AI isn't anywhere near being able to discriminate against an aircraft that is not exhibiting "aggressive" behavior. How will it work when it needs to visually ID an opponent, or when the opponent is flying aircraft that might be allied? Say our opponent is flying an F-16, or F-15? Lots of those out there, and in militaries that easily could become hostile. IFF is not always reliable, (hence the viz ID requirements).
And creating an autonomous UCAS capable of conducting air to air combat isn't going to be cheap at all. The reason we like drones now is because they have the performance characteristics of a Cessna, and they don't put pilots at risk. To compete in A2A combat, they'll need performance (and avionics) that exceed what our best fighters currently have. That will be buku $$...
Out of interest once they reach a certain level of basic ability wouldn't it be easier to have them in "packs" rather than trying to basically replicate everything a human pilot can do in a single drone?
If you have a "pack" of drones big enough that a single enemy combat aircraft can't take them all down at once then if an enemy aircraft were to fire on a drone in the "pack" it could automatically be designated an enemy and be hunted by the remainder?
> AI isn't anywhere near being able to discriminate against an aircraft that is not exhibiting "aggressive" behavior. How will it work when it needs to visually ID an opponent, or when the opponent is flying aircraft that might be allied?
What will you do when the enemy sends up unmanned autonomous aircraft that ignore these niceties and shoot down all your manned fighters?
I'm not dismissing the legitimate problems you raise, but we need to prepare for war, which almost by definition is the absence of rules, such as distinguishing military from civilian targets.
EDIT: Also of interest, if an autonomous fighter shoots down a civilian aircraft, is it a war crime? Mistakes happen in war that aren't crimes. And if it is, who goes to jail?
If the enemey's autonomous aircraft can't discriminate between friend and foe effectively, then when you launch a swarm of them, they'll all fratricide each other. It's a fundamental requirement that they be able to differentiate between friend and foe.
> If the enemey's autonomous aircraft can't discriminate between friend and foe effectively, then when you launch a swarm of them, they'll all fratricide each other. It's a fundamental requirement that they be able to differentiate between friend and foe.
I would guess that identifying your own teammates is much easier than distinguishing strangers who are combatant from non-combatant, and among combatants distinguishing allies from enemies.
Also, suicidal autonomous aircraft are common, in the form of missiles. If these more intelligent missiles kill the enemy, it doesn't matter if they kill each other too (beyond the financial loss). Maybe you give each a 'kill area', in which they are instructed to kill everything, and spread them out enough that they don't overlap too much.
It's enough for the drones to be semi-autonomous. The controllers mark detected airplanes as friend/foe manually, and on-board AI does the maneuvering and shooting.
And what happens when the controllers are jammed? Or when they can't detect whether the bogey is friend or foe? The Air Force lost an RQ-170 to the Iranian Air Force because it relied on commlinks that are susceptible to jamming. If the comm links are vulnerable, how will the "controllers mark" the aircraft?
We don't currently have a problem with enemies jamming comms between AWACs and the F-15s or F-22s they direct. The RQ-170 was using a satellite uplink which is a lot easier to mess with than an airplane closer by. Using jamming against combat aircraft is also problematic because jamming platforms are impossible to hide and very vulnerable.
Correct. And that's because we're fighting an opponent that has trouble with high tech, and has limited resources. If we end up in conflict with Russia, or China or another opponent with better capabilities, your links are going to be severely degraded.
Yeah, maybe it isn't easy to make the AI distinguish "aggressive behaviour", or even do good visual ID. But how's this for a use case:
Simply declare a restricted airspace, where every plane needs to have transponder replying correctly to some challenge-response authentication protocol. Distribute transponders to allies. Tell about zone in the evening news, so that everyone knows. Then program drones to shoot down anything that doesn't respond correctly.
I'm pretty sure that it's a lot cheaper to design and build drone with same performance characteristics as top A2A fighter, there's so much that you don't have to worry about: human rating everything (you don't have to make so damn sure that everything works without the hitch first time), all the control systems that you have to build the pilot an interface to (radar, etc.), the cocpit..
I'm sure those will easily pay for developing a competitive fighting-AI.
And creating an autonomous UCAS capable of conducting air to air combat isn't going to be cheap at all. The reason we like drones now is because they have the performance characteristics of a Cessna, and they don't put pilots at risk. To compete in A2A combat, they'll need performance (and avionics) that exceed what our best fighters currently have. That will be buku $$...