Too funny, I went through flight school with Colin. Great guy and glad to see he picked up command but disagree with him on the benefits of BFM and the true value of manned fighter jets over the coming decades. The US military is caught between two wars. One, against opponents who can’t really hit back where fighter jets are overkill. Better off with AC-130s and the like. The other against opponents who can hit back, where the battle will be won or lost in space, cyber, economically, and possibly through nuclear warfare. Even with regards to fighters, the amount of money spent on BFM is really a boondoggle. It’s like spending billions training the infantry to knife fight. It’s not Vietnam and the last gunfighter with regards to missiles and targeting. Is not the AIM-9X targeting AI itself?
A great book that rings more true than ever talks about the obsolescence of weapons systems. I believe it was Freedman[1] A key thesis is that as a predominant weapon system becomes more vulnerable, it becomes more expensive, as it’s burdened with more defensive measures to survive from cheaper more expendable systems. In World War 2 the canonical example was the battle ship and the aircraft. Now it’s the fighter jet and the missile (or drone) etc. Just look at the ridiculous state of the JSF.
Manned missile trucks are valuable for countering electronic attack, but not dogfighting. Still, practice dogfighting is one of the most fun things you can do, too bad it hasn’t really been applicable since Vietnam. This post from the other day reminded me how fun it is and seems like a great fit for VR.[2] Onward last Samurais! Just try not to spend all the taxpayers money on the way out.
I've been clocking in 10+ hours/wk dogfighting in VR with a decent HOTAS setup since quarantine. You're absolutely right about how fun it is. No other VR experience has been such a consistent draw for me. It's just an excellent place between a fast paced shooter and a strategy game. I love thinking about relative energy and the capabilities of the enemy plane and how they match up with mine in order to come up with an engagement strategy. I also love the tension as you identify a target and you're both trying to come into the engagement from a favorable position. It reminds me of match sprints in track cycling. Very much recommend it.
Do you do anything to deal with the motion sickness, or did you just never experience it?
I can play games where real-world motion matches in-game motion (Beat Saber, PokerStars VR, Superhot VR, Zombie Training Simulator, Space Pirate Trainer, etc.), but any sort of driving or flying makes me sick. Even games that make me use the controller to walk long distances make me dizzy and nauseous.
I love flying. For the first three weeks or so of consistently playing I would get pretty motion sick after about 30 minutes of playtime and near throwing up after 45. That's usually when I would stop and then I'd spend another half hour or so walking around the neighborhood to give me something to concentrate on other than the awful nausea.
Then one day I was flying, and then I was flying and then I was still flying 4 hours later with no sickness. It hasn't come back since.
I started watching some DCS dogfights on YouTube because of the last MSFS post. It looks incredible. If I could afford it, I'd definitely buy a stick/throttle and try to get into it.
Particularly Growling Sidewinder has a lot of great videos and I can't stop watching them.
The military understands this. The f35 is designed for long range kills.. not dog fighting.
But the ability to control the plane is the minimum capability of an AI. And in combat, controlling a plane includes the capability to deploy countermeasures and take evasive action to avoid getting shot down, and defend itself to stop an attack.
I doubt the purpose of this was to create a great dog fighter... but rather it was to prove it's minimum capabilities work so they can continue developing it to operate in more dangerous/common situations... like taking out ground assets in the initial wave; or adding it to existing drones so they can take some defensive measures automatically; etc.
I mean an interesting question and to your point is: how have wars been won in the past decades - or not been won.
To me it seems that almost all wars of the past decades transformed into: “irrespective of your weapon superiority - it will all cumulate into asymmetric partisan wars that drag on for years and cannot be won”.
In the end it almost feels like “whoever drops more ordinances on the civil population to irrevocably break their morale may come out as a winner a bit more”.
Having read some some history, the obsolescence of weapons systems is indeed a cultural problem that people become unprepared for in the euphoria of advancements. Classic example being Syracuse vs Rome, where Rome was held back by the weapons of Archimedes only to be sacked after the Syracusans decided to have a party and left a gate open.
Are manned missile trucks even valuable for countering electronic attack? I'm thinking "no". A missile truck can definitely be AI'ed or controlled remotely. Perhaps only CAS can't be made unmanned.
Cost is a huge problem. We now have unmanned carrier launched refueling trucks that I bet are incredibly cheap. Make them a tad bigger, put missiles in them, and you have a super cheap replacement for the F-35. The F-35 can stick around in small numbers for when you really need a human, if you really need a human in the cockpit. Cost has to drive us to this.
Suspect that includes all the R&D amortized over the couple of vehicles that have been built. The actual device if it's ever fielded wouldn't be anywhere near that price.
No that's total expected program cost divided by the planned total of 72 aircraft, not just the first couple. These are extremely expensive machines no matter how you slice it.
I don't understand why people persist in the fantasy that removing pilots will make aircraft cheap. That doesn't align with reality. There are some cost savings but when evaluated on a full program lifecycle basis they are relatively small.
You can conceptualize all you want about dog fights, the truth is nobody wants to be the pilot having fired all the missiles and having nothing left to engage the remaining enemy planes.
It's a bit like saying a soldier doesn't need a bayonet / combat knife. 99.99999% of the time yes, but would you bet YOUR life on it?
Since there is military competition between countries, it’s more like, if we choose A and China chooses B, are we still at an advantage or will China overwhelm our superior trained manned fighters with lots of cheap drones?
I get the line of thought and the idea of inflated military budgets but I'm not sure your average Joe should get any say in whether a new weapons system should be funded or not. They have no military expertise and no concept of what might be necessary to win the next war. While I do think there needs to be more oversight over how budgets are allotted to military projects, it shouldn't be decided by "do taxpayers want to pay".
So, you're a fan of military juntas then? That's what you get when you remove a civilian guiding hand from military policymaking. I'll give you that civilians absolutely need to keep their nose out of the how, but guidance in terms of the what is absolutely essential. Otherwise you get the MacArthurs of the world calling the shots.
The military industrial complex is absolutely a beast that requires oversight and restraint. Just as the intelligence complex does. I wish more people understood and appreciated it. It doesn't need to be dismantled by a long shot necessarily, but BS needs to be called.
I'm sure there are civilian experts and they absolutely should be involved, as well as elected representatives who are (preferably) guided by experts. Your average citizen has no business chiming in.
If you are within a certain distance you can stay outside of the weapons engagement zone for missiles. Retreating at that point presents a target for a short range missile. Missiles are great in themselves because they force your enemy to stay out of your WEZ while you are slotting in for a guns kill.
If they try to extend out for a better turn rate you hit them with the missile. If they turn too hard they lose energy and you can gun them. The fights tend to end earlier because it's so much easier to make a mistake.
Also with missiles, countermeasures can be employed which are pretty effective. Can't fit much brain in a 40G missile that is mostly solid rocket and explosives. Missile warning systems and automatic countermeasures are remarkably effective. Not so much against 30mm
If your enemy still has missiles and you proceed to give him ample time to shoot them at your tail while you peacefully retreat, you might regret the approach.
I know very little about air-to-air combat, but I had the impression that the effective range of missiles is such that you'd have a hard time reaching your enemy before they had ample time to fire at you.
Having a cannon instead of nothing gives you possibilities, like having a Swiss army knife in a jungle survival scenario.
Yes you're probably going to die, but at least you are not a sitting duck.
They even give pilots a pistol or a sub-machine gun in case they eject over enemy territory. It's probably dead weight, but if it can save someone once, why not? I wouldn't go without it even if intellectually I know I'm not going to take down the whole enemy army with a 15 shots pistol.
> How much of a chance do you have if you don't have missiles, but your enemy still has some? Isn't it better to just retreat?
It probably depends on the situation and what you do. IIRC, missiles lose effectiveness at the kinds of short ranges where you'd use guns. In some situations, running might put you in a more vulnerable situation while closing to a gunfight might even things up.
No shortage of criticisms -- literally "JSF problems" into google/bing/duckduckgo will find you plenty.
Also keep in mind that these are billion-dollar programs, so expect to get a lot of FUD and propaganda from the government contractors building them. I remember riding the DC Metro and rolling my eyes when I saw ads for the F-22 at Metro Center and Dupont Circle.
Saw an interesting video on the military channel a couple of years back that pointed out something important about these super powerful, super fast, super expensive aircraft.
You'd be better off from a cost perspective running a swarm of hundreds of drone strapped with explosives, only one of them needs to get lucky to disable a multi-million dollar plane and the drones themselves can be pretty cheap.
> You'd be better off from a cost perspective running a swarm of hundreds of drone strapped with explosives, only one of them needs to get lucky to disable a multi-million dollar plane and the drones themselves can be pretty cheap.
Why do you think fighters carry a bunch of “drones strapped with explosives” (air-to-air missiles) for air-to-air combat?
The thing is, when you optimize those, they tend to be comparatively short range and have no loiter time, so it's nice to have something to carry them into an engagement area and, if you need to patrol or escort, it's nice for it to also be something with some loiter time.
Sure, but cruise missiles aren't air-to-air missiles. Loiter time for a drone that intends to ram into a stationary or slow-moving ground target and for one that intends to ram (or nearly, because ABF warheads don't actually rely on impact) a combat aircraft have different required performance envelopes.
So proponents of hundreds of cheap drones theory tend to forget that kinetic energy is 1/2mv^2. So Energy required to catch up with a fighter in increases with square of velocity and modern fighters can all supercruise. That energy has to be stored on the drone to be expended which increases mass which increases energy require8d (linearly) and so on. If you need to add loiter time and manoeuvrability, again you need more energy and so mass.
So just like the famous rocket equation, you'll find that the design space narrows down to drones that are no longer cheap or casually expendable - essentially supersonic capable cruise missiles with loiter times
that tend to cost millions of dollars a piece. Certainly cheaper than manned aircraft but not something that can be used in the hundreds casually per engagement.
The other option is of course what's done today - strapping a relatively cheaper air to air missile to an even more expensive but fast and survivable aircraft which brings it to the war zone and gives it kinetic energy at launch.
> Certainly cheaper than manned aircraft but not something that can be used in the hundreds casually per engagement.
That was perfectly visible in the recent Syrian Civil War. Once the Russians decided to actively step in the conflict sure that they sent a rocket or two directly from their bases in Southern Russia/Caucasus, but I suspect that was more for propaganda reasons.
Soon enough they set up an air-base for good in Northern Syria (only a few tens of kms away from rebel lines) and they also brought in a battleship (or whatever is called nowadays the ship from which you can send rockets) off the coast of Syria. I'm pretty sure that proved a lot more cost-effective for them.
>>>they also brought in a battleship (or whatever is called nowadays the ship from which you can send rockets)
"Guided missile cruiser/destroyer/frigate" would be more correct terms. Frigates are rarely employed in land-attack missions, and only 2 or 4 countries have cruisers (US + Russia, as well as China and South Korea if you count their respective oversized destroyer classes as cruisers ). There are no battleships in active service in any navy today. The Russians do, however, possess the closest thing: the world's only nuclear-powered guided missile battlecruiser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirov-class_battlecruiser
Am on mobile, quickly found this news article from October 2015 [1]. The links are probably dead by now, but I remember seeing videos linked to from /r/SyrianCivilWar of said missiles flying over Iraq, like I mentioned, it was excellent propaganda material.
Later edit: A news article from that same timestamp [2] of Iraq complaining that it hadn’t been warned by the Russians of the latter sending missiles flying over their heads. It also includes a video of the supposed launch.
Later later edit: Here's a (short) Twitter video of one of those missiles flying over Northern Iraq [3]
Your tactics change too. Instead of building a drone that can keep up with a fighter, focus on area denial. Throw up tens of thousands of tiny drones into the atmosphere that each travel at say 50 mph (like a model aircraft), and train the AI to put them in the path of anything moving within that airspace. The goal isn't to hit the fighter, it's to make the fighter hit you. Think of a flock of Canada geese over an airport: they're tiny, they move slowly, but they're super unsafe to fly through. Now imagine that instead of trying to get out of the way, the geese try to get in the way - and if you get within 10 miles of one, you may have a Sidewinder on your tail.
Then when not engaged in air defense, these drones engage in CAS. Taking down fighters is a secondary mission - their real role is to dominate the battlefield, and part of that is by making it so unsafe to enter the airspace above the battlefield that it's futile suicide to try.
