Comment by twalichiewicz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by twalichiewicz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

> 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.

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...

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