There are multiple interesting developments wrapped together here.
First, these are intended to be "loyal wingman". They'll be commanded (but not really remotely controlled) from manned fighters nearbyish. Presumably, the "shoot authorization" will be delegated down to the pilots.
Secondly, the actual unmanned platform (the Kratos Valkyrie) is also part of a program of record for the USMC (US Marine Corps) to act as a partner SEAD (suppression of air defence) vehicle.
Thirdly, the "MARS" system chattered about looks to be Airbus' open architecture /system of systems pitch that they were developing for FCAS (the European 6th generation fighter program). MARS and all pitches like it are about ways to make individual platforms as software defined as possible, and to get different platforms/instances to really data/function share as much as possible.
If this program goes well, it shows that Airbus' MARS has the flexibility and capability required to just... layer into/ontop of some random other vendor's hardware/software and then "just work". I think it would be major demonstration/validation of the work.
Why do I get the feeling that the market shifted beneath their feet to drones and these old aircraft companies are using "loyal wingman" to make a half-hearted half-way play between old/new products to stay relevant, which just buys them time to keep selling expensive jets... until pure drone upstarts start eating their lunch.
Like when Blackberry tried to make BlackBerry Storm after iPhone and Blockbuster tried to make Blockbuster Online after Netflix.
Technology shifts rarely wait for these stodgy middle ground transitionary products to find a market.
Roughly everyone expects the 6th generation fighters (the ones currently in development like F-47) to be the last manned generation. Most observers expect many/most 6th gen fighters to become optionally manned within their life span.
The real question is basically - is full autonomy both technically possible and culturally/politically acceptable within 5, 10, or 20 years? Because full autonomy isn't really ready now (or else we wouldn't need hundreds to thousands of drone operators in the Ukraine war). And at least the USAF doesn't think remote control will let them do what they need (which is to fly from Japan to Korea or Taiwan, or Philippines to Taiwan, and contest/control the skies in the face of a basically peer adversary).
Because no one knows that answer, everyone (governments, militaries, manufacturers) is hedging, and CCA is part of that hedge.
I think we are underestimating and/or forgetting that the enemy gets a vote, and remote piloting something from Virginia all the way out to Japan or Korea or Taiwan involves many signals integrity steps along the way. This is to say that you should assume these signals are interrupted and you will not be able to maintain continuous control of the aircraft from whatever datacenter box the "pilot" sits in. That means fully autonomous decision making, functionally for the entire journey, and independent release authorization.
>or else we wouldn't need hundreds to thousands of drone operators in the Ukraine war
I don't think this is the reason the systems are not fully autonomous right now ("fully autonomous" here meaning that they can complete the kill chain independently, no HITL). Even if we assume it true that the drones are not "good enough" to be at parity with a human operator, if you had an essentially limitless amount of them, would you really waste the manpower on operating them in FPV mode? You would not, you would completely saturate the battlefield with them. Thus, as it was in the beforetimes and ever shall be, logistics wins wars.
The reason that FPV drones are so easily disrupted is that they are too light to carry anything more than a radio and fly low.
Disrupting the signal for a normal-sized aircraft is much harder. If you're flying at 10s of thousands of feet and have a line of sight to multiple satellites it's going to take some serious weaponry to disrupt that.
I'm not sure about this. Space is big and these satellite constellations are getting very large, with lots of redundancy. I know I'm sort of arguing against my previous point, but bear with me for a sec. You'd need an anti-satellite system that either destroys them kinetically (accepting the cost of the debris field) or one that breaks them electronically (an EMP or another device that defeats them electronically). The United States' underlying philosophy on advanced weapons has, for a long time, been precision so I could see the emergence of in-orbit interception & defeat/disable platforms. But you'd need a lot of them for the doctrine to be effective, which means a lot of mass-to-orbit logistics. Adversaries do not have this, so I would expect e.g. PRC to have an alternate strategy of rendering entire orbits unusable or dangerous, which I think is easier.
Regarding your missile platform question, there are several companies that already manufacturing loitering munitions, and long-range loitering cruise missiles are on the roadmap, so to speak.
Interesting point re: satellites, I'd say the best tactic here is to presume all gone immediately. Eg, from a planning perspective. The reality may be that the war may need to stretch out a bit, before action is taken.
Of course any planned action would likely try to strike first, by some means.
Autonomous flight is significantly easier than autonomous driving. You just fly between points in space, and there's nothing but air inbetween. The ground control handles most of collision avoidance, and if that's not available, it's easily achieved by moving 300ft/100m up or down.
> This is to say that you should assume these signals are interrupted and you will not be able to maintain continuous control of the aircraft from whatever datacenter box the "pilot" sits in. That means fully autonomous decision making, functionally for the entire journey, and independent release authorization.
Only if every mission is absolutely critical. If disruptions are rare then you don't need autonomy.
Or more interestingly with the low-earth sat/data network. Seeing as projectssuch as starlink are basically mil in nature with a side of barely profitable civilian use.
The whole data centers in space makes more sense. These are not for running cat blogs and video streaming , which is waht they are/will be marketed as.
Realworld application will always be a command and control node spanning the globe for the mil use. And as its rolloed out globally can basically provide jammingfree links for the autonomous commands from space.
>Roughly everyone expects the 6th generation fighters (the ones currently in development like F-47) to be the last manned generation. Most observers expect many/most 6th gen fighters to become optionally manned within their life span.
The said that about the 5th though. Like I've personally talked to people who were actively working on the F35 and they were saying "last manned aircraft" in like 2011ish.
I expect autonomy to be a long steady improvement of taking on additional subroutines of increasing complexity of decisions being made along the way. Fly here, land there, kill that, go over there without being detected, etc, etc, until humans are making only a select set of decisions that will probably be randomly sprinkled at the high and low levels.
Kind of like how when we build a brick wall the "vision" and the actual laying of bricks still get done by human but all the intermediary steps are drudgery that can be trivially automated (not to say they are all automated, just that they could be if labor $$ vs software $$ penciled out that way)
Yeah, I remember thinking that about the 5th gen myself. But I think part of that way unclarity around when the 6th gen would appear. 2011ish would be a weird timeframe.
Obama didn't announce the "pivot to Asia" until 2012. A lot of the world was still believing in the whole unipolar moment thing. The F-35 hadn't even started training squadrons in service yet. 6th generation probably felt really far away. 2016 onwards has been a major acceleration in all sorts of ways.
In my eyes, 6th generation was really ignited by the focus on China. The PCA/NGAD/F-47 was first out the gate, and really set the tempo and got everyone else going.
I agree with your estimation of the likely development path. I expect that approach to merge/converge from the other direction - I expect there to also be a parallel path of fully autonomous systems growing to occupy ever greater mission sets. Imagine telling a drone "I need an ELINT mission in the area and timeframe" (and it plans its own launch time, flight route, calculates fuel loads, communicates with ground staff), or "I need you to airdrop this supply pallet".
> And at least the USAF doesn't think remote control will let them do what they need (which is to fly from Japan to Korea or Taiwan, or Philippines to Taiwan, and contest/control the skies in the face of a basically peer adversary).
I mean, they wouldn't think that, would they? It would put their pilots out of a job. But most flying has been done by autopilot long before AI, and even if/when you need a human in the loop, why would you want to put that human in the cockpit rather than safely in Virginia?
Manned-Unmanned teaming is not a new concept created in the last couple months to placate fighter pilots in the age of ai. With 5th generation fighter using datalink they to use the active radar in far away AWAC planes for targeting so the stealth fighter can get closer to the enemy without breaking cover by turning on active radar.
If you can outsource the radar on a jet it is not a huge leap in logic to put the very hot missiles onto a unmanned aircraft. All of these concepts where written up 20 years ago by both china and the US
> With 5th generation fighter using datalink they to use the active radar in far away AWAC planes for targeting so the stealth fighter can get closer to the enemy without breaking cover by turning on active radar.
What benefit does a human pilot offer in this case? Are going to be using their eyes to track their location or see a Chinese fighter jet launching a standoff antiair missile at them? Drones can do AWACS and deep sensor roles, with a pilot and sensor operators far away from the planes.
