It's logistically a lot easier (and generally less expensive as well) to support a single platform than 10 different platforms. What Draugnar says about pilots goes as well for general maintenance (wouldn't have to train ground crews to support 10 different models any more), spare parts, etc.

A lot of the reason why I support the program is because our fleet is aging. We need new, (5th?) generation planes in order to keep air superiority. I mean, we've designed two new classes of aircraft carriers since a lot of these planes were designed.

Resurrecting this thread because I am genuinely interested and someone might know: Do we need human beings in fighters at all? Is the hurdle lag time? The ability of enemies to jam communications between a fighter drone and a controller?

ckroberts - I saw some blip on TV just the other day about an unmanned F-18.

Theorhetically no, we don't need pilots, but realistically yes, for the time being, I think we need pilots for true air superiority...for the short term.

It's apparently a lot easier to get a drone to defect than a human pilot.
http://rt.com/usa/iran-drone-hack-stealth-943/

But why? It seems like it would be cheaper and easier to, for the cost of one super high-tech fighter, to buy ten or a hundred drones that can chase down an enemy fighter and shoot missiles or kamikaze it.

I understand the need for human pilots in bombers, but for air-to-air superiority it seems like having a person in the cockpit actually makes fighters less effective, since we have planes now that can do maneuvers that would kill or render unconscious any person inside.

Sorry, Tolstoy, missed that when replying to krellin. Is it that difficult to create robust security for a drone?

It is apparently very difficult, ckroberts. Wireless communication is very hard to make truly secure.

ckroberts - Do you think unbreakable security exists? Do you want to place very dangerous weapons in air space over US troops with no tether but a wireless signal?

<shudders...>

And drones still have pilots, so your 10 drones to one fighter also means ten drone pilots to one fighter pilot.

We'll have some sort of next generation fighter come what may, but it very well could be the last. Just think about it. What do manned fighters do better than drones? Are the things that they do better than drones relevant to 21st century warfare?

Fighters could very well be this century's battleships, kept around long after strategic concerns and technological advancements make them obsolete due to a mixture of an abundance of caution and sentimentality.

I disagree. There's nothing like knowing your life is on the lone to get your adrenalin pumping and improve your reaction times. Plus, it is much easier to turn and tilt your head looking for a change in a dot out in the distance. You don't get the same perspective flying remotely. Finally, you don't get the feedback from the plane when flying it remotely from the ground.

Life is on the line...

The question still remains though: should the U.S.A. spend billions of dollars on aircraft that we don't necessarily need?

Military types are generally a conservative bunch. They like to stick with what they know. Unless circumstances force them to rethink things trying to make changes is very difficult.

I think drones taking over from manned fighters is inevitable. I dare say Air Forces across the globe will insist on keeping certain squadrons of manned aircraft, using the security of the signal used to fly them as an excuse, but increasingly they will become more and more like the Life Guards and the Blues and Royals are in the UK.

It's not just fighters, though. We have been too long without a major war for military technology to remain fit for purpose. If we did have a such a war I strongly suspect that a huge amount of the equipment we rely on will be proven next to useless in the field.

As for drones: drones get hacked. That's a fact. You can't completely secure it unless a pilot is in the drone, but that's rather pointless. Besides, there are EMPs as well. Seriously, I have no problem with a drone in my room, as long as it isn't armed or otherwise harmful. Simple as that.

As for the JSF: IMO it's a bad idea for the Dutch at least (we're in on the project as well :(), since what are we going to do with 2 planes which we would basically use for peacekeeping when we already have F-16s for that?

@ steephie

Out of interest, in what sense is a drone more at risk to an EMP than, say, a Eurofighter?

That depends on the Eurofighter, for example: does it use electricity for crucial parts?
Other than that, there are more points the EMP can bother a drone than in the actual drone. If the signals for the drone get disrupted you've got a crashing drone as well, while a Eurofighter pilot just loses contact.

"If the signals for the drone get disrupted you've got a crashing drone"

Do you? I don't see why. Automatic pilots are pretty well advance. I'd be surprised if drones didn't have such a system to take over if human contact was lost. If the EMP was sufficiently strong and well targeted to fry the systems in the drone it would do the same for mannaed aircraft as well.

