A friend points out that the success of the #Ukrainian #drone #attack on #Russian #airfields has to have the US and other large #defense #industries rather jittery. All those big high-tech megabucks systems ... something something ten-rupee jezail.
My suspicion is that the age of drone supremacy will be short-lived: as long as they rely on human #pilots on the ground, their #signals can be jammed, traced, or hacked. Best-case scenario, the drones become flying bricks. Middle-case, the ground control facilities become #artillery targets. Worst-case, the drones are turned against their erstwhile controllers.
Those systems already exist in embryonic form—note that #Ukraine had to rely on old-fashioned #infiltration to get close enough for the strikes to work. You can bet every major #military power on the planet is already putting a lot of money into R&D for much more sophisticated approaches. Of course the alternative is autonomous drones, taking off with a set of mission parameters and the same decision-making authority as pilots in crewed #aircraft. That, uh, presents its own set of problems.
With all this said, drones are going to be a big *part* of everyone's arsenal going forward, and yeah, it's going to disrupt current #doctrine considerably. Assuming Ukraine survives the war, which I'm increasingly confident it will, veterans will be in great demand as consultants—at least in smart countries. I wonder if the US will be one of those.
@zuthal Yeah, I think that's specific to easily identified targets—as you say, aircraft parked in the open are almost a perfect use case. I said elsenet that for strikes on more ambiguous targets, and especially in fluid situations like CAS, I really think autonomous drones will be dramatically worse than human pilots about collateral damage and friendly fire. I wouldn't want to be the grunt relying on a Cylon Raider for backup.
Nice consise analysis.
@medigoth On the other had, it doesn't seem that far-fetched to imagine a drone that only needs to be guided, either by hand or via INS, to within visual distance of its target and then uses computer vision for autonomous target selection, especially if attacking such visually distinctive targets as military aircraft parked in the open. Such a system would, with INS guidance and/or release already in visual range of the target be impossible to jam, and require at least a potent dazzler-type softkill system to defend against for targets that are not/cannot feasibly be sheltered.