Japan Plans To Build Unmanned Fighter Jets (reuters.com) 117
Slashdot reader It's the tripnaut! quotes an article from Reuters:
Japan aims to develop a prototype drone fighter jet in two decades with private sector help in a technology strategy that focuses on weapons communications and lasers, according to a document seen by Reuters... The military technology plan calls for first developing an unmanned surveillance aircraft in the next decade and then an unmanned fighter jet 10 years later, the document showed...
The ministry will also allocate budget funds to acquire an upgraded version of the F-35 stealth fighter, made by U.S. company Lockheed Martin Corp...as tension rises in the East China Sea and North Korea steps up its missile threat, government officials with direct knowledge of the matter said.
The ministry will also allocate budget funds to acquire an upgraded version of the F-35 stealth fighter, made by U.S. company Lockheed Martin Corp...as tension rises in the East China Sea and North Korea steps up its missile threat, government officials with direct knowledge of the matter said.
Stealth (Score:3)
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When you are dealing with war. Being nice is not part of the game. You crush you enemies. You do not mess around. You crush them subjugate them and take their things. Then for the icing make sure they will not rise up again you kill their children.
War is ugly. Don't try to put a humanitarian spin on it.
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To who? You've killed your enemies and their children. Presumably, that may have left some old people and some women. And a destroyed economy.
You've got, what, 50 years or so, before they are back on their feet enough to spit angrily towards you.
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You crush you enemies.
See them driven before you.
And hear the lamentations of their women.
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And someone like Trump in charge of each country.
"Don't make me do it. I'll do it. You know I will. Many people want me to do it. Smart people. Awesome people.. NAMBLA FTW.
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It's bad enough when some military base thousands of kilometers again is bombed, but seeing your own cities rocked by explosions, the lights going out for days, death out of the blue, seemingly at random... Not so nice when it happens to you, whaddaya think?
I think the United States of America has the most powerful military in the world, along with several thousand nuclear weapons.
If another nation-state started to bomb our cities, the "war" wouldn't last very long...
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Unless that other nation-state also has nuclear weapons, or a stealth-heavy navy that's hard to successfully target, or guerilla fighters and false-flag agents operating in other nations, or cyberwar capabilities that can't be quickly and reliably traced to their nation of origin.
The war could last for years, even with nukes, as the participants play a game of chicken, trying to make the other guy be the bad guy first.
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Re:Stealth (Score:5, Interesting)
Could you remind me again, which nation is building military bases on internationally disputed islands that they lost the judgement for, and which nation recently annexed a part of one of its' neighbors and is waging a constant low-level war in a large chunk of said country's east while propping up one of the most brutal dictators in the middle east by white phosphorus and cluster bombing its cities?
Not that I'm a huge fan of the US either, but come on now....
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And why is that a business for the USA, with already more than 800 military bases in more than 100 countries the world over?
Um, let's see, most populous country, nuclear power, major economic force. It's pretty dumb to ignore them.
At least the Chinese haven't killed anybody yet, unlike the USA did with millions (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Irak, Lybia, to name a few countries), and by the way was the first country to deploy, totally unnecessary if you ask me as the Japanese were already surrendering, 2 A-bombs with devastating results for the civilian populations involved.
Come on now.
Wow, the Chinese haven't killed anybody yet? What have you been smoking? Even leaving aside the massive famines that Mao's policies resulted in, there's been plenty of executions for political repression, an invasion of Tibet, disputes with China, Pakistan, and even the USSR that have resulted in loss of life.
And whining about civilian deaths from A-Bombs? If you're going to stand on principle, st
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For the remaining points you mention I still don't see the USA targeted in any of them.
So why again is China considered an adversary to the US?
At the time the A-bombs were dropped, Japan had already offered to surrender, with only one condition: the emperor would not be touched.
That was refused by the US until the Russians were approaching, threatening to finish Japan off, and that's the only reason the A-bombs were dropped, a
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Sorry, but the Emperor was definitely "touched". He wasn't replaced, but severe constraints were placed upon what he could say or do for over a decade. This wasn't totally just, as he had been largely the figurehead of a militarist group, and was only a teenager when things started happening, but in another sense it was necessary. He had been demonized during the war, and had to appear (to the US public) to have been punished. The actual restraints were quite minor as they weren't really needed. He was
Re:in favor (Score:1)
As an example, how do you feel about the divine right of kings? A few centuries ago you'd probably be not only accepting, but passively in favor of it.
Not only would I, 'a few centuries ago', have been in favor of it, a mere few decades ago I actually was.
Not any more though...
