is that bugs will affect your entire fleet. I wonder if a future cyber-security role will be to look for AI blindspots to exploit en masse without prior warning (like flying with the sun behind you, but more arcane).
No doubt some organizations are researching how to perform and defend against things like that. The future of asymmetric warfare in particular could get really crazy.
In this context I would sacrifice multiple aircraft to ‘taint my the enemies training data with solutions which are a disadvantage in a future fight scenario.
That's why this probably won't actually be in use for many decades. You need something a bit closer to AGI than what exists now. Until then, you'll probably have limited use cases, maybe where movement and obstacle avoidance are autonomous but everything else is programmed or remotely controlled.
You could imagine small, agile flying assassination drones which can navigate cities and houses to kill targets with short-range projectiles. Very Black Mirror-esque, but far more ethical than the current approach of Call of Duty 4-style blowing up a big patch of land from the clouds with a Hellfire missile, including all the civilians in proximity.
Human pilots do mot suffer this problem. A human can arbitrarily change things up for better or worse. Going the AI route is basically going the T-34 route. Suddenly quantity (via reproducibility) takes on a quality all it's own. My issue with that philosophically is does going down that road actually solve any pressing problem?
Which to me it rings a bit hollow and empty unless there's so.e other task we'd prefer people that would be pilots be doing.
Are those limits what they are because there wasn't any point in designing stronger airframes if the pilot was just going to black out under higher G forces?
If you take the vulnerable human body out of the equation I wonder if airframes strong enough to withstand that acceleration would actually be feasible.
Today it's all about spotting the enemy first and then the usual logistics of deploying as many weapons on the enemy as possible. An aircraft that can carry 4 missiles and runs out should head back so that it can sortie tomorrow again with a fresh load of missiles instead of starting a desperate dogfight. An expensive plane that can only carry 2 missiles but is guaranteed to return home is more valuable in a war than a cheap one that carries more missiles but gets shot down frequently.
Given that a plane, then, needs to be capable of carrying multiple pieces of ordnance (otherwise, it's pretty much just a guided missile), it's pretty much fundamentally going to have a higher mass than whatever missile you're launching at it.
There has not been an aerial dogfight in this millennia. The last ones that would really count happened over Bosnia in the 90s. I think a Rafale took down a 1960s era MIG-23 in the Libyan Civil war, but modern fighters are either too hard to hit or too expensive to risk.
Take the human body out, and the airframe is a (possibly, bus) missile.
And why in the hell would you fire a missile without a target that would require it loiter unless you were doing something completely mad like Project Pluto? That just doesn't really make sense at all. Though it reminds me of a torpedo from a Michael DiMercurio book that had to be sedated due to it's carbon based computing matrix being smart enough to basically guarantee a hit on an enemy combatant submarine, but not smart enough to understand IFF.
There's a big difference between a Predator with Hellfires, a tomahawk, A Global Hawk, or a man portablerecon/kamikaze drone, and finally Project Pluto, the ultimate "F you" device likely ever contemplated.
Missiles don't care about stalling. They are on a suicide mission to get as close to the target as possible for the nanoseconds necessary to detonate. Missiles, being small and dense, are much stronger than any aircraft.
Even then, as has been said countless times in this thread, high-G maneuvers don't do shit against modern missile threats. They might be useful for dogfighting with guns, but given the range and accuracy of modern missiles, combined with proximity fuzes, it simply doesn't accomplish much.
Against a weaker enemy, you'll never have the need to pull Gs in the first place. Against an equal or stronger enemy, it won't do a damn bit of difference anyway.
Now that no pilot is necessarily needed, different choices can be made.
Even if you could pull an instantaneous 10G acceleration completely perpendicular to your direction of flight without shedding airspeed (think: sideways-mounted rocket motor), in the time it takes a missile to close the last mile, you've moved less than 100ft. And all the while, the oncoming missile is actively tracking you. Even if it misses that's no big deal, since it uses proximity fuzing to blow up at its closest point to you.
