Kind of a follow-on here from an earlier post about UCAVs. I'm curious as to what people on the board think the long-term future of the fighter will be. We've got the F-22 and F-35 on the drawing board with some (like Sec. Roche) thinking about an "FB-22" - there are those (mostly non-pilots) who believe this may be the last generation of manned fighters. Clearly, the state of military aviation fourty years from now is a hard one to predict, but what do people here think of the possibility of no more human shooters?
My own $.02 would be that while UCAVs will enter the force and will eventually take a sizeable share of the most dangerous missions, pilots will always be in at least some fighter cockpits. I base this on the fact that there are basically two means of controlling a UAV - by some sort of remote control (like the Predator), or completely autonomously. With a remote control, I would think our opponents (particuarly our formidable and technologically advanced ones) would make a high priority of developing a way of jamming or even hijacking C2 transmissions. With a totally autonomous UCAV, there are some pretty hard questions about both the ability of a computer (even one decades from now) to reliably make decisions about the political and moral challenges inherent to armed conflict. On top of that, consider the "finite state" in which a computer works. It is an analytical machine and therefore cannot be creative. A pilot however, has the potential to improvise outside of their previous experience and react to the unknown. If this weren't true, nobody would ever dogfight in a simulator and come out alive. Unless a computer can be developed which is truly intelligent (and as yet, nobody has come remotely close to figuring out how to make an intelligent and sensient being out of silicon), we cannot resolve these issues.
Okay, enough of my rant, I'm curious as to what people on the board think. And no, I simply can't picture the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs hoisting shots of Jeremiah Weed on Friday night at roll call. Kill MiGs.
My own $.02 would be that while UCAVs will enter the force and will eventually take a sizeable share of the most dangerous missions, pilots will always be in at least some fighter cockpits. I base this on the fact that there are basically two means of controlling a UAV - by some sort of remote control (like the Predator), or completely autonomously. With a remote control, I would think our opponents (particuarly our formidable and technologically advanced ones) would make a high priority of developing a way of jamming or even hijacking C2 transmissions. With a totally autonomous UCAV, there are some pretty hard questions about both the ability of a computer (even one decades from now) to reliably make decisions about the political and moral challenges inherent to armed conflict. On top of that, consider the "finite state" in which a computer works. It is an analytical machine and therefore cannot be creative. A pilot however, has the potential to improvise outside of their previous experience and react to the unknown. If this weren't true, nobody would ever dogfight in a simulator and come out alive. Unless a computer can be developed which is truly intelligent (and as yet, nobody has come remotely close to figuring out how to make an intelligent and sensient being out of silicon), we cannot resolve these issues.
Okay, enough of my rant, I'm curious as to what people on the board think. And no, I simply can't picture the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs hoisting shots of Jeremiah Weed on Friday night at roll call. Kill MiGs.