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Re: Stealth (Score:2, Interesting)
The most powerful nation in the world has been defeated in Vietnam, sent home packing in Somalia, defeated in Afghanistan, bled dry in Iraq... Shall I continue? And should Russia or China retaliate for drone strikes by using conventional bombs against a legitimate military target such as your capital, would you escalate to nuclear warfare knowing this would mean the death of a lot of your population and the destruction of the US as an industrial nation? I don't think so. Don't bite more than you can chew.
Re: Stealth (Score:3)
To be fair Russia and China both have been bogged down in small conflicts as well.
The problem is political not military. The us military could have won in Vietnam if allowed to fire bomb civilian targets.
Trying to limit warfare to only military targets and win is like trying to arrest drug dealers. You can never get them all
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The US military didn't even need that. All they needed was permission to go into North Vietnam and beat the crap out of them.
Alas, the Korean War was still fresh in everyone's mind - when we rolled up North Korea, the Chinese came into the war. So, the various Presidents said "no invading North Vietnam".
And it's still pretty much true that if you give the enemy a safe space, the enemy CANNOT be beaten. If he's losing, he
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The us military could have won in Vietnam if allowed to fire bomb civilian targets.
If your idea of winning is slaughtering untold number of civilians just to stop the spread of a political system that your overlords deem unacceptable than yeah...maybe you could have "won" that one.
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I still don't think we should ever have been there. We had no call to sabotage the Geneva accords.
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John McCain was shot down while bombing a lightbulb factory.
It's misleading that Vietnam war was a guerrilla warfare, in fact it's was serial of battles to capture/defense positions, areas, with participation of large number of soldiers and weapons, between U.S and NVA (not VC).
There's a myth [g2mil.com] of U.S military won all battles but lost due to politics.
Also, there's problem with statistic, such as usin
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We didn't even have to win to win. If the US was willing to pay the price Vietnam would be partitioned to this day. There's no way they could have defeated us militarily even if we didn't invade the North. But the public wasn't willing to pay the price. I suspect we wouldn't even have needed troops on the ground - the South Vietnamese destroyed a large invasion force with the help of US air power in 1973 and might have been able to hold indefinitely if we had continued to provide air support.
It sucked
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The most powerful nation in the world has been defeated in Vietnam, sent home packing in Somalia, defeated in Afghanistan, bled dry in Iraq... Shall I continue?
We weren't really trying and none of those nations were bombing US cities...
We could have turned all of North Vietnam into a glass-floored, self-lighting parking lot...
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Why do so many Americans get boners at the thought of nuking an entire nation into a parking lot? I see it all the time. Fucking WAKE UP!!!
Stop deluding yourself, it was an observation of restraint exercised in the face of capability.
Noting that is something you should learn, not everybody is so beneficent.
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Why do so many Americans get boners at the thought of nuking an entire nation into a parking lot?
I blame the American car culture.
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The most powerful nation in the world has been defeated in Vietnam, sent home packing in Somalia, defeated in Afghanistan, bled dry in Iraq... Shall I continue?
No, you should stop and think. Each of those wars was not lost by defeating the US with military force. It was the American people who didn't like it, and demanded that the boys come home. Seeing as how the politicians wanted to keep their jobs, they complied.
If the US wanted, it could have kept supplying the Vietnamese with arms for decades. If the US wanted, we could flatten Somalia. Afghanistan? Don't see any occupation troops from there coming here. Iraq? You're confusing "not willing to bother"
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Sorry, but the the US and either Russia or China get into a serious war, humanity will end up deindustrialized, starving, and with probably less than 1% of the current population. There won't be any countries. Or cities. Or towns.
I wouldn't expect a true "On The Beach" scenario, but it wouldn't be far from that.
An interesting question is "What if India and one of it's neighbors gets into a nuclear exchange?". The best prediction includes massive world wide starvation due to a few "year without a summer"s
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If there is a major attack on the US, I'd expect it to be via state-sponsored terrorism. Quietly help some idiot religious fanatics out with some military hardware or nuclear weapon parts.
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That's the basic approach that is the only feasible one. Make it something deniable.
That said, I sure hope the current work on hypersonic missiles is just chest thumping. Several countries can already manage a "doomsday machine".
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Keeping that quiet and making sure it isn't linked back to you is harder than you think... It only takes one mistake...
And nuclear materials are the sort of thing you can use in that way, all refined uranium and plutonium has a signature, it wouldn't be hard to figure out what nation made it.
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Ground-based energy beam weapons will make all existing aircraft obsolete.