So let's do the math for this option. F22 wingspan is about 14m. Let's go easy and say you want a one drone in a square of 30m x 30m ie ~2x the wingspan. To cover 1 sq km, you need ~1000 drones. But the operating ceiling of an f22 is about 18km and the range is about 3000km - so a 1 sq km is not enough as it will simply fly around or over especially if the difference in speeds is over a thousand km/h. So let's say you build a wall 500km wide x 15km high which may make area denial viable - that works out to 7.5 MILLION drones. I doubt the economics of drones that need to fly and loiter 18km high and carry a sidewinder as you say would work out this way - the sky is simply too big.
This is without factoring that a typical war-fighter could simply shoot through such a passive defence wall from dozens of km away if they really need to and if they are moving at Mach 2, they'll be through the hole before it reforms and because of lack of speed, there's essentially no chase capability once through.
These kinds of ideas while interesting remind me of the Magniot line and we all know how it fared
I've alluded to this in other comments and also in the one you're responding to, but I'll spell it out: the goal is not to shoot down the F-22. The goal is to control the battlefield. So you're covering that 1 sq km with 1000 drones, or maybe up to about 20 sq km with 20,000 drones.
The rest of the F-22's range and service ceiling, you don't care about. You let them fly around all they want. If they want to go fly around at 50,000 feet at Mach 2, have fun. An F-22 is basically harmless to a drone: it can shoot down 12 drones with its 12 AA missiles, each of which costs > $1M, about 1000x what a drone costs. There's no pilot in a drone whose life is sacred, and there're plenty more drones where they came from.
You only need to engage the F-22 if they're coming down to engage ground forces. But then they need to fly through the swarm, at a huge risk to the airplane and pilot, and the swarm can react to put as many pieces of plastic in the F-22's path as possible.
If the F-22 stays up at 50K feet and drops precision-guided weapons from 30 miles away, they lose the attrition war to the drone swarm. A drone can very accurately put a bullet into each infantryman and a shaped charge on top of every tank with little resistance, unless the enemy is itself fielding autonomous drones. An F-22 can put 8 SDBs on 8 targets. Which is more efficient?
Well.. dumb bombs dropped from high altitude attain a terminal velocity of almost Mach 1. I suppose SDBs would be somewhat slower but probably not by much. So it's going to be interesting to see how such a diffuse swarm doing a hundred or so kmph could execute area denial against such an attack unless you have sophisticated radar and real time compute and target vectoring. Even more difficult if the attack consists of air to surface missiles instead (anti radar would be the first wave). I wouldn't accept such odds on defense.
Sure simple small drones can attack ground targets but that's a different problem from area denial to air superiority fighters and it assumes you already have a ground presence (ie. insurgency ISIS style) to get within range where you minimize risk of detection and flight time. If detected, an ISIS style drone can be shot down with a rifle.
Again I'm not saying pilotless attack / defence is not going to come - it obviously will. I'm saying it probably won't be the tens of thousands of cheap drones approach for the reasons above - it will be faster, more expensive drones which will be a significant fraction of manned aircraft cost.
The thing is, F22 has radar, it can see a swarm of 20000 drones. What do you do if it just turns around and comes back 3 hours later? How many times can you have 20000 drones take off and reach 50000 feet altitude? These drones don't burn any fuel at all?
Good point, it would require a massive charging operation somewhere in the vicinity of the battlefield since it can be assumed that these drones don't have that a particularly good deployment range. Whereas it is possible to have some jets parked on an aircraft carrier a couple hundred miles away, able of reaching the target within minutes. Much more flexibility there...
> You'd be better off from a cost perspective running a swarm of hundreds of drone strapped with explosives, only one of them needs to get lucky to disable a multi-million dollar plane and the drones themselves can be pretty cheap.
Yea, but a missile can be lighter, move faster, and carry more explosives if it doesn’t have to fly itself into a loitering position and instead gets hauled around by a big reusable multi-missile sensor platform.
Best of both worlds: Drone platforms carrying anti air missiles? :)
Just for fun, and I have no qualifications whatsoever, but the Aim 9 comes in at 188 pounds (85.3 kg), add say 20kg for a release mount? (just guessing), so might be doable.
Might need something more upmarket than a Griff 300 (max altitude 1000m - see https://www.dronetechplanet.com/the-griff-300-review-drone-t...) but even with that, if you had network of these remotely operated they could pack a hell of a surprise for an unsuspecting pilot (missiles would only go active when released), can be positioned strategically around assets.
The F-22 could also just climb above the drones' operating ceiling. Small, cheap drones will not have the thrust or fuel fraction to cruise up there, let alone maneuver without stalling.
The Genie anti-air nuclear rocket [1] was designed to take out soviet bombers, in a time when guided missiles were too immature to provide the required precision. A more modern guided nuclear anti-air missile (with features such as PAL security and tritium boosted fission for a higher / dialable yield) would probably work quite nicely for reducing swarm density.
There's a reason we've pulled back from the Cold War craziness of nuclear bazookas and chicken powered nuclear landmines. The casual tactical use of nuclear weapons is seen as geopolitically extremely dangerous.
If drone swarms might be a threat in the near future then it only makes sense that the capability to fight them needs to be developed now so you aren't scrambling to R&D a response during wartime.
The way I see it, we're probably headed towards a cold (at minimum) war between sino-russia et. al. and the western allies, so (in the absence of something more effective) tactical nuclear weapons to counter aircraft swarms will become more tolerable as tensions continue to rise - far better to use one to take out a drone swarm and cause drama than risk losing an air wing (or something else that interferes with force projection). Hopefully I'm wrong though.
There is no circumstance where tactical nukes will be acceptable in a global conflict between nuclear powers. One nuke goes off and everyone will assume it's no-holds-barred. The potential to escalate to a full-on MAD scenario is just too high.
If you can develop a drone swarm that can totally own an airspace then chances are you can develop drones that can beat them.
If the F22 turns around and aborts mission that's mission accomplished for the drone operator. The question is how many drones you need to deny figher aircraft from any given area, and how that cost compares to operating your own airforce
How do these handle chaff, fog, rain? I know drones don’t handle those too well either but I can’t imagine guided missiles care all that much, while I can see heavy rain severely limiting the effectiveness of that laser.
Indeed. Right now laser systems are feasible as weapons on ships... who have their own gigantic diesel engines (and/or nuclear reactors).
Energy dissipation of a laser in atmo is going to require crazy amounts of energy to go even a moderate distance, so either those lasers are being fired from something really close to the airfield, or else you've got some S.H.I.E.L.D style flying aircraft carrier thing.
An airvase, vs a road based, ad-hoc field, without even minimal infrastructure, and probably no defences too.
A weapon without munitions, is a useless weapon, even if it costs $300M a pop. A war is won by a soldier, and lost by a logistics officer.
The maximum what a few fit men can load very slowly, unassisted is 250kg, and usually only 100kg by a single man. Gravity fed refueling is also quite time consuming.
So how are you going to get "hundreds" of drones up to 50K feet where the F-22 operates? And then when he flies around this swarm at Mach 2, your drones are left in the dust?
> So how are you going to get "hundreds" of drones up to 50K feet where the F-22 operates?
Since we're being realistic, you could use the launcher I sketched out as an elementary school student. It had missile tubes on every surface, including around the wheels.
One option: just let the F-22 fly around at Mach 2 at 50K feet. Meanwhile your drones are strafing, bombing, and otherwise destroying everything on the ground within their area of control.
Why do we have air-superiority fighters? It's to shoot down any aircraft that might be harassing our ground units, and to ensure that our own CAS/attack aircraft can freely harass their ground units without opposition. An F-22 with an air-superiority loadout is pretty much useless in the ground war. So just let it fly around, and if it shoots down 8 drones with its 8 missiles, big deal. There's hundreds more where those came from. Meanwhile any aircraft that are actively strafing, cluster-bombing, etc. the ground forces have to fly straight through the drone swarm, with likely pretty cataclysmic results.
The primary air support plane during the conflict in Afghanistan was the B-1B. This could easily operate above any drone swarm and just lob JDAMS. Strafing is not really that common a mission due to the risk already faced by A2A and SAMs.
The risk goes away if you don't care if you lose the drone. Shoot down a manned CAS aircraft and you lose a $20M aircraft plus two priceless pilots. Shoot down a drone and you lose a $1000 drone.
Now which of these mission profiles can destroy an infantry company more cost-effectively? The JDAM may blow up a vehicle plus any infantrymen around it at the cost of $20K. The drone can individually target each infantryman with a bullet from a range of ~50-100 ft, for perhaps 100 kills for a $1000 drone, and it can be tactically controlled by other infantrymen on the ground, with instantaneous communication, to respond exactly where it's needed and avoid friendly fire.
I thought you were trying to counter the F-22? Moving the goal posts?
If drones are going to be used for CAS, then they need a control channel or Skynet AI. Any control channel in use will depend on LOS, and will be jammed to oblivion in a real war.
This subthread started (before I got involved) with "If the F22 turns around and aborts mission that's mission accomplished for the drone operator." The goalposts have not moved at all.
I think there's an impedance mismatch between some folks who assume "countering" an F-22 or B-1B means shooting it down, and others who assume "countering" it means making it cost-ineffective to achieve your strategic aims. For the latter folk, having your manned aircraft constantly plink away at your forces and shoot down your drones is still mission-accomplished as long as your drones are doing a lot more damage than your forces are receiving.
The aircraft-carrier vs. battleship debate is again relevant. The two times that an aircraft carrier and a battleship got into a direct fight (HMS Glorious vs. Scharnorst, and USS Gambier Bay vs. IJN Yamato), the aircraft carrier got reamed, and sunk in short order. But this didn't matter, because aircraft carriers and battleships almost never got into direct fights. There was Pearl Harbor, Taranto, and Malaya before the belligerents realized that sinking battleships was pointless, and then there was Sibuyan Sea and Okinawa when there were no more targets left. In between were a long string of carrier vs. carrier battles where the battleships were used as AA escorts or moved to shore bombardment & convoy escort duties. Similarly, why bother countering a few smart bombs when your drone swarm terminates every enemy soldier on the battlefield within an hour and makes any attempt at interference suicidal for manned aircraft?
Why would an F22 need to do that if the drones can't know that it is even there? Why would an f22 need to get closer than 25 miles to engage these drones? Why would an F22 ever get in a dogfight?
We're already very much in a theoretical territory, but: Given small size, how do you detect a swarm? Hovering cubes would be ignorable noise to radars. At f22 flight speeds, you can't exactly manoeuver around them.
If you knew where the plane is headed, the question could become: can you create a wide enough curtain ahead of time that can home in on the incoming plane? Chasing is not needed that way.
The sky is too big, the distances are too large, and a fighter jet is moving too fast. What are these drones supposed to do, hope the jet flies close enough that the drone can act as a proximity mine?
Plus, the kind of small drone you’re describing can’t operate at the altitude of a fighter jet. As the air thins out you need a lot of speed to keep sufficient oxygen flowing into the jets, and non-jet aircraft can’t operate. So unless the drones are going to be blimps, a drone that can climb to fighter jet altitude is going to be pretty big and look a lot like a fighter jet.
Considering that a F-22's RCS is roughly the size of a marble, and it is expected to fight similarly stealthy aircraft I'd imagine that you're very much under estimating the ability of a modern jet to detect your swarm of tiny cubes. Next, how exactly do your cubes stay up in the air for long periods of time? You'd need a great deal of energy in order to fly at the altitudes which an F-22 would be flying at. And presumably to loiter up there for long periods of time. Suddenly your cheap tiny swarm is expensive, large, and unweildly.
Sure, and if you know exactly where a plane is headed than a anti-air missle, anti-air gun, or plane with radically less speed/agility would be fine as well.
Any large set of hovering things grouped tightly enough to ensure damage to a passing F-22 would definitely show up on radar. Flocks of birds show up; a flock of drones would too.
> Also, drones are far slower than a missile and even far slower than the airplane they're trying to target.
There's no reason either of these needs to be true. A missile with an active control channel is a drone, and another class of military drones is regular manned aircraft converted for remote and/or autonomous operation, like the QF-16. A purpose built air-to-air combat drone could have a wide range of potential performance envelopes, but would almost certainly both have speed and maneuvering advantages over any manned aircraft it was expected to target (quite possibly a lot less range, though.)
