Remote control of U.S. Air Force drone wingmen
An artist’s concept of drone wingmen near piloted fighter jet. (U.S. Air Force)
The Air Force is considering the idea of having remote controlled drone wingmen flying adjacent to manned fighter aircraft. Instead of being controlled by the fighter pilots, these drones would be partially guided by airmen riding a KC-46 Pegasus, E-7 Wedgetail, or other similar aircraft. The U.S. Air Force is considering this concept for a future generation fighter.
From the Military Times:
The Air Force wants these autonomous CCAs to accompany its future Next Generation Air Dominance fighter, and perhaps also the F-35. Their missions could include striking targets, conducting intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, or electronic warfare operations such as jamming enemy signals, said Brown.
There are a lot of finer points that have to be worked out relating to the way CCAs are guided, he said, whether from the cockpit of the fighters they are accompanying or from other aircraft in the area.
“How does it team with a crewed aircraft?” Brown said. “And could you operate it from the back of a KC-46? We’ll have E-7s eventually, could you operate it from the back of an E-7? Could you operate it from a fighter cockpit? We’re thinking through those aspects.”
His comments echoed suggestions made by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies in an October 2022 paper on drone wingmen. The Mitchell Institute urged the Air Force to focus as soon as possible on refining how humans will interact with these drone aircraft, and one model floated by Mitchell envisioned a swarm of drones being directed by an air battle manager operating from a nearby Wedgetail.
Brown said that as the Air Force lays out future budgets for CCAs, it’s also considering what the aircraft itself — and the autonomous capability that will allow them to fly primarily on their own — will look like.
And the Air Force is also figuring out how it will build the organizations that are needed to operate and maintain these aircraft, and how it will train and equip the airmen who will operate and rely on them, he said.
Keeping costs down will be crucial if this concept will work, Brown said. One of the intended benefits of CCAs is they would be less expensive than traditional aircraft, and would not require an aircrew, he said.
The Military Times and Defense News provide additional details on this concept.
Category: Air Force, Air National Guard
Time to bring back the back seater.
He could be the Drone Operations Pilot Onboard.
DOPO 😉
DOPO!
LOL!
I was thinking more of, Drone Operating Program Engineer 🤓
😆
The fighter mafia is not going to sit still for this.
The US is getting so far behind on drones it is probably too late to catch up. When the F22 and 35 get swarmed by numbers ten times theirs they will understand.
So which countries are ahead of us? In technology and capability? There are several countries who are wiling to do things that the US in not morally willing to do, but except for some experimental drones in China I don’t see any doing what we are doing or any better.
And when i say experimental I mean trying new stuff that isn’t quite working, but they are trying. Maybe you just don’t know what we are and are not doing with UAS.
You are probably right. I’ve been retired for nearly ten years and am out of the loop on a many things in the last ten years. There was a lot of resistance to everything drone when I was in coming from the AB community. I think the Army and Navy are moving on though.
China does have the Wing Loong-3; it is an intercontinental drone with air to air capabilities. The PL-10 Missile gives it parity with Western ATA missiles. The problem isn’t the capability, the problem is the numbers that China can produce are daunting. They have literally hundreds of manufacturers.
I can’t say they’re ahead of us, technologically, but Turkey has far outpaced us in proof-of-concept. Not a gap we can’t quickly close, but real experience does matter.
Granted, Ankara is more inclined to use proxies as lab rats – and there’s no reason we can’t learn from their lessons, but the will to use a disruptive technology is a big driver in adopting it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_aerial_vehicles_in_the_United_States_military
Sounds like someone’s taking concepts from Ender’s Game to me.
Skynet grins.
Skynet already won. All it took was the smartphone.
Which is a shame. I was really hoping to spend my retirement battling terminators.
On a more serious note, low-tech might be the best answer. We’ve all seen video of Harris hawks and mountain goats taking down commercial quadcopters, and a 747 is easy prey for a flock of geese.
I’m not joking, I’d like to see a falconry MOS/AFSC.
So remote controlled aircraft to jam enemy signals. What happens to said aircraft when the enemy figures out how to jam signals? It ain’t rocket surgery.
Technically, wouldn’t precision penetration of advanced aircraft be the definition of “rocket surgery”?
So “Macross II: Lovers Again.” For real this time. I still want Valkyries.
Several problems that I can see immediately:
Multiple signal interference
External signal jamming
Time lag between operator command and drone location/reaction
(ask me how I know about this)
Some of these are resolved or remediated by AI, some by improved communication systems that are more resistant to jamming.
Effective real-time intercontinental control would seem to be a definite problem.
If “Brad” from New Delhi can talk to me in real time about a non-existent legal settlement from Camp LeJune and “Amber” can talk to me in real time from Punjab about my final expense insurance policy, I imagine there is a way.
Didn’t we already see this in that awful movie Stealth (when we weren’t distracred by Jessica Biele in a tight flightsuit, that is)?
It takes a lot for a film to feature Jessica Biel in a tight flight suit and still be considered awful.
Stealth was not a good movie, but was it really THAT bad?
Well, not with Jessica Biel, i admit.
As AI continues to advance we see more potential for both this purpose, and for a domestic use that should give us all a bit of pause.
AI dogs for police, AI robots armed for police, none of this is cause for celebration. A government with armed robots isn’t going to be a government that offers more protections of your personal freedoms.
As I see the applause for such things it occurs to me that the Republic is already lost, we’re just watching the endgame now as the government of the United States becomes an evermore overarching menace to its own people. The number of laws passed “for your safety” or “national security” in the last twenty years have added nothing to your safety or security but have all restricted your personal freedoms in some manner or other…those restrictions are invisible to a great many of our fellow citizens and thus the lack of protest from most, and the few who protest are labeled conspiracy theorists and fringe lunatics.
What a time to be alive.
I’m not sure that falconry fixes this particular problem, but low-tech will always be the answer to high-tech.
The best laser in the world doesn’t function if you put a bullet clear through its housing. You can have the best armor in the world – resistant to whatever ammo or demo you throw at it (on behalf of engineers everywhere, p=plenty and there’s no problem that can’t be solved with an adequate supply of demo – if I can’t penetrate the armor, I’ll throw that bitch high enough in the air that it kills everyone inside when it hits the ground), it means nothing if the supply train is cut off. No gas, no go… and every military in the world today has its share of Jessica Lynch’s.