yes

no and no...... but its getting late in the day....

 

 

It's not the 1960's anymore and no one is going to shoot AIM-7s or SA-2s at you.  Modern missiles can outmaneuver manned aircraft (because they don't have to be crippled to keep from killing the person inside)  Defeating the missile requires a hard kill or soft kill counter-measure.  Neither of which is particularly aided by pulling 9-g circles against 40 g missiles.  Helmet mounted cueing kind of obviates the need to crank into an attack.  And missile warning systems evolving into the spherical synthetic vision on the F-35 is going to make it REALLY hard to try to find an opponents blind spot.  You will not be able to get a gun solution if the opponent is effectively sitting in the airplane backwards staring at you.

 

Given all that, the idea that airpower can be projected into hostile territory for months without a combat loss is really a bad paradigm.  Given the cost of casualties, at least for civilzed countries, the only solution is to push more robots forward.

No and yes.

 

Robots are only really good when dealing with preprogrammed or unambiguous targets.  Any greater level of autonomous decision making is about as reliable as a 10 day old weather forecast.

 

Think of them as just reusable cruise missiles (ground attack) or an extra stage on an air-to-air missile.

 

Remotely piloted or directed vehicles are going to (if they have not already) run into a problem of insufficient band width.  Yes, they are working on ways to get around some of the limitations, but it does not really matter because the demand will always vastly exceed the supply.

 

And flying around transmitting telemetry is a sure fire way to compromise any stealth characteristics.

Remote piloting is not needed.  The only thing you need bandwidth for is to manage the aircraft and order the shoot.  The aircraft are able to fly themselves.  The Scan Eagle, at some 30 pounds, is not remotely piloted.  It is remote commanded.

 

If a pilot is shooting beyond visual range, then the only thing the pilot knows of the target is what his airplane, through its own sensors or shipped in from offboard, tells him.  If the pilot is waiting for an external command to fire, then the pilot is completely redundant.  The only case where a human is needed is if visual ID is required,  Of course, how good is that?  Two army Blackhawks were shot down over northern Iraq in '92 after being visually ID'ed as Hinds by to USAF fighter pilots.  Had the picture of the Blackhawks been piped back to a workstation for review by someone who wasn't currently busy flying the airplane, a better ID might have been made.  Then, if they HAD been proven to be hostile, it would take almost no bandwidth to send the command to take them down.

That is what I meant by remote directed.

 

It makes little difference.  The amount of bandwidth needed to remotely fly the aircraft is less than 10% of the bandwidth needed by the aircraft to transmit back it's sensor information.  The value of having s system where you only supply direction and the aircraft does the flying is that it does not crash if the signal drops out for a minute, not in bandwidth reduction.

 

In beyond visual range attacks the target has almost always been identified and tracked by an AWACS all the way from where it took off.  Otherwise, how can you be sure it's a mig, yak, or sukoi and not an Airbus?

I'm not too sure how likely it will be to have radar tracking from take-off, although I agree that's certainly possible, especially in nice flat terrain like Iraq.  I think determining it's not a friendly when you don't have that degree of track history comes heavily from the Air Tasking Order and good C3 with all Blue forces, while trying to figure out exactly what it is can sometimes come from Non-Cooperative Target Identification.  All of the above also benefits greatly from input from COMINT and Operational ELINT collection.

 

One of the advantages of an unmanned fighter.  If you don't know if the 100 airplanes coming out of the hostile country are bad guys, you send a UCAV forward to find out.  It will either report back with a description (picture) or it won't report back at all.  First case allows clear classification.  Second case is self classifying.

Second case is self classifying.

Or just send in the F-22s and F-15s and soon the F-35s and sort it out the way we always have.