There’s a joke that drone warfare enthusiasts keep inventing the guided missile. Nobody disputes that swarms of drones are effective against fighter jets once the drone side of the argument has backed up to drone-as-guided-missile. But a drone’s anti-fighter capability just keeps increasing as you strip away everything that makes it a “drone”.
It appears to be hard to predict the effect of the introduction of even a single weapon/platform into a complex conflict which consists of many, qualitatively different weapons/platforms. One of my career-defining "Aha" moments is described on page 19 of https://www.iitsec.org/-/media/sites/iitsec/link-attachments... in the section entitled "Forward Area Air Defense (FAADS)."
While I do not believe I am at liberty to provide details (even lo so many years later), I was witness to the first use of (arguably) VR to prototype and introduce a new weapons platform into a combined arms battlefield simulation. The short version is that on Monday morning, despite all the deep thinking done by smart people about how this would all work out, none of us came close to predicting what turned out to be the net effects of the new system as seen by Friday. I was there in my capacity as a nerd simply to keep the blinking lights blinking (vs the capacity of a combat domain expert), but watching the whole thing unfold was a mind-blowing demonstration of the "Law of Unanticipated Consequences."
None of us are as smart as we think we are. We are no smarter than our adversaries. The world is more complex than either of us can know.
Any drone that can operate with reasonable endurance at the same altitude as those super powerful, super fast, super expensive aircraft will not be cheap. An MQ-9 is somewhat cheaper than a manned fighter, but not by orders of magnitude.
If you're going to use the drone in an A2A role then it needs a powerful radar for accurate targeting. Targeting from other platforms using data links is possible in theory, but in practice only works in a narrow set of ideal conditions. Modern radars and other sensors are themselves super expensive.
And an MQ-9 is incredibly slow, can't maneuver worth a damn, and requires clear communication to control it. I don't understand why this question keeps coming up every time drones are in a news article. Sure something like Loyal Wingman might pan out, but the idea that swarms of cheap drones are going to be able to target something that's stealthy, operating at 50K, and around Mach 2 is just a fantasy.
That's a good point. But you also have to take into account how many dogfights have been avoided because the enemy knew there was no point in starting one.
The article talked about that; fighter pilots are taught dogfighting skills mostly so that they can become comfortable doing extreme maneuvers while conserving energy. Basically, it makes you a better pilot in general even if you aren't actually likely to get into a dogfight in a real battle.
The A part of the F/A 18 means Attack. Usually Attack aircraft are capable of close air support, which is a huge and integral part of our military tactics.
Without close air support, troops on the ground can't overwhelm enemies with firepower. Without air superiority, we don't provide close air support. Our strategy dictates air superiority to enable our tactics of close air support.
The reason there's only been one dogfight in the past 20 years is not because these fighters aren't effective, or because they're a relic of the past. It's that they're too effective. We own the sky and nobody is capable of challenging us.
They’re generally allied nations in NATO with compatible technical standards. NATO really doesn’t need member-states with planes that can’t fit American missiles - plus it saves the purchasing country the huge expense of having their own R&D programmes for domestic planes.
As for other countries: it’s still in your geopolitical interests to have countries who aren’t allies using your gear - not just for the money - but because it means you already know their weaknesses and you can sell them nerfed “export editions” to ensure you have technical superiority and to lock them in to buying parts, accessories, training, and upgrades (and successors!) from your own nations’ defence contractors and you can saturate a market that your geopolitical rivals (Russia, PRC, Iran, etc) would otherwise have access to, thus weakening their sphere-of-influence.
For a recent example of it going wrong, see the S-400 sale to Turkey.
Arms sales are an ugly thing - but if NATO states didn’t sell arms to Saudi Arabia, Libya, Turkey, etc what would the alternative be?
When countries set their budgets for the year - they'll set aside, say, 15% for defense - if their DoD reports to the cabinet that none of the superpowers will sell them new toys then that government's cabinet is not going to suddenly craft a new budget and divert that money that would have gone to new fighter-planes or small-arms to other civilian areas - that money will certainly stay with their military who will find some creative use for it.
...and that's the best-case scenario - for a country that isn't expecting hostilities.
What I meant by that was that if NATO doesn't sell to a third-world (using the strict/classical definition of "third-world") nation who is looking to buy arms then a rival power or superpower will - they may even give-away some amount of arms gratis to sweeten the deal and to "thank" the country for leaving or even reconsidering the NATO/OEDC sphere-of-influence - obviously Russia isn't the Soviet Union and they don't have the same expansionist goals, but I believe we're seeing the PRC making its moves. The PRC hasn't yet fired-up its export economy for defence gear yet - but I believe it's inevitable.
I stress that I don't want to start-up any Sinophobic sentiment - but what I'm seeing the PRC do is exactly the same thing I'd expect to see from any rising superpower looking to preserve their unending explosive economic growth... history doesn't exactly repeat itelf, but it often rhymes: the PRC wants influence, apparently to benefit itself (and I am concerned about the signs of Han ethnonationalism being the motivation behind their foreign and domestic policy objectives - and the PRC doesn't stand for the same principles I do) - I'm concerned where it will end-up. So if it means having to sell arms to countries (as part of an socio-economic-military package) to keep them in NATO+OEDC (which _generally_ value the things that I value) with the view of keeping them out of the PRC's SoI then that's something I'll have to accept.
I would argue that Russia very much has expansionist goals. I used to vacation in the Crimea as a kid with my family. Suddenly it wasn’t a part of Ukraine anymore a couple of decades later. Putin very much seems to want to put the USSR back together and I can’t see that stopping anytime soon.
Right - but I understand capturing Crimea was about securing access to the Black Sea before Ukraine eventually joins the EU or NATO. I feel it was a long-term strategic goal rather then an ideological or nationalistic goal.
When I think of the SU’s expansionist goals I think of Seven Days to the Rhine rather than territorial gains of convenience - so I apologise for being vague in my original comment.
I know the same argument applies to the PRC: their occupation of the South China Sea is opportunistic and strategic and so is more comparable to Crimea - it’s not like China is invading Vietnam or South Korea with intent to annex them.
In general, no; we sell a lot of equipment to countries that we might otherwise be protecting with our own hardware and personnel at great cost. Selling the equipment is cheaper.
It is worrying if you're, say, an avionics SWE in that industry. I could realistically see myself working on military tech with the expectation and understanding that they would be deployed (i.e. will kill people) with goals that I support in some way. I'd be mortified if I learned that weapons I worked on were being used the way I hear Saudi Arabia is using them - it's enough to make me want to preemptively sabotage my own work if I was working in that industry :/
No one at LockMart, Boeing, Northrop or whomever makes bombs today is losing any sleep over it anymore than all those Linux contributors here who made the NSA’s or Facebooks infrastructure be the best it can be.
There are differences between being a general contributor to Linux vs. intentionally working on deterrent systems (strategic nuclear weapons systems) vs. working on "regular" munitions and weapon systems though.
Simple economics of keeping the defense industry employed when they're not producing the equipment you need and doing the R&D for future needs. And you don't just want them on a retainer as workers' skills will lapse.
Also the jets sold overseas are generally "export" quality and have downgraded features or require embedded expertise to maintain.
I don’t think that’s quite true. In a post Cold War world, the assumption is that it’s pointless to engage NATO forces in air-to-air combat due to the level of capability.
That calculus is different where combatants are more closely matched (e.g. India and Pakistan), or it may change as opponents improve their capabilities.
Just seems like a lot of time and money when spending less would just mean losing more (probably much cheaper) aircraft before you get air superiority.
Cost vs effectiveness isn’t linear though. An air superiority jet that’s far more advanced and expensive isn’t just a bit more effective, it utterly dominates cheaper less effective opponents.
Also per unit costs are misleading. You can’t easily quadruple Or 10x your number of air bases, number of trained pilots and air crew, number of aircraft carriers to carry all your cheap and cheerful swarm fighters.
A lot of fast jet economics is driven by getting maximum utility out of deployment capacity and support infrastructure that is itself irreducibly expensive.
The amount we spend to have "the best", per aircraft, is exponentially higher than what "good enough" would be. And not just purchase price. Training, maintenance, longevity of the platform, etc.
The funny thing is that for a long time the opposite applied to fighter planes post WW2 - a more advanced one could take down entire airwings of older planes as the tech dominated so well and spam wasn't the answer.
Of course drones lack the biological limits on G-Force and the economic scales and factors like pilot deaths mean the situations are not identical.
The real question to be answered is probably one of "expendible drones vs premium super drones" long term as the age old battle of quality vs quantity.
You're designing a mini jet at that point, one that has to go faster than it's target yet be maneuverable enough to hit it. Which is pretty much just a smart missile at that point.
We learned in WWII that flak works just fine by exploding close to aircraft, which is much easier than directly hitting them. The same applies to drones.
You can have a wall of evenly spaced drones with explosives. When an aircraft passes all adjacent drones explode, the shockwave damaging the aircraft.
That's a total fantasy, just completely disconnected from real physics. Due to the inverse square law, shockwaves don't propagate very far. And there is no possible way to maintain a wall of drones in the air regardless of unit cost.
How large an area do you need to cover with drones to avoid, say, the F-22 climbing or diving by 10,000 feet?
A wall of drones 100 feet apart, covering 10,000 x 10,000 feet, is 100 x 100 drones, or 10,000 drones, which is a wall that's a little under 2 miles by 2 miles. That's a lot of drones to cover very little area, and they have to each carry enough explosive to create a shockwave that might damage the plane.
Moreover, this is a one-shot weapon. Once something sets it off (like a plane-like drone), there's a big gap in the wall. The idea of saturating an area with explosive drones has a scaling problem that would probably make it cost-prohibitive quite quickly.
And don't forget that these drones are going to need some sort of targeting system that works against stealth aircraft. Oh and they either need really good AI or some communications channel that will be jammed to death.
Are drones anywhere near as fast as a missile? In certain situations, an F/A-18 under afterburner can outrun a SAM missile - outrun meaning go fast enough that the missile can't close the distance before it runs out of fuel. How much chance would a drone have of catching it even while not operating under afterburner?
The unclassified ceiling is 50,000 feet, with a 250 m/s climb rate. Could a drone strapped with explosives come anywhere near that level of performance?
Programming the drones would be a pain. The wikileak ROE from 2008 was 27 pages long whereas Alexa struggles to converse on the topic of two plus two. Maybe some century we can replace the entire policy generating middle management of the Army with an AI; not any time soon it seems.
That discussion about swarms always devolves to "just push human beings near the action before launching the pitbull outta control killer drones" which for the last 30 years has been repeatedly successfully been implemented as modern jet fighters carrying short range sidewinder IR guided missiles, which annoys the people who thought they invented the new idea of explosive drones, little did they know we've been doing that for generations and its unfortunately probably even more expensive than swarms of WWII era P-51s with human pilots.
The really cool thing, especially for a ship, would be a dome of drones. They could come back to the ship to recharge and fly out again, and even, depending on weather, travel with the ship. Each one could sense incoming ordinance and move to pre-explode it well before it hit the ship. Of course, this wouldn't work against some things, like heavy kinetic stuff, or really fast stuff. But ordinary missiles? Other drones? Sure.
Why use drones in this missle defense system your describing? Drones are incredibly slow and missiles are INCREDIBLY fast. If you have the trajectory of the missile enough to put some sort of drone or hard object on it, why not just shoot it. That's what the phalanx missile defense system does.
Well this is an interesting question, and there's a good answer: because if you make the drone dome dense enough, the drones can be so slow they don't move. So, the less dense you make it, the more they have to move, so there is a nice optimization problem with the lower bound of density given by the speed of the drone, and the upper bound based on cost and complexity. It also matters how big the dome is - you want a big one, but if its too big density goes down again.
Interesting thought experiment, a single Arleigh Burke destroyer has 96 vertical launch cells and can trivially be arranged to fire to a time and incoming bearing on a target.
So if an enemy ship, perhaps an aircraft carrier, really pissed off a single US destroyer, it can decide to send all hundred supersonic anti-ship missiles in from the same direction at the same instant of arrival, or from every point on the compass, or maybe three directions at once or who knows what kind of crazy four dimensional incoming attack pattern, like waves of ten missiles at a time every second for ten seconds from ten different directions. So how do you distribute your drones so as to soak up a hundred incoming from one direction while not getting sneak attacked by say five from every 30 degrees on the compass at the same time?