High-G maneuvers are great for close-in battles to outmaneuver another plane and prevent a guns solution. They're becoming increasingly useless against modern IR missiles like the AIM-9X, and they're absolutely useless against a missile approaching at ludicrous speeds from 75+ miles away.
It helps that bullets as small as 12.7mm can be steered.
In case I'm not being trolled: the way to defeat a radar-guided missile is to beam (fly perpendicular to) the radar source. For an missile with active or semi-active radar guidance, this means you need to fly perpendicular to it. And, preferably, fire lots of chaff.
This is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of flying straight at the missile trying to shoot it with guns. Head-on, a missile will close the last mile in under one second. During this second, you need to accurately track, predict the flight path of, and reliably put guns onto a target that's cold (all the fuel has been burnt) and has (in the case of an AMRAAM) a 7 inch diameter. And that very well may not even care about being shot up with bullets; at best, I think you'd kill the seeker, but within the last mile it's not changing course much to have to come close enough to kill you by the proximity fuze (of which I believe there are two, one in the nose and one in the tail). By the time the first of your slow-moving bullets has any shot of reaching it, it will easily be within a quarter of a mile.
This is not even a remotely plausible way to defeat an oncoming missile. It runs directly counter to the actions you already be taking to maximize your chance of survival. And on top of that, bullets are only going to damage the leading-edge parts of the missile which aren't particularly critical to its ability to kill you, at least not within the distance it will be by the time your hail-mary bullet salvo hits it.
This is the sort of missile a fighter pilot is up against, 20 years ago. Look at what the sidewinder does at about 1:05. Good luck shooting that down.
Impact energy grows with the square of the velocity. If the velocity doubles, that is like quadrupling the mass of the bullet, which is like turning 20mm ammo into 32.75mm ammo.
It's not like a small flightless ant on radar, and anyway a Mach 4 object will be hot from compression heating. Mach 4 is just below what it takes to rip air molecules apart. That's damn hot. IR tracking would be trivial.
There is no limit that says "one bullet only". Typically the Phalanx CIWS fires about 100 shells, and those aren't even equipped with seekers. It's just dumb 20mm shells, about the same as carried by the typical fighter plane, costing about $30 each. We use the Phalanx CIWS against incoming missiles. It works great.
BTW, that was an unimpressive video with no clear point. Yes, missiles can fly and go after targets. We all know this. It works especially well in the missile vendor's promotional video.
I think you're forgetting that a lot of anti nuclear defense systems use nuclear weapons themselves. When you only need to be within a few hundred meters of a target accuracy suddenly doesn't matter at all, especially when you have several hours to predict the flight trajectory of the enemy missile.
If laser based CIWS turns out to be viable on aircraft then we would see a focus on bigger aircraft that can defend themselves against missiles but even then they would not directly fly into a missile if they can avoid it.
The systems to use nuclear warheads against incoming nuclear warheads were decommissioned half a century ago. I don't think that was ever in use against satellites.
Lasers are nice, but definitely not needed. Phalanx CIWS uses about 100 unguided bullets to destroy an incoming missile. Modern US fighter aircraft carry the same diameter ammunition. The plane is like a flying CIWS, minus the software.
Eh, maybe minus the software. If the software existed, it might not be public. Maybe the F-22 or F-35 already have the capability, limited mainly by pilot G-force survival.
You said the missile had some amazing ability to turn, and now you're saying it has no fuel. You can't have it both ways. There is fuel, or there is no energy to spare. Being "cold" isn't generally possible; nothing cools instantly. Modern IR sensors do not rely on engine heat. Supersonic flight generates plenty of heat on the nose.
That last bit deserves more emphasis. Heat was a serious problem for the Concorde and SR-71, despite operating at much slower speeds. The missile is hypersonic. That is the speed at which air molecules come apart from the heat. IR detection will be trivial.
