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
Why have one heavily trained pilot able to pilot exactly one plane who stands a good chance of dying if it gets shot down when you can have one heavily trained pilot sitting in a drone base safely away from the battlefield commanding 6 drones with or without the help of specialized AI?
The problem with relying wholly on remotely operated drones, especially over vast distances, is that they can be jammed, disrupted, or even completely overtaken, hacked and possesed by your enemy.
Electronic warfare is an absolutely huge component of modern warfare, and would be even more important in a China v US conflict than it currently is in Ukraine.
The war in Ukraine has seen both sides doing everything I first mentioned to the numerous, cheap, smaller and shorter ranged drones.
Even before the Ukraine war kicked off (again) in 2022, US Predator and I think even Global Hawk drones were occasionally being hacked into by ISIS/Iran, first being able to hijack the live camera feed, eventually being able to issue commands to them and have them crash themselves.
Modern 5th Gen ‘Fighter’ jets, at least those fielded by the US, basically are also, simultaneous to being a fast, stealth, air to air or air to ground missile truck, are also capable of a significant degree of electronic warfare and command and control functions that were previously only doable with dedicated AWACS and ELINT aircraft.
What that means is if you throw a bunch of drone fighters at them, they might be able to just completely jam their remote control signal, or even assert control over them and tell them to crash themselves.
I would imagine China has, at the very least, similar capabilites in their aircraft. They already have entire PLA mobile infantry regiments that specialize in electronic warfare.
Think the modern BattleStar Galactica space fleet battles that are more about hacking than anything else.
It is incredibly difficult to find detailed information about exact capabilities of this kind, muchless predict how an encounter would play out… because relevant details are absurdly classified, on both sides.
Anyway, the US approach to this problem is to have their 6th gen ‘fighter’ still be manned, but have a number of drone wingmen aircraft, which are not remotely operated from a carrier or base, but are controlled by the 6th gen fighter itself.
At least… thats the vague, general idea. Again, no specific details, and of course we haven’t actually seen any footage of any test flights.
But for fighting the US and its vassals I’m not certain you need more than a kind of border force of them that can do intercepts and basic air policing around your borders.
If your war is purely defensive, maybe?
Realistically, probably not, no.
The entire Iraqi Airforce was destroyed basically in a week or two of the US’s initial commencement of hostilities in 91, most of their ‘air border’ aircraft were destroyed on the ground, in their own territory, as well as basically all of their ground based AA, then the ground invasion began, with US aircraft enjoying nearly totally uncontested reign over the skies.
A US infantry squad with no long range AT stumbles upon 12 Iraqi t 64s and 4 T 72s a mile and a half away?
Perfect! Call in the A 10s and F 111s, or AH 64s or SuperCobras, tanks are all gone in 2 to 4 hrs.
Doesn’t work that way if the Iraqis can scramble their own fighters.
A huge reason the Russo Ukrainian war is still dragging on instead of being a decisive, lightning victory for Russia is that Russia was unable to destroy all of Ukraine’s air and anti air assets as the US did to Iraq.
The astounding battlefield benefit conferred by air supremacy (which means the enemy has no airborne or ground based assets they can effectively use against your air assets) means that both sides in any kind of large scale conflict, where both sides have airforces, not just an offensive one, are highly incentivized to first strike or pre emptive strike any enemy air assets that could possibly be diverted to the main area of operation.
… But any realistic China v US war scenario would involve offensive stikes into US/Ally territories anyway, as China really really really wants Taiwan back.
The PLA and PLAN and PLAAF are not going to be able to take Taiwan with a marine invasion without launching pre emptive attacks against nearby US/Ally airbases, US Carrier Groups, US/Ally Naval Groups, etc, otherwise all of those things would attack the troop carriers.
That is that in any war you’d pull them back a bit and hit the enemy with waves of drones and missiles and use them as deep defense against penetrating invaders who somehow manage to get past your ground-based anti-air
Unless those attackers cannot be reliably targeted by your ground based AA missiles due to being stealth, and can potentially jam/takeover any drones that get near enough to target said stealth aircraft… in that scenario it makes much more sense to try and wipe out your enemy’s threatening air assets before you are threatened with a massive land invasion.
(which needs to be the most effective thing as dog-fights are not an effective way of dealing with enemy air intrusion).
Dog fights are less than ineffective, they’re likely to be things that don’t even really happen if both air superiority/multi role fighter jets are some significant degree of stealth, as is the case with the US and China’s.
You don’t send in non stealthy bombers or ground attack aircraft to an area you know has air defenses or a nearby air wing that can scramble and shoot them down.