Energy beam weapons are not very effective against low-flying terrain following targets. So you take them out with cruise missiles before launching your main attack. Beam weapons are ineffective against kinetic energy weapons, which are being placed on ships, so they can be taken out if closer than ~100km to the coast. They are also ineffective against over-the-horizon targets, so if carriers are 300 km off your coast enforcing a naval blockade, you can't touch them with ground based beam weapons.
Re:Stealth (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with stealth aircraft isn't finding a missile that can hit them. It's getting a reliable, targetable lock on them. You can detect stealth aircraft with low frequency radar, but you get a very poor quality return. Low frequency doesn't just make stealth aircraft more visible, it makes *everything* in the atmosphere more visible, including water vapour.
A good example of what it takes to shoot down a stealth aircraft with a low frequency radar can be seen in the one time it was accomplished, by the Serbs during the Kosovo conflict. The airplane flew right over their position almost every day. Even with it right overhead, they still couldn't target it most of the time. The time that they finally got it, it was right overhead and had its bomb bay doors open, significantly increasing its visibility.
And this was with an old generation of stealth aircraft.
No country in the world wants to have this much difficulty hitting their adversaries targets. Is the problem solveable? Probably eventually. Is it solved now? Very doubtful. As good evidence to that effect, look at how much money Russia has been throwing into their antiaircraft systems - first modernizing the S-300, then introducing the S-400, and now developing the S-500. Much of Russia's military struggles for funding (look at the sad state of their only aircraft carrier, for example, or their struggle to bring tanks like the Armata or planes like the MiG-35 into full production), but air defense gets tons of money. If they had actually solved the stealth problem and felt that they could reliably shoot down US stealth aircraft, they wouldn't be focusing so heavily on it.
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The problem with stealth aircraft isn't finding a missile that can hit them. It's getting a reliable, targetable lock on them. You can detect stealth aircraft with low frequency radar, but you get a very poor quality return. Low frequency doesn't just make stealth aircraft more visible, it makes *everything* in the atmosphere more visible, including water vapour.
You may need a visual or multispectral lock. Until the terminal phase, command guidance might be necessary. Not sure about all-weather use, though. High frequency radar from very a short distance?
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You may need a visual or multispectral lock. Until the terminal phase, command guidance might be necessary. Not sure about all-weather use, though. High frequency radar from very a short distance?
It's a complex problem at best. You will certainly want a sensor package that includes the visual range. Probably a combination of approaches will work best; you want some sensors that you can use to figure out what's weather and what isn't so you know what to target. All that of course makes the weapon more expensive, which is a big part of the goal of stealth technology to begin with. If you have the economic advantage then you can have better stealth and better detection systems, and the enemy goes bankr
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Much of Russia's military struggles for funding
If you count in dollar, not in rouble.
If Russia could not produce things inside the country, that is the problem with their budget!
or their struggle to bring tanks like the Armata or planes like the MiG-35 into full production
Armata introduced last year.
Mikoyan has problem because Sukhoi has been doing better both on domestic and foreign market. And, MiG is a kind of light fighter, which has less demand today.
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Also if you count in "cutting funding and repeatedly missing deadlines and production targets by massive margins"
It's a systemic problem. Russia has shown itself quite capable of producing very advanced military hardware at the small scale in recent years, but has struggled to produce them in the sorts of volume it can for its older hardware systems. Its testing programs are a
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As I said, some report tried to show that Russians have cut "something" in dollars, not in rouble - which is weaker in recent years.
If you read Russian (I don't but I read using Yandex/Google translator), I cou
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Especially if these new aircraft come free with a subscription to the wireless network that supports them.
Re:Stealth (Score:5, Insightful)
It must also transform into a humanoid robot. After all, this is Japan we're talking about.
Re: Stealth (Score:2)
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From the stories I heard working in defense, airframes still can't match pilots. An aircraft on a mission may need to execute some spectacular maneuvers, and the pilot can often survive quite well, especially with active flight suits. However, the airframe is still damaged by the maneuver, and might not be usable again.
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Which just means that they didn't throw extra weight and strength (a constant cost) into insuring that the meat-sack-carrying vehicle would take no damage in ANY extreme, momentary, corner case that the meat-sack COULD survive.
Remov
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One of the realities is that the current designs are not much stronger than the human body.
That is because there is no reason to do so. If you are carrying a human pilot, there is no point in designing the airframe to turn fast enough to kill him. But if there is no pilot, the design criteria are different. For instance, a SAM can generally turn much faster than a plane.
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What are the design considerations? Do you want a fighter jet that can out maneuver a SAM? Perhaps designed to dog-fight a SAM and shoot it down. Then you could deploy 10 of these around manned aircraft (bombers or the like) as an anti SAM defense.
