Based on my admittedly uninformed observations, it looks very much like the future is going to be Bullpups For Everyone! You get a Bullpup! She gets a Bullpup! Everybody Gets A Bullpup!
In air to ground missions, not much.
The HUD itself is all about what’s directly in front of you. For AG missions in general, the real action is on whatever top-down map display screen you’ve got. Which may be pretty magic or pretty minimal depending on your aircraft’s vintage.
Specifically in a HUD: In addition to the basic stuff needed for aircraft control (attitude, speed, altitude, heading, Gs, AOA) you’ll have time, distance and direction to a designated navigation point. Which may or may not be a target itself.
During an unguided ordnance delivery (dumb bomb or rocket) you’ll have some sighting symbology whereby if you fly to superimpose the symbology over the visual target then release the weapon you’ll get close to a hit. During a AGM delivery (e.g. Maverick, Hellfire) you’ll have some indication of weapons range and where the weapon is “looking”. Whether you steer the airplane to point the weapon at the target or steer a cursor to tell the weapon where to look depends on the details.
The nirvana state for the future direction for AG delivery is the magic all-seeing all-knowing GoogleMap. An accurate image of the ground with all known friendlies, hostiles, and neutrals displayed. Plus with targeting and weaponeering decisions laid out for you, whether by your flight lead or an AI. Of course all this info is shared with all friendlies and with all your own on-board weapons which know how and when to release themselves to get the hit on their chosen target.
The pilot’s job will reduce to driving the airplane into a “basket” or series of baskets forming a tunnel; each basket being a 3D block of sky where each release can happen with acceptable probability of success. At which point we can automate the pilot right out of the vehicle replacing him/her and the unneeded cockpit and life support stuff with something more useful like fuel or weapons.
Reality will lag that nirvana state for another hundred years.
It might be an overstatement to say “the fog of war is conserved over time”. But I for one have real doubts about the success in fighting a largely automated war where each side is killing the targets seen in its respective networked real-time database. In the presence of large scale cyber attacks it’s unclear those databases will bear any resemblance to the real world outside.
GIGO will always be with us. And in spades when the enemy has a hand in creating that garbage.
At least in the case of CAS, this is an example of the luxury of spending several million USD per dead enemy. It only works when the volume of USAF is huge compared to the volume of friendly ground troops in active contact w the enemy.
This kind of thinking has no place in a real war scenario as contrasted with the diddling around we’ve done for the last 20 years. Despite the fact that “diddling” has consumed the lives of thousands of Americans and the health of 100x that many. Plus all the damage and death done to neutrals and hostiles.
We’ve been playing at modern war, not doing modern war. I mean to take nothing away from the very real risks and sacrifices of the individuals directly involved. It’s totally 100% real at their level. At the very same time it’s totally unreal at the national level. Us thinking this is what war is like is the same trap as some parent play wrassling with their 8 yo and thinking that’s valid preparation for a knife fight in a biker bar. It’s not.
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We’ve been playing at modern war, not doing modern war.
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You know, its actually scary how much this fact resembles the pre-1914 era. 
New exotic technologies, used in earnest against poor Afghan tribesmen (!) or Boer farmers. ANd then used against a modern enemy who could reply in kind…
Agreed.
Warfare hasn’t changed whit one since Og & Grog first faced off with a rock and a stick. Ditto human nature.
We collectively seem pretty good at learning from the history of the last 20-40 years and forgetting most of the bigger lessons by the 50 year mark. The academics remember, or at least most of them do. The public and politicians? Not so much. Generals? Somewhere in the middle.
It must get rather more involved in air-to-air. Knowing that the enemy is within maximum range of your missile but holding until it’s within no-escape range must be unnerving.
If the war fairy offered to provide 3 data feeds in air-to-air, what would they be?
I get the impression that desginating targets for an AGM with laser/radar in SACLOS or beam riding is more common than looking through the AGM sensor and guiding it like a kamikaze. What are the situations/factors where one is preferable to the other?
Yes, that makes it interesting to think about how things would go down against adversaries of broadly equivalent sophistication. The fact that something works well against a bunch of Muslim rednecks in the Middle East (like a slow attack plane) is shoddy evidence of its effectiveness or survivability.
How much potential do you see in laser/radar-guided grenades/mortars/missiles as integral support to be called in? In a big, hot war, would a 5000$ munition like the Spike-SR missile be too onerous?
Attaching something like a Pereh missile carrier to a platoon or company would give it mobile, accurate indirect firepower.
In my era we weren’t inclined to wait for no-escape. Get at least some iron in the air real early. If nothing else it’ll disrupt the crap outta their attack plans when they see it coming, their RWR lights up w the missile’s radar detected, or they watch their leader blow up. With AIM-9 we expected the latter to be their first clue most times. Followed in very rapid succession by the rest of them blowing up and us blasting through the remains of their formation to finish off any stragglers from duds 15 seconds later. Viper style was a slashing overwhelmingly fast melee style of battle, not a patient cat and mouse game.
