I've always wondered why there's a guy in the plane at all at this point. Doesn't it severely limit the maneuverability of the aircraft to have a liquid-fueled brain piloting it around rather than some remotely controlled semi-autonomous solid-state electronics?
You are thinking from a technical perspective. You will always need a guy in the cockpit that can refuse an order. Not the same thing if it's a room of drone pilots, a drone pilot will just get fired and replaced on the spot.
Imagine being given an order to kill a terrorist, but you notice the place he is at is actually a wedding. A fighter pilot has final authority on the strike, he can make decisions about collateral damage. Beyond that, if a fighter pilot engaged an enemy aircraft he coule be starting a war,you can't make the same quality of observation about the enemy pilots,their intent and threat.
Humans make different decisions if they are detached from the scene. I agree the piloting and targeting should be mostly automated away but final decison should be done by someone at the scene risking their own lives
This reminds me a lot about the Geneva convention and how the rules of war very quickly got tossed aside during WW2.
If you compare say the Battle of River Plate (1939) vs. say the North Atlantic convoy run or the siege of malta (1942), there's a dramatic difference in how war was conducted and the types of weapon systems that were most effective. River Plate was almost gentlemanly: while commerce-raiding, the Graf Spee would first hail the merchantmen she was taking prisoner, identify them as belligerents, give them the opportunity to surrender, and then take crews on board before sinking them. When she was engaged and damaged, the ship took refuge in Montevideo, released the prisoners, and then there was elaborate diplomatic maneuvering to avoid violating Uruguayan neutrality. The ship was scuttled without further loss of life - other than Captain Langsdorff, who committed suicide. Several of his British adversaries attended the funeral.
By 1942, nobody cared about any of that. The most effective weapons were submarines and aircraft, and they shot to kill on sight.
We're at peace right now, despite a state of perpetual war that mostly exists for propaganda and business purposes. If it ever came to an existential conflict, human judgment would likely become a liability. Humans generally don't want to kill; in a state of total warfare that hesitation could be lethal.
I disagree, soldiers are conditioned to avoid hesitation, two nuclear bombs were dropped on japan,the pilots committed suicide. A soldier that would hesitate means the situation warrants hesitation.
Not hesitating when you should could mean escalation of conflict. Even if you win the battle,it can cost you the war. Look at vietnam, the US lost domestic support because of lack of political support at home. You need the people who are pulling the triggers to know what victory means and it is not as simple as efficiently killing everyone.
The only time taking humans out of decision making makes sense is if you want indiscriminant killing,political support would not waiver at the sight if most civilians being slaughtered , you are fine with inspiring waves of terrorists that will attack your civilians and every other country will remain allied to you and continue to engage in commerce with you despite your genocidal ambitions.
Even in world war 2, civilians were mostly not targeted and prisoners were taken on both sides.
War is not about killing, war is means to acheive a political end by force. A machine that kills without knowledge of the (political) end game in mind will slaughter the enemy and cost you victory. Killing axis soldiers was not the goal of the allies,liberating occupied regions and removal of the fascist regimes was the goal, a goal that can easily be acheived by bombing every populated area of europe with minimal foot soldier involvement.
Civilians were definitely target by both side throughout WW2. From Rotterdam to Dresden, Nanking to Tokyo. Both sides indiscriminately and intentionally killed civilians.
You're making an interesting argument, but one that was rendered obsolete a long time ago.
We've used beyond line of sight weapon systems on massive scale for at least 40 years, and weapons like the Tomahawk and JSOW have taken things completely out of the realm where such an argument can be taken seriously.
The decisions you talk about are probably valid doing close air support in something like a helicopter where the aircraft actually operates at an altitude where the pilot can actually distinguish targets on the ground.
There's a whole vast world of aviation delivered ordnance that has nothing to do with that world.
Good point,and drone strikes are being used as well. Some is vastly different than all. There hasn't been a major war where most or majority of kills happened remotely yet. I think either wars will be very short or exremely long if it was mostly done by unmanned operators and it will mean more civilians and less soldiers will die.
I think the most recent wars we've been involved in have been very tilted towards standoff weapon strikes. I suspect, although I don't think there are real numbers to really look at, that the vast majority of deaths over the last few years in wars the US has been involved in have been from weapons where no pilot was physically in danger.
To your last point, I think we've reduced the civilian death toll greatly by use of precision weapons. Compare what we do now to what was done in WWII or even Vietnam to an extent.
We'd happily have air to air drones (really RPA/RPS) except for jamming.
Basically all the current generation RPS tech (like Reaper) stops working once you're dealing with someone with jamming capability. No one is happy with algorithms pulling the trigger yet for air to ground, but air to air I can see happening quickly.
You could make an argument about drone jamming and autonomous behaviour not being quite there yet... I think that's what the "wingmen" are for.
The paradigm we're moving out of was one where you'd get high-quality sensor data from a specialized patrol or AWACS plane like an E-3, which would send information to ground, which would relay it to the fighters. Now, platforms like the F-35 often have better sensors than patrol planes do; and despite still having a person inside, are better at evading missiles than big patrol planes are. So it's more like the fighters take on the role of the patrol planes; the human inside decides what to do, probably assimilating information from other fighters; and sends the drones out to do acrobatics. And there's no need to run that information through a ground station first.
Still a place for AWACS, bigger RADAR allows different frequencies, much wider field of view, lots of power. Usually they would communicate with fighters directly to update their picture (voice & link). Ground controllers usually take a back seat to what AWACS says.
The difference with the drone wingman (wingbot?) is that the controller is in the air and close by, and she can point a powerful X-band radar at the drones to use as an un-jammable comms link (high power, better geometry). If the manned aircraft were also to merge then they could be jammed because the geometry would be wrong, but for short periods the wingbot tactics are mainly dominated by physics (energy, shot flyout and engagement envelopes).
I think the idea with all the modern long range smart weaponry and anti-radar targeting tech and such is that the airplane with the squishy, fragile pilot is really a platform for very deadly, smart single-use drones (missiles) and if anyone gets close enough to shoot at the drone platform then several things have already gone wrong.
When fighting an advanced adversary with the ability to disrupt satellite communications, remote control can only be used at short ranges within line of sight. And EW makes even that problematic.