One-time pads are completely secure. I assume there is an electronic version of that, and somebody is physically handling these drones once a day and could provide the digital pad for the drone. This might mean some limitations in what the drone could do (like a limited ability to change missions in flight), but drones are so relatively cheap it seems worth it.

I am sure there are all sorts of advantages and disadvantages to drones vs. manned aircraft. But in terms of opportunity costs, the much cheaper drones seem like an obvious choice to replace much or most of manned missions. For example, in Draug's example of feedback from the aircraft, how many drones could we just blow up without ever seeing a target before it reached the cost of a manned aircraft?

In World War II, the Germans had great tanks. But they had a number of different kinds, they were expensive, and they were difficult to learn to use. America's easier and cheaper tanks proved a better option. If America's historic success in major conflicts has been the application of mass production to wartime necessity, then it seems like fleets of relatively cheap, relatively mass produced drones are the best solution.

Forgive what's likely a stupid question -- I know little about these things -- but what would be the point? Surely manpower is a tiny fraction of the cost of air force anyway? I'd think that if there's *ANY* disadvantage to drones, then there would be no point replacing manned planes with them.

Two major disadvantages to manned aircraft. Firstly, if it gets shot down your pilot is either dead or a POW. Secondly, your pilot is limited by the number of gs he can take before his effectiveness is serverely reduced. An aircraft without a pilot could perform much more extreme manouvres.

It's also far easier to monitor your pilot's health when he's at the base. A pilot who has just had a close call out on a mission is likely to be highly shaken and may well not be in any fit state to continue fighting. If he's safe in a seat at base he's less likely to suffer extreme stress, and if he does he can be quickly replaced.

Hm, I see. Can the pilots at base see everything, and with the same resolution, as a pilot in the air? It will be a long time (never) before I trust computers' *judgment* as much as a human being's. But I suppose the idea is that they can make the experience quite realistic for the pilots on base?

@semck - Salary, sure, but training pilots is extremely expensive. Now maybe if all were just trained as drone pilots, it could get cheaper as the physical fitness for handling the Gs would be unnecessary, only piloting skills and a new skill, dealing with flying in 2 .

@semck: they're talking about costs here. Drones don't have to take a human with them for obvious reasons meaning they can be smaller.

@ckroberts: I'll stay from the drone topic because at this point it's beyond my knowledge, but as for your WWII argument: I don't think the point of America's army is to be effective in the sense of cheap kills. At this point the aim seems to be keeping the peace and being practically invincible, while also keeping superiority on all areas.

America's history proves they buy stuff anyway, no matter the costs, as well. And at this point there's little point in having better production since wars can be fought in, say, a day?

And I think we all understand why there's no point in having 150 million Abrams tanks when there are 300-something million Americans, to give an extreme example.
(Hint: an Abrams tank has a 4 person crew.)

Now that is a very extreme example, but at some point you have to realise that there are only so much people who want to be in a tank or plane. Likewise, there are only so much people who want to gun people down with a joystick or something.

@ semck

What a pilot actually sees when he's in a plane is very limited. Most bombing missions happen at night so all the pilot really "sees" these days is a computer screen in the cockpit of the plane. Even in daylight it's damned rare that the pilot does anything of significance by looking out of the window.

I beg to differ. Dogfighting in the day in an F-15 has your rear looking all over for bogies.

Yeah....poor Goose....he had good eyes in the backseat before stupid Maverick killed him...

How important is dogfighting in modern air to air combat, and what aspects of it require a human flying an expensive air craft as opposed to, say, a bunch of kamikaze drones?

Also regarding pilots: In addition to the risk of losing the pilots, I believe that drone pilots can fly more meaningful missions. A drone can autopilot until a human decision is needed.

Steephie, that's true enough, but the whole point of having air superiority fighters (again, as I understand it) is to be ready when some potentially hostile enemy force being prepared to challenge American air superiority. For now I think the USA has more and better planes and equipment than anyone else.

The US has supreme air superiority -- we don't have to engage in dog-fighting because our technology has made it unnecessary. The purpose of advancing air superiority capability is to keep us from having to engage, while giving us the bet equipment available should the need arise.

