Forest Green
ACCESS: USAP
- Joined
- 11 June 2019
- Messages
- 14,499
- Reaction score
- 31,531
USAF/USN 6th Gen Fighters - F/A-XX, F-X, NGAD, PCA, ASFS News & Analysis [2008- 2025]
- Thread starter Matej
- Start date
- Status
Airplane
ACCESS: Secret
- Joined
- 3 October 2015
- Messages
- 433
- Reaction score
- 62
Command and control is a single point of failure. It will be the bane of this country if we ever rely on drones like is in process this very minute and more than just paper studies. With manned aircraft, command and control is distributed among the pilots and we can't hack the human mind yet.
Scott Kenny
ACCESS: USAP
- Joined
- 15 May 2023
- Messages
- 19,511
- Reaction score
- 27,959
Right.
I'd assume that the drones can follow any NGAD plane, even changing who they listen to mid mission. The trick is writing the handoff process so that it doesn't take much pilot brainpower to do, but is hard to spoof.
DrRansom
I really should change my personal text
- Joined
- 15 December 2012
- Messages
- 719
- Reaction score
- 361
Just out of curiosity, how do you know the wing does that?
X-39
To post or not to post, that is the question
- Joined
- 20 February 2021
- Messages
- 382
- Reaction score
- 954
In other news, Col. Dan Javorsek bio has been "updated" with a correction replacing the "X-273" and "YF-220" designations with "prototype" and "demonstrator aircraft". The new names properly match their old description, but a fighter prototype? Flying as back as 2021, or earlier? (Not the X-plane) The revelation that three demonstrators have been flying makes things even more confusing. It makes little sense for a "prototype" to be flying when the EMD award to whichever company is declared winner is not scheduled to happen until 2024. For example, this would be akin to Lockheed traveling in time to "borrow" a brand new EMD F-22 from the future and dropping it alongside the YF-22 amidst ATF trials... in 1990. Yeah, no. Maybe they tried to get too ahead of the game and backfired. It could also mean the competition has been restarted under our noses following the steps of the OMFV/XM30 troubled saga with GDLS basically being told to pack it up and start all over again. F/A-XX? Doubt it. Unless they mean PEA? but it wouldn't receive a YF- prefix, and probably has been absorbed into the ASFoS thing by now.
Attachments
This picture is new for me, do we know where it is from?
- Joined
- 1 April 2006
- Messages
- 12,276
- Reaction score
- 15,084
LM presentation that I don't remember where exactly on my PC. Was posted here quite a while ago.
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/th...-a-xx-f-x-ngad-pca-asfs-news.3536/post-318140
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/th...-a-xx-f-x-ngad-pca-asfs-news.3536/post-318140
Last edited:
- Joined
- 1 April 2006
- Messages
- 12,276
- Reaction score
- 15,084
That central sting apparently is _not_ the nozzle hence it's two engined whatever it is. Demonstrator doesn't need to have F135 thrust class monsters to power it. It is something like SAAB 210 in short.
X-39
To post or not to post, that is the question
- Joined
- 20 February 2021
- Messages
- 382
- Reaction score
- 954
What certain ex-Soviet aircraft do you think could merit the honor aside from the ones everyone already knows of? Unlike certain military hardware, there have been no RuAF fighters spotted on flatbeds on highways half a world away to this day. And the bio specifically highlights his role in the program, so the odds of the actual representative airframes being behind these nomenclatures are possible.
Attachments
Easier than you might think. Set it up so the UAV will accept commands from ANY controller with the right address (and, of course, the correct encryption). It's done today to handle the transfer of control between ground stations.
Scott Kenny
ACCESS: USAP
- Joined
- 15 May 2023
- Messages
- 19,511
- Reaction score
- 27,959
Ah, that's good, there's already a start to the process then.