Longer-ranged missileers have different tradeoffs. Depending on whether you need a hard kill or can settle for a mission kill it may make sense to wait to no-escape. Also depends on who the target is. For enemy counter air I’ve got to be real concerned about their simultaneous attack on me; remember that we carry swords but not shields.
Going after enemy ground attack aircraft or heavies, not so much. OTOH, every second you’re driving towards that enemy with your mind focused on them is another second something else is possibly sneaking up on you. 360 3D degrees of hazy sky can hide a lot of bandits while you’re focused on a 2 degree-wide cone containing your known target set.
As to the war fairy:
The hardest part of any fight is knowing where everybody is. And being confident you’ve spotted all the enemy, not just most of them. Conversely, our group tactics were designed to ensure it was real unlikely they could detect all of us, much less keep track of even most of us once we started moving around.
The sensor fusion to meld GCI, AWACS, and friendly fighter data (IR, radar, laser) into a coherent who’s-where is a total game changer. Getting that beamed into cockpits was Star Wars stuff when I was in. And is apparently fairly well in hand with F-22 and F-35 now.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear enough. Things like the Viet Nam era AGM-62 Walleye - Wikipedia worked like you describe: the WSO (or F-100 pilot :eek:) manually drives the thing all the way to the target via a joystick while looking out a camera in the missile nose.
The next generation was things like AGM-65 Maverick - Wikipedia. This is what I was referring to. The missile is looking straight ahead. The pilot visually aims the aircraft and missile at the target & looks through a camera in the missile nose. He maneuvers until the target (building, vehicle, etc.) is in the cross hairs then designates then fires. The missile’s computer watches the scene in the nose cam getting bigger and flies the missile to impact at the designated item. After firing the pilot is not involved. Hence “fire and forget”.
In some cases the pilot can slew the missile’s crosshairs someways off boresight before firing. So he can aim the aircraft in the general direction and fine tune the missile’s designation before release. It still gets real busy in an A-10 or F-16 trying to both fly the aircraft and aim the separate missile. Works better in an F-15E, etc. with a WSO to divide the workload.
The various laser designation systems are a mix where somebody someplace on the ground, in that jet, or in another jet has to initially laze the target and keep tracking the target to weapon impact. Sometimes this is automatic, other times it’s a guy w a joystick.
Meantime the weapon dropper has to detect the laser spot using a laser receiver either built into the aircraft or built into the ordnance. Once the crew is sure the missile “sees” the laser spot and is in range they launch & forget the bomb or missile. Though if it’s own-ship designating they need to either manually track the target with the laser, or at least make sure their own egress maneuvers don’t prevent their tracking computer from keeping the designation aimed at the spot on the ground.
Some of the latest magic does away with all that laser / IR / TV tracking crap. You laze the target for a moment to get exact range and 3D bearing, do the trig from the designator’s known GPS position to determine the GPS coords of the target, pass those automagically to the missile/bomb guidance system them let 'er rip once in range. The weapon flies to the GPS coordinates and detonates. If everything is in good enough calibration the target *should *be sitting right at the scene of the explosion.
Cool idea for fixed targets but fails utterly for moving land & water vehicles. Can even fail for groups of foot soldiers if the weapon time of flight is long enough and something spooks them before impact.
'Zactly. The scurrilous politics is that the Army likes preparing for low intensity wars against unsophisticated opposition and the USAF likes preparing for high intensity wars against sophisticated opposition. Hence the endless budget battles about which “next war” are we buying for?
Not really my area of expertise. Neither is practical for leg infantry which is the limit of my direct Army experience. The mechanized / armor guys would be the ones to ask.
The conceptually similar “smart” List of 40 mm grenades - Wikipedia is something that seems like it’d have huge applicability to urban and jungle / forest infantry fighting. I know we’d have used the crap out of it in my day had we had it.
For damn sure we’re desperately needing to get the cost of “smart” munitions down to cheap-in-bulk prices. We can’t be launching $100K missiles at every Toyota pickup with 3 goons in the whole damn war zone. And doubly so in a near-peer battle.
As perhaps you mean to suggest, we should probably be suspicious of the idea that effective engagement ranges by small arms and mg’s in WWI were systematically different from those in WWII.
In mid-late 19th century wars with general issue of rifles infantry could engage infantry at much longer ranges than before (ie the couple of centuries during which most infantrymen carried smoothbore muskets, despite some use of rifles by skirmishers/sharpshooters), but they were still often firing at close order formations of men standing. In the WW’s infantry made themselves much more difficult targets, as they’d begun to do even in 19th century wars.
Though anecdotes can be found of apparently effective long range rifle fire in WWI I don’t see a reason to believe the WWII conclusion that max effective rifle range was usually 200-300 meters at most was really any different. And OTOH machine guns on tripods were used for indirect fire at much longer ranges in both those wars, and later ones (some Chinese mg gunners in Korea were very skilled at this).
For that matter it’s doubtful either thing has changed greatly up to the present. Electronic ‘fire control’ is now easy to develop for rifles, and is changing long range hunting of animals. But in human combat there’s still the problem of seeing the enemy at long range, especially when being shot at.