So, apparently the USAF has flown a flight demonstrator of a 6th generation fighter.
And the army also shot down a cruise missile with an hypersonic projectile fired by field
artillery.
And the F-16 now has a laser weapon pod that can zap enemy missiles and planes out of the
sky
And there are all those hypersonic weapons being tested
And the AMRAAM replacement will be sooooo amazing!
And don't forget that AI that defeated an expert F-16 pilot 5 to nil
And the Skyborgs are coming!
Why not adding all the space initiatives currently on-going to the stack?
Well, all of this reminds me of something...
Welcome to Millennium Seven Star the channel that helps you make sens of military history
and military technology. Please stay with me till the end because the stuff that we
discuss here is not easily found anywhere else
So, we all heard a lot of sensational announcements in the last few months, depicting an amazing
high tech future for the USAF. It seems that, suddenly, all this kind of
futuristic technologies are coming online. The USAF is achieving such a superiority that
no opponent will ever have a chance to win. Actually, win, I mean, every opponent will
be completely destroyed in the first few hours...actually in the first few minutes of a war by a hail
of highly sophisticated weapons that will make any reaction useless.
Yes...
Ok, to those among you who have some grey hair, like I do, this may not not remind you
of something.
What? ... just think to it.
I give you a few seconds to think about it... let me know your ideas in the comments below
Ok, do you remember the Strategic Defense Initiative?
On the 23rd of March 1983, the then president Ronald Reagan made his famous "Star Wars"
speech. He announced the decision to develop the technology to intercept the nuclear ballistic
missiles during their flight. In this way, a defensive shield had to be deployed above
the USA to protect them from a nuclear strike. The hardware required to achieve this result
did not exist, and a large scale initiative to develop it was launched.
Also during the '80s, news of incredible military developments appeared frequently and regularly
in the press. The stealth plane above all, but also super silent submarines, new missiles,
new tanks, airborne radars of an unprecedented range, electronic surveillance systems etc.
Did it work? Well, in the case of the SDI it was quickly
realized that the operational deployment of these technologies was decades away.
Even Sting wrote a song titled "Russians" to say that he did not believe that the SDI
could work.
Some of the super weapons of the '80s eventually become staples of the US armed forces, still
in service today, but many of them, particularly the space ones, were abandoned and today,
they are forgotten.
However, the mere existence of such a program, the mere evidence of such a large effort being
ongoing around all these sci-fi weapons, put pressure on the Soviet Union and it contributed,
in no small measure, to force the enactment of those politics that ultimately led to the
fall of the Soviet Union.
Now.
I can't help thinking that what is going on today is... just like the SDI.
A lot of technologies are being thrown to the media to give the impression to the external
observer that the USA is on the verge of a military technological revolution.
Let's unpack it.
I want to be clear. I don't think that the announcements are fake, I actually believe
that they are quite representative of the current status of the programs. What I believe
is that the way the information is presented it is conducive to generating a sophisticated
propaganda operation for the internal public and the foreign observer.
I will go through a few of these news to better explain what I mean with this.
Let's start with the recent announcement of the first test flights of a 6th generation
fighter. First element to consider is that the plane
has been explicitly defined a technology demonstrator and not a prototype.
A technology demonstrator is a plane, built in very small numbers, to test in the real
world some new technologies. It is not a prototype as some media outlets have erroneously reported,
it is not the first iteration of a production plane.
If it is a technology demonstrator, which kind of technologies was it built to demonstrate?
Traditionally, a demonstrator covers "make or break" technologies, like fly by wire,
composites, inverse sweep wings etc. In the 6th generation, the only really new
technology that has not been demonstrated yet is the integration with drones, but to
demonstrate this, probably a fleet of planes had to be built and we would probably had
had some more news.
What I think was demonstrated was the concept itself, the ability to go thorough the design
cycle very very quickly by the use of the "Holy trinity" , as it has been defined, of
new design techniques: digital engineering, agile software development and open architecture.
None of these are new, they have been in use for decades. The novelty is their radicalization
and the pervasiveness of their use as it was done recently on the new T-7 trainer jet,
the harbinger of this new approach.
I have already covered the "new century series" approach championed by Will Roper in another
video, so I won't go in details now. However, I will speculate that the manufacturer involved
in the demonstrator could be Boeing. It was part of the T-7 project with Saab and Saab
was one of the forerunners of adopting the digital engineering paradigm. For example,
every Saab employee has a digital model of the Gripen E/F available to play around with
"what if" scenarios. This would also match with the news that the Tempest consortium,
formed by BaE, Saab and Leonardo, is adopting similar technologies to develop the Tempest
6th generation fighter.
The second event I would like to cover is the announcement that an artificial intelligence
algorithm has beaten an expert F-16 air combat instructor 5-0 in a recent competition.
The echo of all the media outlets wisely pontificating about the end of the age of piloted fighters
has just faded away...
Where to start on this. I have to say it, it did not happen.
It did not.
First, the software that has beaten the pilot was not an AI software, it was a classical
algorithm. This means that it is not modern at all, it could have been written 40 years
ago, and it probably was in some corner of the American military industrial complex and
then it was forgotten. So no, AI is not better than humans on the
basis of this test.
Second, the environment was greatly simplified. It was supposed to be cannon only, but there
was no simulation of the cannon ballistic. If one of the players entered a cone of one
degree protruding from the nose of the enemy plane, it was considered to have been shot
down. This is by no means the way the cannon is
used in real combat. In real combat each plane tries to reach a position behind the other
because it is the only position where the cannon rounds have a high enough probability
to reach the enemy plane. The simplified scenario resulted in the human
being shot down most of the time by "shots" from the frontal arc which would never be
attempted in real combat.
For those who say that AI could also manage to take those kind of shots, I remind you
that the French, while developing the Rafale, attempted just this. The cannon would have
been set in an auto-firing mode just to automate frontal and high deflection shots, without
relying on the pilot judgement and reflexes. Well, they gave up. It tuned out to be way
too complex.
Third, the algorithm had full situational awareness, so it knew exactly what the human
was doing, something that even the most sophisticated sensors can't provide to a computer trying
to fly a plane. Actually determining the opponent's speed and attitude in 3 dimensions, for a
total of 6 degrees of freedom, is a big challenge for every type of sensor currently available.
Not to speak of the need of doing so spherically around the plane, and not only in the frontal
arc.
In both of the cases discussed before, if we scratch the hype covering the actual news,
we find some interesting research programs that are sold as a done deal.
The actual news are correct, nobody has said that these technologies have already rendered
obsolete the current assets. Nobody has said that these technologies are
entering service. However the way these news are over-hyped
in the media shows, in my opinion, that they are being used to put pressure onto the hostile
stakeholders. The logic behind this is simple, if they believe
that these technologies are behind the corner, then they will squander their resources trying
to catch up and the US will always be on top of the evolution.
From my point of view this may work but it also entails huge risks.
Remember what happened with the Mig-25? It was believed to be such a great plane that
the US sprinted to develop the F-15 in reply, which, for a while, outclassed all the other
players in the air to air combat arena for a couple of decades. And, in the end, the
Mig-25 did not turn out to be such a great plane. There is the possibility that the opponent
feels compelled to the point of developing something that actually outclasses the new
technology.
Another possible reaction is the opponent deciding that it will never be able to catch
up, thus developing asymmetric methodologies to counter the menace of the new technology,
thus creating a threat where there was none before.
For example, if there is no way to develop a comparable 6th generation fighter, an opponent
could focus on developing bacteria feeding on the radar absorbing materials, delivered
by dispersing aerosols and letting them be transported by
the wind.