Since the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force operationalised the J-20 fifth generation fighter in February 2017, which made China only the second country in the
i disagree and i think this website tends to fall into jeune-ecoleism whether it be about drones or hypersonic missiles vs surface assets.
for the role you mention specifically, using drones for an air superiority fighter has a couple major problems. firstly is input lag; there is a significant delay from operator input, to the drone reacting because of latency. secondly it’s possible to disrupt the link between drone and controller. These can be solved with autonomous control systems but these will never be as smart or as flexible as a human in the pilots seat. in terms of anti drone airspace denial, all the regular a2/ad countermeasures work against large drones. for small observation drones, large SAMs aren’t worth it and have trouble picking them up on radar but various gun systems can do the job perfectly well. if you want a drone swarm, you need small drones, that means small payloads and short range which makes them counterable by gun systems. electronic warfare, hacking and jamming can be extremely effective against drones, something like 90% of ukrainian drone attacks are unsuccessful.
in ukraine specifically you have to bear in mind that drones make their own propaganda. every drone records its flight, and most are commercial and directly designed to upload and share that footage, so its only a couple clicks from the battlefield to some gore video on twitter. all other elements need to explicitly add a camera somewhere, record that footage, transfer it to a computer, and then upload it. thats another massive filter right there.
so we see a much larger share of drones action in the war than any other weapon(-s system), distorting our view.
weaponised drones further distort it: an unsuccessful attack has no significant cost, you just don’t upload it. or for FPV drones where you cant see the aftermath either way, you can still upload it and claim it a success regardless of if you destroyed your target. this further inflates their importance, because people will think they do much more damage than they actually did.
it may well be the case that drones are the future of air superiority but they are not the near future of air superiority and that’s a very relevant distinction for most DoDs.
i disagree and i think this website tends to fall into jeune-ecoleism whether it be about drones or hypersonic missiles vs surface assets.
for the role you mention specifically, using drones for an air superiority fighter has a couple major problems. firstly is input lag; there is a significant delay from operator input, to the drone reacting because of latency. secondly it’s possible to disrupt the link between drone and controller. These can be solved with autonomous control systems but these will never be as smart or as flexible as a human in the pilots seat. in terms of anti drone airspace denial, all the regular a2/ad countermeasures work against large drones. for small observation drones, large SAMs aren’t worth it and have trouble picking them up on radar but various gun systems can do the job perfectly well. if you want a drone swarm, you need small drones, that means small payloads and short range which makes them counterable by gun systems. electronic warfare, hacking and jamming can be extremely effective against drones, something like 90% of ukrainian drone attacks are unsuccessful.
in ukraine specifically you have to bear in mind that drones make their own propaganda. every drone records its flight, and most are commercial and directly designed to upload and share that footage, so its only a couple clicks from the battlefield to some gore video on twitter. all other elements need to explicitly add a camera somewhere, record that footage, transfer it to a computer, and then upload it. thats another massive filter right there.
so we see a much larger share of drones action in the war than any other weapon(-s system), distorting our view.
weaponised drones further distort it: an unsuccessful attack has no significant cost, you just don’t upload it. or for FPV drones where you cant see the aftermath either way, you can still upload it and claim it a success regardless of if you destroyed your target. this further inflates their importance, because people will think they do much more damage than they actually did.
it may well be the case that drones are the future of air superiority but they are not the near future of air superiority and that’s a very relevant distinction for most DoDs.