Its like say you have a Greek Phalanx, that's pretty well defended over a couple hundred feet, but try to use the same one phalanx spread out to defend all one thousand acres of city-state farmland simultaneously and its not going to work out well.
But you need to make sure that control radio signals are not jammed or that the onboard AI is intelligent enought that it will not target friendly or civilian targets.
I dont think thats a problem that can be solved today to the exclusion of manned aircrafts. If you are a terrorist it might not matter but for the kind of nation states that can field fighter jets it certainly matter.
This tactic only really works during peace time. The main strategy relies on the fact that the US (or whoever) isn't willing to shoot on sight. The swarm might well be able to get a good shot or two in but that would be the end of it.
Once a war is going on the you can move to a much more aggressive strategy. The US can just declare that any boats within a certain region are subject to summary attack and all shipping should steer clear. Attack aircraft can start sinking these small boats as soon as they leave harbour (or most likely cruise missiles blow them up at anchor).
I think this also is subject to the fact that today the US navy has not entered any area in force on a wartime footing. You can't just go around with your Phalanx armed if there might be anything non-hostile around you today (be it just an oil tanker of your foe - the PR by causing a massive oil spill is horrendous). A phalanx (or probably the 25mm cannons on the newest Arleigh-Burke destroyers) will quickly tear your swarm to pieces.
In the limit, we get rid of navies and stick swarms of drones in 40-ft shipping containers, and then just sail container ships with 10K+ drones aboard around.
Presumably on slow high-flying drones (think like a U-2) or on a balloon. For drones that go under 30 mph you can actually solar-power them, letting them stay aloft indefinitely.
I'd expect to see a shift toward more visual and IR sensors as well, to combat stealth technologies. Modern ultra-HD cameras + image recognition algorithms are a lot more sensitive than human eyes are, and you can field many more drones than AWACS aircraft with much less cost of a loss, letting you bring the relevant detection platforms in closer.
Visual and IR sensors don't work well in bad weather. Modern cameras have superior resolution to human eyes but dynamic range is still worse. Solar powered drones don't have the power or payload to handle useful radars. For that mission you need something like an RQ-4, which is roughly equivalent to a U-2 in performance and just as expensive.
Navies have had a counter tactic to attack by swarms of small fast boats since the beginning of the 20th century. The boats would be ripped to shreds in seconds by small calibre guns.
This fact has always nagged me in context of the breathless stories about the "war game in Persian Gulf" and IRGCs swarm of speedboats. The story of the famous war game is repeatedly mentioned (even here on HN) but rarely the facts intrude to deflate the (imo) implied message: "this is why we haven't done anything about IRI in the past 40 years." This also lets IRI push ridiculous propaganda on Iranians showing them boats circling a mock aircraft carrier. Are IQs really dropping globally?
Sometimes I swear there is a pas de deux going on between these apparent enemies.
Fry: "I heard one time you single-handedly defeated a horde of rampaging somethings in the something something system"
Brannigan: "Killbots? A trifle. It was simply a matter of outsmarting them."
Fry: "Wow, I never would've thought of that."
Brannigan: "You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down. Kif, show them the medal I won."
>>the argument about the death of the dogfight, or that there is no need for within visual range engagements anymore is a tired one. There was a pretty popular movie in the ‘80s about that very argument, so I am not going to rehash it here.
Regardless of the actual merits of whether dogfights are a thing any more, I feel like "because Top Gun" is not exactly a sound argument.
CSBA has a report that goes through the data. It's rather one sided. Unless something like the vietnam rules of engagement concerning visual id happens again, dogfights are done. Add stealth to that and the arguments get monumentally stronger.
It's not a cloaking device, it's a <1 multiplier on the effectiveness of enemy radar. Both sides will still have radar, and detection range for a good stealth fighter with modern radar against itself is going to be higher than visual range. What stealth does do is it reduces detection range to well below the employment range of good missiles, which means that the first one to get a radar lock will either end the fight then and there, or at least be able to manouver into a very favorable position while the enemy has to evade a missile. This is why fights with stealth aircraft in simulation and training are so very technical and one-sided.
It's worth reading the report. There's a lot more pieces to this puzzle. Another recent development is high off bore sight missiles, which drastically reduce the need/utility of high energy cost maneuvers.
What's interesting to me - I thought I was a pretty big fan of Top Gun, but now I'm not so sure.
I did not pick up there is an argument about whether or not dog fighting still was needed.
The only "argument" I recall was the recap of how pilot deaths increased after training stopped, and decreased after training started. But it was a one off history lesson as part of the Top Gun school intro.
But the rest or the movie seemed very clearly - yes, the US needs dog fighting to defend its interests across the globe. There seemed to be absolutely no challenging of that idea within Top Gun.
Top Gun the Movie is actually pretty accurate when you look at the last 30 years of "no fly zone" enforcement, which was the mission in the movie.
Many dozens of times over multiple decades in multiple theaters against multiple opponents, the vast majority of stereotypical NFZ engagements have ended in "two american planes primary and wingman have a brief dogfight against enemy aircraft to obtain ideal firing positions, involving visual identification, then end the fight with short range IR guided sidewinder missiles". There are, of course, occasional exceptions but the VAST majority of NFZ aerial combat stories look like this.
Its interesting that for 30 years NFZ ROE documents have been classified and are generally still classified and only rarely can you find an ROE illegally posted on wikileaks. HOWEVER the secret squirrel types seem to have ignored the internet and OSINT in general. So you can't legally find a piece of paper titled RoE describing how visual ID was necessary and BVR generally prohibited for all practical purposes, however, its trivial to read on wikipedia the stories of about a hundred NFZ engagements and then reverse engineer the classified ROE to match the large number of mostly identical individual engagements.
Or to summarize the above, the RoE for NFZ operations for the last 30 years remain classified, although the results of seemingly all air to air engagements have been publicly released, and traditional OSINT techniques applied to hundreds of "isolated" public anecdotes can easily reverse engineer the contents of those classified RoE documents, and the reverse engineered RoE documents pretty much mirror the fight scene at the end of the Top Gun movie; get close, dogfight into missile launch position while performing visual ID, end fight by launching short range IR missiles.
My main issue with it is that the movie is over 30 years old and the argument in the movie is based on data from a conflict that began 55 years ago.
Maybe I'm completely wrong (I'm not a pilot and have no military knowledge), but I feel like things have moved on since then in terms of both the technology and the types of wars fought.
Maybe someone more knowledgable than me can answer... when was the last time a US combat aircraft engaged in a real dogfight?
Over the past few years, I've been hoping to run into an 80s soviet movie with heavily armed evil american antagonists. The soviet ideological indoctrination and censorship game must've been strong, because so far everything I've seen either has pirates/hooligans/etc. as antagonists or fails to even have a "man vs. man" plot at all.
I grew up in post Soviet Ukraine, watching all the movies that were made in the USSR. I cannot recall a single “us vs them” movie with another country or nationality being the them, except movies about WWII. I don’t know why that is, but when we started getting American movies in the early 1990s it was a huge contrast. In Soviet movies the good guys were often the police trying to combat recidivism after WWII (huge socioeconomic shift led to a huge socioeconomic problem that gave rise to a huge amount of crime). In the American movies the bad guys were often foreigners.
This isn’t to say there wasn’t propaganda, just that the propaganda was pointed in a different direction: for example a young idealistic police officer working with an veteran of the force to tenaciously investigate an elusive criminal gang for the glory of the Soviet Union. The focus was to make Soviet patriotism an attractive quality, regardless of being young or old. It was a lot more focused internally. In the meantime, a movie like Die Hard has none of that: German thieves that pretend to be terrorists are the bad guys, an all American hero is a good guy. American movies rarely have a true patriotic streak, as in “and this, son, is why we must work to better our union.” In fact, the idea of glorifying labor was so prevalent in the Soviet movies and so absent in American ones that this might be the biggest contrast. It shows a different face of patriotism and could easily explain the divide: some think patriotism is exercising your rights while others see it as holding back on exercising your rights. “It’s my right not to wear a mask” is a clear example of that.
>>>This isn’t to say there wasn’t propaganda, just that the propaganda was pointed in a different direction: for example a young idealistic police officer working with an veteran of the force to tenaciously investigate an elusive criminal gang for the glory of the Soviet Union.
Interesting, the closest Western execution of this Soviet theme, albeit much more cynically, might be "Child 44", which was banned in much of the FSU and bombed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_44_(film)
Personally I enjoyed it.
>>>American movies rarely have a true patriotic streak, as in “and this, son, is why we must work to better our union.”
"The Siege" might be one of the best for sticking to American values and trying to curb xenophobia. A big part of the plot is the importance of holding other Americans accountable for violations of our laws and our values, even when fighting against "foreign" enemies.
> Over the past few years, I've been hoping to run into an 80s soviet movie with heavily armed evil american antagonists. The soviet ideological indoctrination and censorship game must've been strong, because so far everything I've seen either has pirates/hooligans/etc. as antagonists or fails to even have a "man vs. man" plot at all.
Not 80s, but Wolf Warrior is China vs. evil American mercenaries.
Comrade Detective was funny and might simulate that perspective.
"You don't become a good communist by going to meetings. Or memorizing the manifesto. You do it with your fist."
Comrade Detective: "You're telling me the purpose of the [Monopoly] game is to drive your fellow citizens into poverty, so you can get rich? It's diabolical."
American subversive: "It's just a game. Nowadays the West finds it as a useful tool to indoctrinate young children into the capitalist system."
Yes, that gets close to the cold war vibe (and fits my question as posed modulo the source), but if I'm reading properly, the Dyon Corps are mercenaries. In "Top Gun", "Rambo III", etc. the antagonists were regulars.
Drones can be, and have been jammed, or even captured [1]. You need now, and will continue to need for the foreseeable future pilots in planes. But teams of piloted fighters and drones? That will be the winning combination. And how can a single human command a flock of 20 aircraft? By giving short orders, and letting AI taking care of the rest. The ethics of killing will never be left to AI, but the technicalities of acquiring and prosecuting the target? You bet.
Ha. I know of a device with a very simple AI program that can tell if an enemy is standing on it. If so, the enemy is killed.
It’s called a mine.
They have been used in every land (and naval) war since they were invented.
These examples of “no human in the loop” are stretched so wide as to lose all meaning. A human designed the mine to destroy anything that meets the programmed requirements (weight on mine or proximity to mine).
You don’t have a case of no human in the loop until that mine is capable of exploding or not exploding and it’s responsible on a case by case basis for deciding which to do.
The naval mine isn't triggered by a simple contact switch. It is capable of launching or not launching the torpedo on a case by case basis depending on pattern matching from multiple sensors.
I think they just meant that the military long left the “kill/don’t kill” decision along the wayside despite the propaganda of saying we have someone in control of the kill vector.
That may be a valid technical complaint, but the problem remains—we create devices that are designed to kill humans, autonomously, without human decision inputs.
From a different perspective you might think of guns and bombs as having similar problems—a human might decide to pull the trigger, but the human involved has limited control over who is killed and what is destroyed.
Let me know if I understand your priorities correctly—you care about whether the word “AI” is being used correctly, but you are not interested in discussing whether machines are autonomously killing humans?
I think this has to be a pretty classic example of the way discourse can get derailed on HN, Stack Overflow, or the like—Alice has an interesting point to make, but Bob takes the floor to point out that Alice used a word incorrectly, even though he knows what Alice meant.
The discussion about landmines is actually a good point—the legal language around landmines has evolved somewhat over the years and you might hear them referred to as “LAWs” these days, which stands for “Lethal Autonomous Weapons”. So many of the the same treaties will regulate both autonomous drones and landmines, with the same language.
It's not. Landmines aren't placed randomly. They also do not discriminate in what they kill. They are a simple explosive with a step trigger or proximity sensor. That does not an AI make. It completely deludes the definition of AI to call any switch based mechanism an AI. Words and meanings matter and it cannot mean whatever you want it to mean or it loses all capacity to communicate an idea.
> Words and meanings matter and it cannot mean whatever you want it to mean or it loses all capacity to communicate an idea.
Words and meanings are not equally important. Words are only there to communicate meaning. You can communicate meaning without words, and you can even communicate the correct meaning with incorrect words.
