I read that Predator’s were launched and landed under local control, but operationally flown by pilots in the continental US. Then they put on missiles! Then they sent over a bigger drone, the Global Hawk (over a ton of payload, and the size of a 737). And a Hellfire missile weighs just over 100 pounds.
When will we no longer need manned attack aircraft? I take it for granted the time will come. Primarily because you with near-real-time-data transmission networks, you can put more brain power (as many brains as you need) into the “cockpit” of a high performance aircraft than ever before. And if you need to you can increase the performance and payload of any design if you don’t need pilots/life support.
The Gulf War was the first war where we didn’t use infantry (we used mechanised infantry, but no US soldier marched into battle). Now we have the first war with remote bombing by remote aircraft. Surely we can do this with a tank. Eventually we can do it with small enough vehicles to replace infantrymen.
I know, I know, what about jamming? Well, you can always program some escape/loiter AI into the thing til a link is reestablished.
I don’t believe there is any more “marching into battle”. Everything is mechanized or airborne. The days of war as in WW2 are over. They died in Viet Nam.
You can do it , but alot of pilots will refuse to fly by remote control , also data links are different frequencies to ECM so ECM doesn’t do very much to it , however the delay
might cause some problems in dogfights , also if you lose data link (say terrain masking) what does it do? (the film DR Strangelove where they lose radio is an interesting example).
If you lose the data link you revert to some on-board the plane AI routine. Maybe it climbs and circles until a link is reestablished or until fuel gets critical, then flies home.
Maybe a lot of pilots would quit, but there’d be millions of computer game geeks waiting to sign up. If you don’t have to learn navigation or train for the physical stresses of piloting, the floodgates open on who can qualify as a “pilot”.
Nowadays, the only way to take down a plane is to shoot it down.
With the OP’s system, you can either shoot it down, or destroy the transmitter. That’s two ways to take down the plane. It’s twice as vulnerable.
And what about relay stations? One of those just makes the plane three times as vulnerable.
Not to mention jamming and even worse, hacking. How’d you like it if you can never be sure whether or not your own planes will suddenly turn around and bomb you?
And how about centralization? Do you want to Be in a situation where one cruise misslie - or one unit of sperial-ops saboteurs - can immobilize an entire flight wing, or battalion?
I don’t think so.
(And don’t come to me with "AI Routines) You can program a plane to circle, but you can’t program it to evade interceptors, let alone dogfight itself. A weapon system that isn’t attacking is much worse than useless).
Not to insult, Alessan, but I think you’re missing a key point here. Losing a drone costs you just that: a single drone. Expensive and irritating, yes? Losing a piloted plane is often even more expensive in terms of equipment, and has astronomical costs in the loss of a laboriously trained pilot and homefront demoralization. The loss of ten drones is probably easier to take than a single piloted aircraft. So what if you lose drones? Cheaper than pilots even if you don’t add the cost of a human life.
Jamming and hacking require the enemy to break your encryption in real-time, something that is very difficult to do. Further, ECM is also subject to ECM, and high-powered transmitters for ECM are a gigantic bullseye to anti-radiation missiles.
Centralization- I don’t follow your argument here. Manned aircraft require specialized services at stationary large-scale airfields. Transmission and control equipment can be lugged around in the back of a truck, and distributed over the world if not the entire battle theater. I also think that you understand the state of programming in drones. They can be made to do a lot more than just circle, even without real AI.
As for winning dogfights, think of what a dogfight is nowadays- it’s a pilot locking on a missile and firing. The missile itself already does much of the work, work that a drone can be programmed to do as well.
Special forces, Kipper, not regular Army, and very few of them for a very short time. That campaign is also significant for proving the absolute limitations of a marching soldier, even if he is special-forces in top shape. Mechanized warfare arrived for good in the Second World War, which was a war of maneuver on a scale unimaginable to a marching or horse-drawn army. Even the First World War would have been completely and utterly impossible without the use of railways to deploy and then supply the troops. If you really want to get technical, the Germans had figured out the futility of marching warfare in the late 19th century, when they put railroad building under control of the General Staff. You simply cannot supply a large army over any distance without mechanization, and a professional army of any size is virtually impossible without mechanization. Remember, if you will, that those marching special forces made the vast bulk of the journey from Britain on a motor vessel.
That’s all well and good, if your primary interest is minimizing your own losses. If your interest is in actually winning the battle, then you can’t really think in those terms - you have to worry about maximizing your enemies damage, and more importantly, maximizing your chance of completing your mission.
Frankly, I think your engaging in defeatist thinking. Your thinking “how little can I lose?” instead of “how much can I gain?”. That’s OK for limited warfare like the Gulf War and Afganistan, but it’s certain death in total war.
Codes have been broken before, especially when the enemy starts capturing your hardware. And in this case, the amount of damage 15 seconds of enemy controll of your aircraft can do is mindboggling.
Airfields can take a lot of punishment before being put out of commision, and can be easily repaired. We’re talking about a situation where one well-placed missile can take out 30 planes in the air.
And besides, where will you controllers be? In an APC? Vulnerable. In a bunker? Also vulnerable, and not very mobile. In an aircraft carrier? They can be sunk. Under a mountain in Colorado? They’ll have to transfer information by satelite, and there are plenty of missiles which can take those down, not to mention lag time.
