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Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

breakingdefense.com

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Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#211

Post by chasd00 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #208

They are pilotless. Ok. That is one job that has been removed from the equation, but take a look at any airforce base. Not everyone is a pilot. The vast majority of personnel are not pilots. These things will still need the engine techs, the avionics people, the ground crew, fuel people, air traffic controllers, all the way down to the guy driving the mule. The net change in manning between an "autonomous" drone and…

downing a drone doesn't require the kind of response that killing a pilot does. It's easier to deescalate from a bunch of drones being shot down vs coffins coming home to families.

Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#212

Post by sandworm101 »

iamthirsty wrote: post #210
sandworm101 wrote: post #208

They are pilotless. Ok. That is one job that has been removed from the equation, but take a look at any airforce base. Not everyone is a pilot. The vast majority of personnel are not pilots. These things will still need the engine techs, the avionics people, the ground crew, fuel people, air traffic controllers, all the way down to the guy driving the mule. The net change in manning between an "autonomous" drone and…

> The net change in manning between an "autonomous" drone and an oldschool drone driven by a pilot in a trailer is minimal. Well the whole point is not to reduce headcount totally but reduce the amount of people put directly in harms way, for example a pilot flying in a direct combat scenario.

An "unmanned" drone still has a pilot. That pilot is on the ground, flying the drone remotely. An "autonomous" drone is one that has no pilot anywhere. In neither case is anyone in harm's way.

Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#213

Post by jessriedel »

sandworm101 wrote: post #208

They are pilotless. Ok. That is one job that has been removed from the equation, but take a look at any airforce base. Not everyone is a pilot. The vast majority of personnel are not pilots. These things will still need the engine techs, the avionics people, the ground crew, fuel people, air traffic controllers, all the way down to the guy driving the mule. The net change in manning between an "autonomous" drone and…

Why do you think anyone else thinks that eliminating the job is the valuable thing bere? I have always heard the benefits to be things like less risk to life (vs piloted), quicker reaction (vs piloted and remote), can’t be jammed (vs remote). Literally never heard anyone mentioned salary saved ever, and indeed everyone expects it to be more expensive.

Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#214

Post by nradov »

sandworm101 wrote: post #208

They are pilotless. Ok. That is one job that has been removed from the equation, but take a look at any airforce base. Not everyone is a pilot. The vast majority of personnel are not pilots. These things will still need the engine techs, the avionics people, the ground crew, fuel people, air traffic controllers, all the way down to the guy driving the mule. The net change in manning between an "autonomous" drone and…

A lot of the support staff on those airbases exist to support training flights by human pilots (both in the cockpit and remote). If training flight hours can be cut then that will tremendously reduce ground personnel requirements. The autonomous flight software only has to be "trained" once; new copies don't have to spend years in the pilot training pipeline.

(I am aware that current autonomous piloting technology is very limited and can only accomplish a small subset of Air Force missions.)

Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#215

Post by Havoc »

sandworm101 wrote: post #208

They are pilotless. Ok. That is one job that has been removed from the equation, but take a look at any airforce base. Not everyone is a pilot. The vast majority of personnel are not pilots. These things will still need the engine techs, the avionics people, the ground crew, fuel people, air traffic controllers, all the way down to the guy driving the mule. The net change in manning between an "autonomous" drone and…

Unfortunately it’s also the coolest job of those you lost that got killed

Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#216

Post by sandworm101 »

jessriedel wrote: post #213
sandworm101 wrote: post #208

They are pilotless. Ok. That is one job that has been removed from the equation, but take a look at any airforce base. Not everyone is a pilot. The vast majority of personnel are not pilots. These things will still need the engine techs, the avionics people, the ground crew, fuel people, air traffic controllers, all the way down to the guy driving the mule. The net change in manning between an "autonomous" drone and…

Why do you think anyone else thinks that eliminating the job is the valuable thing bere? I have always heard the benefits to be things like less risk to life (vs piloted), quicker reaction (vs piloted and remote), can’t be jammed (vs remote). Literally never heard anyone mentioned salary saved ever, and indeed everyone expects it to be more expensive.

>> never heard anyone mentioned salary saved ever

When it comes to fighter pilots, salary is irrelevant. The few pennies paid in salary is absolutely nothing compared to the millions of dollars a year it takes to train and maintain an active combat pilot. Those costs are at the center of nearly every discussion re military drone tech. An autonomous pilot, a computer program, doesn't need check rides. It doesn't need to re-qual its AAR ticket every month. And it doesn't retire or get promoted out after five years.

Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#217

Post by nurbl »

Symmetry wrote: post #196
ein0p wrote: post #89

I find it remarkable how the readers of this site are at the same time “worried about LLMs”, and totally enthusiastic towards what will inevitably become a no-human-in-the-loop Skynet. Sure, we’ll all get smashed with drones if we stop paying taxes or otherwise disobey, but at least our LLMs won’t accidentally praise Hitler or something.

Any rogue AI, if it proves to be a danger, will still need to maintain its servers somehow. So to be a danger it either needs to get humans to do what it wants, in which case it can bomb things just as well with manned fighters, or develop its own robots and manufacturing, in which case it can build its own fighters. We ought to worry that these will let General Ripper go rogue more easily or an adversary hack them,…

If the movie "the Cube" has taught us anything (and I guess it hasn't) it is that it's possible work on something without knowing what it's actually for. With some misdirection, an AI could probably run in a data center that is on paper doing something completely different. Do most people maintaining cloud servers today even know what they are running?

Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#218

Post by njarboe »

solatic wrote: post #175
ethbr1 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> future of warfare Color me skeptical. It feels like what we're seeing now is a local optimum: new systems (drones) designed to asymmetrically win ($) against legacy systems (mechanized vehicles) designed for very different goals. We'll see what things look like once the post-drone evolution cycle has turned on the armored side. That said, I do think the Marines are right, in that distributed agility/logistics from…

> We'll see what things look like once the post-drone evolution cycle has turned on the armored side I'm not convinced this is feasible in the short term; drone warfare is predicated on launching not just cheap drones but many of them. The new armor isn't steel or iron to survive the blast, but to shoot down attacking drones before they can explode. Most current defenses are ground-based missile batteries that can't…

It's already being done. Check out these Russian improvised "Turtle Tanks"[1]. A big, light, metal canopy to keep drones from exploding next to the tank.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDfkwlMaK7g

Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#219

Post by whywhywhywhy »

hn_20591249 wrote: post #179
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s stated they have a no renders policy so would be weird if they had that then did what you suggest.

A startup founder lying to get juicy government contracts? Say it ain't so!

I dunno, this was pretty impressive and real, maybe OP knows better and it is a ruse.

https://twitter.com/anduriltech/status/1730451908794720388/v...

Re: Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets

#220

Post by michaelt »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #147
gcanyon wrote: post #137

I'm hearing that dogfighting is a thing of the past because weapons systems operate at large distances anymore. Drones should do (at least?) three things well: dog fight, since they can make decisions in an instant and tolerate higher g-forces than a human can; prevent a human death if they get shot down; and be smaller/lighter/carry more/have greater range because they're not designed around carrying a pilot. Any id…

One important distinction, though - lethal drones should not be making decisions.

Arguably you're right.

But the makers of lethal autonomous drones would probably claim their product is really more like a cruise missile or fire-and-forget missile, where there's only a human in the loop at the moment of launch and things are autonomous thereafter.

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