There is a circular circuit board that is very much needed for the proximity fuse. That is full width.
The speed of the missile contributes to its own destruction. Bullet impact will be devastating. The missile can not endure supersonic flight with a lopsided hole and a bunch of cracks, and it wouldn't fly straight even if it could. Tumbling means instant destruction, like Space Shuttle Columbia.
Shooting back is the action to maximize chance of survival. It takes priority; all other options are obsolete.
It becomes slightly more reasonable if you turret the gun, until you factor in the weight of the necessary ammunition to neutralize multiple threats, the turret itself, and the independent radar used for target acquisition and tracking. A B-52 could pull it off, a fighter couldn’t yet. Not without massively compromising their payload and aerodynamics.
Chaff, flares, stealth and jamming are used because they actually work in practice. Jamming is a big one that people don’t hear about much. Wonder how the B-52 is still in service? Jamming. Wonder how wild weasels do their job? Jamming.
When you see a turret like that on a bomber then you can get excited for self-guided bullets shooting down dozens of multiple incoming missiles. But tbh at the rate we’re going it’ll just be a laser instead.
Don’t modern missiles use optical target acquisition in the first place?
BTW, tanks have active automatic ballistic defense systems for a while now.
It is more common to have active electronic systems. For example, one such system fires grenade-like projectiles upward that then explode in a downward direction. The timing is accurate enough that the incoming attack is hit by the shrapnel. Another system is more like a shotgun.
The more reasonable comparison is ship-based defense systems. The USA uses the Phalanx CIWS, which fires simple dumb projectiles of the same diameter as those of a typical fighter plane gun. About 100 are fired to destroy an incoming missile.
Adding an AI to a modern fighter makes it an awful lot like a flying Phalanx CIWS. You have a nearly identical gun with a nearly identical radar.
That helps the defender. The faster the missile goes, the harder it gets hit by defensive shrapnel.
I'd like some of that.
Phalanx CIWS was prototyped in 1973 and has been in service since 1980. Shooting down incoming missiles with machine gun fire has been viable for a very long time.
Well, if it's only Mach 4, it won't ever experience hypersonic flight, so that's pretty much a given.
> Phalanx CIWS was prototyped in 1973 and has been in service since 1980. Shooting down incoming missiles with machine gun fire has been viable for a very long time
Sure, if you are firing at much slower missiles and you've got a platform big enough to mount a rapid-rotating turreted Vulcan on, and even then it's not super reliable which is why it's being replaced or supplemented in newer deployments with systems based around the Rolling Airframe Missile.
Also, there is no way to install such a system on a fighter airplane.
It has nearly the same gun, 20mm in both cases. It has fancy radar. Basically, a modern fighter plane is a flying CIWS, if it has the software to do so.
No, it's not, because it can't change targeting axis fast enough; you'd have to have a turret mounted gun plus software, which is simply not feasible for a fighter.
Also, a major surface warship can afford to expend a lot more weight of ordnance defending against a single missile than a fighter can without sacrificing whatever mission it was protecting itself to accomplish.
The F-22 can sustain over 30 degrees per second. The exact value, and the instantaneous value, are both classified.
That isn't way off. Limits are in place to prevent pilot blackout, but since we're discussing an AI pilot here, the limits could be removed.
How many rounds does an aircraft carry?
Can CIWS intercept a Mach 3 missile while on an aircraft flying above Mach 1 (a relative speed of Mach 4+)?
Is it a good tactic to point your aircraft nose at an incoming missile?
Why hasn't this been done already?
The larger 30mm and RAM were created to extend that range. We planned to engage when the thermal plume was detected on the horizon.
The higher speed of ballistic threats meant that the pK of the SM-3 was pretty low. Luckily finding ships at sea is hard.
In a fight against a first line threat it was best to be in a boomer.
With thrust vectoring and a TWR > 1 this is less of a concern.
