Comment by dmix

I think we are underestimating and/or forgetting that the enemy gets a vote, and remote piloting something from Virginia all the way out to Japan or Korea or Taiwan involves many signals integrity steps along the way. This is to say that you should assume these signals are interrupted and you will not be able to maintain continuous control of the aircraft from whatever datacenter box the "pilot" sits in. That means fully autonomous decision making, functionally for the entire journey, and independent release authorization.

>or else we wouldn't need hundreds to thousands of drone operators in the Ukraine war

I don't think this is the reason the systems are not fully autonomous right now ("fully autonomous" here meaning that they can complete the kill chain independently, no HITL). Even if we assume it true that the drones are not "good enough" to be at parity with a human operator, if you had an essentially limitless amount of them, would you really waste the manpower on operating them in FPV mode? You would not, you would completely saturate the battlefield with them. Thus, as it was in the beforetimes and ever shall be, logistics wins wars.

>Roughly everyone expects the 6th generation fighters (the ones currently in development like F-47) to be the last manned generation. Most observers expect many/most 6th gen fighters to become optionally manned within their life span.

The said that about the 5th though. Like I've personally talked to people who were actively working on the F35 and they were saying "last manned aircraft" in like 2011ish.

I expect autonomy to be a long steady improvement of taking on additional subroutines of increasing complexity of decisions being made along the way. Fly here, land there, kill that, go over there without being detected, etc, etc, until humans are making only a select set of decisions that will probably be randomly sprinkled at the high and low levels.

Kind of like how when we build a brick wall the "vision" and the actual laying of bricks still get done by human but all the intermediary steps are drudgery that can be trivially automated (not to say they are all automated, just that they could be if labor $$ vs software $$ penciled out that way)

I don't think there's a way that the 6th generation will be manned.

> And at least the USAF doesn't think remote control will let them do what they need (which is to fly from Japan to Korea or Taiwan, or Philippines to Taiwan, and contest/control the skies in the face of a basically peer adversary).

I mean, they wouldn't think that, would they? It would put their pilots out of a job. But most flying has been done by autopilot long before AI, and even if/when you need a human in the loop, why would you want to put that human in the cockpit rather than safely in Virginia?

> With 5th generation fighter using datalink they to use the active radar in far away AWAC planes for targeting so the stealth fighter can get closer to the enemy without breaking cover by turning on active radar.

What benefit does a human pilot offer in this case? Are going to be using their eyes to track their location or see a Chinese fighter jet launching a standoff antiair missile at them? Drones can do AWACS and deep sensor roles, with a pilot and sensor operators far away from the planes.

> All of these concepts where written up 20 years ago by both china and the US

Defense contractors and the gov planners are often the same group of people, the same small community, there's not that many vendors. They show up at defence trade shows and see what industry is offering them. They tend to stick with the same big safe companies that change slowly. Bold ideas are infrequent. The smaller countries can take those risks easier than America.

Really loyal wingmen are just an extension of jets.

Ultimately a carrier strike group could achieve many of the missions a F35 can through cruise missiles, ballistic missiles etc.

What an F35 provides is a sensory platform deep into enemy airspace.

But with the F35 being very expensive, and required to stay silent in RF to maintain stealth it's further desirable to have a loyal wingman out there.

The whole thing becomes one large sensor network with th added weapons.

It makes most sense in a near adversary situation and as it stands that particular scenario is why the F22 is not exported.

> i hope we never assign a piece of code, AI or not, to be the decision maker.

This is already a past station, just not at Airbus.

Drones doesn't automatically mean no pilot or no human in the loop. Motherships and relays to command centers solve nearly everything loyal wingman offers. The only question is data access (which is still a major issue in manned jets operating in EW conditions far from home).

Same with the idea that drones can't have high end radars and other stuff which requires a fancy human jet in the loop. Decidated single purpose drones with high end sensors can solve a similar purpose with a much lower risk and cost.

The war in Iran proves the opposite: It is actually the future. The US could easily establish air dominance over Iran, yet it can't stop their military from launching smaller drones both in the air and at sea. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed and air power alone seems unlikely to fix the situation. If you want to effectively eliminate an opponent nowadays you need an army of drones - the economics don't work out if you are only fielding expensive ships, planes and missiles. And regarding your point that an Apache can easily shoot down a drone: Roughly 9/10 drones in the Russia Ukraine frontline get shot down and the remaining 10% make up for about 80% of the casualties (rest being mostly artillery and mines).

I think GP's point is more relevant than your question implies. The vast majority of civilian flights could be flown entirely autonomously right now. (I'm not close enough to the aviation industry to make a confident guess, but +90% wouldn't surprise me.) Humans are there to take (decision or control) over when something goes off the happy path - in fact, pilots are encouraged / required to hand-fly landings that could be done automatically in order to keep their skills current. Obviously no one would accept even a 0.01% crash rate for civilian flights, so we're many orders of magnitude of improvement away from replacing pilots in that sector.

Military calculations are very different. Every military asset - most definitely including humans - is disposable, and all wars are (in some dimension) wars of attrition. Holding mission success constant, when the cost x capability x ability to manufacture for autonomous platforms becomes cheaper than all that plus training / replacement cost of human pilots, then human pilots will disappear. The logic of war being what it is, I expect HITL decision-making to very quickly be dropped as soon as it is seen to be retarding the progress of a cheaper option.