Back in the depths of the cold war, the British Minister of Defence proclaimed that the end was in sight for manned fighter aircraft, and that automation was rapidly making humans obsolete in the cockpit. A few generations on, another British minister is saying the same thing, with a bit more chance of being proven correct:
In a bizarre repeat of history, a British defence minister has given it as his opinion that we are currently witnessing development of the final generation of manned combat aircraft. The comments made last week by Quentin Davies MP echo those made in a 1957 government white paper by the then Defence minister, Duncan Sandys.
Mr Davies, minister for Defence Equipment and Support, made his new “last of the manned fighters” comments at an Unmanned Air Systems exhibition held on Friday at the London headquarters of the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
“My own working assumption is that although we certainly need the manned combat aircraft, and are investing in some very good ones at the moment… that will take us through to the 2030s, but beyond that I think the name of the game will be UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles],” he said.
To be fair, the view from 1957 was not as dazed and confused as it might appear to be in hindsight. It was only 13 years after the start of the first widespread and successful cruise missile attacks (Nazi Germany’s V-1 “buzz bombs”), and in the middle of the nuclear arms race. Strategic bombing was still the way wars were expected to be won . . . and with thermonuclear warheads, it was likely to be a final war for all concerned. Flying fighter aircraft was seen to be a relic of the second world war, and an expensive relic at that.
He’s dreaming. There’s three big hurdles in the development of UCAVs, two of which are technical hurdles, and the other is a … human factor.
1) UCAV satcom data links are not fast enough to tackle something as high stakes as air combat maneuvers. Initially the CONOPS for UCAVs was to have the operators sit stateside and the aircraft overseas doing the flying and fighting. But then they realised that there was a significant signal delay in having the operators in CONUS, so they have a bunch of them in Iraq and Afghanistan for situations where a certain degree of lag is unacceptable. This is a fine arrangement for OEF and OIF where the enemy is not getting airborne in their own craft and coming to bomb the base where the operator trailers are parked. You could imagine how well that particular employment strategy would pan out against, say, China.
2) Let’s say you have a notional UCAV with F-35 capabilities, that is, it is multi-role, has a fairly robust payload capacity, and has all-aspect sensor and targeting capability. You are fine fighting against 7th century Taliban on the ground, or mid-20th century air opponents like Iran. But if you go up against ecven a second-tier foe like Russia your goose will be cooked as soon as your missiles run out. For while the bird may have all-aspect targeting range out to say 100nm BVR range, what’s the guarantee that your missiles are going to hit? Some guys will evade and get in close, and now your UCAV has to turn and burn in a dogfight, which is where signal lag is going to kill it. Unless its pilots are in-theatre, in which case a bomber will be on its way to kill them. Pilots aboard aircraft are harder to kill than pilots stationary on the ground.
3) Let’s assume that your UCAV with F-35 capabilities has its all-aspect sensors/targeting and missiles with pretty good all-aspect targeting, too. What do you think the odds are of a political leader authorising the Air Force to engage targets at BVR range on Day One of a conflict, without any visual verification of the airborne target, and relying solely on SIGINT and IFF for target ID? Here is a hint. It hasn’t happened so far. So your UCAV ends up in a turn and burn fight again where its signal lag might kill it.
First they have to invent a UCAV that can identify and prosecute targets all on its own. Without operator intervention, and with a high degree of discrimination and discretion, equal to or better than a human pilot. Then there will be no further manned fighters.
Comment by Chris Taylor — August 7, 2009 @ 10:31
For those of you not as steeped in military aviation terminology (like former ground-pounding pongoes like me), here’s a brief glossary for Chris’s comment above:
UCAV: Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle
CONOPS: Concept of Operations
CONUS: Continental United States
OEF: Operation Enduring Freedom
OIF: Operation Iraqi Freedom
BVR: Beyond Visual Range
SIGINT: Signals Intelligence
IFF: Identification friend or foe
Are those correct guesses, Chris?
Comment by Nicholas — August 7, 2009 @ 10:49
It’s worse than that.
Something that they ALWAYS gloss over when talking about ground-controlled UCAVs is electronic warfare. If I were an enemy country, getting ready to face off with a high-tech superpower, I’d invest in a medium-sized fleet of ultra-high altitude U-2 equivalents (or balloons, or blimps, or even co-located jammer satellites for that matter) with no payload other than a suite of wide-bandwidth, high-power jamming devices. Even with something like a broad-spectrum frequency-hopping control system, you only have to contend with very low-power signals (no, you can’t get high-power control systems based off of satellites with anything like current or even proposed technology – noise is much cheaper than clean signal). All they need to do is put out enough RF noise to push your super-clever control signals into the mud.
So you have a handful of cheap counter-drones floating around at 100,000+ feet, pushing out lots of noise, and suddenly all of YOUR drones have no pilot input at all… and that’s the GOOD scenario.
The bad scenario is when the other side manages to get a spy in your design process and finds out how to crack your control systems, making that fleet of UCAVs swap sides with little or no fuss – and if they do it right, the first thing you’d know about it would be when your drones come home fully-loaded with munitions – and drop them on your head. If they invested in enough control-stealing hardware, you just handed them several fighter wings for free.
Comment by cirby — August 8, 2009 @ 09:51
Yup that’s correct. Sorry, I didn’t realise I had lapsed into nerd.
And I concur with cirby; degrading the comm links is the easiest way to render UCAVs largely toothless. In their current incarnation they are only good for permissive environments where the other guy can’t really harm your aircraft or comms. When they get autonomous then they’ll be more practical for warfighting against advanced foes. But they’ll also be kinda scary.
Comment by Chris Taylor — August 8, 2009 @ 17:19
Quote “But they’ll also be kinda scary.” Unquote.
Kinda? You once again show your gift for understatement. 😉
Comment by Nicholas — August 8, 2009 @ 18:21