Trick is how to let another pilot/aircraft know that they're now in charge because the current controller is entirely too busy dogfighting to do anything else.
jsport
what do you know about surfing Major? you're from-
- Joined
- 27 July 2011
- Messages
- 8,596
- Reaction score
- 6,898
folks can laugh as they wish but if VGeometry, morphing wings, (very) Advanced Flow Control (AFC) or all the above are abandoned then one is periling one self.
If CAS is not to be completely abandoned.(appears to be the case) than slow low is still a thing..even at the cost of some stealth.
- Joined
- 2 January 2006
- Messages
- 4,235
- Reaction score
- 8,279
Some illustrations based on LM's outine sketch
View: https://twitter.com/Gsh_60_1/status/1676485984681357314
View: https://twitter.com/Gsh_60_1/status/1676485984681357314
Forest Green
ACCESS: USAP
- Joined
- 11 June 2019
- Messages
- 14,499
- Reaction score
- 31,531
Seriously doubt the intakes will be above the wings, there are obvious problems with that for a fighter. Although it looks like the intakes are above and below, which is weird.
Starting to look a lot like:
Starting to look a lot like:
Last edited:
Kat Tsun
eeeeeeeeeeeeeee
- Joined
- 16 June 2013
- Messages
- 1,887
- Reaction score
- 2,666
Where are you going to find these pilots?
Part of the transition from manned to unmanned platforms is due to the lack of birth rates causing a dearth of people, both in cohort size and falling on the right side of the bell curve, to fly aircraft. This is not something Western societies, much less militaries, are equipped to solve. Low births and decreasing quantities of laborers across the board seems immanent in post-WW2 industrial societies both capitalist and communist.
Accepting the problems of unmanned combat systems is something future militaries will need to do if they want to continue to exist.
The most viable long-term solution seems to be an autonomous aircraft that operates with little to no man-in-the-loop capability.
Dreamflyer
'Senior Something'
- Joined
- 13 July 2008
- Messages
- 555
- Reaction score
- 918
Both correct. Which makes it interesting.
I suggest we look at dockside container cranes. Latest systems are unmanned. But a human is needed for the hookup of the container, to deal with wind, weather, ship movement. So a human, sitting in a remote office, is injected for the 30 seconds needed for hookup. After that the SW runs everything.
Not sure why communists are immune to demographics, but that’s politics. Finding a few thousand pilots from, U.K., with 70M people, doesn’t seem too difficult. Everyone likes pilots….
If cut off from human/AI control, the aircraft needs to carry on with its mission. When patchy comms are made, new instructions, ROE can be downloaded.
X-39
To post or not to post, that is the question
- Joined
- 20 February 2021
- Messages
- 382
- Reaction score
- 954
I guess it depends on how you look at the planform. If it belongs to an SR-72 type of aircraft, M 6 might be doable, but if the profile was that of a fighter, then M 2.5 is realistically the safer bet.
View: https://twitter.com/DrChrisCombs/status/1675525149393559556?s=20
Scott Kenny
ACCESS: USAP
- Joined
- 15 May 2023
- Messages
- 19,511
- Reaction score
- 27,959
The same place we currently find F-22 and F-35 pilots?
People want to be Top Guns for some reason.
Yes. But everyone still wants a live human to pull the trigger for the foreseeable future, which tends to suggest a small number of NGAD pilots with at least 1 Loyal Wingman/CCA each. And I'm expecting more like 3 CCA per NGAD.
Kat Tsun
eeeeeeeeeeeeeee
- Joined
- 16 June 2013
- Messages
- 1,887
- Reaction score
- 2,666
Nowhere? Pilots across the board are leaving the USAF for private airlines for a bunch of reasons, none of them easily fixed. COVID's already eviscerated Army enlistment for the next 2 years or so, since recruiters couldn't prowl high schools, and the youngest generation of Americans might be the most anti-militant generation since Vietnam.