There's an interesting discussion to be had here, but "are landmines AI" isn't it.
Fine I'll bite but I still think the conversation is asinine. Landmines are not placed randomly. They are intentionally placed to protect or guard an area. They don't make decisions about targets, they simply react. Of course there's a fundamental difference in strapping warheads to an AI controlled vehicle and allowing it to select and determine its own targets...and dumb switch based landmines. The latter will work as intended: if someone steps on the mine, the mine goes kaboom. There's no risk of the mine uprooting itself and carrying itself into an urban civilian population center.
> There's no risk of the mine uprooting itself and carrying itself into an urban civilian population center.
And yet, landmines kill an estimated 15-20,000 civilians each year. About one in five are children. All because someone decided to defend an area. You say this is “working as intended”, but—how can this be the intended result?
Automatic weapon systems allow you to make decisions about who lives and dies, and they let you escape responsibility by making those deaths occur at a different time/place from when and where you caused those deaths. If you were defending an area with teammates and friends’ lives on the line, you might be a little less careful about how your decisions affect the lives of civilians—especially the civilian deaths are uncertain and distant.
The whole point is that the initial argument was not "AI bad", it was "should we allow weapons to kill without direct human involvement". That is the moral issue with AI weapons. The GC was merely pointing out that we have already done this with things like mines.
There exists an even simpler AI program, wherein an edge is pressed against an object. If done so with sufficient force, the object is cut. This AI is called a knife.
You're missing the point. The point is, we have very stupid systems making kill/no-kill decisions today if you step on top of them or drive by them. Slightly smarter systems making kill/no-kill decisions within a designated envelope should not be surprising.
AI _is_ a buzzword with questionable signification.
The level of complexity is arbitrary. Maybe the AI won't blow something up unless it has a heat signature. Maybe it has to detect a pulse. Maybe it won't blow up something that emits a certain beacon. Maybe the kill has to be within a certain timeframe. Maybe the target had to have a certain mass. Which of these considerations qualifies as AI?
I know of someone who worked on face-recognition AI landmines for the US. They only explode if they recognize you. I don't think anything like that has actually been used though.
>The ethics of killing will never be left to AI, but the technicalities of acquiring and prosecuting the target?
This is unfortunately completely wrong. Fully autonomous weapons have already deployed for years, and are currently in use on the North/South Korean border. Fully autonomous weapons systems, including drones that use AI to autonomously choose and destroy their targets have been under development for many years.
There's a reason experts are sounding the alarm - because the ethics of killing are being shifted to AI right now.
>Kallenborn, an expert in unmanned systems and WMD, describes one type of swarm that he calls an Armed, Fully-Autonomous Drone Swarm, or AFADS. Once unleashed an AFADS will locate, identify, and attack targets without human intervention
> The ethics of killing will never be left to AI, but the technicalities of acquiring and prosecuting the target?
Other have already answered this, but I want to chip in with my own experience working for a submarine and military boat manufacturer + talking to navy officer.
They already have system to acquire and try to distinguish friend of foe. The only reason why the system is not pushing the launch button by itself is because there is a lot of tactic involved in starting an engagement. Especially for submarines who might prefer to remain hidden than launch a torpedo which will uncover its position. Also, those system are not perfect, one navy officer who was on radar duty told me that he activated the alarm on his ship after seeing something on the radar that ended up being a flock of seagull.
If the system was able to manage tactic and be able to distinguish friend of foe reliably, they would give it the power to kill.
I hope you're right, but what makes you so sure? In a wartime scenario, if a country is short on skilled personnel why wouldn't they release AI combatants if they had the tech? Especially if they're facing a perceived aggressor or defending their territory.
Keep in mind that electronically jamming a modern fighter is effectively downing it, irrespective of the human inside. I have read that are beyond the ability of a human to fly directly, and absolutely require fly-by-wire to stay aloft.
As for taking control of an AI drone, you can eliminate that possibility by only allowing abort orders remotely.
Classical drones still require a remote human. This is a different league.
"electronically jamming a modern fighter" isn't going to do anything to its flight controls.
You're correct that flight computers are generally required to keep dynamically unstable aircraft flying -- but that's done at a much lower level than anything that's connected to a radio.
The US military already has drones that are flown remotely. It seems to be a small step to add a dogfighting AI to a plane and just have the remote pilot sic the AI at another plane. The remote pilot just has to reengage after the fighting is over. That’s assuming that they can add the sensors and AI to track the other plane.
As the author mentioned, the dogfighting AI seems to counter the real pilot’s moves effectively while maximizing the amount of energy maintained. It seems to have caused the real pilot to overshoot or undershoot while maintaining or gaining energy. The countering also included adjusting aim to hit the real pilot as the real pilot tried to maneuver away. It wasn’t just perfect information or efficient flying.
> it was noted that with a little extra work the QF-16 could be turned into a combat UAV for dangerous missions like SEAD (suppression of enemy defenses) or attacking ground targets guarded by heavy air defenses.
1. The AI had "total situational awareness" (perfect position, direction, velocity of opponent). Even given 360 cameras, radar, etc there is still uncertainty, errors, etc.
2. The human was an expert pilot, not a sim expert (see videos, he was going way too fast several times, not something he'd do in a real plane). A DCS master would likely have done better.
3. The AI wasn't trying to avoid head-ons.
With this and the Starcraft2 blink micro "win" I'm just going to these from now on.
Why should it? Presumably the AI pilot is backed up / remote / not precious - while the human pilot has an inherent value - isn't reckless disregard one benefit of automated systems?
You don't risk an expensive plane with head-ons - that's what missiles are for.
This was testing the AI. If real-world AI was going to be deployed in warfare shooting down manned planes, you'd make custom hardware that is smaller, faster and 10-100x cheaper than a f-35.
It’s not minded, it’s not any different in than alphago or alphastar or the OpenAI dota bots, it doesn’t understand anything outside of the context of the game it’s playing.
It doesn’t have a mind. On the “intelligence” spectrum it’s much closer to the guidance system in a heat seeking missile to than say even a dog, yet alone anything that we would define as having cognition.
Where the game is 'total world domination'. Through any means necessary, in particular by utterly destroying one's physical adversaries. Arguably the human brain development is a byproduct of an arm's race between social BIs, fighting off the next tribe since time immemorial. Time to up the ante and build smarter and stronger entities. Somebody's got to win the game, this nuclear stalemate we're living through is too boring.
Short term, runaway hostile killer drone swarm. Medium term, it's an arms race to build the smartest, strongest, most ruthless global killer drone swarm. The outcome of that race is anybody's guess.
Well, OP was talking about billions of dollars of DARPA funding going towards military AI research. I presume they would be trying to get much closer to cognition.
I obviously can't speak for Defence but my understanding was that a lot of the training et al was so that high command could have predictable outcomes.
They may give troops on the front line some leeway, but within parameters for pursuit of a goal.
I don't think Defence wants "uncontrolled" anything. Even if they manage to develop fully cognizant AI they will want to know the exact parameters it can work within.
> it doesn’t understand anything outside of the context of the game it’s playing.
Yea, and the game is life and death. A military minded AI won't distinguish between surrendering and fighting enemies, won't distinguish between enemies and non-combatents, might confuse a shutdown order with an electronic attack. Just cause AI isn't by definition "smart" doesn't mean its harmless.
A heat seeking missile can’t do any of those things either, I’m not sure you understand the role of “AI” in this case, you also anthropomorphize it too much.
Yes and that's a big part of the problem. It does not have a concept of "after" the victory.
So if it gains autonomy there is high chance of it destroying everything else before dying itself.
I found the story of Horizon Zero dawn highly plausible. The main takeaway - dumb military AIs destroy all the living things. The only bit we are missing is fully automated fabrication.
> The only bit we are missing is fully automated fabrication.
Supply chains for high tech goods such as AI-powered autonomous fighter jets are extremely complex. We've already automated some of the individual steps, and will surely in the coming decades automate many more. But high-level orchestration of the chains as a whole, that requires many human-level intelligences to cooperate in advanced social systems, I don't think anything short of general AI could replace that.
Not only what we are missing is self replication but everything else including the important part and what was the problem “converting bio-mass into energy” without that it wouldn’t be an issue, not to mention that HZD makes little sense in general even with the coverup nukes exist and they blow up shit just fine their lore made little sense in the long run as they couldn’t replicate they just had really big robots the octopus ones that could manufacture more of the smaller ones.
And more importantly since the biomass conversion was basically nano machines why couldn’t you produce a swarm of them that simply eats robots? Or why couldn’t you produce a swarm of robots to fight the rogue swarm.
The whole “unhackable” thing also doesn’t makes sense and if they were then well make another swarm that just is unhackable and let them duke it out. The technology and more importantly the consistency of the technology in that universe makes absolutely no sense.
As much as I liked the game the story while cool was about as plausible as an alien invasion that triggers a zombie apocalypse followed by the second coming.
The only thing that will address that is a broad international agreement with sanctions and political consequences for aggressor AIs that violate it, just like agreements that mostly keep horrifying biological weapons off the table and mostly kept nuclear weapons programs in check.
"mostly" still leaves a lot of room for bad actors, but these sorts of compromises have worked surprisingly well enough that the failures were notable. Political problems are only going to have political solutions, and almost by definition those are imperfect.
Firstly, agreements do not keep biological weapons off the table or nuclear programs in check.
The first is done largely by the great powers agreeing that it's a bad idea from a military standpoint. That is, biological weapons are not stockpiled not because of all the obvious horrible consequences, but because the common wisdom is that they are ineffective weapons.
Keeping nuclear programs in check is mostly done through expense. Everyone who has them has made enough of them to feel safe, and doesn't want to make more because they are really expensive. After states have decided they don't want any more nukes, they sign agreements with each other to make sure no-one else is building a massive stockpile. If any of them wanted a larger stockpile, they would make it.
In general, powerful states can not be limited by agreements. They only ever work as a framework that allows everyone to do what they would have wanted to do anyway, while feeling confident of what everyone else wants to do and how to plan for it. The American obsession of thinking of the UN as world government and international agreements as laws really distorts your view on the world. That is simply not how any of this works.
But regardless of all that, even if broad international agreements would actually work to limit weaponry, it still wouldn't work, because AI is deniable. The initial AI isn't going to replace the pilot, they are going to augment them. And those are developed further until the pilots are no longer needed, and past that. So you can develop all the way to the point where humans have become a detriment, without needing to show your hand. And only deploy completely unmanned platforms once the proverbial shit hits the fan, which is after the point where everyone has stopped caring about international agreements anyway.
> The first is done largely by the great powers agreeing that it's a bad idea from a military standpoint. That is, biological weapons are not stockpiled not because of all the obvious horrible consequences, but because the common wisdom is that they are ineffective weapons.
Can you point to any evidence that this is the case? It doesn't sound plausible to me.
This is about chemical weapons but a lot of it applies to biological as well. Biological weapons also have the added benefit of possibly becoming a global pandemic and infecting your own military and economic base.
> when the USA recently smoked General Soleimani with Hellfire missles, where was the UN?
This is a good example of the weird attitude where Americans think of the UN as a world government.
UN is a place where diplomats of different countries keep constantly in touch and maintain relations. That's all it is. UN does not have opinions. The member countries have, UN is only a place where they are presented. UN does not do things. The member countries do things, UN is the place where this is organized.
To take your "not perfect" results into a conspiracy theory arena.
Genetic engineering on humans.
Politically there is a ban. But given your "not perfect enforcement" and 2000 billionaires I guess at least one of them has this goal - whether it is considered kooky or not. Someone is trying to engineer their offspring for intelligence/looks/health.
Whether they achieve it remains to be seen and will no doubt come out in history.
It has completely failed to keep nuclear weapons in check, imo.
Keeping AI technology out of existence has the same problem as keeping nuclear weapons out of existence - the incentives are too great for any nation to have them.
If a nation is armed with nuclear weapons, the only possible check on them is another nation that is armed with nuclear weapons. Thus even in the existing non-proliferation framework, the largest nations (the United States, Russia, China, several European powers) ALL still have nuclear weapons. The reason why is that if any nation was the only nuclear armed nation it would be impossible to defeat with any quantity of conventional force.
The same argument applies for AI. It would be impossible avoid the existence of militarized AI if it provides the same level of force multiplication as nuclear weapons. It would be necessary for any nation to try to gain the same technology as a deterrent against attack by a rival that possesses the technology.