Sure you can point the nose wherever you feel like, but from the missile's perspective all you've done is given up your ability to make abrupt changes in direction and made its job of predicting your future location easier. Without lift under the wings, you're spinning the plane around on its axis but you're not actually changing the plane's motion vector as much as if you'd made a coordinated turn.
And on top of all this, a missile doesn't actually have to hit you directly to kill you. Missiles are proximity fuzed, so simply blow up next to you. Even a fancy 10G maneuver (a maneuver with thrust-vectoring while stalled, by the way, is ~0-1G since you're mostly just a ballistic object) isn't going to help much against a missile at Mach 4 that can pull 50G.
I found reading Boyd's biography, so much effort was made before decision makers would use his tactics, even when they were clearly superior.
Even board game like Go and Chess have experienced new and novel tactics from AI despite being much older, with lower barriers to entry. Inversely, dogfighting is new and the barriers to entry are so high its unlikely its close to optimal.
We already shoot missiles at other missiles. Drones will make that cheaper. In other words i think the biggest change will be in the economics of war. War will become much cheaper in the same way SpaceX's reusable rockets made space travel much cheaper.
It was an economic victory for the U.S. more than anything else. There is always a balance. It's just like the hoopla over hypersonic cruise weapons. Sounds horrifying. Until you realize the trumpet bell makes countering them easier rather than harder as long as you detect them early, because there is simply no way to reorient quickly at those speeds without being torn apart.
Further, no one is saying we should stick with manned fighter craft, only that they won't likely be the silver bullet everyone seems to think they will be, will be fraught with their own weaknesses, may not in the long run be cheaper than man operated, and may Coe with unforeseen doctrinal changes as the enemy adapts.
War is complicated, and rarely does who has the cooler gun perfectly translate to who wins or loses.
But the pilot requires more design compromises. The requirement to have a large canopy protruding from the fuselage for maximum visibility is a challenge to both building a stealthy aircraft and aerodynamics.
Also, currently the pilot and their circulatory system keeps aircraft from turning at more than ~9G (and then only for brief periods of time). Without a pilot, it would be possible to build aircraft with stunning maneuverability.
A better option would probably be to design drones that are less maneuverable. Sure more will be shot down. But that will lower the price so just manufacture more.
Another commenter said it first, but pretty much any set of reasoning that gets you to autonomous drones eventually leads to simply making guided missiles.
If we didn't have to care about those things, changing the existing infrastructure in an aircraft would be greatly simplified (not simple, but simplified).
High-G maneuvers are great for an in-close adversary moving relative to you. They don't do much against an adversary approaching at Mach 4. At that speed, while pulling 10G, you'll make less than a hundred foot change in your predicted position while the missile closes the last mile.
And keep in mind, the missile will be actively tracking you during this period.
> A swarm of small, cheap, explosive drones with a kamikaze AI sounds like the end of human-piloted warplanes to me.
This already exists. We just call them surface to air missiles or air-to-air missiles.
Modern air superiority combat is point-and-click. Send your air superiority fighter over, shoot a missile from beyond the sensor range of the other craft, and then blow them up.
----------
Air support fighters need guns (see A10 warthog) and other ammunition. But will we really be using guns in the future of air to air combat?
That transition has already happened. In recent conflicts the US has favored precision guided munitions over gun runs, even when sending the A-10 in somewhere. The A-10 is an internet favorite, but the reality is that it's expensive and obsolete. It's honestly a travesty congress keeps throwing money at it.
While at the same time occasionally dropping bombs at targets to make ignoring it not an option.
That's what makes unmanned planes special: It doesn't. It just has to force enough missiles to be fired that the missiles are more expensive/valuable than the plane when it ultimately gets shot down.
(Value can be different from financial cost, depending on e.g. supply shortages, influence on the rest of the war, etc.)