The USAF has a shortage of specifically frontline combat fighter pilots going on twenty years now, and the airline industry in general has a dearth of them as well, except airlines can generally beat the USAF in terms of benefits. Which is how they got a record hiring year this year, and the USAF is a record low. Less work, more pay, that always wins. That's why the USAF doesn't hurt for Globemaster or Galaxy drivers, for that matter: it's a job that easily translates to the civil field...
It also doesn't lack for B-2 drivers, either, because strategic bombers are cool.
It's getting to the point where the USAF is going to have to offer direct commissions to fly aircraft. There's always the option of training qualified NCOs as pilots, but that's not something the USAF is or was historically prepared to do, and AFAIK only the Imperial Japanese did that. The USAF tried that with drone pilots and immediately nuked it because the fighter pilot corpus complained.
Eventually something will have to give, either the quantity of manned aircraft will need to decrease, or the number of combat squadrons. The USAF simply seems too heavily wedded to manned aircraft to seriously consider unmanned combat systems, so it will probably just continue declining in pilot quantity, and quality (i.e. shifting heavy drivers to fighter squadrons), as it competes with an ever more cutthroat airline industry's better hiring practices.
Part of this is due to a lack of pilot schools, which is what caused the initial 2,000 pilot shortfall back in FY99 that has dogged the USAF for every year since, but that has been resolved for a number of years now. It's just a demographic game these days.
It will likely go into the next world war without enough pilots, which is rather unprecedented in American history. Alternatively, it will simply go to the next war without enough planes, which has some precedent, except back then the US Army could expect new aircraft on a roughly 4 month schedule (more or less, P-39 might be closer to 6 months from prototype to entry into production) instead of more modern ~400 month schedule.
It is a rather dire situation, especially when the PLAAF looks more and more like a reincarnation of the IJN in terms of modernity of ideas.
Last edited:
FighterJock
ACCESS: Above Top Secret
- Joined
- 29 October 2007
- Messages
- 7,227
- Reaction score
- 8,538
And I am one of those people that wants a human in the cockpit with the finger on the trigger, I don't want AI controlled AI potentially going rogue and starting world war three.
Kat Tsun
eeeeeeeeeeeeeee
- Joined
- 16 June 2013
- Messages
- 1,887
- Reaction score
- 2,666
AMRAAMs never started a war, yet they have finished a couple. DARPA also had some good ideas like Thirsty Saber in hunting TELs prior to Desert Storm. I suspect that would have worked rather better than F-15Es guided by Joint STARS.
There's no functional difference between a autonomous bomber aircraft and an active-radar guided missile in terms of "risk". The only reason human pilots stick around is because bombing weddings or whatever is bad PR, but that sort of brain rot rapidly ceases its importance in general wars.
I, too, wonder why a country of 350 million people with a desired span of control of "the entire world" might lose in a industrial and demographic race against a country of 1,500 million people with a desired span of control of "roughly twice the sea area of the Gulf of Mexico".
A real stumper.
Anyway an autonomous aircraft would be autonomous. It would be given orders to "suppress local air defenses" or "destroy enemy aircraft" or "attack airbases" in a geofenced area and proceed to do so. That's it.
Such robotic control apparatus are incredibly common on naval warships. Every American, British, and French destroyer have such things. Humans really can't be expected to guide or track possibly dozens or hundreds of combat weapons outgoing and incoming. They can barely manage to track an airliner right beside them. That's why Aegis (as well as PAAMS possessing an analogue) has the AUTO/SPECIAL mode: the weapons officer has his team set velocity, altitude, and azimuth gates. Anything inside those gates that meets the criteria is engaged and killed automatically by the combat system. It's a good way to ensure that leakers are annihilated before they hit the ship if the crew is suffering from extreme battle stress or information overload.
