A little something to take your mind off the never ending sh*t show in the news these days.
It would be nice if our government spent half as much money and effort protecting us from, oh let’s say a viral pandemic, rather than nebulous foreign military threats.
The discoveries of healing science must be the inheritance of all. That is clear.
Disease must be attacked, whether it occurs in the poorest or the richest man or woman simply on the ground that it is the enemy; and it must be attacked just in the same way as the fire brigade will give its full assistance to the humblest cottage as readily as to the most important mansion.
Our policy is to create a national health service in order to ensure that everybody in the country, irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation, shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.
Noted liberal hippie socialist Winston Churchill
That being said, national defense is still an important government function and air power is an important part of defense.
Elon Musk seems to think the age of the fighter pilot is over.
Last week Elon Musk sat in front of an assemblage of U.S. Air Force officers and declared that the era of the fighter jet, “had passed.” Musk, interviewed by U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. John Thompson at the Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Florida, said that the future of air warfare belonged to drones and that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter would have “no chance” against a drone fighter.
www.cnbc.com/...
Now, questioning Elon Musk is a good way to get in trouble around here. I can hear it now: “Hey Kong! How many electric cars have you built?”
OK, you got me there. By the way, how many DFC’s does Elon Musk have?
The end of the manned fighter has been predicted before. As far back as 1957, in a now infamous defense white-paper, the British government decided that missiles would shortly make the manned fighter obsolete. A number of promising aircraft designs were cancelled because of this. It turned out they were just a tad bit optimistic on that prediction.
Doesn’t mean they were wrong, however. They may have just been premature.
This became apparent in Vietnam, when the F-4 Phantom went into combat without a gun and found that its missile-only armament wasn’t quite ready for prime-time.
Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
George Orwell
Pretty much every airplane geek by now knows the “F-4 didn’t have a gun in Vietnam!” story. While true, we’re as far from Vietnam today as Vietnam was from the Red Baron. A lot can change in 50 years. I believe there was exactly one gun kill in Desert Storm, an A-10 of all things versus a helicopter. The number of gun kills since then can probably be counted on one hand.
Since the Vietnam era, missiles have become very effective indeed. Some of the newer missiles have roughly a 95% PK (probability of kill). Glad I retired.
Drones have also become much more sophisticated since the Ryan “Firebee” of the 1960’s.
Drones and missiles really aren’t that different. In a sense, a missile is just a single-use drone. Both are pilotless aircraft that operate with varying degrees of autonomy. Some of the early missiles, like the Bullpup, required a human to remotely fly them to their target.
Let’s take a look at drones. The term drone covers a lot of territory. Drones range from my hummingbird-sized quad-copter that drives the cat nuts, to the airliner sized Global Hawk.
The type of drone that Elon is talking about here is specifically a UCAV (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle). A UCAV is essentially an unmanned fighter plane.
The advantage of unmanned being it doesn’t have to carry around a cockpit, ejection seat, pressurization system or an oxygen system. Eliminate the pilot and you also eliminate the need for Combat Search and Rescue. If a UCAV gets shot down there’s nobody to rescue.
I’m going to call our UCAV a “Cylon” because it sounds better and I really liked Battlestar Galactica. Sometimes I just need to let my geek flag fly. I especially liked the reboot where the Cylon Raiders were actually sentient beings. Note that the F-16 got the nickname “Viper” from the original Battlestar Galactica.
So how does the Cylon stack up against the “Colonials” flying F-22’s and F-35’s?
The machine could probably be made to be more maneuverable than a manned fighter. The human physiology is limited to 9-10 G’s. A machine doesn’t have that problem. Plus we’ll assume it’s lighter than an equivalent manned fighter because it’s not carrying around all the stuff needed to support a pilot. It does have to carry some extra “drone stuff” but at the end of the day it’s still probably lighter. Advantage Cylons.