Part of my point to base the discussion around existing jets, is that that's all we know. Designing a jet with unlimited capabilities is beyond aerospace design.
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Or are the fighters of the future just mobile weapons platforms?
The fighters of the present are of use only because they are mobile weapons platforms. The quality of the mobility and the kind of weapons are what makes fighter jets what they are.
You do have good points to the first generation. Once humans are removed from the cockpit, there likely won't be a hard limit to the size of vehicles, but it'll take considerable time for humanity or its successors to come up with good designs to take advantage.
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TFA says there's a line item in a budget with the wish of having an unmanned fighter. No plan for
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Air combat?
Bingo. For example, Oxford dictionary has this to say about fighter jets [oxforddictionaries.com]:
A fast jet-powered military aircraft designed for attacking other aircraft:
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You mean like the QF-16? Or the QF-4?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
fighters have been converted to drones in the past, and continue to be good for targets/testing.
use in combat might be different.
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My question is "How do you prevent them being jammed?" Are they going to have a built-in AI? What could possibly go wrong with that?
Re:Stealth (Score:4, Interesting)
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I didn't see anywhere in the article that these were "autonomous fighters", just that they were "drones", or "unmanned fighter jets". My assumption is that human controllers will still very much be in control of these things at some tactical level. You're still going to need to regularly train whoever controls, commands, and maintains these things.
I'd agree that they'd need to fly less frequently, but they'd probably still need to regularly perform in training missions, just like every other military asse
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Regular duties such as patrol could be taken over by simpler planes with lower maintenance costs where the full capabilities of a modern fighter are not required.
Instead, those things would probably have massive endurance, I imagine.
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All the same, North Korea is not going to appreciate the Hello Kitty H-bomb drones that are controlled from Samsung phones.
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You're assuming you'd fly a drone fighter with the same air superiority tactics that you use for manned fighters. That might not be the case.
You might opt to forgo the traditional aerobatic capabilities of a manned fighter for more stealth, even knowing that you'd lose more aircraft. It depends on how the math works out. Suppose you expect to lose 20% of your drones to dog fighters, but your early weapons lock advantage allows you to shoot down an additional 1.5 fighters for every drone you lose. That's
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" The ideology of; if we don't do it then our enemies will is the path to darkness."
Nope, darkness is when your enemy does it first.
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Way to go, bro...
Unbeatable (Score:2)
Without a pilot, a drone fighter will be unbeatable, except by other drones.
The limitations will then be the HARDWARE, not the pilot.
Only a matter of time (Score:2)
Then we can only pray Godzilla comes to save us.
Let's do it! (Score:2)
The United States tried implementing autonomous killer bots in Iraq. They never saw action and one day starting targeting, but not firing on Marines. The were removed with quickness.
Vaghn Bode's Ramdove (Score:2)
It's Vaughn Bode's Ramdove Weapons Platform [tripod.com].
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Because there is a non-insignificant chance that the Russians would sell them to the Chinese as well. So the Chinese could reverse engineer them and find weaknesses. Also it wouldn't be the first time Japan and Russia fought a war. They are regional competitors and have an ongoing dispute about ownership of the Kuril islands.
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Japan over the decades is encourage to always consider made in the USA.
China is Doing the Same Thing (Score:2)
The biggest fear of the US Military is autonomous fighter jets. Even if you disrupt command and control it's quite possible the jets could still defend/attack enemy forces. The problem for that is the Chinese can make a MIG for a fraction of the cost of a F-35. Sure, the F-35 would take out some MIGs, but the it only holds a relatively small number of missiles.
Sweet jesus, we're all doomed. (Score:2)
Japanese pilots have demonstrated the ability to fly more than one craft simultaneously while defeating overwhelming odds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
And you thought drone warfare was bad? (Score:2)
Hey, let's build remotely-controlled fighter jets, great idea!
Build a whole fleet of them
Someone hacks a vulnerability in your control system and takes over the entire fleet
Skyscrapers burning everywhere!
Civilian targets hit everywhere!
Hey here's an even better idea: Why not build an entire fleet of bombers? Be sure to put your nuclear weapons in them while you're at it.
Hey here's an
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Thats why nations are so careful about how much encryption to add. If a drone is captured, lost, induced to land in another nation or staff walk out with the codes thats an expected loss.
The loss of US drones in the past shows the US thinking on the issue. The drone has just the right amount of crypto to fly for a long time and anything lost is only sensitive to that mission. No need to pack in, power and keep an e