The only reason they aren't on fighter aircraft is quite literally because pilots are afraid it will make their jobs redundant. They're right, and that's a good thing, at least if you want to win wars. The alternative, which is a post-industrial society having enough kids to produce enough people of sufficient intellect to be good fighter pilots, isn't really realistic. The USSR sort of managed that with absurd quantities of childcare and living subsidies (and such high social expenditures were sustained only by a combination of internal tax revenue and energy exports), as does Israel (albeit this is shrinking; the IDF expects it will be unable to sustain conscription beyond 2035, thus joining the ranks of Europe and America), but that isn't in the cards for any modern Western country.
The PLAAF and PLAN are already ahead of the curve here, mostly because their own pilots are so bad they don't have much of a lobby, and because of the rates of nearsightedness in East Asia make their demographic pressures nearly as bad as the USA's. Their solution is to short-term hire European mercenaries, have a few wings of capable single-seat strike aircraft, and medium- to long-term replace them with robotic aircraft and twin-seat control-fighter-bombers like J-20.
The difference being the PLAAF will actually get a Loyal Wingman if they can build one. The USAF has been able to build one for literally decades, it just prefers manned platforms, for some reason. If the PLAAF gets a functional robotic bomber in quantity there isn't much the USAF can do to challenge that, but as long as that doesn't happen, it's probably fairly close to parity for right now.
Cross your fingers the USAF and USN develop a Loyal Wingman that's actually cheap enough to field at a rate of 2-3 per JSF, otherwise, there won't be enough fighters in Asia to matter for Taiwan and the South China Sea. Hope it's smart enough they don't need a Sentry directing it, too. Lastly, hope the USAF actually procures them, instead of burning more money for it's vaunted 1,700 JSFs it won't have the pilots or maintainers for.
Last edited:
Scott Kenny
ACCESS: USAP
- Joined
- 15 May 2023
- Messages
- 19,511
- Reaction score
- 27,959
Given what they're talking about for Loyal Wingman roles (missile truck, EW, and recon)
- Recon can probably be outsourced to something the size of an ITALD. Still wouldn't be cheap, because sensors are not cheap, but you could probably afford a couple dozen of them per F-35 or NGAD.
- EW is likely to be large and expensive, the Growler carries some 7000lbs of various jammers, plus 2000-5000lbs of "immediate response" weapons like 2x AARGM-ER and 2x JSOW. Plus a couple of AMRAAMs for self defense. There might not be one EW drone per F-35/NGAD, because you usually only need one Growler per entire strike package. Ideal is to have one per F-35/NGAD though, so that you can have one manned aircraft per strike package.
- Missile truck is where things get weird. I see them having at least 4x AAM capacity, and more likely 6x (2x WVR and 4x BVR, whatever the designations end up being). That's going to be way bigger than the XQ-58 Valkyrie, as that can only carry 600lbs internally. It's likely going to be roughly the size of the MQ-20 Avenger (Predator C), as the Avenger can carry 3500lbs internally, and another 3000lbs externally. 3600lbs is enough for 4x AIM-9X and 8x AMRAAMs, and that would be one EVIL surprise for someone.
- Bomb Truck is a mission the USAF isn't talking about for Loyal Wingman but seems absolutely obvious to me. Send a bomb truck into A2AD space to drop, let the F-35 give the "Weapons Free" command from some distance away. The Bomb Truck would carry 10-15klbs of weapons internally, along with enough fuel to go just as far as the F-35/NGAD. Bay needs to be long enough to hold SLAM-ERs (4.4m) or maybe even a GBU-28 sized weapon (5.70m). As a bomb truck it wouldn't need as fancy a radar (it would need the ground-mapping capabilities for finding targets, but we can go easy on the air search capabilities unless it's cheaper to leave them on an off-the-shelf radar unit), but I would want the DAS from the F-35 as well as a built-in laser designator, for maximum flexibility in weapons employable. Laser JDAMs, plain JDAMs, StormBreakers, SDB-1s, etc ad nauseam.