> All of these concepts where written up 20 years ago by both china and the US
Defense contractors and the gov planners are often the same group of people, the same small community, there's not that many vendors. They show up at defence trade shows and see what industry is offering them. They tend to stick with the same big safe companies that change slowly. Bold ideas are infrequent. The smaller countries can take those risks easier than America.
My read is that the "loyal wingman" thing is a ploy to get around all the pilots / expilots in Air Force brass who might otherwise gatekeep anything they think is a threat to the careers of human pilots. These people want the Air Force to be about hotshots flying planes; this is part of the reason the US spun off the space stuff, because Air Force brass is institutionally incapable of taking anything other than manned flight seriously.
mistakes in A/A combat can have serious repercussions. not only loss of expensive air vehicles, but things like civilian airliners.
'loyal wingman' gives the kill / no kill decision to an Air Force officer. And having the decision maker geographically close eliminates jamming, delays, and the requirements to have a satellite infrastructure (like is required for Predator UAV's).
i hope we never assign a piece of code, AI or not, to be the decision maker.
Airbus has publicized that it is working on a Project Maven style project with France's DGA [0][1].
Thales also publicly launched and demonstrated SkyDefender a couple days ago [2].
Mistral AI also announced in January 2026 that it is working with the DGA to productionize it's models for military applications [3] - ironically similar in manner to how the DoD was using Claude but is now using Gemini and GPT.
No country is going to leave networked, autonomous offensive and defensive capabilities on the table.
That's not really what they meant. They meant that the weapon is guided by software that decides which targets to pick and autonomously makes that decision without a human in the loop. The device seeks you instead of you going to it.
A landmine has no friend-or-foe-or-noncombatant decision engine, it will kill you or maim you just like it will kill or maim the guy that laid it or any other passer by.
You missed the point. The Mk 60 Captor is not a "land" mine. It is guided by software and autonomously makes the decision to launch a homing torpedo without a human in the loop.
A homing torpedo/release mechanism is not AI by the normal definition of the word. You're welcome to redefine words as much as you want but it's a bit silly. We also don't use that term for heatseekers or for line followers.
The 'signature' bit is interesting, but I'd still not label that AI, and neither does anybody else. It is a loitering munition, I'll give you that, and I think that that brings it closer to the 'mine' definition of things than the 'AI killbot'.
No, it obviously does not only apply to LLMs. It just does not apply to loitering munitions from decades ago. And I'm pretty sure nobody ever labeled that thing AI before you did.
Drones doesn't automatically mean no pilot or no human in the loop. Motherships and relays to command centers solve nearly everything loyal wingman offers. The only question is data access (which is still a major issue in manned jets operating in EW conditions far from home).
Same with the idea that drones can't have high end radars and other stuff which requires a fancy human jet in the loop. Decidated single purpose drones with high end sensors can solve a similar purpose with a much lower risk and cost.
One argument is that fighter airplanes are becoming more like airborne control centers than actual fighters. You don't get the same level of situational awareness from a remote controlled drone camera than from inside a cockpit. And if you look at the F-35, what is often put forward is its stealth and communication capabilities. Radars, electronic warfare, etc... that's what's important, and yes, having a human in the loop is important too. These planes can dogfight too, but ideally, they shouldn't, but they still have to be able to defend themselves when things go wrong.
Drones like they have in Ukraine are more like cheap missiles, they don't compete against fighter jets, and they can't do anything to them once they have taken off.
Those low-cost drones are just a fad. Fiber optic TV guided exploding thing is literally the oldest kind of anti-tank missiles. Russian winged cruise missiles are even older, early cold war kinds of stuff. It just so happens that none of Ukraine, Russia, Iran etc has air dominance nor proper war time production capacities, and so they must resort to substituting military equipment with remixes of AliExpress stuffs.
Just in the invasion in Iran we all saw Apache handling drones with ease. They can probably put on the minigun or even microgun on an MQ-9, which is a drone, but not like the ones discussed here. Or someone might realize a turret on a Super Tucano is cheaper than the Reaper ground control trailer. My point is, Ukraine and Russia throwing drones at each others is not a sure sign that that's the war of the future.
The war in Iran proves the opposite: It is actually the future. The US could easily establish air dominance over Iran, yet it can't stop their military from launching smaller drones both in the air and at sea. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed and air power alone seems unlikely to fix the situation. If you want to effectively eliminate an opponent nowadays you need an army of drones - the economics don't work out if you are only fielding expensive ships, planes and missiles. And regarding your point that an Apache can easily shoot down a drone: Roughly 9/10 drones in the Russia Ukraine frontline get shot down and the remaining 10% make up for about 80% of the casualties (rest being mostly artillery and mines).
I think GP's point is more relevant than your question implies. The vast majority of civilian flights could be flown entirely autonomously right now. (I'm not close enough to the aviation industry to make a confident guess, but +90% wouldn't surprise me.) Humans are there to take (decision or control) over when something goes off the happy path - in fact, pilots are encouraged / required to hand-fly landings that could be done automatically in order to keep their skills current. Obviously no one would accept even a 0.01% crash rate for civilian flights, so we're many orders of magnitude of improvement away from replacing pilots in that sector.
Military calculations are very different. Every military asset - most definitely including humans - is disposable, and all wars are (in some dimension) wars of attrition. Holding mission success constant, when the cost x capability x ability to manufacture for autonomous platforms becomes cheaper than all that plus training / replacement cost of human pilots, then human pilots will disappear. The logic of war being what it is, I expect HITL decision-making to very quickly be dropped as soon as it is seen to be retarding the progress of a cheaper option.
Does this just continue the ‘western way’ of spending a crap load of money on each military item, instead of getting good at making A LOT of something really cheaply?
Ukraine and Iran are both showing it quickly becomes a war of attrition and fancy weapons get very expensive very fast, or run out very fast.
I agree that European militaries need to be able to generate a lot of mass.
But we would be remiss to pick up on some threads from both Ukraine and Iran.
In Ukraine, the VKS is still able to generate substantial damage (both in tactical support of ground forces, as well as part of the civilian bombing campaign) with glide bombs (carrying 500kg+ class bombs, launched by tactical jets from over Russian controlled airspace).
These tactics are effective, and are able to do things that Shaheds aren't quite capable of doing - for example ensuring destruction of certain targets with a single hit. I imagine Ukraine would love to be able to be able to take glide bombs off the table, but it can't.
It can't because it lacks the air force to conduct an offensive counter-air campaign, and it lacks the long range strike capability to permanently disable relevant airfields, or destroy enough airframes on the ground.
European militaries would like to be able to avoid this situation, and therefore certain relatively exquisite capabilities are needed.
In Iran, while Iran has demonstrated its ability to severely tax the much more exquisite forces of the US+Israel and the Gulf States, the reality is that they have NOT been able to meaningfully degrade the US or Israel's ability to bomb Iranian ground targets at will.
European militaries would also like to be able to prevent the VKS from just... bombing central to eastern Europe at will.
European war aims - which would be to able to defeat Russian forces so soundly and quickly that Russia will forever be deterred, requires exquisite capabilities, that are able to strike the Russian war machine from the front line, all the way back several hundred kilometers in high precision, and high density (in time and in weight of payload), in a way that can actually cause collapse (when combined with ground counter attacks). It cannot rely on a Ukrainian style war or Ukrainian style tactics purely because... well, Russia is infact actually fighting that war right now, and hasn't given up yet.
A Europe that has to fight at all, is a Europe that has already lost. A Europe that has to fight for more than a few weeks or months, is a Europe that has deeply lost.
Using a beaten down Russia in the current year is probably a bad way to plan for your future military. It should be considered against a real target like China where all of those fancy jets won't get close to China proper (w/ long range AA missiles and SAMs) so everything will be at standoff range including SEAD campaigns. Which is where mass drones and cheap cruise missiles/decoys will be much more effective.
Using high end jets as delivery platforms for high end missiles is not scalable in a conflict anymore. Likewise most estimates say even the US will run out of Tomahawks within the first 1-2 months of a conflict with China. They are gambling those missiles open up a big enough window to do anything else while their own Navy is under siege in the process.
> instead of getting good at making A LOT of something really cheaply?
also you'd want to maximize dual usage (civil/military) of components so that your production capacity can be easily switched back and forth more on demand.