Not quite sure why some of you are so hung up on drones...as if to suggest we are not using them. We use them all the time, and are increasign the use. The military/DARPA whatever is workign *towards* the unmaned fighter - but they aren't there yet. What's so difficult to grasp about that?

krellin, the question for me (and apparently for others) is whether we are actually already at that point, but for reasons of bureaucratic and institutional inertia the American military continues to produce exceedingly expensive manned aircraft.

The American military spends so much money that's easy to forget that it's not unlimited. Will we consider this money to be wasted in ten or twenty or thirty years, when there's a meaningful threat to American air superiority?

You do realize that the military has strategies and functionality that are built up over years or history, practice and training, right? You don't just up and say one day, "OK...no more fighters...drones only". Then what do you do? Mothball your fighters? Retire your pilots.There is no good reason to make the change right now, as far as I can tell.

You seem to have this video-game mentality where you say, "I researched the tech...OK, I'm only building drones now" and everything works hunky-dory.

Are you honestly ready to remove man from your war-fighting capability?

and before you say "pilot's fly drones" I will refer you back to the discussion on security, especially in wireless -- assume it doesn't exist. (Especially since half the software engineers I recruit in my job are coming from overseas!)

Check out the threads on the NSA, and then tell me how secure anything is.

I prefer my heavily armed weapon platforms to have a human at the stick.

Discussions between modern hunting airplanes are determined by co-operation of radar, linked up communication systems and dashboard computers as well as intelligent weapon systems (fire and forget) from a save distance. With a supreme air superiority like the hyper power USA, which is weapon-technically 25 years ahead, you will get surely seldom the opportunity to come in sews of an dog fight. Today the board cannon belongs again to the standard arming of most fighter aircraft, after developments in the late 1950th (McDonnell F-4) this had been renounced. In aerial battles between modern fighter aircraft has appeared that the curve fight is still from some meaning. Please excause my bad English.

"For now I think the USA has more and better planes and equipment than anyone else"

Then you haven't been keeping up with military tech. The Chinese and Russians have planes that are just as good as the top American ones (not including JSF). Not to mention that drones are laughably easy to bring down by another aircraft. They aren't designed for evasive maneuvers.

Also, your point on price is moot. Lets say a system costs $100 billion to research and develop. If this system is the JSF and you're ordering 75 planes, that's $1.3 billion per plane. If its the Predator drone and you order 300, its $330 million per drone. I don't know the exact costs for each project, but by nature the fighters are going to be more expensive than the drones because 1) They can do more and 2) There are fewer of them

This is a silly question. Of course drones are the way of the future - and not just in the sky either.

Consider WW2, the last time we had a total war situation. Despite a ridiculous amount of strategic bombing by the allies Germany had more Messerschmidts than they knew what to do with. What they were running short on was skilled pilots.

Drone warfare makes the limiting factor a nation's industrial capacity, rather than it's talent pool.

@YJ - Drones are still pitloted. They aren't computer controlled or anything. Somebody sits behind a joystick in a bynker and flies the thing. So having a ridiculous amount of drones is the same as Germany's Messerschmidt problem.

"How important is dogfighting in modern air to air combat, and what aspects of it require a human flying an expensive air craft as opposed to, say, a bunch of kamikaze drones? "

Dogfighting is profoundly important. Drones aren't good at shooting other aircraft, especially fighters or fighter bombers. Just becuase you are only flying drones doesn't mean your enemy is. If he is using a fighter bomber that can evade your drones (and most can with ease) then you need fighters to stop him sending one in to the White House. Drones aren't much more than R/C missiles. In the old days, we had missiles that locked on a target. Now a drone can have several potential targets and a pilot sits and guides it. But said drone is easily shot down by a pilot in a fighter. So now you have to send 20 drones with 20 pilots in the bunker hoping a few get through while the enemy sends up 5 fighters to shoot them down. So you escalate to 100 drones and he escalates to 20 fighters. And on and on...

Fighters still serve an airdefense purpose and fulfill a role that drones aren't yet capable of. And fighter bombers are still more effective on well defended targets with SAM missiles than drones will ever be. Drones can't drop chaff or evade SAMs like a fighter. They just aren't up to the task. By the time the pilot back in the hanger knows there is a missle lock on his drone and can respond, the drone is crashing and burning.