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Airbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft

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Re: Airbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft

#41

Post by maximinus_thrax »

busterarm wrote: post #9
maximinus_thrax wrote: post #3

Good! Great to hear! EU needs to grow its domestic military industry, the French were right all along.

The EU already has the 2nd, 4th, 6th and 10th largest share of global arms exports. Losing the 8th place slot due to Brexit.

Akshually it's the the 2nd (France), 5th (Germany), 6th (Italy), and 9th (Spain) spots. But that's a bad argument, say.. a way of lying with statistics, considering the 1st place has 43% of the market share AND that exporting arms is not very relevant when the topic du jour is military build-up. The muscovites for example export 7.8% of the market share but that's not that relevant considering they're using the lion's share of military industrial output to terrorize Ukrainians.

Re: Airbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft

#42

Post by XorNot »

Barrin92 wrote: post #34
XorNot wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The history of warfare, hell the literal current warfare happening in Ukraine makes this entire argument unbelievably specious. There were more wars before any type of mechanisation of warfare, with the only slow down really happening after nuclear weapons were developed.

>There were more wars before any type of mechanisation of warfare yes but they weren't comparable. With the exception of ancient Chinese wars which are a bit of an odd case given the population sizes and that they kept sending farmers to the front until everyone starved, European pre-modern wars consisted of small armies and relatively low civilian casualty ratios. It's this and the late 20th century that saw civilia…

And this is a bait and switch: you were talking about the propensity of countries or people to go to war, now you are talking about the scale of destruction.

Cities were routinely razed and famines and disease killed scores of people in historical warfare as well - we have the accounts, we know it happened. The "difficulty" of implementing any of this was enormous given the lack of modern logistics or simple things like refrigeration to keep armies resupplied.

How does this support your argument though? World War 1 increased the level of danger and destruction of warfare and...then we had World War 2. If the hypothesis was that making war easy leads to more wars, then no example presented shows that because WW1 was at the time the most destructive war in history and simply set the stage for an even more destructive war.

Re: Airbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft

#43

Post by budman1 »

dmix wrote: post #31
icegreentea2 wrote: post #10

There are multiple interesting developments wrapped together here. First, these are intended to be "loyal wingman". They'll be commanded (but not really remotely controlled) from manned fighters nearbyish. Presumably, the "shoot authorization" will be delegated down to the pilots. Secondly, the actual unmanned platform (the Kratos Valkyrie) is also part of a program of record for the USMC (US Marine Corps) to act as…

Why do I get the feeling that the market shifted beneath their feet to drones and these old aircraft companies are using "loyal wingman" to make a half-hearted half-way play between old/new products to stay relevant, which just buys them time to keep selling expensive jets... until pure drone upstarts start eating their lunch. Like when Blackberry tried to make BlackBerry Storm after iPhone and Blockbuster tried to m…

mistakes in A/A combat can have serious repercussions. not only loss of expensive air vehicles, but things like civilian airliners.

'loyal wingman' gives the kill / no kill decision to an Air Force officer. And having the decision maker geographically close eliminates jamming, delays, and the requirements to have a satellite infrastructure (like is required for Predator UAV's).

i hope we never assign a piece of code, AI or not, to be the decision maker.

Re: Airbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft

#44

Post by budman1 »

twalichiewicz wrote: post #24
blobcode wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) Aircraft rarely fly in anything close to formation in combat - large gaps are the norm (1-10 miles), and one would think that increased distance is something that could be exploited by an unmanned platform (able to take more risk, etc.) (2) Remains to be seen. (3) Individual Patriot missiles are around that price point, with S300/S400 anywhere from 500k-2M depending on capability. One would think that cost-per-ki…

At 10-mile intervals you're maintaining a high-bandwidth, low-latency mesh network in a contested electronic environment. If the command aircraft is 10 miles away and the enemy is jamming the link, the drone is going to be making split-second (potentially) lethal decisions without the pilot. You're right about them both costing about the same, so the real leverage only comes if these drones can stay out of the engage…

at 10 miles, the data link cannot be jammed. and it won't be observed, either. military is very good at this 'mesh networking' thing. L16 is 40 years old at this point, I expect they have something much better.

