Reddington777
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Yep. This whole forum inevitably falls back to the fly high fly fast paradigm and that always ends up becoming a comparison of engines, planforms and payload. Just not the only things or even the most important things that matter anymore.
Being able to coordinate, respond and actively plan and execute a collaborative task is trivial if one were ready to allow it. While teaming technology continues to be studied, there is sufficient tech there already for it to happen.
As it stands, no one is making CCAs that are semi-autonomous either. Truly semi-autonomous control is used for the purpose of dev and verification. Otherwise It completely defeats the purpose of collaborative combat if every paired cca itself cannot decide how to execute an attack on a target and requires the human to micromanage it. Especially in an extremely dense and complex environment, the pilot should simply be designating targets and assigning / directing attack groups when needed. The 6th gen pilot is more of an AWACS controller than a drone mission planner.
What isnt trivial though is how your AI system reacts when the information being gathered is sparse, theres plenty of jamming and deceptive signals, and what targets you pick up are of varying quality and then having to build awareness and execute plan of actions based off that.
The problem imo is also a matter of how that information flows to the processor, who is doing the processing, and how do you process it well enough to build the required situational awareness to act accordingly. That means each individual unit must be able to take action alone as well as in a group and that gets complex really quick. How complex a model you use depends now on how much electric generation your main processing node has. How much autonomy now depends on how much power generation your drones have too.
Then theres also the problem of how the human affects and is affected by the fight under this framework, because when your teaming AI is taking over, are you, the pilot in the 6th gen still retaining control or are you yourself being commanded by the AI in order to win the fight?
So autonomy and teaming itself is easy, and no CCA user is not going to have this capability. Its when you add in the rest of these problems that its no longer easy. differences in 6th gen fighters and CCAs will be in the quality of the onboard solutions to these problems.
I should also add especially for readers notoriously concerned about kinematic and physical requirements of aircraft - given the likely density of flying targets in a future air war, awareness and appropriate cordination is increasingly more important than having range or kinematics. Id even venture enough to say that kinematics quite frankly take second seat to awareness and reaction.
Even if you can shoot to kill at 300 miles, you need to engage and send to defensive all the opposing enemies that are engaging your force at that 300 mile mark in order to keep them at 300 miles. You also have to have these targets fixed by someone across the missiles flight profile and up until pitbull. Otherwise you wont be able to stop an opposing force from closing in and, if close enough, obtaining a firing solution on you esp with the amount of targets both LO and VLO flying around. Being able to fly faster and higher means absolutely nothing when you with the more exquisite and less numerous force simply cant cover all the required geometries to prevent leakers. Hell being able toshoot first isnt even all that valuable anymore when theres something you havent engaged yet already pushing your position. This is why an appropriate level of sophistication and amassability is far more valuable than increased kinetic and kinematic capability with regards to CCAs.
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