Take my bits awaaaay: DARPA wants to develop AI fighter program to augment human pilots DARPA, the US military research arm, has launched a program to train fighter jets to engage in aerial battle autonomously with the help of AI algorithms. The Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program seeks to create military planes that are capable of performing combat maneuvers for dogfighting without the help of human pilots. …
Sort of? As I understand it, it’s been rather a long time since there was a fight with anything close to evenly matched AirPower on both sides, so a lot of this is hypothetical.
When you have an Air Force and they don’t, you can afford to take more risks to get visual IDs, etc. When both sides are evenly matched, you’d want every edge you can get, which means starting to fire from as far away as possible. But since no one has actually needed to do it in so long, we probably don’t know exactly how effective it would be and what percentage of fights would devolve into close-range dogfights.
IIRC that was a mistake the US already made previously, in Korea? Sent the F4 Phantom in armed only with missiles in the belief they could destroy the enemy at stand-off range.
Technology has moved on considerably since then though. As mentioned above the limit is probably more political (IFF before firing) than physical.
"Are they still a thing in modern aerial warfare?"
yes
The idea of superseding close-in aerial combat was thought up back in the 60's, probably by LBJ's whiz kids and others like them [who excelled at killing people unnecessarily by making stupid "smart" decisions like that]. It went so far as to take guns off of planes. This may have been talked about in the Top Gun movie from the 80's as I recall, or maybe I just saw a documentary about the REAL Top Gun [which used to be here in San Diego, I live only a few miles from Miramar, which is now a Marine Corps air base]. In any case, guns were removed from F4's but pilots insisted they be re-installed, as missiles were inadequate for close-in combat which was still happening.
And I don't expect this has changed at all.
Arthur C. Clarke's "Superiority" applies again.
Interesting. DARPA’s just articulated why I think committing to 1.5$T in spending on F35 is a huge risk on a 40-50 year time frame.
BTW, there are some indications F35 is maturing and unit cost dropping. It might not be an automatic failure at the tactical level for the next 5-20 years. It may even dominate, maybe. But spending so much leaves us with massive sunk costs once autonomous weapons tech matures.
BTW, there are some indications F35 is maturing and unit cost dropping. It might not be an automatic failure at the tactical level for the next 5-20 years. It may even dominate
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Very unlikely.
Of the five kinds of stealth (radar, visual, infrared, sound, em emission) it is biased toward the first.
Due to compromises to provide V/STOL, carrier, and land-based versions with the same airframe design it is slow, expensive, needs a very powerful engine, and suffers from high wing loading.
It claims a large weapons load, but anything beyond what fits internally destroys stealth.
Due to the shape required for the lift fan, it is radar stealthy only from a limited forward arc.
Due to radar stealth being a 30 year old idea, people have come up with counters for it. It is really only stealthy over certain frequencies. Longer wavelength radars don't interact with the stealth shaping due to non-resolution of the shapes.
The fragility of the stealth coating means flying through rain is bad.
One report indicated that weight requirements for V/STOL operation mandated the removal of fire suppression equipment. Oops.
So far they are having real problems getting the gun to shoot where the sight points. And it is the wrong gun for a lot of applications. The size (25mm) makes it inferior for ground support to the 30mm gun on the A10, while providing about 1/7 the ammunition. It is the US favourite, a gatling cannon, which means it takes about half a second to get up to speed and thus full rate of fire, compared to the 1/20 of a second for the revolver cannon other fighters use (Typhoon, Rafale, Gripen), which is not good for the quick shots of air to air combat.
It needs a large manufacturer provided computer system to operate, which limits the number of bases... minimizing the targets for enemy strikes against aircraft and ground facilities.
While its powerful radar is touted as an advantage, the reliability of LPI (low probability of intercept) not giving away the craft's location, increases in computing power and broad spectrum SDRs makes actually using that radar riskier year by year. Ditto for extensive sensor networking among aircraft and other platforms.
The F35 does not have a built in IRST (infrared search and track) system, which have been continuously improving and now have a totally passive detection range often exceeding 150 km. The three previously mentioned aircraft all have this capability. It may be that the US manufacturer doesn't want prospective buyers to start thinking about IRST and that big, hot enigne in the back...
By rushing the production of F35s to preclude cancellation of the project, aircraft have not been as fully tested as with a full prototype, development, preproduction, production model. Some of the first aircraft have now reached the point where it is no longer economically possible to bring them up to current standards. In addition, it is now suspected that the planned airframe life of 8,000 hours for the F35B V/STOL model is currently about 2,000 hours.
Analysis of pitting the same dollar value of F35As against other fighters almost invariably results in the total or near total destruction of the F35s engaged. Remember that once the ball goes up, the F35s are committed, as they are slower than the other aircraft, and not stealthy while running away.
The F35 also has a per hour operating cost between 1.5 and 5 times that of the other fighters mentioned. This directly affects how many you can operate, and also retained pilot skill - a key factor in combat success.
At least so far, it has a much lower sortie rate. When operating from a secure base as a 'bomb truck', without significant enemy threats, the F35 managed about one sortie every 3 days per aircraft. If I remember correctly all the others could sustain a rate of more than 1 sortie per day per plane.
There's a lot more, but I am tired of typing... check it out yourself if you are curioius.
We may assume this is currently deployed and in use by some elite groups.
Because of the nature of research, the military always has the most cutting edge technology. When the first machine intelligences surpass humans and take over, it will certainly be military machines. Hmm, we really are doomed.
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