Complemented, and AI-piloted, but not replaced. There are significant positive scale factors in aerodynamics. Larger jets have much better thrust to weight ratios, allowing them to move faster, travel further, maneuver better, and carry heavier and longer ranged weapons and sensor platforms.

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.

Bigger fighters definitely still have a place, but I'm not sure manned ones do. Imagine a dogfight between a manned fighter jet with a maximum G limit of 15G and an AI fighter jet with a limit of 30G - it won't even be close.

It isn't feasible to design an AI fighter jet with a limit of 30G. The airframe necessary to handle that strain would be way too heavy, seriously limiting the fuel load. And how would you avoid compressor stall in a 30G turn?

Dogfights no longer occur anyway. What matters is early detection.

To add another response, (a) dogfighting is not something 5th+ gen fighters need to be good at and (b) no fighter is ever going to tolerate 30G in anything except maybe a straight line. Fighters are big and have big shear stresses and would tear apart long before then.

I said AI-piloted in the first sentence.

I suspect there will be a fairly long lasting middle step: an AI piloted "mini jet fighter". Say 4x smaller, but faster and more maneuverable by virtue of not having to protect a human pilot, and still capable of carrying existing air to air and surface to air missiles. It will sort of be an auto-piloted aircraft carrier for the missiles, which at some level are the "real aircraft" these days already. The missiles need a larger, fast and hard to shoot down vehicle to carry them into the region of combat.

Anyone who plays RTS games knows this is about resources, speed of construction, how much damage the unit can project, and how much damage the opponent can absorb.

No it’s about the military industrial complex milking the US defense budget for all its worth.

I think that ignores that these drones would be much cheaper, no? Certainly in bang:buck.

I'm a bit skeptical. For one, how much of a modern aircraft is actually really dedicated to cockpit space, maybe 5% on a small fighter? How much extra fuel and thrust is really required to lug along a ~80 kg human (okay maybe double to account for supporting systems)? Keeping in mind a single Sidewinder missile weighs 85 kg.

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.

You're asking the wrong question. Not how much space the human takes, but how much performance the plane loses because it contains meat jelly.

I'm not disputing the notion that primary fighters might one day be completely autonomous. My point is that autonomous fighters won't lead to the end of the modern jet fighters as we know them. They'll still be the big expensive machines we know and love (fear?) because most of the factors driving that trend are unrelated to whether the pilot is a human or an algorithm.

It seems you misunderstood GP. Their point is that machines have higher tolerances and won't just die of too many g. Unlike weight, this is not obviously irrelevant.

I understood their point perfectly well and agreed that there may be a point in time where autonomous aircraft replace manned combat aircraft. My point was that such an occurrence wouldn't lead to a significant reduction in aircraft size or cost.

They absolutely will just die from too many G. You're just replacing a family at home mourning the loss of a pilot to the accountants throwing themselves out of windows because these damned airframes keep ripping themselves apart or otherwise incurring excessive maintenance costs because the maneuvers they engage in are pushing the airframe itself to it's material limits. Believe it or not, the art of engineering is striking the right balance to minimize the overall cost of the process, and trying to keep from just stunting the cost to a different coffer.

That's a good point. I always considered this in the opposite direction though. Once you have a sufficient number of drones I don't think any conventional aircraft will have sufficient weaponry to deal with them effectively.

Use the Sidewinder missiles as an example. You're going to run out of munitions very quickly and be left with far poorer capabilities.

I just don't see a drone swarm sufficient to the task of taking down a single jet fighter in disputed territory as being economically feasible (for the reasons I outlined previously).

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.

I'm always baffled when I see people talk about "drone swarms" as if they have never used a drone or RC aircraft. Most drones can't fly for more than 30 minutes and then they have to charge for significantly more than 30 minutes.

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.

> I'm always baffled when I see people talk about "drone swarms" as if they have never used a drone or RC aircraft. Most drones can't fly for more than 30 minutes and then they have to charge for significantly more than 30 minutes.

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.

> I think that days of big expensive aircraft like modern fighters / bombers are numbered. They will likely be replaced with a swarm of drones, which are smaller, cheaper and harder to detect. For $100M (the price of just one fighter) you can field 10000 cheap drones and literally blot out the sun over the field of battle.

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.

I could see a hybrid approach, where a bunch of drones are loaded into a mothership, possibly a repurposed bomber with a bomb bay full of drones. That gives you local control of the swarm, and a way to deliver them over much longer range.

Come on, let's be serious. What makes your idea distinct from existing weapon systems? Instead of making up new names for old things just look up what is serving the same purpose as your idea. "Drones" are just guided bombs or missiles. "Motherships" are just fighter jets or bombers.

CARRIER HAS ARRIVED

Headline: America switches to Protoss, rushes Fleet Beacon.

You've pretty much described the F-35 doctrine that the US is developing. The only major difference is that an aircraft carrier or some other ship holds the drones before launch, which makes sense as the you already need the carrier to launch the flight controller craft (the F-35)

This may result in a situation that strongly favors the defender. If it takes ten drones to shoot down a fighter but they're only 1% the cost, countries that otherwise can't project air power internationally may become capable of defending themselves at home.

> This may result in a situation that strongly favors the defender. If it takes ten drones to shoot down a fighter but they're only 1% the cost, countries that otherwise can't project air power internationally may become capable of defending themselves at home.

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.

So you're saying ground based defense systems should engage in stealth as well? Attackers use stealth but can also easily spot and fly around known defense systems.

This reminds me of The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson...maybe not nanobots yet...but still..