I have read unclassified reports/press releases that unmanned aircraft have been given a GPS target and have autonomously chosen which of the 4 UCAVs was going to make the approach and which would do something else. My impression was that "something else" was SEAD and decoy/distraction maneuvers for the actual attacker.
So a pilot can take off, tell all the drones on the ground "follow me", fly to the insertion point, tell the 4x Bomb Trucks and 1x EW to go to GPS coordinates and attack then return, fly with his 3x Missile Trucks to shoot down some enemy aircraft until the Bomb Trucks return, then send 1x Recon after the strike for BDA, and finally fly back with however many of the Loyal Wingmen survived. I'm talking a minimum 10 aircraft strike package with only one pilot, and I can see having more EW and Recon to have them accompany the air combat team while the Bomb Trucks are doing their thing.
And I believe that this is all demonstrated capabilities already.
Ainen
I really should change my personal text
- Joined
- 25 August 2011
- Messages
- 2,819
- Reaction score
- 4,925
I think it's a major misunderstanding.
We only now approach to true LW capability technology-wise.
Such level of authonomy, allowing to fully cooperate with manned combat a/c under all conditions, is still tomorrow.
"Go there engage that" (i.e. relatively simple algorithm flier like valkyrie or kilzema) is not a loyal wingman per definition...and even this level of mission authonomy is actually very new.
Scott Kenny
ACCESS: USAP
- Joined
- 15 May 2023
- Messages
- 19,511
- Reaction score
- 27,959
Last 10 years or so that it's been admitted in public, maybe 15 for the "go there bomb that" with the added mix of the drones independently deciding among the group which drone would attack directly and which would fly SEAD. "Go there bomb that" has existed since cruise missiles got submunition dispensers in the 1980s.
They have had luck teaching drones how to dogfight. Not sure what drones they were using for this, I don't remember the articles about it saying which drones they used, but the person flying against them beat the drones fairly regularly for a while and then the drones started beating him. This was within the last 5 years in public. I'm guessing QF-16s or something similar that has an airframe that can actually dogfight.
Autonomous takeoffs and landings have been demonstrated within the last 5 years, as have UAVs flying in formation with their assigned aircraft.
But yes, the combination of all of the above is very new, and I'm not sure the entire combination has been put into one drone before.
Forest Green
ACCESS: USAP
- Joined
- 11 June 2019
- Messages
- 14,499
- Reaction score
- 31,531
Whoever gets to autonomous UAVs with minimal human intervention first will have a huge advantage, particularly if such a platform is short/rough runway capable or runway independent. I doubt anyone is going to completely run out of pilots or maintainers any time soon, but having an aircraft that is quicker to manufacture and doesn't require a pilot allows for a rapid buildup of mass or replacement of attrition. Even more so if the core control element can be ported across multiple designs and manufacturers, which seems to be what the AFRL is attempting.
I assume the PRC has a similar effort underway, though I've not heard any public information released concerning such. Where as the USAF has so many separate UCAV technology programs investigating different aspects on different platforms that it is difficult to track all of them. Most of them seem like tech feeder projects outside of the CCA program, which will be the actual finished platform.
I assume the PRC has a similar effort underway, though I've not heard any public information released concerning such. Where as the USAF has so many separate UCAV technology programs investigating different aspects on different platforms that it is difficult to track all of them. Most of them seem like tech feeder projects outside of the CCA program, which will be the actual finished platform.
books
ACCESS: Confidential
- Joined
- 9 August 2009
- Messages
- 91
- Reaction score
- 196
I'd like to propose that the three streams here might merely be a metaphor for the "three streams" involved in the internal processes of adaptive cycle engines like the AETP and NGAP designs, rather than a literal tease hinting that we should expect three engines.
Deflationary interpretations like this aren't always right, but it does seem to be the case that more prosaic interpretations are correct a disappointingly high percentage of the time.
