
USAF’s Missing Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (2016) - ctoth
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/3889/the-alarming-case-of-the-usafs-mysteriously-missing-unmanned-combat-air-vehicles
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ohazi
This sounds like a worryingly bad idea on many levels.

1\. "Such a system could find, fix and finish a target without external
direction by a human controller."

The fact that human-out-of-the-loop kill decisions is a bad idea should not
require further elaboration.

2\. "Suddenly, a simulated threat radar activated. The pair of networked UCAVs
immediately classified the threat and executed a plan to destroy it based on
the position of each X-45 in relation to the target, what weapons were
available, what each drone’s fuel load was and the nature of the target
itself. The calculations happened in a blink of an eye."

Congratulations, now all of the adversarial techniques that make state-of-the-
art neural networks fall over will apply to fighter jets as well. Does the
system deterministically plan to attack _everything_ it sees that looks like a
threat? What about easy threats that show up first, followed by progressively
more challenging / fuel-draining threats? Now instead of radar jammers, the
signals guys will go back to building elaborate decoy generators.

Without a human in the loop, our current autonomous technologies are woefully
inadequate for determining whether or not something smells like a trap. Our
enemies are going to learn how to knock these things out of the sky with a
$200 SDR and a power amp.

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nwallin
Not sure if the article was edited before you posted, but the author covers
this. There is a human in the loop. The swarm sends all its data to the ground
station, where a human gives go/no-go.

There thing that is automated is the first phase threat identification and the
generation and execution of the attack plan, not the threat verification or
decision to execute. Which is fine IMO.

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Spooky23
That's always in the narrative to make you feel better. If the military gave a
shit decisions about attack plans, we wouldn't have missiles.

With a plane-sized stealth drone, you can use inertia/gyro guidance to
eliminate the GPS risk. Seems silly to build a stealth aircraft that has to
transmit and receive instructions. Where do vehicles like this fit? You have
long-range cruise missiles, cheap, long loitering drones with hellfire
missiles, manned aircraft, and these unmanned fighter-jet class devices
already.

A weapon like this wouldn't have super-long loitering time, but would be
potentially more stealthy and more disposable than a manned aircraft. It's
pretty obvious why it's secret... it's an air-defense buster, strike platform
against a nation-state (vs. rabble), delivery truck for special bombs, etc or
a nuclear weapon delivery truck.

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JackFr
> It's pretty obvious why it's secret... it's an air-defense buster, strike
> platform against a nation-state (vs. rabble), delivery truck for special
> bombs, etc or a nuclear weapon delivery truck.

This

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ben7799
This is a fascinating article that is well written and has a lot of
interesting information.

However it feels like he is falling into the same trap that most of the media
falls into constantly, thinking that AI & Software are easy.

If he thinks the F-35 was hard to launch with all it's software that's nothing
compared to an autonomous combat swarm with all the features he's talking
about. You can't rush out stuff that controls machines killing stuff.

My guess is he's more of an aviation guy than a software guy so this stuff
somehow doesn't seem as hard as it is.

He also mentions the USAF has had a lot of black programs but then continues
on with the thesis that they're ignoring this as opposed to continuing to
develop in the black.

Also these swarms will be least effective in the kinds of operations we've
been mired in. It's a lot easier to set a swarm in motion with orders to clear
the sky in a WW3 scenario than it is to have them try and shoot a particular
pickup truck filled with civilian-clothed possible enemy combatants in an
urban area in Afghanistan.

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dsfyu404ed
As long as you've observed the particular pickup truck before IDing it later
is actually a very solved problem (like, the exact one, not just make and
model). Back when I was an intern I worked on the "old boring currently
deployed legacy tech" and it was quite good (probably scary good to some
people) and it was using radar signatures. I suspect that the development of
that technology combined with recent visual spectrum developments (i.e. cheap
good cameras) has made the tech even better.

Having the good judgement to not obliterate the truck while it's yielding for
a funeral procession is the hard part to do in software.

I agree he's underestimating the software complexity. Anyone can built that
crap. It takes tons of R&D man hours to refine it into something that actually
works and works consistently in the real world.

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stunt
I think he is talking about decision making abilities. But even stuff you
mentioned are too hard to build for a real world military scenario. They have
to deal with countless different objects, scenarios, and situations. Too many
edge cases to cover and will take ages to adjust and it will be full of human
errors.

They can build it for simple tasks. Find the best route to go there, bomb that
specific target, come back and during your mission deal with a limited set of
defense scenarios.

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sgt101
14) The USAF has discovered that there are insurmountable problems that have
prevented the development of effective autonomous systems. Therefore they have
declined to invest in technology that isn't working.

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Shivetya
I would suggest that manned attack craft are as important to the Air Force as
the Carrier is to the Navy. Neither will let go until circumstances outside of
their control over Congress forces it.