Nazi Germany had a credible air defense. We sent bombers anyway. At one point, the expected lifetime (survival) of a bomber crew was a month.
It has been some time since we fought a war that was worth that risk.
They're ultimately just aren't that many aircraft or cruise missiles in modern militaries relative to WW2, and they each cost 2-3 orders of magnitude more than their WW2 counterparts (although the cost increase matches the capability increase).
GP was effectively describing SAM with loitering capability and those surely don't exist yet.
The issue is that advanced opponents (ie: Russia or China) will have air defense of their own. How do you expect to take down a SAM site? Its specifically designed to destroy air targets as they approach.
With what, with air-drones? Against a hardened anti-air specialty base?
This is where electronic warfare comes in handy: "jamming" the radar of a SAM site for example will blindfold them. But the battle of information (jamming, stealth, and advanced radar) is constant, there's no guarantee that your jamming or stealth technology will be good enough for the next generation of Radar.
And no. You don't approach a SAM site (or any area a SAM site is defending) from the air. US Patriot systems can take out SCUD missiles traveling at Mach 5.
And if your "kamikaze drones" are flying at Mach 5 with an explosive payload, that makes them effectively a SCUD missile.
This is completely mistaken. SEAD (suppression of enemy air defenses) is one of the most basic and important missions the air force and naval aviators train for. The US absolutely does attack SAM sites from the air, and has done so going back to the Vietnam war. In 91 Saddam had a state of the art integrated air defense system that was systematically demolished by air in the initial days of the counterattack, long before ground troops got close to say Baghdad.
Google what the acronym at the bottom of the "Wild Weasel" patch means for a laugh.
Jammers (think emit a huge amount of energy on the frequency the radars use) and anti-radiation missiles (think radar homing) are a big part of it.
In modern warfare, the offense still has the advantage, if you don't run out of ammunition. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-300_missile_system#S-300PMU-...
> With what, with air-drones? Against a hardened anti-air specialty base?
Yep, air drones (or, to use the more common name, “missiles”, whether launched from the surface or launched from manned aircraft) are by far the most effective technique.
In fact, there are missiles optimized exclusively for that (anti-radiation missiles for taking out radars sites.)
> You don't approach a SAM site (or any area a SAM site is defending) from the air.
Yes, you usually do.
> US Patriot systems can take out SCUD missiles traveling at Mach 5.
SCUDs are ballistic missiles, which at any given speed are the easiest thing to hit, since they don't maneuver.
> And if your "kamikaze drones" are flying at Mach 5 with an explosive payload, that makes them effectively a SCUD missile.
No, it makes them hypersonic cruise missiles. Which no one, anywhere, has a particularly good counter for right now.
A plane that is flying high enough and can travel fast enough is essentially immune to ground-based interception. Your launch has to spend a significant amount of time and energy just to get high enough, and launches like this are extremely loud to the defending plane's sensors. If you launch too early they can just turn around and fly out of range; too late, and they can overfly and outrun your range.
Essentially, the position + velocity interception state space for smaller kamikaze designs does not necessarily include ground level & stationary for a large portion of the design space. And once you start up-scaling things to get the endurance necessary to attempt intercepts, then you lose the maneuverability and cost advantage for making kamikaze attacks, and attaching parasitic missiles or drone aircraft for the final attack run makes a ton of sense.
Without a human pilot in a fast jet, how do you get up there to take a closer look at the situation to decide what to do?
Modern warfare is limited in nature, with rules of engagement, etc.
Iran just shot down an airliner because they had poor ROE and control of their systems.
Just because something looks like a threat on sensors does not mean it is a threat. It could be that natural phenomena are masking things. It could be a ruse, such as an adversary is disguising a civilian aircraft to look military, or vice versa.
This result with dogfighting is interesting, but is only a very small part of what fast jets are useful for.