Kat Tsun
eeeeeeeeeeeeeee
- Joined
- 16 June 2013
- Messages
- 1,887
- Reaction score
- 2,666
More or less, yeah. No one is going to run out of maintainers or pilots, sure, but you'll hit a critical mass where it's impossible to replace losses and you never have enough to overmatch the enemy in the first engagement. Which means attrition sets in.
That means either airpower becomes irrelevant (Ukraine) or airpower vanishes against opponent aviation (ETO). Which way it goes depends on the nearness of air power parity of the opponents.
It doesn't need to be short field capable at all. Just use a Bas 90-style system where you have a main airbase, scramble from that, and then half a dozen single-squadron divert fields nearby that the maintenance and aviation wing split off to. That confounds nuclear targeting much less far less sortie efficient PGM attacks.
The USAF having multitudinous programs is probably indicative of a general lack of interest. If it were truly serious, it would be defining actual combat requirements, and narrow it down to one or two main combat systems. It did this with JSF and ATF. That it can't do it with drones is...interesting.
I'd guess it's trying to merge manned and robotic systems so it can try to have its cake and eat it too, though. A fully unmanned autonomous system is probably too adventurous for most air forces, PRC included, and a fully manned system is demographically unsustainable. The best middle-of-the-road option is optional manning.
Scott Kenny
ACCESS: USAP
- Joined
- 15 May 2023
- Messages
- 19,511
- Reaction score
- 27,959
Yes, I think the ideal is going to be one manned plane per strike package. Manned plane +3 CCA fighters to fly air cover. 4+ CCA bombers + 1x or 2x CCA EW for the actual strike. 1x or 2x CCA Recon to fly point and do BDA. Though it's possible that the manned plane will be a 2-seater if they can't get the workload of the CCAs down low enough. It's also possible that they will send a manned fighter in with the CCA bombers for that extra fraction of a second shorter decision time to drop or not drop.
Colonial-Marine
UAVs are now friend, drones are the real enemy.
- Joined
- 5 October 2009
- Messages
- 1,714
- Reaction score
- 1,819
I'm no expert on sociology but it seems ridiculous if we can't find the number of fighter pilots needed in a society of 330+ million people when we put far greater numbers of pilots in the skies when we had a significantly smaller population in the past. Airline pay and accommodations can't be all that perfect where nobody wants to fly anything else.
Kat Tsun
eeeeeeeeeeeeeee
- Joined
- 16 June 2013
- Messages
- 1,887
- Reaction score
- 2,666
The ideal is however many aircraft can be controlled by one person. With highly automated AI this is probably around two or three. Without it, maybe one or two. If the pilot has to both fly his strike aircraft/fighter and tell the robot what to do, then it's closer to zero. This is what was found with drone operation in Afghanistan with Apache crews, at least.
The autonomous methods of loyal wingmen are pretty doable, it just requires breaking the idea of man-in-the-loop, and accepting that robots should be allowed to make mistakes in bombing targets. Any good autonomous aircraft will necessarily make similar or identical mistakes as a human, because there's something innate about fuzzy logic and error production, so it sort of comes with the territory.
Advanced strategic bombers like the B-21 can basically fly themselves, though, so they only really require weapons/sensor operators. Cutting out the human operator there probably won't save much money, but it will certainly free up a major bottleneck of needing to find pilots, and means that extraneous things like CSAR can be heavily reduced.
For frontline aircraft like intruders/fighter-bombers, fully automatic systems are ideal. It frees scarce pilots for the DCA and BARCAP mission.
Part of that problem is that 330+ million figure is broadly middle aged people. It's not young kids who have dreams of being fighter pilots, at least not anymore. The average American in 1880 was about 15 years younger than the average American today, and the average one in 1930 was about a decade younger.
It's a genuinely tough cookie.
Planes stopped being interesting? People are getting dumber? Aircraft are harder to get certified to fly? Medical concerns (eyesight) are reducing the pool of available candidates?