(Otherwise you just end up a stockpile of obsolete drones/weapons)
Instead of this we have anti dual-use policies, especially in semiconductor. Any chip a fab produces need hefty paper work to prove it cannot be used for military. This is due to the military-industrial complex lobby. They don't want cheap competition.
It's just a project to extract the maximum amount from the "Sondervermögen", while the conservatives are still having a say.
Doesn't make sense. Esp. since the "Bundeswehr" already lacks personal and the resistance against conscription is huge.
Delaying things has become a typical German thing.
They always "check" what to do, debate endlessly without results.
(Like with their cartel office: no other European country has seen gasoline prices rise as fast and they're still "checking" if there's an illegal cartel agreement -- and their only solution is to lower taxes on gas, which already didn't work back when Russia attacked the Ukraine)
They are still able to improve during disasters, like when they raised the LPG terminals within two years.
They have to have their -- as they phrase it -- "Arsch auf Grundeis" (ass on ground ice) first, before anything is moving forward.
It's a crude mixture of conservatism, corruption/euphemism: "lobbying", laziness and old fashioned know-it alls blocking real, obvious innovation.
I misread “uncrewed” as “unscrewed” and for a moment this became a much stranger, better aerospace story. Not autonomous aircraft, but aircraft apparently liberated from screws. A future of pilotless aircraft is plausible enough; a future of screwless aircraft is much weirder.
Not as weird as one might think, fasteners produce local loads and require holes, so designing without them would be much better. It has been a goal for decades but progress is slow! Maybe uncrewed vehicles can be iterated on more rapidly.
Whether or not Anduril's cheap solution delivered, cheap anti-drone tech does work in Ukraine, interceptor drones are quite effective against Shahed-style drones.
Ukraine and Iran are showing us that scrappy low-cost and improvised drones are the future. The asymmetry with slow procurement, long-term and very expensive delivery is so stark that I feel Europe (Ukraine excluded) and the US have no good answer here.
Cheap systems are certainly a game changer, but I don't think they completely deprecate high performance, high end systems like this. Cheap drones by definition lack powerful long range sensor suites and associated power systems, because such a package would mean they'd no longer be cheap. They have limited range, are slower, and are less able to react dynamically to a changing combat situation.
I can see a system like this acting as the sensor and control node for a flight of cheaper drones. We've had cruise missiles for many decades now, and they're drastically more capable than cheap drones, but they didn't deprecate manned fighters. Something like this might.
These small proxy wars are irrelevant. Scrappy drones are only used because that is all these small countries can produce. For superpowers, the goal isn't to stockpile mediocre equipment; it is to develop intellectual capabilities. During wartime, manufacturing can then be rapidly ramped up. You cannot invent and develop advanced tech overnight, but you can rapidly scale production.
Also fighter jets are capable of doing so much more than fpv drones, its actually funny that people think drones are the future.
I’m not saying scrappy drones are the key to victory in all circumstances.
But look at Iran - their air defenses and navy are destroyed. Yet they can inflict massive damage on their neighbors with drones within 10 minutes flight distance, making them hard to stop.
By doing so they’re keeping the price of oil high and are able to put economic pressure on the US completely disproportionate to their military capabilities.
So even though drones are not the full solution, without an answer to them you can’t win either.
Drones seem to have reached their zenith of operational freedom. I’m genuinely surprised the U.S. and Israel don’t field gun- and laser-based anti-drone demonstrators.
Except, they're not. And by the way, they are two completely different conflicts.
With Ukraine, if Russia had been able to establish total air dominance early on, they wouldn't have been stopped in their tracks the way they were. The fact that they weren't able to do that has nothing to do with cheap drones, which became a decisive factor only much later.
In Iran, US and Israel were able to establish total air dominance, but they didn't have any plan to follow on with boots on the ground, which is still necessary to actually defeat an enemy. And most successful hits so far were achieved through ballistic missiles, not cheap drones.
In terms of military technology we now have aerial and naval drones clearly outperforming previous generation of ships and aircraft in "bang for buck".
> MARS also contains an AI-supported software brain called MindShare which not only replaces the missing pilot, but is also capable of coordinating entire mission groups by being distributed across many manned and uncrewed platforms.
Akshually it's the the 2nd (France), 5th (Germany), 6th (Italy), and 9th (Spain) spots. But that's a bad argument, say.. a way of lying with statistics, considering the 1st place has 43% of the market share AND that exporting arms is not very relevant when the topic du jour is military build-up. The muscovites for example export 7.8% of the market share but that's not that relevant considering they're using the lion's share of military industrial output to terrorize Ukrainians.
Yeah, I believe Kratos (who is doing this joint venture with Airbus) and AeroVironment are the current leaders in the space. Not sure what happens when Anduril goes public
I think the USA has ~3ish airframes/systems that are roughly in this category:
* The Kratos Valkyrie with the USMC in a SEAD role
* Anduril (YFQ-44) and General Atomics (YFQ-42) are battling it out for the USAF's CCA Increment 1 contract (we're apparently supposed to get a decision on that this year) - with Increment 2 probably getting spun up pretty soon
* USN has the Boeing MQ-25 as an drone tanker... once that gets up the speed, I'm fairly certain it's going to morph into something strike capable
Elsewhere, Boeing Australia's Ghost Bat seems to be doing well as well.
"uncrewed combat aircraft"? it is basically an autonomous drone that is trained to act like a wingman. Just a natural evolution of where military drones are heading.
It's completely different. Shaheds are low cost one way attack drones. They're basically just very cost efficient cruise missiles with fresh marketing (and to be fair, the cost efficiency is a true categorical difference).
These drones are "helpers" for fighter jets. It's a type of role that is still in development (no one has an operational collaborative combat aircraft as far as I understand), both technically and in concept.
But the basic idea is that you'll have drones that can somewhat keep up with your fighter jets and help it do stuff that might be too risky. Maybe fly ahead, or be the one with the active emissions or sensors or whatever. Or maybe it's just a way to increase the amount of ordnance/sensors you can fly per sortie / generate from a given amount of training/flight hours in a year.
Of course it did. War is hard, and lots of people die in it. The parent comment said always. I am saying that always is not true. I made no suggestions it was easy.
>There were more wars before any type of mechanisation of warfare
yes but they weren't comparable. With the exception of ancient Chinese wars which are a bit of an odd case given the population sizes and that they kept sending farmers to the front until everyone starved, European pre-modern wars consisted of small armies and relatively low civilian casualty ratios.
It's this and the late 20th century that saw civilian death ratios climb up to 80-90% in mass bombing campaigns and urban warfare environments. People like to use 'medieval' as an insult but the medieval age was quite constrained compared to Gaza. And if you take the pilots out of the equation and fully automate this, that's probably only a taste of what people will do to civilian populations.
Because a picture says more than words, this is the kind of thing you can probably look forward to:
"European pre-modern wars consisted of small armies and relatively low civilian casualty ratios." I don't think the Napoleonic wars of early 17th century can be considered small armies. French Empire had around 1.2 million regulars in 1813.
And this is a bait and switch: you were talking about the propensity of countries or people to go to war, now you are talking about the scale of destruction.
Cities were routinely razed and famines and disease killed scores of people in historical warfare as well - we have the accounts, we know it happened. The "difficulty" of implementing any of this was enormous given the lack of modern logistics or simple things like refrigeration to keep armies resupplied.
How does this support your argument though? World War 1 increased the level of danger and destruction of warfare and...then we had World War 2. If the hypothesis was that making war easy leads to more wars, then no example presented shows that because WW1 was at the time the most destructive war in history and simply set the stage for an even more destructive war.
Very very evil,if we remove the human cost of war our politicians will have no qualms about going to war. Ah well it's just another day in techno hell.
by "combat aircraft" they of course mean weapons platforms suitable for "pasivising" brown skinned agricultural communities and pastoralists, who are beligerantly living on top of extractable resources.
Wouldn't uncrewed aircraft, and (hypersonic) missiles merge technologies and become the same at some point? Why are we engineering the two separately? Are missiles by definition exploding themselves rather than releasing payloads?
(I'm pretty sure Musk could make them reusable. /s)
As a software engineer who thinks that qualifies me to answer other engineering questions, I think it's too hard to mount payloads external to missiles, but normal for aircraft.
