I don't think dogfights are the future of air-to-air combat.

> 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.

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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?

> 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.

Bullets are cheap. There's a reason pretty much every 3rd world air force slings gun ponds under its ground attack aircraft. No reason to spend a multi-thousand dollar bomb when 20mm will do.

That no longer works when the adversary has any sort of credible air defense. Can't risk manned aircraft at low altitude any more.

Pretty much all ground attack aircraft that aren't just multi-role fighters with precision munitions hanging off of them are crap if you don't have air superiority.

OTOH, an plane with a very precised gun may "win" an encounter by circling above a well-defended area, having SAMs shot at it, shooting down the SAMs as they approach, while being cheaper to operate (and replace when it eventually does get hit) than the missiles shot at it.

While at the same time occasionally dropping bombs at targets to make ignoring it not an option.

The defender in this scenario has a seriously disadvantage, in that the local SAM sites can send many missiles at the same time, and the anti-missile suite of the plane has to defeat every single one. A gun that would succeed in this scenario would be a massive technological leap. The US Navy uses gun-based anti-missile setups, but they are more of a last ditch sort of defense that can defeat a small number of incoming missiles by putting an absurd amount of bullets in their way.

> can send many missiles at the same time, and the anti-missile suite of the plane has to defeat every single one.

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.)

The plane is the attacker, unless someone invaded their home and put SAM sites everywhere while they were out.

You can bet we will be risking manned aircraft and low altitude for a very long time to come. I don't think you understand military priorities in times of war.

Sure they will take the risk at low altitude when there's no other option. But the preferred technique now is to orbit at medium altitude and dispense precision munitions. Why expose the aircraft to ground fire when it's not necessary?

We can and we will risk manned aircraft at low altitude against a credible air defense. The war just has to be meaningful enough.

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.

There is an interesting angle on modern great power conflict. Even in a non-nuclear war, all modern combat systems, munitions, and manufacturing bases, would be destroyed or expended within the first weeks by precision munitions. Pro-longed non-nuclear conflict would likely require tradeoffs towards lower-tech components that could be manufactured in more locations at lower risk of bombardment.

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).

> This already exists. We just call them surface to air missiles or air-to-air missiles.

GP was effectively describing SAM with loitering capability and those surely don't exist yet.

Certain anti radar missiles have a loiter capability where they deploy a parachute, looking down and waiting until their target lights up.

Not as rare as you'd think. Even Iran seems to have them.

https://www.google.com/search?q=loitering+sam

*AAM (air-to-air missile)

Runways, SAM Sites, Fuel Depots are hit at the same time. You gain air superiority very quickly

Bombarding the opponent with rockets and artillery usually wins. We've been doing that for decades.

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.

> And no. You don't approach a SAM site (or any area a SAM site is defending) from the air.

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.

Nice. :) For the lazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Weasel

There are reams of doctrine about how to approach a SAM site from the air. Look up Suppression of Enemy Air Defense (SEAD) or Destruction of Enemy Air Defense (DEAD).

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.

How many incoming bombs, cruise missiles, and other threats can a modern SAM system engage at once? According to wikipedia, a SA-20 carries 4 missiles per TEL, and each command vehicle can control up to 12 TELs. That gives the command vehicle 48 missiles to play with. There is a 0.7 chance of intercepting a "tactical ballistic missile," which is the equivalent to a SCUD, and is probably the easiest thing to intercept. If you fire two missiles at each TBM, you have about a 91% chance of intercepting each missile, meaning you only need to fire 7 TBMs at a site in order to have a fifty chance of one of the missiles making it through, if they fire two missiles at each one. In the meantime, the SAM sight has expended 14 very expensive surface to air missiles. BTW, the .7 figure is likely under favorable conditions, which most battlefields would not be, as there would be jamming, decoys, cyber attacks, and lots of other clutter. This is also for ballistic missiles. Terrain following cruise missiles and precision guided munitions would likely be more difficult to target. [1]

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-...

> 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?

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.

If all else fails, there's always the intercontinental ballistic tungsten telephone pole. Nothing short of a nuke can stop it.

The Earth does a pretty good job. Just don't stand in the way, and you won't get hit.

You'll want a two-stage system of some sort anyhow. There's a fundamental tradeoff between the ability to carry the fuel needed to gain height, maneuver into the correct position/heading/speed, loiter, etc, and to have the extreme power-to-weight ratio and maneuverability for a suicidal final attack run.

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.

Please show me a swarm of small, cheap, explosive drones that can't be avoided by using radar and outdistanced/outmaneuvered. To do that you need medium to large and expensive drones.

Well, as others have mentioned, the current version is called "missiles". They require a platform to launch from.