And I am one of those people that wants a human in the cockpit with the finger on the trigger, I don't want AI controlled AI potentially going rogue and starting world war three.
AMRAAMs never started a war, yet they have finished a couple. DARPA also had some good ideas like Thirsty Saber in hunting TELs prior to Desert Storm. I suspect that would have worked rather better than F-15Es guided by Joint STARS.
There's no functional difference between a autonomous bomber aircraft and an active-radar guided missile in terms of "risk". The only reason human pilots stick around is because bombing weddings or whatever is bad PR, but that sort of brain rot rapidly ceases its importance in general wars.
Vise versa, if we produce really capable loyal/disloyal wingmen - there is no strict rule that manned component shall be a Death star.
It may as well be a small, nimble aircraft, relying primarily on datalinks for tactical picture. If the pilot's mission is to command - do we absolutely need much more than a "flying cockpit"? Or maybe survivability can be increased simply by mimicking a cheaper unmanned component, way down the engagement priority list?
Command and control needs to be protected. Under that model, the manned NGAD would be the stealthiest and well armed for self defense.
Command and control is a single point of failure. It will be the bane of this country if we ever rely on drones like is in process this very minute and more than just paper studies. With manned aircraft, command and control is distributed among the pilots and we can't hack the human mind yet.
Where are you going to find these pilots?
Part of the transition from manned to unmanned platforms is due to the lack of birth rates causing a dearth of people, both in cohort size and falling on the right side of the bell curve, to fly aircraft. This is not something Western societies, much less militaries, are equipped to solve. Low births and decreasing quantities of laborers across the board seems immanent in post-WW2 industrial societies both capitalist and communist.
Accepting the problems of unmanned combat systems is something future militaries will need to do if they want to continue to exist.
The most viable long-term solution seems to be an autonomous aircraft that operates with little to no man-in-the-loop capability.
I suggest we look at dockside container cranes. Latest systems are unmanned. But a human is needed for the hookup of the container, to deal with wind, weather, ship movement. So a human, sitting in a remote office, is injected for the 30 seconds needed for hookup. After that the SW runs everything.
Not sure why communists are immune to demographics, but that’s politics. Finding a few thousand pilots from, U.K., with 70M people, doesn’t seem too difficult. Everyone likes pilots….
If cut off from human/AI control, the aircraft needs to carry on with its mission. When patchy comms are made, new instructions, ROE can be downloaded.
I, too, wonder why a country of 350 million people with a desired span of control of "the entire world" might lose in a industrial and demographic race against a country of 1,500 million people with a desired span of control of "roughly twice the sea area of the Gulf of Mexico".
A real stumper.
Anyway an autonomous aircraft would be autonomous. It would be given orders to "suppress local air defenses" or "destroy enemy aircraft" or "attack airbases" in a geofenced area and proceed to do so. That's it.
Such robotic control apparatus are incredibly common on naval warships. Every American, British, and French destroyer have such things. Humans really can't be expected to guide or track possibly dozens or hundreds of combat weapons outgoing and incoming.
They can barely manage to track an airliner right beside them. That's why Aegis (as well as PAAMS possessing an analogue) has the AUTO/SPECIAL mode: the weapons officer has his team set velocity, altitude, and azimuth gates. Anything inside those gates that meets the criteria is engaged and killed automatically by the combat system. It's a good way to ensure that leakers are annihilated before they hit the ship if the crew is suffering from extreme battle stress or information overload.
The only reason they aren't on fighter aircraft is quite literally because pilots are afraid it will make their jobs redundant. They're right, and that's a good thing, at least if you want to win wars. The alternative, which is a post-industrial society having enough kids to produce enough people of sufficient intellect to be good fighter pilots, isn't really realistic. The USSR sort of managed that with absurd quantities of childcare and living subsidies (and such high social expenditures were sustained only by a combination of internal tax revenue and energy exports), as does Israel (albeit this is shrinking; the IDF expects it will be unable to sustain conscription beyond 2035, thus joining the ranks of Europe and America), but that isn't in the cards for any modern Western country.
The PLAAF and PLAN are already ahead of the curve here, mostly because their own pilots are so bad they don't have much of a lobby, and because of the rates of nearsightedness in East Asia make their demographic pressures nearly as bad as the USA's. Their solution is to short-term hire European mercenaries, have a few wings of capable single-seat strike aircraft, and medium- to long-term replace them with robotic aircraft and twin-seat control-fighter-bombers like J-20.
The difference being the PLAAF will actually get a Loyal Wingman if they can build one. The USAF has been able to build one for literally decades, it just prefers manned platforms, for some reason. If the PLAAF gets a functional robotic bomber in quantity there isn't much the USAF can do to challenge that, but as long as that doesn't happen, it's probably fairly close to parity for right now.
Cross your fingers the USAF and USN develop a Loyal Wingman that's actually cheap enough to field at a rate of 2-3 per JSF, otherwise, there won't be enough fighters in Asia to matter for Taiwan and the South China Sea. Hope it's smart enough they don't need a Sentry directing it, too. Lastly, hope the USAF actually procures them, instead of burning more money for it's vaunted 1,700 JSFs it won't have the pilots or maintainers for.
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