All reasonable explanations and all true to a degree, perhaps. There's probably more to it as well, like bad personnel management policies, general attitudes towards the military since the end of the 1990s and now the GWOT-related occupations, and lack of conscription, etc. that are all very complicated and interact with each other in ways that are beyond the control of any single agency or government branch.
America could easily find enough pilots if it just let sergeants and corporals fly aircraft, like the IJN, but that would require more flight hours, which are tough to come by if you aren't deploying anywhere. It would also require more maintainers, which is an actual personnel bleed issue, and far worse than the pilot shortages. Those same maintainers would be the first guys signing up to be fighter jocks!
Well, they certainly aren't great, as evidenced by how many pilots are on food stamps, but airlines have a much better hiring rate than the Air Force! If the Air Force is anything like the USN, then its personnel management policies are positively medieval, and it's no small wonder why people prefer working with Delta or American Airways.
Last edited:
Scott Kenny
ACCESS: USAP
- Joined
- 15 May 2023
- Messages
- 19,511
- Reaction score
- 27,959
Again, it was demonstrated over 15 years ago that you can tell a flight of 4 UCAVs to "go bomb this location" and they will choose which plane of the group has the best line to the target and which of the rest will hit other targets in the area, usually described as AA/SAM emplacements and/or radars. This was part of the Lockheed Cormorant development, where the controller of the drones was in a sub, not a plane.
About 5 years ago, they demonstrated UCAV fighters able to equal or beat the pilots training them in dogfighting.
That's also why I said that it may end up that the drone complex needs a WSO/Drone Pilot in the back seat of the NGAD.
Kat Tsun
eeeeeeeeeeeeeee
- Joined
- 16 June 2013
- Messages
- 1,887
- Reaction score
- 2,666
Yeah, small wonder that a ship with a C3I setup, BLOS communications, and a CIC can control more aircraft than a single seat fighter-bomber.
You need a twin seater to use anything less than a fully autonomous strike aircraft. One man operates the drones and one man flies the plane. Highly advanced drones can be operated by timesharing and hot seating the controls. A good backseater might be able to juggle two or three robots. Less advanced ones need more babysitting by a pilot.
If you have a fully autonomous aircraft you don't need the manned component at all, though. The USAF simply made a mistake by making its entire future air force fleet nothing but single seat fighters. It will be paying for this well into the 2070's as JSF won't get a replacement before then.
Since it's all single seaters, there isn't much room for autonomous or robotic aircraft in the USAF, as it's too much of a threat to the pilot community. Which is why the USAF won't go for it.
The PLAAF and PLANAF OTOH are pretty invested in heavy twin seat twin engine fighters for drone control and weapons operation.
So is the USN.
Scott Kenny
ACCESS: USAP
- Joined
- 15 May 2023
- Messages
- 19,511
- Reaction score
- 27,959
A ship with a single seat drone control station and restricted communications because continuous communications reveals your location. And no CIC in the Ohios, even the GNs.
Very much a single drone controller telling 4 birds "go here and bomb this"
"Drones Attack-2, -3, -4, and EW-1, follow Attack-1"
WSO then gives orders to Attack-1 as the lead ship in the formation.
"Drones Fighter-1, 2, 3, EW-2, and Recon-1, follow me."
You know, the same way people have been controlling sub-units in RTS games since RTS games were a thing?
Yes, the USAF is stupid about their design choices, there should have been a requirement for a 2-seater for both F-22 and F-35.
Now it's looking like the F15EX and NGAD will have to be 2-seaters to handle the drones, unless/until someone does a panic-build of some 2-seat F-35A/Cs. Marines will have to suck it up and not have much CCA support for the F-35Bs, there's no space to put a second seat in the B models.
Kat Tsun
eeeeeeeeeeeeeee
- Joined
- 16 June 2013
- Messages
- 1,887
- Reaction score
- 2,666
Real life is different...