This seems to be the generally agreed upon direction defense companies are going, but a couple architectural concerns come to mind regarding this "Manned-Unmanned-Teaming" approach:
- Even if the XQ-58 has a low radar cross section, a swarm of four drones flying in formation with a non-stealthy Eurofighter significantly increases the aggregate probability of detection. Unless these drones are performing active electronic countermeasures or "blinking" to spoof radar returns, they’re essentially a giant "here we are" sign for any modern radar. I wonder if they've compensated via the flight software to manage formation geometry to minimize the group's total observable signature?
- Anti-air systems will prioritize the command aircraft (the Eurofighter) immediately. If the C2 link is severed (kinetic kill, high-power jamming) what is the state-machine logic for the subordinates? Do they revert to a fail-passive (return to base) or -active (continue last assigned strike) mode? Without a human-in-the-loop, rules of engagement issues are abound. (I'm not even accounting for the fact that the drones probably rely on calculations from the command craft, so edge-computing will factor in as well.)
- They're calling these "attritable," but at $4M a pop plus the cost of the sensors, they aren't exactly disposable. Is the cost-per-kill for an adversary’s interceptor missile actually higher than the cost of the drone it's hitting?
(1) Aircraft rarely fly in anything close to formation in combat - large gaps are the norm (1-10 miles), and one would think that increased distance is something that could be exploited by an unmanned platform (able to take more risk, etc.)
(2) Remains to be seen.
(3) Individual Patriot missiles are around that price point, with S300/S400 anywhere from 500k-2M depending on capability. One would think that cost-per-kill would be favorable considering the increased capability granted.
At 10-mile intervals you're maintaining a high-bandwidth, low-latency mesh network in a contested electronic environment. If the command aircraft is 10 miles away and the enemy is jamming the link, the drone is going to be making split-second (potentially) lethal decisions without the pilot.
You're right about them both costing about the same, so the real leverage only comes if these drones can stay out of the engagement envelope while sending cheaper submunitions (likely using something like these Ragnaroks (~$150k) https://www.kratosdefense.com/newsroom/kratos-unveils-revolu...) to do the actual baiting.
> high-bandwidth, low-latency mesh network in a contested electronic environment.
Hard to win at jamming, when you're further away and the opponents are frequency agile.
1. They can use directionality more effectively to their advantage
2. Inverse square law works against you (unlike e.g. jamming GPS where it works for you).
3. They can be frequency agile, strongly rejecting everything outside of the 20MHz slice they're using "right now"-- and have choices of hundreds of those slices.
Fighters already have radars that they expect to "win" with despite that being inverse fourth power, a longer range, and countermeasures. They can send communications-ish signals anywhere over a couple GHz span up near X-band. Peak EIRP that they put out isn't measured in kilowatts, but tens of megawatts.
My concern is less total link loss than what happens under degraded or intermittent connectivity. If the wingman still depends on the manned aircraft for tasking or weapons authority, then the interesting question is how it behaves when the link is noisy rather than gone.
Stealth is less effective against long range radar, stealth is more effective closer in against targeting radars.
When you're high up you can have pretty long 'line of sight' so it's not unreasonable that these could fly way way ahead. 100 miles and way more is not unreasonable.
You basically get 'double standoff'.
I can see this as being almost as effective as manned stealth and if they are cost effective they could very plausibly defeat f22 scenarios.
Once you add in the fact that risk is completely different (no human), then payload, manoeuvrability, g-force recovery safety, all that goes out the window and you have something very crazy.
3 typhoons with 2-3 'suicidal AI wingmen' each way out ahead is going to dust them up pretty good at minimum. It's really hard to say for sure obviously it depends on all the other context as well.
That may be true, but it seems to strengthen the case for moving the human out of the forward cockpit rather than keeping them there.
If the unmanned aircraft are the ones flying far ahead, taking the risk, and extending the standoff envelope, then why is the human still sitting in the forward fighter rather than supervising from a safer node further back?
At that point it seems like the architecture is optimizing for tactical latency and current doctrine, not necessarily for the cleanest end-state.
at 10 miles, the data link cannot be jammed. and it won't be observed, either.
military is very good at this 'mesh networking' thing. L16 is 40 years old at this point, I expect they have something much better.
There are multiple interesting developments wrapped together here.
First, these are intended to be "loyal wingman". They'll be commanded (but not really remotely controlled) from manned fighters nearbyish. Presumably, the "shoot authorization" will be delegated down to the pilots.
Secondly, the actual unmanned platform (the Kratos Valkyrie) is also part of a program of record for the USMC (US Marine Corps) to act as a partner SEAD (suppression of air defence) vehicle.
Thirdly, the "MARS" system chattered about looks to be Airbus' open architecture /system of systems pitch that they were developing for FCAS (the European 6th generation fighter program). MARS and all pitches like it are about ways to make individual platforms as software defined as possible, and to get different platforms/instances to really data/function share as much as possible.
If this program goes well, it shows that Airbus' MARS has the flexibility and capability required to just... layer into/ontop of some random other vendor's hardware/software and then "just work". I think it would be major demonstration/validation of the work.
Why do I get the feeling that the market shifted beneath their feet to drones and these old aircraft companies are using "loyal wingman" to make a half-hearted half-way play between old/new products to stay relevant, which just buys them time to keep selling expensive jets... until pure drone upstarts start eating their lunch.
Like when Blackberry tried to make BlackBerry Storm after iPhone and Blockbuster tried to make Blockbuster Online after Netflix.
Technology shifts rarely wait for these stodgy middle ground transitionary products to find a market.
Roughly everyone expects the 6th generation fighters (the ones currently in development like F-47) to be the last manned generation. Most observers expect many/most 6th gen fighters to become optionally manned within their life span.
The real question is basically - is full autonomy both technically possible and culturally/politically acceptable within 5, 10, or 20 years? Because full autonomy isn't really ready now (or else we wouldn't need hundreds to thousands of drone operators in the Ukraine war). And at least the USAF doesn't think remote control will let them do what they need (which is to fly from Japan to Korea or Taiwan, or Philippines to Taiwan, and contest/control the skies in the face of a basically peer adversary).
Because no one knows that answer, everyone (governments, militaries, manufacturers) is hedging, and CCA is part of that hedge.
I think we are underestimating and/or forgetting that the enemy gets a vote, and remote piloting something from Virginia all the way out to Japan or Korea or Taiwan involves many signals integrity steps along the way. This is to say that you should assume these signals are interrupted and you will not be able to maintain continuous control of the aircraft from whatever datacenter box the "pilot" sits in. That means fully autonomous decision making, functionally for the entire journey, and independent release authorization.
>or else we wouldn't need hundreds to thousands of drone operators in the Ukraine war
I don't think this is the reason the systems are not fully autonomous right now ("fully autonomous" here meaning that they can complete the kill chain independently, no HITL). Even if we assume it true that the drones are not "good enough" to be at parity with a human operator, if you had an essentially limitless amount of them, would you really waste the manpower on operating them in FPV mode? You would not, you would completely saturate the battlefield with them. Thus, as it was in the beforetimes and ever shall be, logistics wins wars.
The reason that FPV drones are so easily disrupted is that they are too light to carry anything more than a radio and fly low.
Disrupting the signal for a normal-sized aircraft is much harder. If you're flying at 10s of thousands of feet and have a line of sight to multiple satellites it's going to take some serious weaponry to disrupt that.
True. But the next rung up the escalation ladder is of course disrupting the satellites.
I envision them all gone seconds into any large scale war.
The G forces are another thing. I wonder why they aren't stsrting wth missle platforms instead.
Sure, winged flight has uses, but taking a missle platform, adding small munitions instead of a big bang?
I'm not sure about this. Space is big and these satellite constellations are getting very large, with lots of redundancy. I know I'm sort of arguing against my previous point, but bear with me for a sec. You'd need an anti-satellite system that either destroys them kinetically (accepting the cost of the debris field) or one that breaks them electronically (an EMP or another device that defeats them electronically). The United States' underlying philosophy on advanced weapons has, for a long time, been precision so I could see the emergence of in-orbit interception & defeat/disable platforms. But you'd need a lot of them for the doctrine to be effective, which means a lot of mass-to-orbit logistics. Adversaries do not have this, so I would expect e.g. PRC to have an alternate strategy of rendering entire orbits unusable or dangerous, which I think is easier.
