Posted on 03/10/2010 6:15:30 PM PST by myknowledge
Very good point, especially with Bozo cutting funding to our space programs. We have to ask ourselves, will we even have those satellites in 20 years? This doesn't even take into account the many ways the signals could be interfered with without destroying the controlling birds.
Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, and Yes. And they have a real human being filtering the data and making the decisions.
Are you addressing me?
“I’d be interested to hear your evaluation, as a fighter pilot, of how you would deal with such an adversary. I’m not trying to be argumentative but as an engineer I’m very interested to hear the pilot’s perspective on this.”
As a fighter/instructor pilot I’m used to dealing with the engineer personality. A+B= C. But flying in general incorporates ALOT of art. We call it “hands” or “stick”. As in “he’s got good hands” or “he’s a good stick”. In any fighter group in the world, every pilot on base knows who the best pilots are. 10% routinely beat up on the rest. How can that be if they are all flying the same airframes?
But modern air combat isn’t even about flying so much. It’s about situational awareness and being able to predict the future of everything around you for the next 30 sec to a minute or so. It’s a battle between forces to not lose that SA.
Typically in a large scale air battle each side may start out with 12 or more jets 100 miles apart. Each side will probably probe the other with 4 or 8 trying to paint a good picture for their side with the onboard radars. Communicating with your whole team to build your SA. As the advance force gets within longer range missile range and begins firing (or fake firing) each side drags out leaving chaff and using electronic countermeasures. This is called the “exploding cantalope”. As the first wave is running away bravely, their buddies are flowing inbound and painting a radar picture of the airbattle and communicating that to the package. This may repeat itself several times until some element finally loses enough SA to get themselves killed. (BTW- this is why the F-22 is so important, it’s stealth lowers the enemies SA and it’s incredible on board radar raise our guys SA to the point of it being no match)
It’s just not possible for drones, dealing with uplinks and and delays to deal with the immediacy of this kind of air war. Not to mention how easy it is to jam the datalinks. That’s why fighter ops train so hard in groups of 4 operating visually. Comm/data can be jammed.
As far as end game dogfighting it would be a joke. It’s a pure visual/experience/instantaneous/SA fight. How do you think a remotely operated car would fare driving the streets of Taiwan? Would automatic sensors be able to look down range and see a dog headed for your lane? Now ad in the element of altitude and comm jamming and spoofing, in both cases it would be ugly.
Nope, drones won’t be taking over the air combat role anytime soon. Not in our childrens lifetimes for sure.
Sorry this was long.
Speaking as an Computer engineer, there are only 2 fundamental roadblocks to fully autonomous drones, and both are solvable in the next 20 years:
1. AI technology has rapidly advanced over the last 2 decades. Algorithms using a combination of Evolutionary and Social Heuristics is already allowing for very complex team work between sets of semi-autonomous drones. We’re talking about groups of drones smart enough to play soccer or scout out a maze as a team.
2. Wireless data bandwidth continues to grow exponentially. So data latency should become a fairly insignificant issue in the 5-10 year time frame. Assuming sufficient bandwidth, drones within a unit could conceivably be destroyed in very large numbers, but as long as one drone survives, the lessons learned from that battle could be added to the knowledge base(Heuristics) of the entire unit.
Meaning, a robotic squadron would get exponentially smarter over time against human opponents using generally the same set of conventional tactics.
And by the way, that’s just development from a conventional Information Technology based approach.
There are other more exotic avenues of AI research that tries to create general purpose autonomous agents using cultured organic neural networks or even quantum computing.
Thank you for your replies, very interesting.
Obviously there are no UAVs right now that have been developed specifically for air superiority, however somebody with the technical expertise and financial resources will undoubtedly explore the possibilities.
It’ll be interesting to see how the technology develops.
Not wanting to be rude to you, but you just don’t understand fighter operations. It’s not what you see on movies or TV.
You are probably a very good computer engineer, but so aren’t the people who operate in fighter aviation. It is folly to presume that because you have vast knowledge about computer technology that the people who actually have to fly the airplanes are technology troglodytes.
Bottom line, no drone with all the vast technology available to it will beat a manned aircraft which will possess the same technology. The only advantage that drones have over fighters is that they are not constrained by full bladders.
“The only advantage that drones have over fighters is that they are not constrained by full bladders.”
LOL. Don’t you know that depends aren’t just for people with bladder control problems.
F-16 Ping.
Or that piddle paks are impossible in a 30 degree inclined seat!
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