MUM-T troops in Afghanistan could scarcely command more than two drones at a time, provided the Longbow was sitting back and not engaged in action, and that was up to the gunner and pilot working together. One drone was doable if the Longbow was flying around but it could hardly do battle. No drones in combat because use of the robotic AH-6 required the full attention span of the gunner/pilot crew.
It's why the MUM-T drones were used explicitly as vanguards for detection of targets to be destroyed by the Longbows. Modern ones just use Grey Eagles that can fly in a circle and pipe the sensors back to the helicopter, because it turns out the Little Bird drone helicopter was a bad idea.
A combat fighter pilot has a much greater attention span debt than a combat helicopter pilot though. He can't simply stop and hide behind a hill while talking to a pair of drones. They need to be literally autonomous and able to conduct strike missions on their own, much like human pilots, and this will necessarily entail hitting things like civilians misidentified as combatants, or civilians identified as racially/ethnically Chinese (thus, "the enemy" and a valid target), or whatever targeting parameters the neural network discerns from a given dataset and its labels.
Drones today require essentially constant manned babysitting. Some can be trusted to fly in a straight line without getting lost. This is something a backseater would do in a better designed aircraft than JSF. It's something the pilot will need to juggle, along with everything else, in the JSF.
In practice I suspect the USAF will rely on, if it ever gets the idea of using UCAS in the first place, Air Battle Managers controlling UCAS like ordinary fighters and using them to replace the fighter-bomber job of the JSF. This would free JSFs up to do F-22's job of OCA/DCA. It would also put the least pressure on the poor single-seat fighter pilots.
That's important because the USAF is at a deficit of about 600 frontline tactical fighters aka ATF, which it hopes to make up with 1,700 JSFs and several hundred F-15/F-16, but right now it's looking like it will have a deficit of both JSFs and ATFs, and probably of F-15EX as well. Eliminating the bomb truck mission from JSF means it will be able to do ATF's job, albeit poorly. Because it's a stealth A-7, not a stealth F-15, thus it's probably not the best at maneuvering in BVR. So it goes...
If the robotic aircraft is smart enough to find targets on its own, destroy them, and return to base, it can probably be trusted to two or three per JSF, at best. If it isn't, then it's not worth much, because no JSF driver will be able to operate a drone and fly a jet at the same time, which is impossible. Which is why the robotic aircraft needs to be smart enough to kill things on its own and not be expected to wait for a man-in-the-loop decision to tell it to kill things.
That's kind of the point of a loyal wingman...
A CCA/loyal wingman isn't going to be a panacea, but it will certainly reduce the "virtual attrition" of JSF put into JDAMing/SDBing armor columns, and let them do more important things like killing enemy bombers and protecting own bombers.
If only the USAF has enough brains to make a good one and not a tiny one. UCLASS would be ideal since it can carry 8-16 SDBs per.
Unfortunately, the USAF didn't have enough brains to keep the WSO in the back of the F-22 or F-35, so it's unlikely that drone operation will be viable in a future world war outside of B-21 I guess. If it has to rely on Sentry or Joint STARS, it's doomed, because those will be killed by long range VLO aircraft. B-21 seems to be the only USAF two-seat VLO aircraft that will actually be available in less than a decade and has some built-in drone management capacity. But that's also the most modern and only actual XXI century aircraft the USAF has at the moment.
JSF and ATF are both ancient, from the Reagan-era, and would have been excellent if they had been built in the same numbers and America had the same demographic/personnel situation of the era. So they're pretty short sighted designs that didn't take into account remote UCAS/drone operation as a matter of importance for frontline fighters.
Maybe they'll bring back the robotic teammate for B-21 at some point though.
Last edited:
- Status
Similar threads
-
Japanese next generation fighter studies (aka i3, F-3)- Started by bobbymike
- Replies: 588
-
CNO Greenert Warns Congress of Fighter Shortfall, Hornet Line to Close 2017- Started by Triton
- Replies: 1
-
-
-