Regarding your missile platform question, there are several companies that already manufacturing loitering munitions, and long-range loitering cruise missiles are on the roadmap, so to speak.
Interesting point re: satellites, I'd say the best tactic here is to presume all gone immediately. Eg, from a planning perspective. The reality may be that the war may need to stretch out a bit, before action is taken.
Of course any planned action would likely try to strike first, by some means.
> I wonder why they aren't stsrting wth missle platforms instead
Price and ease of manufacture. Missiles are expensive and hard to build.
Latest FPV drones in Ukraine became much more resistant to electronic countermeasures. Plus other drones are used as retranslators.
Seems they are using kilometers of fibre optic cables, so they fly tethered and communication can't be disrupted.
I'd hate to be part of the clean-up crew when that war ends. Broken fibre is nasty stuff.
I believe they’ve also deployed hybrid solutions: FPV fibre drones launched and piloted via link to an unmanned platform.
So a drone boat with good/secure signalling pulls up and a bunch of fibre optic drones launch from that point penetrating inland.
I'll gladly take up the fibre clean up. You deal with the mines :)
FPV drones cannot have powerful GPU yet to enable truly autonomous flight. And the issue is not only weight/energy restrictions, but also cost.
Autonomous flight is significantly easier than autonomous driving. You just fly between points in space, and there's nothing but air inbetween. The ground control handles most of collision avoidance, and if that's not available, it's easily achieved by moving 300ft/100m up or down.
True, but take into account that plants need to be able to fly/fight with instruments only and without vision.
Also dogfights are much rarer now, most people just fling rockets at each other (so you know how much these cost, a b200 seems cheap in comparison)
You don't need a super powerful GPU to do computer vision. There are cheap small devices that can do it.
> This is to say that you should assume these signals are interrupted and you will not be able to maintain continuous control of the aircraft from whatever datacenter box the "pilot" sits in. That means fully autonomous decision making, functionally for the entire journey, and independent release authorization.
Only if every mission is absolutely critical. If disruptions are rare then you don't need autonomy.
Or more interestingly with the low-earth sat/data network. Seeing as projectssuch as starlink are basically mil in nature with a side of barely profitable civilian use. The whole data centers in space makes more sense. These are not for running cat blogs and video streaming , which is waht they are/will be marketed as. Realworld application will always be a command and control node spanning the globe for the mil use. And as its rolloed out globally can basically provide jammingfree links for the autonomous commands from space.
How do you defend them?
>Roughly everyone expects the 6th generation fighters (the ones currently in development like F-47) to be the last manned generation. Most observers expect many/most 6th gen fighters to become optionally manned within their life span.
The said that about the 5th though. Like I've personally talked to people who were actively working on the F35 and they were saying "last manned aircraft" in like 2011ish.
I expect autonomy to be a long steady improvement of taking on additional subroutines of increasing complexity of decisions being made along the way. Fly here, land there, kill that, go over there without being detected, etc, etc, until humans are making only a select set of decisions that will probably be randomly sprinkled at the high and low levels.
Kind of like how when we build a brick wall the "vision" and the actual laying of bricks still get done by human but all the intermediary steps are drudgery that can be trivially automated (not to say they are all automated, just that they could be if labor $$ vs software $$ penciled out that way)
Yeah, I remember thinking that about the 5th gen myself. But I think part of that way unclarity around when the 6th gen would appear. 2011ish would be a weird timeframe.
Obama didn't announce the "pivot to Asia" until 2012. A lot of the world was still believing in the whole unipolar moment thing. The F-35 hadn't even started training squadrons in service yet. 6th generation probably felt really far away. 2016 onwards has been a major acceleration in all sorts of ways.
In my eyes, 6th generation was really ignited by the focus on China. The PCA/NGAD/F-47 was first out the gate, and really set the tempo and got everyone else going.
I agree with your estimation of the likely development path. I expect that approach to merge/converge from the other direction - I expect there to also be a parallel path of fully autonomous systems growing to occupy ever greater mission sets. Imagine telling a drone "I need an ELINT mission in the area and timeframe" (and it plans its own launch time, flight route, calculates fuel loads, communicates with ground staff), or "I need you to airdrop this supply pallet".
I don't think there's a way that the 6th generation will be manned.
> And at least the USAF doesn't think remote control will let them do what they need (which is to fly from Japan to Korea or Taiwan, or Philippines to Taiwan, and contest/control the skies in the face of a basically peer adversary).
I mean, they wouldn't think that, would they? It would put their pilots out of a job. But most flying has been done by autopilot long before AI, and even if/when you need a human in the loop, why would you want to put that human in the cockpit rather than safely in Virginia?
Manned-Unmanned teaming is not a new concept created in the last couple months to placate fighter pilots in the age of ai. With 5th generation fighter using datalink they to use the active radar in far away AWAC planes for targeting so the stealth fighter can get closer to the enemy without breaking cover by turning on active radar.
If you can outsource the radar on a jet it is not a huge leap in logic to put the very hot missiles onto a unmanned aircraft. All of these concepts where written up 20 years ago by both china and the US
> With 5th generation fighter using datalink they to use the active radar in far away AWAC planes for targeting so the stealth fighter can get closer to the enemy without breaking cover by turning on active radar.
What benefit does a human pilot offer in this case? Are going to be using their eyes to track their location or see a Chinese fighter jet launching a standoff antiair missile at them? Drones can do AWACS and deep sensor roles, with a pilot and sensor operators far away from the planes.
> All of these concepts where written up 20 years ago by both china and the US
Defense contractors and the gov planners are often the same group of people, the same small community, there's not that many vendors. They show up at defence trade shows and see what industry is offering them. They tend to stick with the same big safe companies that change slowly. Bold ideas are infrequent. The smaller countries can take those risks easier than America.
My read is that the "loyal wingman" thing is a ploy to get around all the pilots / expilots in Air Force brass who might otherwise gatekeep anything they think is a threat to the careers of human pilots. These people want the Air Force to be about hotshots flying planes; this is part of the reason the US spun off the space stuff, because Air Force brass is institutionally incapable of taking anything other than manned flight seriously.
Really loyal wingmen are just an extension of jets.
Ultimately a carrier strike group could achieve many of the missions a F35 can through cruise missiles, ballistic missiles etc.
What an F35 provides is a sensory platform deep into enemy airspace.
But with the F35 being very expensive, and required to stay silent in RF to maintain stealth it's further desirable to have a loyal wingman out there.
The whole thing becomes one large sensor network with th added weapons.
It makes most sense in a near adversary situation and as it stands that particular scenario is why the F22 is not exported.
mistakes in A/A combat can have serious repercussions. not only loss of expensive air vehicles, but things like civilian airliners.
'loyal wingman' gives the kill / no kill decision to an Air Force officer. And having the decision maker geographically close eliminates jamming, delays, and the requirements to have a satellite infrastructure (like is required for Predator UAV's).
i hope we never assign a piece of code, AI or not, to be the decision maker.
> i hope we never assign a piece of code, AI or not, to be the decision maker.
This is already a past station, just not at Airbus.
> just not at Airbus
Airbus has publicized that it is working on a Project Maven style project with France's DGA [0][1].
Thales also publicly launched and demonstrated SkyDefender a couple days ago [2].
Mistral AI also announced in January 2026 that it is working with the DGA to productionize it's models for military applications [3] - ironically similar in manner to how the DoD was using Claude but is now using Gemini and GPT.
No country is going to leave networked, autonomous offensive and defensive capabilities on the table.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/airbus-wi...
[1] - https://www.janes.com/osint-insights/defence-news/defence/ai...
[2] - https://www.janes.com/osint-insights/defence-news/air/thales...
[3] - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/marjorietoucas_were-happy-to-...
Yes, we are ~4-5 years into AI kill-chains now, though maybe only 1-3 with full autonomy.
You haven't been paying attention. We are at least 47 years into AI kill chains.
https://www.vp4association.com/aircraft-information-2/32-2/m...