Re: Airbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft

#45

Post by dash2 »

icegreentea2 wrote: post #33
dmix wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do I get the feeling that the market shifted beneath their feet to drones and these old aircraft companies are using "loyal wingman" to make a half-hearted half-way play between old/new products to stay relevant, which just buys them time to keep selling expensive jets... until pure drone upstarts start eating their lunch. Like when Blackberry tried to make BlackBerry Storm after iPhone and Blockbuster tried to m…

Roughly everyone expects the 6th generation fighters (the ones currently in development like F-47) to be the last manned generation. Most observers expect many/most 6th gen fighters to become optionally manned within their life span. The real question is basically - is full autonomy both technically possible and culturally/politically acceptable within 5, 10, or 20 years? Because full autonomy isn't really ready now…

> And at least the USAF doesn't think remote control will let them do what they need (which is to fly from Japan to Korea or Taiwan, or Philippines to Taiwan, and contest/control the skies in the face of a basically peer adversary).

I mean, they wouldn't think that, would they? It would put their pilots out of a job. But most flying has been done by autopilot long before AI, and even if/when you need a human in the loop, why would you want to put that human in the cockpit rather than safely in Virginia?

Re: Airbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft

#46

Post by jacquesm »

budman1 wrote: post #43
dmix wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do I get the feeling that the market shifted beneath their feet to drones and these old aircraft companies are using "loyal wingman" to make a half-hearted half-way play between old/new products to stay relevant, which just buys them time to keep selling expensive jets... until pure drone upstarts start eating their lunch. Like when Blackberry tried to make BlackBerry Storm after iPhone and Blockbuster tried to m…

mistakes in A/A combat can have serious repercussions. not only loss of expensive air vehicles, but things like civilian airliners. 'loyal wingman' gives the kill / no kill decision to an Air Force officer. And having the decision maker geographically close eliminates jamming, delays, and the requirements to have a satellite infrastructure (like is required for Predator UAV's). i hope we never assign a piece of code,…

> i hope we never assign a piece of code, AI or not, to be the decision maker.

This is already a past station, just not at Airbus.

Re: Airbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft

#48

Post by jandrewrogers »

budman1 wrote: post #44
twalichiewicz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 10-mile intervals you're maintaining a high-bandwidth, low-latency mesh network in a contested electronic environment. If the command aircraft is 10 miles away and the enemy is jamming the link, the drone is going to be making split-second (potentially) lethal decisions without the pilot. You're right about them both costing about the same, so the real leverage only comes if these drones can stay out of the engage…

at 10 miles, the data link cannot be jammed. and it won't be observed, either. military is very good at this 'mesh networking' thing. L16 is 40 years old at this point, I expect they have something much better.

The Link16 replacement is called MADL. It is used in the F-35 and has capabilities not available using Link16.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multifunction_Advanced_Data_Li...

Re: Airbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft

#49

Post by remarkEon »

icegreentea2 wrote: post #33
dmix wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do I get the feeling that the market shifted beneath their feet to drones and these old aircraft companies are using "loyal wingman" to make a half-hearted half-way play between old/new products to stay relevant, which just buys them time to keep selling expensive jets... until pure drone upstarts start eating their lunch. Like when Blackberry tried to make BlackBerry Storm after iPhone and Blockbuster tried to m…

Roughly everyone expects the 6th generation fighters (the ones currently in development like F-47) to be the last manned generation. Most observers expect many/most 6th gen fighters to become optionally manned within their life span. The real question is basically - is full autonomy both technically possible and culturally/politically acceptable within 5, 10, or 20 years? Because full autonomy isn't really ready now…

I think we are underestimating and/or forgetting that the enemy gets a vote, and remote piloting something from Virginia all the way out to Japan or Korea or Taiwan involves many signals integrity steps along the way. This is to say that you should assume these signals are interrupted and you will not be able to maintain continuous control of the aircraft from whatever datacenter box the "pilot" sits in. That means fully autonomous decision making, functionally for the entire journey, and independent release authorization.

>or else we wouldn't need hundreds to thousands of drone operators in the Ukraine war

I don't think this is the reason the systems are not fully autonomous right now ("fully autonomous" here meaning that they can complete the kill chain independently, no HITL). Even if we assume it true that the drones are not "good enough" to be at parity with a human operator, if you had an essentially limitless amount of them, would you really waste the manpower on operating them in FPV mode? You would not, you would completely saturate the battlefield with them. Thus, as it was in the beforetimes and ever shall be, logistics wins wars.

Re: Airbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft

#50

Post by bpodgursky »

rlarah wrote: post #47

Let's see how this turns out. The hyped Anduril "cheap" anti-drone tech didn't work in Ukraine and evidently does not work in the Middle East. I have more trust in Airbus than the PayPal mafia though.

Whether or not Anduril's cheap solution delivered, cheap anti-drone tech does work in Ukraine, interceptor drones are quite effective against Shahed-style drones.
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