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Future of Manned Aircraft

ltedge46

ltedge46

Lost in the machine
None
I think the SECNAV is a bit too optimistic. History is full of examples of "this new technology will continue forever and what we have now will never be needed again". The Maxim gun would make infantry obsolete because casualties would be too high. Bombers made navies pointless. ICBMs made bombers pointless. Air to air missiles meant no more dogfights.

UAS has its place, and they're not going away. But they've never been employed in a peer-competitor scenario, against an opponent with his ECM shit in one sock. Never mind the issues with ROE and weapons-release authority. I'm sure F/A-XX will chase its tail into over cost/behind schedule tangling with "optionally manned" issues, but I think predictions of manned strike's demise are very premature.
 
Uncle Fester said:
I think the SECNAV is a bit too optimistic. History is full of examples of "this new technology will continue forever and what we have now will never be needed again". The Maxim gun would make infantry obsolete because casualties would be too high. Bombers made navies pointless. ICBMs made bombers pointless. Air to air missiles meant no more dogfights.

UAS has its place, and they're not going away. But they've never been employed in a peer-competitor scenario, against an opponent with his ECM shit in one sock. Never mind the issues with ROE and weapons-release authority. I'm sure F/A-XX will chase its tail into over cost/behind schedule tangling with "optionally manned" issues, but I think predictions of manned strike's demise are very premature.
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Which is why the man will never be taken out of the decision loop- only out of the airplane.

I do know that as UAS tech grows, and as more and more aviation minded folks are seeing the potentials that exist within the community we're absorbing more and more mission sets. We compliment manned aviation very well, and I think that will continue.

Eventually manned fighters are going to be too expensive to train and maintain- that's when I see UAS's taking over. It will eventually come down to a cost benefit analysis- and right now UAVs are (comparatively) cheap.
 
I just have to wonder how a UAV of the future would survive in some of the situations that manned-aircraft are CURRENTLY encountering. And I'm not talking about a bunch of guys with sand in their shorts and an angry outlook on life, but a more advanced state actor.
 
autonomous control systems - and at some point you have robots fighting robots.
 
The issue with autonomous weapons release isn't the technology, it's politics - or ethics, if you want to look at it that way.

Someone always has to sign for the bomb. There is just no way in hell - ever - that the JAGs and decision-makers would sign off on ROE that says "if the robot thinks it should take the shot, sure, that's good enough." There will always have to be a person in the loop, whatever the engineers say the system can do, verifying that it is, in fact, Sarah Connor in the crosshairs. Or at least, taking responsibility for the decision.
 
Sure, there's a person turning the key, just like there's full auto on ship defense systems. I can easily see a situation some years down the road where unmanned systems are launched downtown, and before entering a full on denial environment, are told to target fixed position X or column of trucks Y or equipment Z.

All this assumes advances in AI, decision making systems, etc., but isn't terribly far out of the realm of current day operations.
 
squorch2 said:
Sure, there's a person turning the key, just like there's full auto on ship defense systems. I can easily see a situation some years down the road where unmanned systems are launched downtown, and before entering a full on denial environment, are told to target fixed position X or column of trucks Y or equipment Z.

All this assumes advances in AI, decision making systems, etc., but isn't terribly far out of the realm of current day operations.
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The thing is, robots are dumb.

"Advances in AI" is easy to say but it's light-years away from where we actually are. And even when or if the technology does get there, there still would have to be the legal and ethical and political will to let it be used, and to take responsibility for what a robot decides to kill. Maybe I'm just cynical, but I can not see any time in the foreseeable future envision a theater commander or higher being comfortable with that.

CIWS is never set to auto-engage unless you're in a real-time, holy shit, Red Storm Rising-style shitstorm of incoming. CRAM - CIWS on a truck for knocking down mortars - has limited range and there's a lot of cutouts in place to ensure nothing gets shot at unless it's really incoming. I've seen a CIWS go nuts trying to lock on to spinning helo rotor blades because they didn't put it in standby before flight quarters. At least one of the blue-on-blue Patriot incidents during OIF 1 was because the battery was in auto-engage mode after an air raid warning forced the crew into bunkers. It met the engagement logic but there was no human in the loop to say, "wait, I don't think that's really an Iraqi jet because that doesn't make any fucking sense".

At most, I can see maybe a consent-to-engage logic where it tells the AVO/MC "this looks like what you asked me to kill. Can I kill it?"

UAS has value for ISR and targeting things where a long-stare is needed (who's in that house? is that our target in that truck?) in order to satisfy ROE. What you're talking about - going after fixed or clearly identifiable targets - we can already do with conventional missiles. Why send a drone to do it? They're more expensive and less useful than simply lobbing a Tomahawk or JDAM in. If you need to make an intelligent decision on whether to engage (intelligent in the sense of applying risk assessment and fuzzy logic, not necessarily smart decisions), there will always be a human in the loop.
 
Moore's law - generally and liberally applied - informs my optimism on autonomous combat systems.
 
I like to imagine pilots will operate UAVs via remote "simulators" that provide all the proper stimuli from the UAV's outside environment—from the safety of an off-site cockpit. I also like to imagine this will all take place well after I've enjoyed my decade or so having a blast in the MH-60 :)
 
I'm just saying, I'm learning about CAS right now...and I'm bad at it with two eyeballs and two hands that can make instantaneous decisions based on rapidly changing scenarios. I don't see how an operator in a booth looking through a soda straw could possibly do any better.

Just my humble opinion.
 
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