That's not really what they meant. They meant that the weapon is guided by software that decides which targets to pick and autonomously makes that decision without a human in the loop. The device seeks you instead of you going to it.
A landmine has no friend-or-foe-or-noncombatant decision engine, it will kill you or maim you just like it will kill or maim the guy that laid it or any other passer by.
You missed the point. The Mk 60 Captor is not a "land" mine. It is guided by software and autonomously makes the decision to launch a homing torpedo without a human in the loop.
A homing torpedo/release mechanism is not AI by the normal definition of the word. You're welcome to redefine words as much as you want but it's a bit silly. We also don't use that term for heatseekers or for line followers.
The 'signature' bit is interesting, but I'd still not label that AI, and neither does anybody else. It is a loitering munition, I'll give you that, and I think that that brings it closer to the 'mine' definition of things than the 'AI killbot'.
It's odd how some people now think the term "AI" only applies to LLMs. I guess they're just ignorant of computing history.
https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/proposed-dod-princ...
No, it obviously does not only apply to LLMs. It just does not apply to loitering munitions from decades ago. And I'm pretty sure nobody ever labeled that thing AI before you did.
Those don't self launch.
I'm talking about systems that classify thousands of targets at once and can self-launch. Computerized kill chain.
Those self launch. Did you even read the article?
Drones doesn't automatically mean no pilot or no human in the loop. Motherships and relays to command centers solve nearly everything loyal wingman offers. The only question is data access (which is still a major issue in manned jets operating in EW conditions far from home).
Same with the idea that drones can't have high end radars and other stuff which requires a fancy human jet in the loop. Decidated single purpose drones with high end sensors can solve a similar purpose with a much lower risk and cost.
One argument is that fighter airplanes are becoming more like airborne control centers than actual fighters. You don't get the same level of situational awareness from a remote controlled drone camera than from inside a cockpit. And if you look at the F-35, what is often put forward is its stealth and communication capabilities. Radars, electronic warfare, etc... that's what's important, and yes, having a human in the loop is important too. These planes can dogfight too, but ideally, they shouldn't, but they still have to be able to defend themselves when things go wrong.
Drones like they have in Ukraine are more like cheap missiles, they don't compete against fighter jets, and they can't do anything to them once they have taken off.
Those low-cost drones are just a fad. Fiber optic TV guided exploding thing is literally the oldest kind of anti-tank missiles. Russian winged cruise missiles are even older, early cold war kinds of stuff. It just so happens that none of Ukraine, Russia, Iran etc has air dominance nor proper war time production capacities, and so they must resort to substituting military equipment with remixes of AliExpress stuffs.
Just in the invasion in Iran we all saw Apache handling drones with ease. They can probably put on the minigun or even microgun on an MQ-9, which is a drone, but not like the ones discussed here. Or someone might realize a turret on a Super Tucano is cheaper than the Reaper ground control trailer. My point is, Ukraine and Russia throwing drones at each others is not a sure sign that that's the war of the future.
The war in Iran proves the opposite: It is actually the future. The US could easily establish air dominance over Iran, yet it can't stop their military from launching smaller drones both in the air and at sea. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed and air power alone seems unlikely to fix the situation. If you want to effectively eliminate an opponent nowadays you need an army of drones - the economics don't work out if you are only fielding expensive ships, planes and missiles. And regarding your point that an Apache can easily shoot down a drone: Roughly 9/10 drones in the Russia Ukraine frontline get shot down and the remaining 10% make up for about 80% of the casualties (rest being mostly artillery and mines).
Exactly. "An Apache can shoot down a drone" is like "Tiger tanks were better than Shermans": the relative numbers of each matter.
Right - the relative cost matters very much.
A Shahed drone costs $20K each. The Patriot missile interceptor costs $4 Mil each.
And the inevitable result is that the interceptors run out first
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-war-israel-tells-us-...
https://www.economist.com/international/2026/03/13/gulf-stat...
https://bsky.app/profile/mekka.mekka-tech.com/post/3mgrvx5gr...
The only lasting solution to low-cost drone attacks is low-cost defences. Ukraine knows this. The US apparently does not yet. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/10/what-are-the-ukrain...
But the end result is not "low-cost drones are just a fad." it's drones vs. more drones vs. yet more drones.
You expect drones to replace civil passenger aircraft any time soon?
I think GP's point is more relevant than your question implies. The vast majority of civilian flights could be flown entirely autonomously right now. (I'm not close enough to the aviation industry to make a confident guess, but +90% wouldn't surprise me.) Humans are there to take (decision or control) over when something goes off the happy path - in fact, pilots are encouraged / required to hand-fly landings that could be done automatically in order to keep their skills current. Obviously no one would accept even a 0.01% crash rate for civilian flights, so we're many orders of magnitude of improvement away from replacing pilots in that sector.
Military calculations are very different. Every military asset - most definitely including humans - is disposable, and all wars are (in some dimension) wars of attrition. Holding mission success constant, when the cost x capability x ability to manufacture for autonomous platforms becomes cheaper than all that plus training / replacement cost of human pilots, then human pilots will disappear. The logic of war being what it is, I expect HITL decision-making to very quickly be dropped as soon as it is seen to be retarding the progress of a cheaper option.
That is why I was talking about civil aircraft. With the waiting list for those aircraft Airbus can stay relevant for a very long time.
> The vast majority of civilian flights could be flown entirely autonomously right now.
This is extremely dependent on your definition of "autonomously" because at the moment they are not at all approaching autonomy.
At best, they'd be automatic, in the most rote way.
Does this just continue the ‘western way’ of spending a crap load of money on each military item, instead of getting good at making A LOT of something really cheaply?
Ukraine and Iran are both showing it quickly becomes a war of attrition and fancy weapons get very expensive very fast, or run out very fast.
I agree that European militaries need to be able to generate a lot of mass.
But we would be remiss to pick up on some threads from both Ukraine and Iran.
In Ukraine, the VKS is still able to generate substantial damage (both in tactical support of ground forces, as well as part of the civilian bombing campaign) with glide bombs (carrying 500kg+ class bombs, launched by tactical jets from over Russian controlled airspace).
These tactics are effective, and are able to do things that Shaheds aren't quite capable of doing - for example ensuring destruction of certain targets with a single hit. I imagine Ukraine would love to be able to be able to take glide bombs off the table, but it can't.
It can't because it lacks the air force to conduct an offensive counter-air campaign, and it lacks the long range strike capability to permanently disable relevant airfields, or destroy enough airframes on the ground.
European militaries would like to be able to avoid this situation, and therefore certain relatively exquisite capabilities are needed.
In Iran, while Iran has demonstrated its ability to severely tax the much more exquisite forces of the US+Israel and the Gulf States, the reality is that they have NOT been able to meaningfully degrade the US or Israel's ability to bomb Iranian ground targets at will.
European militaries would also like to be able to prevent the VKS from just... bombing central to eastern Europe at will.
European war aims - which would be to able to defeat Russian forces so soundly and quickly that Russia will forever be deterred, requires exquisite capabilities, that are able to strike the Russian war machine from the front line, all the way back several hundred kilometers in high precision, and high density (in time and in weight of payload), in a way that can actually cause collapse (when combined with ground counter attacks). It cannot rely on a Ukrainian style war or Ukrainian style tactics purely because... well, Russia is infact actually fighting that war right now, and hasn't given up yet.
A Europe that has to fight at all, is a Europe that has already lost. A Europe that has to fight for more than a few weeks or months, is a Europe that has deeply lost.
Using a beaten down Russia in the current year is probably a bad way to plan for your future military. It should be considered against a real target like China where all of those fancy jets won't get close to China proper (w/ long range AA missiles and SAMs) so everything will be at standoff range including SEAD campaigns. Which is where mass drones and cheap cruise missiles/decoys will be much more effective.
Using high end jets as delivery platforms for high end missiles is not scalable in a conflict anymore. Likewise most estimates say even the US will run out of Tomahawks within the first 1-2 months of a conflict with China. They are gambling those missiles open up a big enough window to do anything else while their own Navy is under siege in the process.
> instead of getting good at making A LOT of something really cheaply?
also you'd want to maximize dual usage (civil/military) of components so that your production capacity can be easily switched back and forth more on demand.