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greedo
The AF probably realized that in a contested environment, drones would be
useless. If the Iranians can shoot down a $200M Global Hawk with homebrewed
missiles, the Russians and Chinese will have no problem. And if you can't
shoot them down, just jam GPS etc. That's how the Iranians captured an RQ-170.

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chiph
Former USAF here, with no knowledge of any of this. My guess is the F-35
program sucked up all the funding for UCAVs.

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michannne
Wow, was just reading this article after reading the one about SAPs. I don't
have much of any knowledge on aerospace engineering or what the Air Force/Navy
have planned for our skies, but it's still a crazy thought that they'd abandon
that kind of tech. I understand the upper echelons of governments get really
bureaucratic but a lot of the times their decisions are incredibly simplistic,
a program like this could be abandoned just because the top rung shift focus
to intelligence gathering, any platform that doesn't fit that purpose or can
easily be made to fit that purpose gets the axe, despite how useful it may be
in the future. All boils down to money eventually.

I'm really interested in what the "next phase" of aviation combat will be, or
if there even will be a next phase. It's possible some organization would
create a weapon that would physically disrupt any vehicle or object flying
through a certain patch of sky - that may push us into a air-to-groud laser or
smart-guided weapon age to counter those kinds of measures, and also means air
vehicles will need serious intel platforms to get around them. We also may see
vehicles that can transition from air to sea and retain full combative power,
anything in the skies that can't float at that point goes the way of the do-
do, no matter how intelligent it's systems are, so maybe the USAF is waiting
until it's clear what will work for the next 50 years, while other branches
invest UCAV technology.

*air-to-ground, not ground-to-air

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nitrogen
Though I'd much prefer to have advances in the technology of diplomacy than
that of war, I think having a number of semi-autonomous small drones in
formation flight around a manned aircraft makes more sense than AI drones. The
drone swarm could detect the attacks you describe destructively if needed, so
the pilot can dodge.

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doctorRetro
Pardon a nitpick moment.

"Boeing’s control software ... was called DICE, or Decision Mission-Control
Software."

Okay, well, I see where the D and the C in the acronym comes from, but...

~~~
closetohome
Decision mIssion Control softwarE

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moh_maya
The article is from 2016. A lot has changed since then..

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DuskStar
How many stealthy UCAVs are flying publicly? As far as I'm aware the answer is
still 0. (Well, 1 if you count the XQ-58 Valkyrie [0], which has flown _twice_
)

0:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratos_XQ-58_Valkyrie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratos_XQ-58_Valkyrie)

~~~
wafflesraccoon
I was under the impression that there are a few stealth UAVs being operated
currently.The Sentinel comes to mind and I think both China and Russia have
working prototypes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_RQ-170_Sentine...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_RQ-170_Sentinel)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Okhotnik](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Okhotnik)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CASC_Rainbow#CH-7](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CASC_Rainbow#CH-7)

~~~
adolph
The article speaks to the RQ-170, introduced 9 years before the article and is
one of your links. The idea is that the Air Force abruptly pulled out of a
join effort with the Navy and didn’t seem to have an alternative. What
happened? Does the AF have something else that is not public or did the manned
aircraft program see UCAV as threat to eliminate?

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Causality1
The USAF is making the right call as far as I'm concerned. It is
breathtakingly easy for hostile actors to manipulate the behavior of UAVs.
Hell, Iran stole one by just spoofing its GPS and landing it exactly where
they wanted. Giving every hostile nation and hacker the opportunity to find
zero-days on a fleet of supersonic aircraft is stupidly reckless.

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slang800
I get the impression that the author vastly overestimates the capabilities of
modern software. We don't even have reliable self-driving cars, yet they are
hoping for reliable self-flying planes that can decide when and how to kill?
Even the task of collecting training data for such a system would be
monumental.

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ceejayoz
The F-117's retirement is cited as evidence of a secret UCAV, but I was under
the impression that the B-2 made it obsolete anyways.

~~~
cptskippy
According to the article, the B-2 is of limited availability so while it could
fulfill the mission parameters, it cannot meet the demand.

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jandrese
The B-2s problem is that it was obsolete before it was even built. Long range
strategic stealth bombing isn't really a useful mission profile in a world
with ICBMs or even ship launched cruise missiles.

~~~
ceejayoz
It lets you surprise an enemy like Libya with 80 JDAMs.

For the cost of about one of those cruise missiles ($25k/JDAM versus $1.4m
Tomahawks), and a lot less likely to be intercepted by air defenses.

~~~
jandrese
Yeah, but you need to add in the cost of the B2 per flight hour on top of
that. It's hard to argue a cost savings with anything related to the B2
program.

~~~
ceejayoz
$135,000/hour, which means you get 1-2 more Tomahawks in a mission. The B-2
still comes out very much on top there.

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craftinator
Isn't this article pretty much describing reprogrammable ICBM's?

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exabrial
Isn't this the purpose of cruise missiles? Essentially a drone that flies to a
target and kaboom.