> The reason why is that if any nation was the only nuclear armed nation it would be impossible to defeat with any quantity of conventional force
Really debatable. Bribe enemy generals, drop commando paratroopers right on top of enemy's political leadership, even at 90% attrition rates, bomb vital military infrastructure, like strategic stockpiles, to demoralise the enemy (making them understand that the war will be long, hungry, and ugly,) even if it means sacrificing the entirety of your airforce, and wait until your land force finally reaches enemy territory amid this complete chaos.
One country having nuclear weapons means that they can prevent all of what you propose with mere threats. If a few your planes are in position to drop paratroopers or bombs, they can and will threaten to nuke your capital in retaliation the moment the first commando or bomb gets dropped; and the expected result is that you will fold.
You can't bomb much of vital military infrastructure if your own infrastructure - not only airfields, but also population centres - have been nuked. Your bombers can drop a single full payload, after which they will have no bases left where they can return to reload. I mean, we have Cold War studies of all of that - the only way to ensure that bombers really have the ability to bomb enemy infrastructure was to ensure that they are up in the air patrolling, or alternatively scramble to launch within minutes of an alert, since an hour after the start of WW3 you only have a single strike with the airforce that you have in the air.
You can't demoralise the enemy by "making them understand that the war will be long, hungry, and ugly" because the war will end in a single day, after which half of your population will be dead, and the other half in need of food, electricity and supplies. Sure, you will have people willing and able to defend the country, but nobody will be invading; but after being on the receiving end of a nuclear strike your ability to deploy and supply a massed overseas invasion is destroyed, so you're not a meaningful threat anymore, the conflict is over.
Nuclear deterrent is the ultimate defensive weapon because it ensures that any war is unwinnable for the attacker - if the attack fails, then it fails, but if the attack succeeds, there's no good response to an ultimatum to accept ceasefire or have your cities nuked. All your soldiers and commanders know that if they invade and win, then their families and their homeland will die anyway.
And I read much of them, and what I wrote above is a restatement of what I read.
> Your bombers can drop a single full payload, after which they will have no bases left where they can return to reload.
Yes, but even this will likely be enough to bomb biggest C3 centres, bases, stockpiles of food, ammo, and fuel. Just enough to ensure 1.) initial shock, and C3 paralysis, 2.) making sure that the adversary will be running on the leased time too.
Even at the height of cold war, each side had at most 10 strategic level stockpiles. Without them, the huge force would've ran out of supplies from regional bases in under 6 month.
> after being on the receiving end of a nuclear strike your ability to deploy and supply a massed overseas invasion is destroyed,
If you have your entire tank, and mechanised force on the go, and one leg on foreign soil already. It doesn't matter. The enemy will either have to nuke own cities captured by your force, or contest them with conventional force. Similarly, they will have to either set their equally diminished supplier on fire to deny them to invader, or have to contest them.
> All your soldiers and commanders know that if they invade and win, then their families and their homeland will die anyway.
Yes, it requires one to be a madman to accept such "victory." Especially if you already are a somehow major power, as you know that in today's free-for-all world, a third power will swoop in to claim spoils in no time. But think of it as a "counter-MAD," or "asymmetric MAD," or "madman's MAD"
Do you have any historical examples of someone accomplishing what you’ve described?
It seems like if what you are arguing is possible, nukes don’t need to be invoked at all. Why wouldn’t you use the same technique against a conventional enemy, if it is possible at all?
Well, all of the above is so far purely hypothetical.
There are exactly 0 countries on record who went on offensive against nuclear states, with intention to invade them.
To execute a strategy like this, one needs to be quite a monster to rationalise such losses in their sane mind.
It is as ruthless to your own soldiers, as it is to the enemy: forcing a stronger enemy into the most ugly, meat grinding form of ground war, with exact intention to exact maximum attrition losses, while negating advantages of high tech weaponry. Sending them a message "All your bombers, and missiles are useless at the bayonet range, you will have to bury us with your bodies"
Even Mao only sent covert cues to Soviets that he is ready to repeat Zhenbaotai, but even he had no real intention to follow up on them. That was a pure theatre.
What you're saying sounds like a strong argument in favor of my original post.
It is insane to go to war against a nuclear armed opponent. Sure, you could kill half your able bodied population of military age and maybe win (what if something goes wrong in your battle plan? Now you're nuked and the opponent is still combat ready), but now any of your neighbors can easily take advantage of your now devastated country.
The problem isn't so much an AI involved in military planning so much as an AI raised by the military, similar to how we are more okay with children who grow up to join the military rather than child soldiers (or children raised to be in the military). Defense (defense!) should be a tool taught and employed only after one has developed an understanding and appreciation of what they should be defending.
Frankly, we shouldn't be developing AI outside of institutions with STRONG ties to humanist missions (possibly including religion). AI is not for war, and it's not for "efficient" resource extraction and development; it's for helping humanity to safeguard itself and its potential.
Even in that international agreement, someone still has the weapons. International agreements failed to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the strongest nations because why would they ever give up their nukes?
Phew. Thankfully since we decided not to invest in defensive AI our power rivals also decided not to invest heavily in offensive AI. I was afraid the world wasn’t a fair and moral place for a minute there!
Home security companies working in AI also tends not to end well in the movies, video games.
It amuses me to think that Aperture Science had a protocol for rogue AIs with the codename "Birthday Cake". GLaDOS did not understand why all of the humans kept talking about cake as they died. They really seem to like cake...
it's as inevitable as nuclear proliferation following WW2. you can slow it down, try and create a few key players and build around that, but it's always coming.
Despite all the Smedley Butler memes the US actually spends a pretty normal amount of money for a country with a large economy. Most people don't grasp how much the US economy dwarfs that of other nations.
Germany and Canada both spend 1.3% of their GDP’s on the military. United Kingdom and China are at 1.9%. However, the US is all the way up at 3.4%. A 30% cut would still leave the US well above the international average and due to it’s sheer economic might result in a clear military advantage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
Consider the US Air-force is unquestionably the #1 most powerful Air-force in the world with the US Navy comfortably holding the #2. That’s frankly expensive.
Well, all members of NATO have agreed to spend at least 2% of their GDP on military defense - the idea being mutual defense spending based on your ability to spend the money.
Unfortunately, many NATO countries are currently spending far less than 2% (as you showed above)... and the US is spending far more than 2%, in part, to make up for the shortfall (ie, why we have tens of thousands of troops stationed in Europe, etc).
Quite reasonably the question arises, defense vs what? Even without the US, NATO is still extremely well protected with a giant and extremely advanced military. They even have a strong Nuclear deterrent. Really the US is the only roughly equivalent military force on the planet.
This is an extremely over confident view of NATO and the US. In wargames NATO loses the Baltic states to Russia [1]. And that's WITH US forces. And lets not bring up nukes, no EU member is willing to go nuclear over Tallinn.
That’s a massive misunderstanding of warfare. The complaint is over the deployment of forces not the total quantity of such forces.
Any nation in history will lose a single battle if their enemies concentrate on a single point and their defending a huge area. However, such a loss represents no significant reduction in fighting forces and is therefore not militarily meaningful. Further a massive defensive concentration of forces into a small area just means the actual attack takes place somewhere else.
In the end winning requires armies to face armies or supplies to run out over long periods.
US spends so much on military because other countries essentially outsource their own military to the US. For example, the EU spends very little on military in large part because of a large US military presence in Europe.
You could just as well double the EU's relative share by halving the US military budget. The US would still spend more than China, Russia, and a bunch of other countries combined. Surely that's more than enough.
It's just that US politicians always frame it as if the total spending had.to remain constant.
And it's not like much of that US budget is spent wisely. A lot of it is just make-work programs and military industrial complex expenditures to appease various congresspeople and constituencies.
Hopefully we can remove many or most of those bases in the future. No reason to be the world police or to let other counties outsource their military to American lives.
The counterargument to this is that dependence on the US military keeps other countries from putting in the resources to become military competitors. It's as similar argument to how sanctioning Chinese tech companies ends up encouraging them to develop indigenous technologies that will later compete for market share on other continents. The US having a dominant military presence globally ensures that other actors either don't even bother spending on a military or don't have conflicts they can practice their militaries on (a big problem for China when they can't see if their new toys actually work) If only the US has active military experience then it's a lot easier and cheaper to fight inexperienced competitors. Even for allies like Europe, if the US leaves the EU to develop a military and they get some experience with fully self-reliant overseas adventures in North Africa or the Middle East, how do you know they won't turn Fascist/Communist/fancy future political ideology one day (or the reverse for the US) and start launching invasions across the Atlantic?
> The counterargument to this is that dependence on the US military keeps other countries from putting in the resources to become military competitors.
You dont need to be a direct military competitor, Afghanistan and Iraq have shown that you can still defeat US with a thousand cuts.
Last I remember it was the US invading Afghanistan/Iraq and not the other way around. The US funding Saudi Arabia, antagonizing Iran, and collapsing Iraq has the bloody logic that it prevents an oil-rich Islamic superstate from unifying the Middle East like various Turkish/Iranian/Arabic empires have in the past. Keep globally influential competitors from forming.
> Keep globally influential competitors from forming.
At the expense of US soldiers dying from the hands of AL Qaeda/ISIS and wasting trillions of dollars which could have been used to rebuild US infra and providing healthcare and other services to US citizens.
Argue whether it's a winning or losing strategy in congress, I'm just saying that's what the strategy is, making sure the US has as a much of a global monopoly on conventional military power as possible.
In the conventional sense that the US ultimately failed. Yes they managed to blow up a lot of things and kill a lot of people, but it's difficult to argue that US national interests have been improved, let alone with any durability. In some respects it's fairly uncontroversial to say that US interests have suffered a net loss.
A lot of this has always confused me. In times of peace you should invest more in civilian research. In times of war or near war, more military. They complement one another too. Civilian research will always be used by military, from basic understanding of how people act, to lasers, to economic theory. One helps the other. The reverse direction is slower though because it is often held close to the vest for a bit of time.
> Civilian research will always be used by military
It goes both ways, and military applications create market pressures and timescales that wouldn't normally exist. Take for example, sustained fission, computing, or the semiconductor industry as a whole (which was subsidized by the government in its early years for aerospace applications, some civilian and some not).
But that said it's more about industrial capacity than research. We build planes and tanks not because we need them today, but because we might need the ability to build them tomorrow. Continued research on military applications prevents institutional knowledge from dying and tools from rotting.
>> One helps the other. The reverse direction is slower though because it is often held close to the vest for a bit of time.
Glad we agree
> We build planes and tanks not because we need them today, but because we might need the ability to build them tomorrow.
I also agree. I'm not sure why people think I am saying to not build tanks and planes during peace time. I just think we should be funding civilian science more and that the military benefits from such research. I haven't really disagreed with all these people "disagreeing" with me.
Peace time is the best time to invest in military research because you'll be more prepared to secure an advantageous position when a conflict emerges. If you only invest during an in-progress conflict then what you're really doing is playing catch up.
Read past my first few sentences. I'm arguing that civilian research IS military research. I'm also not arguing 100% in one vs 100% in another, such a scheme would be absurdly idiotic.
> "I'm arguing that civilian research IS military research."
Which is prima facie untrue. While there are benefits to basic research over the long term, it took roughly 60 years from the discovery of the laser to the beginnings of deployable laser weaponry today. Those sorts of timeframes aren't that useful for a military expecting a conflict in the next few years.
> it took roughly 60 years from the discovery of the laser to the beginnings of deployable laser weaponry today.
But it took less than a year for it to be used by the CIA and FBI for spying (an interferometer was one of the first applications) and not much longer for it to be used for range finding and targeting for the military and not much longer than that to be used to determine mass of objects.
The directed energy weapon you are referring to isn't the only application that the military, CIA, FBI, and other agencies have for lasers. There are hundreds more than what I mentioned and a dozen of which were in practical use within the first 5 years of its discovery.
Just because you aren't aware of the uses of such technology doesn't mean that they aren't used and doesn't mean they aren't __HIGHLY__ valuable assets. We could go on and include things like nightvision, underwater communications (other types of communications as well), guidance, or defensive applications but I think it is pretty clear that the laser is one of the _best_ examples of technology being used (and quickly adopted) by military/government, not worst.