(Otherwise you just end up a stockpile of obsolete drones/weapons)
Instead of this we have anti dual-use policies, especially in semiconductor. Any chip a fab produces need hefty paper work to prove it cannot be used for military. This is due to the military-industrial complex lobby. They don't want cheap competition.
No it does not. Drone warfare is a hot topic in Europe, there’s a lot going on right now.
https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/aerospace-news/2025/ger...
Also, Helsing is apparently a decacorn now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsing_(company)
The Ukrainians are still getting a lot of use out of F16s and the US from their aircraft carriers. These things are not fully redundant yet.
It's just a project to extract the maximum amount from the "Sondervermögen", while the conservatives are still having a say.
Doesn't make sense. Esp. since the "Bundeswehr" already lacks personal and the resistance against conscription is huge.
Delaying things has become a typical German thing. They always "check" what to do, debate endlessly without results. (Like with their cartel office: no other European country has seen gasoline prices rise as fast and they're still "checking" if there's an illegal cartel agreement -- and their only solution is to lower taxes on gas, which already didn't work back when Russia attacked the Ukraine) They are still able to improve during disasters, like when they raised the LPG terminals within two years. They have to have their -- as they phrase it -- "Arsch auf Grundeis" (ass on ground ice) first, before anything is moving forward.
It's a crude mixture of conservatism, corruption/euphemism: "lobbying", laziness and old fashioned know-it alls blocking real, obvious innovation.
Sure seems so. They should just clone the latest Russian improved Geran and call it a day, but oc they won’t.
The thing in the article, a modified Vlakyrie is very different to a Geran suicide drone. It's more an uncrewed mini F-35 https://www.twz.com/air/xq-58-valkyrie-heading-to-european-m...
Yeah, more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_S-70_Okhotnik-B
I misread “uncrewed” as “unscrewed” and for a moment this became a much stranger, better aerospace story. Not autonomous aircraft, but aircraft apparently liberated from screws. A future of pilotless aircraft is plausible enough; a future of screwless aircraft is much weirder.
Much of the aircraft is rivets, not screws.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/6312/why-are-ai...
"Airplanes are riveted, not screwed because they are the product of engineers, not lawyers."
Not as weird as one might think, fasteners produce local loads and require holes, so designing without them would be much better. It has been a goal for decades but progress is slow! Maybe uncrewed vehicles can be iterated on more rapidly.
> a future of screwless aircraft is much weirder
This is actually an important part of what makes a stealth airframe "stealthy", along with other stuff.
Let's see how this turns out. The hyped Anduril "cheap" anti-drone tech didn't work in Ukraine and evidently does not work in the Middle East.
I have more trust in Airbus than the PayPal mafia though.
Whether or not Anduril's cheap solution delivered, cheap anti-drone tech does work in Ukraine, interceptor drones are quite effective against Shahed-style drones.
Ukraine and Iran are showing us that scrappy low-cost and improvised drones are the future. The asymmetry with slow procurement, long-term and very expensive delivery is so stark that I feel Europe (Ukraine excluded) and the US have no good answer here.
Cheap systems are certainly a game changer, but I don't think they completely deprecate high performance, high end systems like this. Cheap drones by definition lack powerful long range sensor suites and associated power systems, because such a package would mean they'd no longer be cheap. They have limited range, are slower, and are less able to react dynamically to a changing combat situation.
I can see a system like this acting as the sensor and control node for a flight of cheaper drones. We've had cruise missiles for many decades now, and they're drastically more capable than cheap drones, but they didn't deprecate manned fighters. Something like this might.
These small proxy wars are irrelevant. Scrappy drones are only used because that is all these small countries can produce. For superpowers, the goal isn't to stockpile mediocre equipment; it is to develop intellectual capabilities. During wartime, manufacturing can then be rapidly ramped up. You cannot invent and develop advanced tech overnight, but you can rapidly scale production.
Also fighter jets are capable of doing so much more than fpv drones, its actually funny that people think drones are the future.
I’m not saying scrappy drones are the key to victory in all circumstances.
But look at Iran - their air defenses and navy are destroyed. Yet they can inflict massive damage on their neighbors with drones within 10 minutes flight distance, making them hard to stop.
By doing so they’re keeping the price of oil high and are able to put economic pressure on the US completely disproportionate to their military capabilities.
So even though drones are not the full solution, without an answer to them you can’t win either.
> they can inflict massive damage
Damage. Not massive damage.
Drones seem to have reached their zenith of operational freedom. I’m genuinely surprised the U.S. and Israel don’t field gun- and laser-based anti-drone demonstrators.
Except, they're not. And by the way, they are two completely different conflicts.
With Ukraine, if Russia had been able to establish total air dominance early on, they wouldn't have been stopped in their tracks the way they were. The fact that they weren't able to do that has nothing to do with cheap drones, which became a decisive factor only much later.
In Iran, US and Israel were able to establish total air dominance, but they didn't have any plan to follow on with boots on the ground, which is still necessary to actually defeat an enemy. And most successful hits so far were achieved through ballistic missiles, not cheap drones.
In terms of military technology we now have aerial and naval drones clearly outperforming previous generation of ships and aircraft in "bang for buck".
Land warfare is next on the list: https://time.com/article/2026/03/09/ai-robots-soldiers-war/
> MARS also contains an AI-supported software brain called MindShare which not only replaces the missing pilot, but is also capable of coordinating entire mission groups by being distributed across many manned and uncrewed platforms.
So this is Skynet v0.1?
Good! Great to hear! EU needs to grow its domestic military industry, the French were right all along.
They are reprogramming a US built drone to the German datalink equivalent with some AI sprinkled on top. Unfortunately far away from a real industry.
That's how it was always done. Nobody invented the whole thing from scratch.
Some other country started by _stealing_ US tech and now they arguably have a higher military tech throughput. Everyone has to start somewhere..
The EU already has the 2nd, 4th, 6th and 10th largest share of global arms exports. Losing the 8th place slot due to Brexit.
Akshually it's the the 2nd (France), 5th (Germany), 6th (Italy), and 9th (Spain) spots. But that's a bad argument, say.. a way of lying with statistics, considering the 1st place has 43% of the market share AND that exporting arms is not very relevant when the topic du jour is military build-up. The muscovites for example export 7.8% of the market share but that's not that relevant considering they're using the lion's share of military industrial output to terrorize Ukrainians.
It is relevant because having an industrial base and know how makes it much easier to scale up. Hopefully that’s what will now happen.
Also, let’s see how the 43% holds up when European and gulf states do their next round of procurement.
Yes, arguably imports are more important than exports... It's about what you have rather than what you have sold to others...
Yeah, I believe Kratos (who is doing this joint venture with Airbus) and AeroVironment are the current leaders in the space. Not sure what happens when Anduril goes public
I think the USA has ~3ish airframes/systems that are roughly in this category:
* The Kratos Valkyrie with the USMC in a SEAD role
* Anduril (YFQ-44) and General Atomics (YFQ-42) are battling it out for the USAF's CCA Increment 1 contract (we're apparently supposed to get a decision on that this year) - with Increment 2 probably getting spun up pretty soon
* USN has the Boeing MQ-25 as an drone tanker... once that gets up the speed, I'm fairly certain it's going to morph into something strike capable
Elsewhere, Boeing Australia's Ghost Bat seems to be doing well as well.
Does general atomics have plans on spinning off and going public?
"uncrewed combat aircraft"? it is basically an autonomous drone that is trained to act like a wingman. Just a natural evolution of where military drones are heading.
Airbus' Ghost Bat equivalent?
Top Gun Maverick was kinda right.
Similar to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_S-70_Okhotnik-B
Is this the EU's version of the Shahed drones? or is it something different?
It's completely different. Shaheds are low cost one way attack drones. They're basically just very cost efficient cruise missiles with fresh marketing (and to be fair, the cost efficiency is a true categorical difference).
These drones are "helpers" for fighter jets. It's a type of role that is still in development (no one has an operational collaborative combat aircraft as far as I understand), both technically and in concept.
But the basic idea is that you'll have drones that can somewhat keep up with your fighter jets and help it do stuff that might be too risky. Maybe fly ahead, or be the one with the active emissions or sensors or whatever. Or maybe it's just a way to increase the amount of ordnance/sensors you can fly per sortie / generate from a given amount of training/flight hours in a year.
