The US is preparing to start testing an air-to-air combat drone, pushing the limits of human judgment and artificial intelligence in aerial combat while aiming to provide cheap mass for fierce flying competition.
General Atomics’ design for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency( DARPA ) LongShot program, which aims to create an unmanned aircraft vehicle ( UAV ) that can launch air-to-air missiles, is expected to start flight tests in December, according to Breaking Defense.
According to Breaking Defense, DARPA awarded General Atomics, a US energy and security company with its headquarters in San Diego, an award for Phase 3 of its LongShot project that could be worth up to$ 94 million.
According to the report, flight tests will validate key vehicle handling characteristics and lay the groundwork for follow-up development and testing. The drone is anticipated to considerably improve the engagement range and mission effectiveness of existing 4th generation jet fighters and air-to-air missiles.
According to Breaking Defense, the flight tests will support DARPA’s opinions on LongShot, an autonomous aircraft system that could be dropped from a sub or fighter and used by both the Air Force and Navy.
The project, according to the same report, aims to create a novel UAV that can significantly improve mission effectiveness, increase engagement ranges, and lower the risk to manned aircraft.
Following the announcement by US Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks of the” Replicator” effort to acquire hundreds of robots across various regions in the next 18 to 24 months, Breaking Defense notes that the Pentagon is prioritizing modern aircraft design.
The Replicator task, which aims to provide as a tenacious distributed system with quicker deployment closer to the military edge of operations, has been covered by Asia Times.
In addition to numerous US automatic drone initiatives aimed at revolutionizing coming warfare capabilities, Replicator places a strong emphasis on ethics and adherence to armed conflict laws to allay concerns about automatic systems in combat.
Asia Times has also written about the US Autonomous Multi-Domain Adaptive Swarms – of-Shams ( AMASS ) project, which aims to create self-sufficient drone hordes that can be launched from the sea, the air, and the land to overpower enemy air defenses.
In order to destroy an enemy’s defenses, such as anti-aircraft systems, ordnance, missile launchers, and intelligence-gathering platforms, the project aims to develop a system that can build and manage numerous robotic drones. The main goal of these aircraft flocks is to prevent or thwart a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
The LongShot poke might develop into a devoted companion. In a possible conflict between great powers, the development of devoted friend drones addresses the need for mass-produced and biodegradable aircraft, according to Asia Times.
These drones give their operators an advantage in numbers by acting as a swarm of decoys or manned aircraft’s complement, enhancing their combat capabilities by expanding their sensor ranges and by operating in areas that are thought to be very dangerous for them due to sophisticated surface-to-air defense systems or other aerial threats.
While modern air combat and the LongShot drone may concentrate on missile-based beyond-visual-range ( BVR ) combat, the growing stealth of both drones and fighter aircraft may make it difficult for opposing forces to locate one another, unintentionally leading to a close-quarters dogfight. One of the most difficult aspects of air-to-air conflict is a dogfight, but new AI experiments have produced encouraging results.
Due to their extraordinary accuracy in aiming cannons from apparently impossible angles, AI fighters outperformed individual pilots in traditional, close-range, turning dogfights, according to DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution.
In a 2014 article for Air & amp, Space Journal, Michael Byrnes emphasizes these benefits by pointing out that AI’s superhuman level of machine-controlled maneuvering and accuracy renders every cannon round” golden bullet ,” i.e., that one AI-powered unmanned fighter with just one round of ammunition and enough fuel can effectively eliminate an entire manned combat fleet at minimal cost.
Byrnes notes that these costs can be further decreased by implementing commercial-off-the-shelf( COTS ) hardware miniaturization of components and doing away with the requirement for a one-to-one crew to – aircraft ratio.
Despite this overwhelming possible advantage, people pilots still have some important advantages that may be irreplaceable.
Rich Wordsworth notes that it is deceptively difficult to replicate the human camera’s capacity to continuously, quietly, and instantly check for dangers in an article published in Engineering & amp, Technology in May 2022.
According to him, cameras don’t give peripheral vision at the same time because they can see what is immediately in front of them, and because of who is looking out the front, drones have frequently been denied permission to fly in ordinary airspace.
Wordsworth claims that traditional air conflict is getting more and more expensive. AI may lessen pilots’ risks and the capabilities of G-forces, but it cannot protect people’s lives.
Wordsworth notes that remotely piloted aircraft are more expensive because they need a sizable staff, multiple teams assuming control of one another, and extensive support system.
Air combat is complicated and constantly changing, so people judgment will still be required to make high-risk decisions, even though AI technology has proven effective in some circumstances, such as those with clear-cut solutions.
Technology will eventually just partially remove the need for human decision-making in active weather fight situations, despite the rapid advancements in AI capabilities.
Therefore, the best man-machine framework for upcoming air operations had run on a model that combines the precision of AI technology with the adaptability of human judgment.