Then they’d better be pretty well-armored trucks, because every enemy aircraft, tank and infantryman in the area will be attacking them. In fact, they’ll be impossible to hide, because they’ll be constantly transmitting a huge volume of radio waves. And raen’t there missiles who can lock on radio transmissions?
Now that I think of it, not only will these trucks be constantly transmintting, so will the drones. I mean, they have to get a huge amount of information back to there controllers, don’t they? So not only will stealth be impossible, you can also forget about heat-seeking missiles. Why search for a heat signature when you have a radio beacon pointing out yuour target loud and clear?
Ever played online? Then you’d know that there is absolutely no comparison between a computer and a experienced, hardcore gamer. A trained human is always better.
And considering the speed of airborn combat, all you need is ten seconds in which your opponent is slightly less efficient, and you’ve won the battle.
Now, now. I may not know much about flying, but that’s just absurd. There’s a LOT more to air combat then just point-and-click. Otherwise, why do they invest millions of dollars in training every pilot?
The thing is, even if remote piloting was secure, it still wouldn’t be half as efficient as real piloting. There’s just so much a computer can simulate, only so much a radio link can confer. There is no electronic device which as efficient as an eye on the target. And piloting isn’t just vision - a pilot wins by feeling the G-forces, by sensing the little shakes and noises of his craft, which only he knows what they mean. If nothing else, he can sense an enemy behind him by the prickling of the hairs on the back of his neck. You can’t simulate that
Oh, and BTW - I was infantry, and although we had APCs, and trained in armored combat, we walked a *lot. Screening ahead of the tanks for enemy AT defences, nighttime raids (walk 10k, blow something up, walk back), ambushes (regular and AT), airborne assaults (where the choppers dropped us off some distance from the target, to maintain the element of surprise), opening roads… we trained for them all, and did a few for real. No, we didn’t go marching for weeks at a time; that would be stupid. But frankly, on rough terrain - the kind we were prepared to fight for - often the fastest, most reliable, most efficient form of tansportation is a pair of leather boots. You try to lead a tank along the steep side of a wadi and tell me how far you’ll get, and how fast.
Frankly, I don’t like APCs. They’re big, dumb visible targets. I’d much rather have my spread out and hunkered down, then have them cooped up in one of those tin cans, at the mercy of a stray mortar shell or Sagger.
I see lots of dogmatism and absolutist rhetoric here… which is, I guess, the historical tradition where discussions of military doctrine are concerned. As always, though, I think the truth lies somewhere in between.
Obviously drones and manned aircraft each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Drones made their debut back in World War II, usually in a “kamikaze” role blurring the line between aircraft and guided missile (the German “Mistletoe” and arguably the V-1, and the US “Aphrodite” project). As technology has advanced, the capabilities of drones have increased.
While we’re still nowhere near drones being able to do everything a piloted aircraft can do, combat environments are such that there are many circumstances where you don’t need something that can do everything a piloted aircraft can do. Certain situations play to the strengths of drones, and those situations are increasingly common (political expense of casualties or prisoners, low value targets where the monetary cost of losses of manned aircraft would be prohibitive, etc.).
I don’t think that concerns about losses and cost effectiveness are necessarily out of place even in an all out “Total War” scenario. While neither the US or any other major nation has been involved in such a conflict in over 50 years, if we look back at World War II, both the Germans and Japanese could attest to the adverse consequences of losing experienced personnel and/or top-drawer equipment in a war of attrition against superior numbers of lesser or merely adequate quality.
Moreover, nuclear proliferation changed the definition of Total War. Limited regional conflicts have been the order of the day ever since World War II, and will surely continue to be for many years. While it might be foolish to ignore the possibility of a broader conflict, it would be even more foolish not to recognize and prepare for the likelihood of narrower ones.
While drones are unlikely to be able to hold their own in a one-on-one dogfight for a long time to come, their use might help make such dogfights less likely. Drone strikes might need less effective escort because losses would be less significant. In air-to-air combat, waves of drones might overwhelm their manned foes with numbers, launching barrages of air-to-air missiles to destroy their opponents before they could close to dogfight range. Moreover, drones aren’t subject to a lot of the inherent engineering constraints that manned aircraft are. A drone can be smaller and lighter than a manned plane simply by virtue of being able to leave out the pilot. It can maneuver more drastically by virtue of not having to worry about the pilot blacking out. It doesn’t have to worry as much about its own survival, so it can take risks that a human pilot wouldn’t. All of these features can help offset the advantages of original thought and flexibility that a human pilot possesses.
I’m a bit skeptical of the security of remote control, but I doubt that either the problems or the solutions involved will be absolutes. Electronic warfare will merely become an additional dimension of conflict, the same way air combat itself did in World War I.
I certainly don’t think that we’re on the verge of the complete obsolescence of human pilots, but I do see them becoming gradually less common, and held for those applications for which they are best suited. In the near term, I see drones acting as a “force multiplier” for human pilots. Over time, human pilots will become a specialist force – kind of like commandos of the air – amidst the drone rank and file.