Somehow closest concept I imagine is shmup pods.
https://shmup.fandom.com/wiki/Pod
There's a funny term some cool kids use for them, "drone", I think? Personally I think it's too short to convey the full utility.
"Begun, the Clone War has." -Yoda
They are already on in Ukraine.
The worry being that war will be a lot easier to stomach when none of the combatants are alive.
But a robot war is an endless war. There will always be more robots to fight until the economy is completely exhausted.
Not necessarily. If the factories that build the robots are taken out, for example. Someone (even a robot) still has to build them.
What if the factories are located in foreign countries and the belligerents are only buying off-the-shelf products ?
Wars are always bad news and robot wars are very bad news. Many countries will fall into an endless war economy.
It turned out to be pretty hard to take out Germany’s factories in ww2.
Of course it did. War is hard, and lots of people die in it. The parent comment said always. I am saying that always is not true. I made no suggestions it was easy.
The history of warfare, hell the literal current warfare happening in Ukraine makes this entire argument unbelievably specious.
There were more wars before any type of mechanisation of warfare, with the only slow down really happening after nuclear weapons were developed.
>There were more wars before any type of mechanisation of warfare
yes but they weren't comparable. With the exception of ancient Chinese wars which are a bit of an odd case given the population sizes and that they kept sending farmers to the front until everyone starved, European pre-modern wars consisted of small armies and relatively low civilian casualty ratios.
It's this and the late 20th century that saw civilian death ratios climb up to 80-90% in mass bombing campaigns and urban warfare environments. People like to use 'medieval' as an insult but the medieval age was quite constrained compared to Gaza. And if you take the pilots out of the equation and fully automate this, that's probably only a taste of what people will do to civilian populations.
Because a picture says more than words, this is the kind of thing you can probably look forward to:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G_63OmTawAABeIg.jpg?name=orig
"European pre-modern wars consisted of small armies and relatively low civilian casualty ratios." I don't think the Napoleonic wars of early 17th century can be considered small armies. French Empire had around 1.2 million regulars in 1813.
I don't think most people would consider them pre modern either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity
And this is a bait and switch: you were talking about the propensity of countries or people to go to war, now you are talking about the scale of destruction.
Cities were routinely razed and famines and disease killed scores of people in historical warfare as well - we have the accounts, we know it happened. The "difficulty" of implementing any of this was enormous given the lack of modern logistics or simple things like refrigeration to keep armies resupplied.
How does this support your argument though? World War 1 increased the level of danger and destruction of warfare and...then we had World War 2. If the hypothesis was that making war easy leads to more wars, then no example presented shows that because WW1 was at the time the most destructive war in history and simply set the stage for an even more destructive war.
None on the offensive side, perhaps.
Very very evil,if we remove the human cost of war our politicians will have no qualms about going to war. Ah well it's just another day in techno hell.
by "combat aircraft" they of course mean weapons platforms suitable for "pasivising" brown skinned agricultural communities and pastoralists, who are beligerantly living on top of extractable resources.
> Airbus selling ai-operated strike drones.
FTFY
No you didnt
Cylons
Wouldn't uncrewed aircraft, and (hypersonic) missiles merge technologies and become the same at some point? Why are we engineering the two separately? Are missiles by definition exploding themselves rather than releasing payloads?
(I'm pretty sure Musk could make them reusable. /s)
As a software engineer who thinks that qualifies me to answer other engineering questions, I think it's too hard to mount payloads external to missiles, but normal for aircraft.
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A modern V-2. Nothing could possibly go wrong!
Did they pick the word "uncrewed" to not use the word "unmanned"? If so, I'm not hopeful. Might be another EuroDrone disaster.
Even the absence of a person could potentially become offended, I suppose.
Better than unpersoned I guess?
This seems to be the generally agreed upon direction defense companies are going, but a couple architectural concerns come to mind regarding this "Manned-Unmanned-Teaming" approach:
- Even if the XQ-58 has a low radar cross section, a swarm of four drones flying in formation with a non-stealthy Eurofighter significantly increases the aggregate probability of detection. Unless these drones are performing active electronic countermeasures or "blinking" to spoof radar returns, they’re essentially a giant "here we are" sign for any modern radar. I wonder if they've compensated via the flight software to manage formation geometry to minimize the group's total observable signature?
- Anti-air systems will prioritize the command aircraft (the Eurofighter) immediately. If the C2 link is severed (kinetic kill, high-power jamming) what is the state-machine logic for the subordinates? Do they revert to a fail-passive (return to base) or -active (continue last assigned strike) mode? Without a human-in-the-loop, rules of engagement issues are abound. (I'm not even accounting for the fact that the drones probably rely on calculations from the command craft, so edge-computing will factor in as well.)
- They're calling these "attritable," but at $4M a pop plus the cost of the sensors, they aren't exactly disposable. Is the cost-per-kill for an adversary’s interceptor missile actually higher than the cost of the drone it's hitting?
(1) Aircraft rarely fly in anything close to formation in combat - large gaps are the norm (1-10 miles), and one would think that increased distance is something that could be exploited by an unmanned platform (able to take more risk, etc.)
(2) Remains to be seen.
(3) Individual Patriot missiles are around that price point, with S300/S400 anywhere from 500k-2M depending on capability. One would think that cost-per-kill would be favorable considering the increased capability granted.
At 10-mile intervals you're maintaining a high-bandwidth, low-latency mesh network in a contested electronic environment. If the command aircraft is 10 miles away and the enemy is jamming the link, the drone is going to be making split-second (potentially) lethal decisions without the pilot.
You're right about them both costing about the same, so the real leverage only comes if these drones can stay out of the engagement envelope while sending cheaper submunitions (likely using something like these Ragnaroks (~$150k) https://www.kratosdefense.com/newsroom/kratos-unveils-revolu...) to do the actual baiting.
> high-bandwidth, low-latency mesh network in a contested electronic environment.
Hard to win at jamming, when you're further away and the opponents are frequency agile.
1. They can use directionality more effectively to their advantage
2. Inverse square law works against you (unlike e.g. jamming GPS where it works for you).
3. They can be frequency agile, strongly rejecting everything outside of the 20MHz slice they're using "right now"-- and have choices of hundreds of those slices.
Fighters already have radars that they expect to "win" with despite that being inverse fourth power, a longer range, and countermeasures. They can send communications-ish signals anywhere over a couple GHz span up near X-band. Peak EIRP that they put out isn't measured in kilowatts, but tens of megawatts.
Fair point, “jammed” was too binary.
My concern is less total link loss than what happens under degraded or intermittent connectivity. If the wingman still depends on the manned aircraft for tasking or weapons authority, then the interesting question is how it behaves when the link is noisy rather than gone.
That feels like the real hinge in the concept.
Stealth is less effective against long range radar, stealth is more effective closer in against targeting radars.
When you're high up you can have pretty long 'line of sight' so it's not unreasonable that these could fly way way ahead. 100 miles and way more is not unreasonable.
You basically get 'double standoff'.
I can see this as being almost as effective as manned stealth and if they are cost effective they could very plausibly defeat f22 scenarios.
Once you add in the fact that risk is completely different (no human), then payload, manoeuvrability, g-force recovery safety, all that goes out the window and you have something very crazy.
3 typhoons with 2-3 'suicidal AI wingmen' each way out ahead is going to dust them up pretty good at minimum. It's really hard to say for sure obviously it depends on all the other context as well.
That may be true, but it seems to strengthen the case for moving the human out of the forward cockpit rather than keeping them there.
If the unmanned aircraft are the ones flying far ahead, taking the risk, and extending the standoff envelope, then why is the human still sitting in the forward fighter rather than supervising from a safer node further back?
At that point it seems like the architecture is optimizing for tactical latency and current doctrine, not necessarily for the cleanest end-state.
The human is 100 miles back, that's the point.
at 10 miles, the data link cannot be jammed. and it won't be observed, either. military is very good at this 'mesh networking' thing. L16 is 40 years old at this point, I expect they have something much better.
The Link16 replacement is called MADL. It is used in the F-35 and has capabilities not available using Link16.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multifunction_Advanced_Data_Li...