So did the USS Vincennes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
Even when you take the fleshy bits on the inside of the plane out of the equation, a plane that's capable of carrying multiple missiles and/or bombs is simply not going to be able to out-turn a missile that can pull 50G+ approaching at Mach 4 with any sort of regularity.
Pulling hard Gs is all but pointless because even if you cause the missile to "miss", the missile doesn't care about actually impacting you. They're proximity-fuzed and will happily detonate right next to you instead.
A large part of getting a missile to target is predicting where the target will be. Zig zagging hard and rapidly ruins the prediction and you don't have to do it all the time- only when it knows it's illuminated.
This means a swarm of "cheap" craft that focus on deploy 20 to take anything out is going to be the optimal. And without the need for all those human systems (glass cockpit, AR consoles, ejection systems, seats, etc) we're good.
For non-combat operations they can be flown similarly to drones.
There must be a reason that I'm missing why this isn't already a thing, anyone got an idea?
for a fighter jet with a remote pilot, you're looking potentially hundreds of miles of range, and the latency of the video transmission to the pilot combined with the latency of the controls signal back to the plane. i can't imagine that being acceptable for any sort of dogfighting scenario.
Buffering audio is actually a great answer to disconnections. Plus, it's less energy-intensive to fill the buffers at once than to stream it as needed. And since it's pre-recorded anyway, you already have the whole buffer. Yes, initial transfer can take a while, though.
But in theory, the play/pause operations shouldn't have latency, and the bluetooth device could clearly communicate its state. I'm not sure how audio is actually implemented in the bluetooth stack, though, I've only ever done serial communication with it.
Also opening up the ol' remote desktop port on an F16 is a major cyber risk.
Also think about the export market! Countries that now can buy the ruthless-pilot with the plane! And like with so many exports, you can give them a shittier version of the AI, so they do not become a danger to your forces!
The real question is how much does gun dogfighting ability matter now because guns are almost vestigial on modern fighters. Dogfights now are missile affairs and this test was a gun based one.
https://www.businessinsider.com/f35-pilot-f-35-can-excel-dog...
Not something I'm excited about, but likely inevitable.
The issue with AI is that combat can change so quickly. It's hard to make the right calls.
Let the AI handle Air to Air defense while the human pilots take out what targets they can read by their discretion etc.
Something like this but with a ~full-size airplane:
You don‘t need the AI to replace every plane or pilot, you could have a traditional plane and pilot to do all the human things and an AI or two to protect the human or engage the targets. Mixed AI/human squadrons.
and the enemy doesn't need to beat the AI in dogfight, just the infinite side channel attacks on the training set.
WW3 might be won by adding a few high intensity LEDs to some old MIGs.
https://www.businessinsider.com/clothes-accessories-that-out...
There just aren't that many methods of interacting with a plane >1km away, and even fewer at the 50-100KM ranges that modern fighters are built to fight at.
I'd disagree. Data is more important than the model. But also you can do black box attacks on AI pretty effectively. What you do is train your AI to perform a similar feat and then figure out its weaknesses. Those weaknesses are likely to translate to the other AI. Robustness is a difficult task.
As for blasting confusing data, well that already happens to human pilots. There are radar jammers, targeting jammers, visually occluding devices, etc. But hey, if an AI can operate under 90% of typical dog fight situations, then that's a big reduction in needed pilots. Then those pilots can be all trained to be aces.
I don’t think the problem is fundamentally different from the pre-AI state of electronic warfare and countermeasures.
It's just another step in the arms race ladder.
() Not needing 2-5 years of expensive training. () not needing space for the human and it's associated safety systems (*) being completely willing to sacrifice the aircraft to "win" an encounter or otherwise achieve it's goals.
In other words, an air force does not need AI that can completely dominate human pilots. It simply needs AI that is "mostly similar in performance", and when combined the advantages mentioned above, means that such aircraft will be significantly better in terms of fighting capability.
Of course, that is just raw combat, not other areas of flight where greater human intelligence is of more value.