Government science investment frequently comes from fear. ARPA was the US government's big "give money to research" program. It was started in response to Sputnik because we feared we were falling behind the Soviets.
Then in 1969-73, Senate majority leader Mansfield decided that this research might be being misused to fund science in ways that wasn't directly useful to fighting Soviets, so ARPA became DARPA (the D is for Defense!) and now researchers needed to explain why their science might help build missiles.
If war breaks out, it's too late. Especially nowadays, where technology is crazy complex and it takes absurd amounts of time, effort and coordination to get something like a new fighter plane all the way from the drawing board into production. And then trying to iron out all the bugs while fighting a shooting war? That might have worked out back in WW1 or 2, but modern wars would be over in a flash (comparatively). Either you have the technology and you win, or you don't and you lose. Our modern capabilities of blowing each other into oblivion are too effective to only start research when war breaks out (or is "near" to breaking out).
That said, DARPA has always been one of the biggest funders of research in the US, whether it's basic research or applied. Just think of the DARPA Grand Challenge (self-driving cars in an off-road setting). While, yes, ultimately their goal is military application, this cultivation of research into self-driving cars is something that will benefit everybody, not just the military.
I think you're misunderstanding me. You seem to imply it is 100% of funding into one vs 100% into another. I'd argue such a swing is absurd. The other part is that I'm arguing that civilian research is also military research (the reverse is also true, but not as strong of a connection).
The reason to invest in civilian research while in times of peace is that you want products to go into the public domain and be mass produced. This means that the new fighters you can make are much cheaper to produce and can have much more advanced weapon capabilities. The only real difference between civilian and military research is if the knowledge gets into the public domain or not (with the exception for weapons, which is more niche than you'd expect). This is why DARPA does that funding, but it isn't just DARPA. The entire SBIR/STTR program exists to get companies to bootstrap themselves and mass produce things the government needs (yes, it is abused quite a bit). Many contracts exist for this reason too.
The last aspect is economic and cultural. If your country is doing well economically it is often able to avoid war in the first place. Rich countries often don't fight with soldiers and jets, they fight with computers and resources. Why invade a country when you can put economic shackles on it? China and the US are both doing this. The other part is cultural exportation. If your country is producing all the widgets that another country likes and enjoys then their people are not eager to fight you (as long as you're not being aggressive towards them).
All these, and more matter. War is much more than bullets and fighter jets.
I'm really not sure what you're arguing. Military research needs to be funded always, because when war starts, it's too late. Civilian research needs to be funded always, because ... anything else would be insanity. Your original statement was that we shouldn't do military research outside of war. Nothing you've said supports that.
The reason you're seeing this story is not because the Pentagon felt like you would enjoy some candor on a whiz-bang AI thing. No, they're way out in front of this issue. This is part of a prolonged PR campaign to prepare the public for reducing or eliminating human-in-the-loop limitations. A wet dream for systems guys since they were children reading sci-fi.
The Pentagon has been using robots to kill robots and other humans since before 9/11. This story has a long arc. We meat bags are the major limitation for machines of war and that limitation will be engineered out.
Is there value in having a pilot, just to increase the consequences of shooting down a plane? When Iran shot down a US drone, there was pretty much no real response by the US. If it was a manned plane, there would almost certainly be at least retaliatory strikes, so Iran (and other countries) are going to be much less likely to shoot down a manned F-18 than an unmanned one. So maybe having manned fighters is valuable just to increase the barrier to engagement.
And regardless, is there even value in having autonomous fighter jets when we already have advanced missiles? It doesn't matter how good the pilot/AI is if they are just firing missiles from miles away. We already have missiles that can loiter for hours before choosing a target and attacking it (ex. IAI Harpy) - to me that is much more valuable and dangerous than an AI fighter.
Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War is a good book to read about it.
> In the episode, the crew of the Enterprise visits a planet engaged in a completely computer-simulated war with a neighboring planet but the casualties, including the Enterprise's crew, are supposed to be real.
They did that in a Star Trek episode, more or less. "You have been assigned as dead. Please report...etc" so they could preserve infrastructure, which is so much more valuable than human life.
Isn't that the moral equivalent of someone holding a hostage in front of them as a shield? If the only reason to send in human pilots is because the enemy is less likely to shoot them (or because it justifies greater retaliatory response), that seems like it's turning the pilot into little more than a sacrificial lamb. Moreso if the retaliatory response means sending in the drones.
This is a common tactic, actually. The idea is that you create a credible threat by putting yourself in a situation that, if your adversary challenges you, you have no choice but to respond. Burn the bridge behind you, as it were.
The famous example is the US’ 10k troops in Berlin during the Cold War. If the USSR attacked, those troops were toast - and everyone knew it. But it meant that if the USSR took Berlin, it would be at the price of 10k American soldiers, and would inevitably lead to war. Even if that was the US’ calculation anyway, the Soviets wouldn’t know that for certain without the troops there.
Reminds me of the old idea of putting US nuke launch codes inside a person who would be part of the president's entourage, so that if the president wanted to launch a nuclear attack he would have to start by literally murdering and cutting open a person he was close to. It was explicitly intended as a disincentive.
When the guy who proposed the idea, Roger Fisher, was asked who the hell would ever volunteer to be the nuclear pinata, he volunteered to do it himself.
I love it and I'm sure there would be plenty of willing people. What I think is misguided is the assumption that the president would do the deed personally. "SGT Thompson, bring me the codes, I'll be in the next room" Still chilling, but not personally traumatic.
I'd never heard of that before and it's a genius idea -- too easy to dissociate yourself from a million deaths on the other side of the planet, but if the first step is killing a single person with your own hands, that puts it all in perspective.
The negative value of having an pilot paraded around (ala Gary Powers) far supersedes anything that might be gained. The Iranians were perfectly justified in capturing the RQ-180, and the Global Hawks might have been justified. They'd have no qualms or legal issues with defending their airspace from manned flight.
>They'd have no qualms or legal issues with defending their airspace from manned flight.
It's one thing to go a mile outside your airspace to nab somebody's drone. To do that to nab someone else's pilot is a whole 'nother level of escalation.
It is an interesting, if ethically difficult, question.
Actually, the US military prepared multiple counter strike options, and the president (eventually) picked one.
He then called off the strike a few hours before the time on target, because a faction in the Whitehouse gave him an estimate that the counterstrike would result in 150 casualties.
See John Bolton's book "The Room Where It Happened" for a very elaborate inside account. He is very open that he would've preferred the strike to go through, and while he believes above casualty estimates were much too high, he was very much aware the number would not be zero.
I can see how any US casualties might've tipped the balance in Trump's mind.
So yes, there might be some value. But where it gets complicated is whether the value is positive or negative:
One could say that the US flying only an autononous aircraft that day saved up to 151 lifes.
Even more, considering the inevitable Iranian counterstrike. Killing people in response to a piece of equipment being lost would have been a horrifying agression that the Iranians couldn't have let slide.
> The fact that in the contest, the AI had perfect information at all times, and rules of engagement were not a factor, are not inconsequential details. I recognize that providing the amount of data and sensor fusion the AI would require to perform at the same level in a real aerial engagement (one that does not take place in cyberspace) is not a small undertaking and still a bit in the future. The rules of engagement discussion could fill up the syllabus for the entire semester of an ethics class, and will always be a touchy subject with regards to AI's involvement in war.
This is probably the important bit, and the bit that most needs a human in the loop. Once the decision is made, engage the AI and let it do its thing.
Of course, if some regime out there didn't care at all about ROE or human life or killing the wrong people, they could build a bunch of killing machines to take out anything that moves. It would be more efficient.
> Hell, I am only a voting member as far as the flight controls are concerned in the Super Hornet anyways. If I put a control input in that is not aerodynamically sound (i.e. could result in a departure from controlled flight), the flight control system will not move the control surface or will move a different surface to give me the movement I am requesting. Who is flying who?
That's a good take on the matter. Computer systems are already a big part of the aircraft, in the near term this could result in some pretty wicked copilot software.
Now that AI assist is being openly discussed in the wider anglophone press, I wonder if we'll see a diminution in "unsafe unprofessional" air intercepts?
(I don't know what the search terms would be in chinese[1], but "искусственный интеллект су-35" gets plenty of older —at least by HN standards— hits.)
I'm assuming combat aircraft are capable of delivering more G's than a human body can handle, though pilots train to sustain brief bouts of high G for quick maneuvering - is this limit factored into to the "AI player" handling? Is it meant to simulate another human pilot or is it human versus the physical limits of a machine?
If I were building an AI commanded aircraft I would have it use every G the airframe could handle. No pilot means fewer maneuvering limitations and an increased chance of victory.
An intermediate step could be an AI-assisted aircraft. It might be better at setting up shots, and still work within the physical limitations of the human inside.
Something not mentioned is an AI powered plane's ability to more-rapidly change from positive to negative G's (not sure if this is technically called jerk or not). A human has a really tough time making that transition.
There was another discussion a couple months ago [0] which linked to an MIT lecture on Youtube about the F-22 and its design. At 40 minutes in [1], he describes a scenario with an F-15 where the pilot could rip the wings off of the plane. He contrasts that the F-22's software was designed to make the most use of control surfaces and limiters to prevent that.
Yeah thats alot of force. I'm sure every drop of steel/alum/titanium has been thoroughly alloyed/pressed/treated - frame could flex at rate of 15-20G for up to 2 seconds?
Dogfighters see one another pull up (or dive initiate) and expect a loop, and so they think in maneuver sequences that occur in 5-10 second chunks. Also a cadence of countermeasure ejection turn-taking to deplete opponent heat-seeking payload, punctuated in between fixed projectile fire. "Checkmate" occurs when a dogfighter has successfully "landed" a loop or sequence of maneuvers that gives them a shot behind their opponent.
I'm wondering if the modern combat aircraft would have gimballed barrels and auto-aiming (non-projectile speed of light high intensity laser could melt a fuel tank). If this were true, then by default pilots are already setting up shots as you say using a form of AI assistance.
The question I have is, auto-aiming aside, how would an NN understand how to coordinate these "chess moves". This question becomes irrelevant if suddenly there could be a positive to negative G change mid-loop that no seasoned dogfighter could ever expect to happen.
> frame could flex at rate of 15-20G for up to 2 seconds?
Current fighters wear out after so many flight hours. What puts the majority of these hours on is pilot training. With an AI commanded aircraft, there's little need to actually fly it, other than to demonstrate capability occasionally so that potential opponents see that you have a credible offense. So you build them to essentially be disposable - rather than design for a 10,000 hour lifetime, you design for a 500 hour (rather intense!) lifetime.
Since the human player was in a simulator, the limits of the human body weren't a factor here. As for whether the jets are capable of delivering more Gs than a human body can handle, I'm speculating, but I'm not sure it would make sense for current jets to be designed to do so, at least not by a large margin, since that capacity would be wasted. Future jets without human pilots will certainly be able to do so though, which will make the contest even more lopsided.
Most current fighter aircraft have airframe stress limits below 9G, especially when loaded. Building an airplane to handle more Gs makes it heavier, which makes it less maneuverable.
The last match was apparently with both players (the AI and human) simulating a 9-Gs maneuver.
Because it was a simulation, the human didn't black out. Its just a game. Albeit a well simulated game close to dogfighting "reality", but its a game nonetheless.
The setup of the game is simply unfair for a comparison between AI and human. If you want to keep the perfect data link between the simulator's outputs and the AI player computer, then at least let the human play by watching the (God's eye) display with the aircraft sprites sporting those kill-point spears and ditch the HUD. The objective would simply be to touch the enemy aircraft with that spear.
The HUD is cool and all. But how do I know where the enemy is if it is outside of the HUD's field? Think about how the AI knew. :) And while we are at this, maybe just invite a young gamer instead of a real pilot.
Given how vastly different WWI and WII were from their predecessors, I don't see planning for WWIII being a very useful exercise. The game theory is so vastly open ended, and capabilities of belligerents so great it Bogles the mind.
(Oh, and I fail to see how China wouldn't win. Heh.)
That just leaves "counter-insurgency" empire building crap which is super inefficient at even the stated goals, and the stated goals are worthless.
Therefore I conclude the whole exercise is pointless and a waste of money.
Do you actually know that to be true? Speed-of-light delays would be important for pilots based in Montana flying in Iraq, but not if the remote pilot is in the theatre. And if it's not speed of light, it's a solvable problem.