Two opposing stealthy fighter aircraft approach each other from 50 miles away. By the time they are 10-20 miles away, one of them has superior ability to detect, target acquire, and then fire an AA missile at the other, then leaves. The other one either has no idea anything is amiss and then suddenly blows up, or gets a warning 5 seconds before impact and barely manages to flare/jam/chaff and then leave.
At no point are the aircraft in visual range of each other.
The problem with relying wholly on remotely operated drones, especially over vast distances, is that they can be jammed, disrupted, or even completely overtaken, hacked and possesed by your enemy.
Electronic warfare is an absolutely huge component of modern warfare, and would be even more important in a China v US conflict than it currently is in Ukraine.
The war in Ukraine has seen both sides doing everything I first mentioned to the numerous, cheap, smaller and shorter ranged drones.
Even before the Ukraine war kicked off (again) in 2022, US Predator and I think even Global Hawk drones were occasionally being hacked into by ISIS/Iran, first being able to hijack the live camera feed, eventually being able to issue commands to them and have them crash themselves.
Modern 5th Gen ‘Fighter’ jets, at least those fielded by the US, basically are also, simultaneous to being a fast, stealth, air to air or air to ground missile truck, are also capable of a significant degree of electronic warfare and command and control functions that were previously only doable with dedicated AWACS and ELINT aircraft.
What that means is if you throw a bunch of drone fighters at them, they might be able to just completely jam their remote control signal, or even assert control over them and tell them to crash themselves.
I would imagine China has, at the very least, similar capabilites in their aircraft. They already have entire PLA mobile infantry regiments that specialize in electronic warfare.
Think the modern BattleStar Galactica space fleet battles that are more about hacking than anything else.
It is incredibly difficult to find detailed information about exact capabilities of this kind, muchless predict how an encounter would play out… because relevant details are absurdly classified, on both sides.
Anyway, the US approach to this problem is to have their 6th gen ‘fighter’ still be manned, but have a number of drone wingmen aircraft, which are not remotely operated from a carrier or base, but are controlled by the 6th gen fighter itself.
At least… thats the vague, general idea. Again, no specific details, and of course we haven’t actually seen any footage of any test flights.
If your war is purely defensive, maybe?
Realistically, probably not, no.
The entire Iraqi Airforce was destroyed basically in a week or two of the US’s initial commencement of hostilities in 91, most of their ‘air border’ aircraft were destroyed on the ground, in their own territory, as well as basically all of their ground based AA, then the ground invasion began, with US aircraft enjoying nearly totally uncontested reign over the skies.
A US infantry squad with no long range AT stumbles upon 12 Iraqi t 64s and 4 T 72s a mile and a half away?
Perfect! Call in the A 10s and F 111s, or AH 64s or SuperCobras, tanks are all gone in 2 to 4 hrs.
Doesn’t work that way if the Iraqis can scramble their own fighters.
A huge reason the Russo Ukrainian war is still dragging on instead of being a decisive, lightning victory for Russia is that Russia was unable to destroy all of Ukraine’s air and anti air assets as the US did to Iraq.
The astounding battlefield benefit conferred by air supremacy (which means the enemy has no airborne or ground based assets they can effectively use against your air assets) means that both sides in any kind of large scale conflict, where both sides have airforces, not just an offensive one, are highly incentivized to first strike or pre emptive strike any enemy air assets that could possibly be diverted to the main area of operation.
… But any realistic China v US war scenario would involve offensive stikes into US/Ally territories anyway, as China really really really wants Taiwan back.
The PLA and PLAN and PLAAF are not going to be able to take Taiwan with a marine invasion without launching pre emptive attacks against nearby US/Ally airbases, US Carrier Groups, US/Ally Naval Groups, etc, otherwise all of those things would attack the troop carriers.
Unless those attackers cannot be reliably targeted by your ground based AA missiles due to being stealth, and can potentially jam/takeover any drones that get near enough to target said stealth aircraft… in that scenario it makes much more sense to try and wipe out your enemy’s threatening air assets before you are threatened with a massive land invasion.
Dog fights are less than ineffective, they’re likely to be things that don’t even really happen if both air superiority/multi role fighter jets are some significant degree of stealth, as is the case with the US and China’s.
You don’t send in non stealthy bombers or ground attack aircraft to an area you know has air defenses or a nearby air wing that can scramble and shoot them down.
Two opposing stealthy fighter aircraft approach each other from 50 miles away. By the time they are 10-20 miles away, one of them has superior ability to detect, target acquire, and then fire an AA missile at the other, then leaves. The other one either has no idea anything is amiss and then suddenly blows up, or gets a warning 5 seconds before impact and barely manages to flare/jam/chaff and then leave.
At no point are the aircraft in visual range of each other.