Now this isn’t as great an advantage as some people think. There are still structural and aerodynamic limits to maneuverability. Whether it’s piloted by a human or a robot, high G turns bleed airspeed and “speed is life”. In fact, one way to beat a missile is to force it do a couple of those really awesome turns and bleed off its energy.
So I don’t think we’ll see UCAVs out there pulling 20 G turns because it would be dead in the water after it did one. The “cobra maneuver” looks awesome at airshows but wouldn’t do much for you in real combat.
Still, all things being equal, an unmanned craft could outmaneuver a manned aircraft in close combat. Advantage Cylons.
So what’s a fighter pilot to do? Fighter pilots have often been portrayed as the successors to medieval knights, battling each other in valiant combat.
In reality fighter pilots are more like assassins. They don’t want to battle you valiantly.
Oh they will if they have to, but they’d much rather sneak up on you unseen and kill you before you even know they’re there. Going back to the earliest days of air combat, most kills have been against someone who never saw it coming.
One minute you’re flying along fat, dumb and happy and the next you’re being shredded with 20mm cannon shells or titanium rods from a missile’s fragmentation warhead. War ain’t pretty.
The F-35 and especially the F-22 can indeed dogfight, but that’s not their specialty. They prefer to use their superior situational awareness, combined with stealth, to take a beyond-visual-range shot before the bad guys even know they’re in the neighborhood. In a fight between a sniper and a knife-fighter, I’d bet on the sniper 9 times out of 10.
Our hypothetical F-22 pilot would probably say “The Cylon is a fireball at the merge.”
What about cost? Every techie I know tells me that manned fighters will just be overwhelmed by swarms of cheap drones. Yeah, since when has the Pentagon every done anything on the cheap?
Like combat aircraft, cheap drones are not very capable and capable drones are not very cheap.
Let’s look at a “cheap” drone. An MQ-9A Reaper costs right around $16 million a copy, almost as much as an F-16C. The only thing it does better than an F-16C is loiter (which it does very well). It would last about 5 minutes against any “near-peer adversary”. Performance wise it’s a WWII airplane and a slow one at that.
Something with the capability of an F-22 is probably going to cost about as much as an F-22. What makes an F-22 expensive isn’t the fact that it carries a pilot.
Now Elon is obviously a smart guy, and what he’s proposing isn’t without merit. He wants to take the pilot out of the F-35 and have them fly it remotely. I realize I’m just a caveman from a technology standpoint, but I think keeping a human in the loop is a good idea. Having fully autonomous death robots flying around with orders to “kill anything that isn’t you” sounds like a bad idea.
Maybe they’d let me telecommute? I like the idea of sitting in my bathrobe, wearing my fuzzy slippers and fighting the war from my home office.
The only drawback I see with Elon’s plan is that it will likely require a satellite data-link. If I were a “near-peer” adversary that wanted to really give us a hard time, the first thing I would do is go after the satellites. We’re already highly dependent on them and only getting more so. Anyone that remembers how to navigate without GPS is probably my age or older, and I’ve been retired for longer than I care to think about.
I expect the near future will see a mix of manned and unmanned systems. We’ll probably see F-35’s flying with robotic “wingmen”. At some point, the human may indeed be completely removed from the cockpit. I just don’t think it will happen as soon as Elon thinks it will.
Since drones and remotely piloted fighters are supposed to be the next big thing, let’s look at the next next big thing. Lasers.
We currently have laser-based systems to defend against IR (heat seeking) missiles. A small laser turret on the aircraft shines a laser at the missile’s seeker-head, effectively “blinding” it. At least I think that’s how it works.
Now the Air Force is saying that they are within a year of deploying a laser-based weapon on an aircraft. A laser that is able to actually destroy missiles and perhaps other aircraft, even Elon’s unmanned F-35. If it lives up to the hype, this could be a real game-changer.
I imagine that a larger aircraft, one with massive generator output, could carry an even more powerful laser. Blasting enemy aircraft and missile like a………….Battlestar.
I think I know just the thing.