Whats really incredible is the AI company behind these wargames(Heron Systems) only has 25 employees[1]. Which to me seems very small considering the engineering behind making this successful.
To remove the need of pilot completely a lot of still have to be done - making the same AI capable of the full cycle - from taking off to engagement, from the engagement to landing. Combining all these in the same software is harder than making them work independently. Maybe it will be just a few separate AIs. Then the interconnect problem arises.
I mean to say that those systems are in fact killer robots already.
There is nothing special about China and Russia having similar systems.
The same military requirements apply everywhere.
And just because in the US it is not be popularized as "killer robots" does not mean that it is not already that.
Its kind of silly that some people think that the US military has some type of military moral high ground in this case or any. Or that by not explicitly saying "killer robots" that means it is not so.
The classic dogfight can only persist in the hearts and minds of old pilots. A modern state of the art unpiloted fighter, with no human pilot or the burden of life support, and G limitations will be lighter with the same engines, capable of 30-50+ G maneuvers(for which is has been specially designed), with modern long range standoff weapons and suitable radars, will slaughter any human if faces. The high G ability will leave any standoff missiles fired against it in the dust by active evasion.
It will be vulnerable to high grade stealthed missiles. as well as hard ballistic stealthed rounds shot from afar - unless it detects and evades. In fact, any modern robot craft will perform high G random jinks to make path prediction difficult. The soone the USA realizes this, the better. You can be sure Russia/China have learned this lesson.
I've said the exact same thing in other threads. You can do fakeouts a human can't possibly do like corkscrew at 500rpm and pull 50gs randomly and repeatedly when a radar is trying to predict your path.
If the engineers in charge of designing these crafts around an AI pilot think outside the box we could see some pretty wild tech.
500 RPM corkscrews and 50Gs are firmly in "missile only" territory due to the limits of material sciences. The square cube law is a harsh mistress and engineering is a game of trade-offs. If you want to design a re-usable platform it's typically better to concentrate on other things like sensors, stealth, speed, networking, and payload which could allow you to get a shot off from outside of the enemy's range or before they are even aware of your presence. It would be interesting to see the inevitable version of this contest for BVR combat but I suspect that's going to end up being classified territory given that it's much more relevant to actual modern combat. AI systems will certainly play a huge role in future fighters but it will probably be more in terms of perfect coordination and execution of long range aerial combat rather than something like dogfighting.
Because we need a human up there, flying around, controlling the missiles. Moving the human closer to the battlefield for a more up-to-date viewpoint is quite important.
Yes, an AI fighter, stripped of all life support amenities, seats, cockpits etc could easily end up like a missile, with 3-4 wings, all the same with all needed control surfaces, and a similar tail. It would have no preferred up/down and all wings would have lift/control capabilities.
Fuel based, air burning engines would have more endurance than rockets that carry oxidizer and fuel. Such a plane would be ramjet/rocket capable, for part of the envelope, in case it went above the atmosphere for a short period = satellite shoot-down?
> I've said the exact same thing in other threads. You can do fakeouts a human can't possibly do like corkscrew at 500rpm and pull 50gs randomly and repeatedly when a radar is trying to predict your path.
Well, we can already do things like this with non-piloted tech; and there is no way that a traditional jet could keep up, load-wise. The g-force induced load limit for most modern jets is about double the rated limit. You likely wouldn't be able to fly any air-frames made with human passengers in mind over 35g without significant re-engineering.
The point of the AI jet-fighter idea is to have an AI that is capable of piloting a fighter jet (designed for a human) at near-human levels.
We can already programmatically control super fast flying devices into whatever wacky flight-plan we calculate on the fly, on the device, near instantly. Lockheed and Raytheon advertisements have been talking about super-fast on-device radar/surveillance avoidance systems for years.
> we could see some pretty wild tech.
you're not kiddin', the only thing that outweighs my hope for what the future brings is my fear of what the future brings.
Why would the engineers designing the opposing guidance systems not do the same?
If modern fighters are missile platforms, why not design a fleet of cheap no-human drone missile platforms and put most of the intelligence into the missiles?
The "wild tech" would mean getting rid of super-expensive low-reliability fighters altogether, because it's not obvious what they bring to an automated conflict.
> I've said the exact same thing in other threads. You can do fakeouts a human can't possibly do like corkscrew at 500rpm and pull 50gs randomly and repeatedly when a radar is trying to predict your path.
Those maneuvers sound like they'd destroy the plane.
> I'm thinking of a plane built from the ground up to never be piloted by a human. A missile like drone really.
I'm not sure if that would work. Missiles can put a lot more stress on the airframe because they're literally single-use disposable items. Something that takes the "plane" role would probably be larger (so missile solutions may not scale) and would have to account for things like fatigue over time.
I'm reminded of the Mig 25: the planes are capable of flying at Mach 3.2, but doing so wreaks the engines. If it was a missile, it'd operate a full speed no question; but since it's a reusable plane, it's operationally limited to Mach 2.8.
Please explain how to design an aircraft that can maneuver at 30G without stalling the wing or compressor. I'm sure Lockheed Martin would pay a fortune if you can teach them that trick.
The reality is that aircraft have to fly in air, which imposes severe physical limits regardless of whether there is a human pilot on board.
Higher G needs a fully powered flight envelope. You can not stick a vane out and get a ~~30G turn. You might need vectorable thrust at many places on the aircraft. If this comes from discrete thrust engines, or diverted from the main engines, these will need to be powerful to effect the changes needed.This much like the path above mach 1, where methods and procedures need to be determined by testin in tunnels and then in air.
Some rececnt Russian missiles have one time attitude thusters. Of course for an aeroplane, it would need recurring and controllable thrust - small spot engine or ducted??
Silly and totally impractical. What works in a relatively small missile will not scale up to a larger drone. Powerful attitude thrusters are too heavy and take up a lot of space. Aircraft don't have weight and volume to spare. They would be left with insufficient capacity for fuel and weapons.
You have no idea of the engineered redundancy for piloted flight. Dual and treble hydraulics/electrics. space for pilot, ejection seat, seat and cockpit, and on and on.
Strip this out and you get a massive increase in the power to weight ratio. Air breathing, modern high efficiency jet engines - even turbo-prop with point jets.
It will take 10 years or more for this to reach optimization. 30G is well within reach, ~~50?? A lot depends of flight endurance needed. They now make mach 15 air to air rockets that no human piloted plane can evade. Jamming helps many of these, but times are getting so short that at mach 15 few loops can close in time to avoid the focussed blast radius of the latest missiles. This means a steered shrapnel pattern, versus an omni directional banger.
I obviously have a better idea than you do. Stripping out redundant equipment only saves a marginal amount of weight. Large drones aren't disposable; they still need a certain level of redundancy to return to base after a mechanical failure.
30G is not within reach. Calculate how much the airframe would have to weigh to handle that strain, and explain how to avoid stalling the wing or compressor. Scaling up a small missile design won't work at all. This is just basic physics. Range and radar signature are higher priorities than maneuverability.
Would 20G be more attainable? Or, what about +/- 10G? That's not possible with a pilot onboard but should be achievable in an unmanned aircraft.
If I were designing such an aircraft I would make sure that the onboard missiles could be rapidly swiveled. Someone on your tail? Easy, just swivel a missile around 180 degrees and then fire. No need to maneuver the entire aircraft.
10G is attainable at lower altitudes for a few seconds at a time, but it would require a heavier airframe which means less weight budget for fuel and weapons. And you still won't be able to outmaneuver a missile so what's the point? Not a good design trade off. 20G is still in the realm of science fiction for turbine engines.
A swiveling missile launcher is far from easy. Please calculate how much such a contraption would weigh. Remember that it needs to securely hold multiple large, heavy missiles without structural deformation during your hypothetical 10G maneuvers. And what sensors will you use to detect someone on your tail and target your own missile before he does? Where will those sensors be placed, how much will they weight, and how much drag will they add?
The maximum delta-V budget (https://www.google.com/search?q=maximum+delta-V&oq=maximum+d...)
means few sustained 30G sprints driven by fuel, so any such high-g maneuvers will be emergency evasion. Few air frames can tolerate 30-G. so designs will emerge?
I can see no humans in these high g machines, just reporting ground links, with local AI running the attack/defence strategy from the ground.
You're completely missing the point. Please calculate how heavy an airframe would need to be in order to handle a few seconds of 30G without cracking. After accounting for airframe weight how much useful capacity so you have left for fuel, sensors, and weapons? How many pounds of thrust do you need for a 30G maneuver?
The concepts you propose only work in cartoons, not in the real world bound by laws of physics.
Great points but all of what you've described can also be solved by teleoperation.
In terms of tactical decision making while flying, I think AI's advantage is its ability to integrate (much) more data into overall situational awareness. If you were somehow able to integrate all of this directly into the human proprioception system I have a feeling we would fare much better. It seems like we're probably quite a bit further from humans being defeated in contact sports by an AI-powered robot of equivalent strength/weight/mobility.
For all we know this kind of AI is much more advanced than we think, even up to AGI. All that needs to be true is that the AI has brain implanted us to make it look like nothing is happening.
They don't select fighter pilots for their writing or reasoning skills, and it shows in this article. There doesn't appear to be anything worth paying attention to here.
This shows how the old experienced people can fall into the trap of over-rating the 'hands-on' human experience.
In fact a human will have no chance at all against an AI operated fighter designed as a high-G fighter.
We saw how the video AI was able to win with the ability of the AI fighter limited to the human driven planes ability. What do you think will happen when the AI has 30-50 G turn capability.
This is why modern missiles have guaranteed kill zones - they have 30-50G turn capability. Modern jamming is running out of room gradually as tech advances, so missiles can still be jammed for quite a while as that arms race evolves.
Well, this was set up as a fight with equal resources. The same plane, flown by AI/Human.
In a real case you want to set up 'win'scenarios = sure kills. The AI was able to dominate. He seemed to think that a real human in a real plane against the same plane with AI, would draw upon human resources to feel G at 600 knots etc and exceed the ability of the AI to draw on those resources - being an unfeeling machine.
In fact, once stripped down AI fighting platforms get made, they will dominate.
It will take a design cycle to remove the human life support weight and to remove the cockpit etc,so it can be a 30-50G missile platform - that is what it will be. AI attacked versus AI ground defence missiles with similar AI counter fighters.
One can postulate a similar AI blizzard of radar/radio/optical jamming by both sides that will see-saw back and forth as tech develops. We fancy ourselves and look down on Russia, in fact Russia has a capable educational system. It was killed as the USSR by bad economic policies = central planning = a dead horse nobody can ride to victory. Now they are dragged down by the Oligarch tax = oligarchs steal any good idea and company that another Russian creates take it over with a faked shareholders and board meeting = they fill all roles, and drain cash from it. There have been hundreds of these and they are slowly and wurely killing Russia. Look at Putin, poisoning other politicians. /politics off....;)
> He seemed to think that a real human in a real plane against the same plane with AI, would draw upon human resources to feel G at 600 knots etc and exceed the ability of the AI to draw on those resources - being an unfeeling machine.
I don't think he's saying that at all. On the contrary, he's saying the opposite, explaining the advantages an AI has in these areas. For example,
> Even proficient aviators have to use a percentage of their concentration (i.e. situation awareness) on not over-performing or under-performing the aircraft. AI could easily track this task and would most likely never bleed airspeed or altitude excessively, preserving vital potential and kinetic energy while also fine-tuning lift vector placement on the other aircraft to continue the fight if required.
A great book that rings more true than ever talks about the obsolescence of weapons systems. I believe it was Freedman[1] A key thesis is that as a predominant weapon system becomes more vulnerable, it becomes more expensive, as it’s burdened with more defensive measures to survive from cheaper more expendable systems. In World War 2 the canonical example was the battle ship and the aircraft. Now it’s the fighter jet and the missile (or drone) etc. Just look at the ridiculous state of the JSF.
Manned missile trucks are valuable for countering electronic attack, but not dogfighting. Still, practice dogfighting is one of the most fun things you can do, too bad it hasn’t really been applicable since Vietnam. This post from the other day reminded me how fun it is and seems like a great fit for VR.[2] Onward last Samurais! Just try not to spend all the taxpayers money on the way out.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Future-War-History-Lawrence-Freedman-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24255191