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posted by CoolHand on Monday March 11 2019, @01:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the top-gun-will-never-be-the-same dept.

The US Air Force’s jet-powered robotic wingman is like something out of a video game

The US Air Force has successfully tested an advanced, jet-powered drone called the XQ58-A Valkyrie, that could someday accompany human-piloted fighter jets on missions. The concept is a bit like something we’ve seen in video games, a drone (or swarm of drones) can fight alongside a human pilot, or absorb enemy fire in their place.

The vehicle was developed as a partnership between the Air Force Research Laboratory and Kratos Unmanned Aerial Systems as a relatively cheap platform that can fill a electronic warfare, strike, and surveillance role on the battlefield, controlled by a piloted aircraft on its own or as part of a swarm group. It can carry a small payload of bombs, and can use a conventional runway or can be launched via rocket.

The prototype completed its first test flight (of five planned missions) on March 5th over the Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona, and the Air Force says that it “behaved as expected” over the course of its 76-minute flight. The battery of test flights that it will go through will look at how well the drone’s systems worked, and how well it takes off, flies and lands.

What’s interesting about this particular plan is that it’s an early demonstration of a concept called “loyal wingman.” While this test saw the drone fly on its own — not alongside the fighter aircraft that it’s designed to accompany in the future — the idea is that it could fly alongside a piloted vehicle, which would control it. From there, it could do everything from provide a bit of extra force projection in the air, fly ahead to scout out terrain, or even taking enemy fire in place of its human-piloted companion.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 11 2019, @04:42PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 11 2019, @04:42PM (#812750)

    We couldn't imagine the Great War until it happened, and we thought it was the War To End All Wars, and then later we renamed to to World War I.

    If we fail to prepare for "the unthinkable", then we lose. So, let's make a plan to simultaneously fight most of the world. We could be fighting Russia, or China, or a European Caliphate, or a pair of those as allies. Hopefully they don't all gang up on us, but it is possible.

    So communications are dead. (GPS included) Forget it. An AI might work. If it has a glitch though, that will be fully exploited to wipe it out.

    Today we build 100 planes, but in WWII we would build 10000 planes. Today we are horrified when a pilot dies, but in WWII we'd send people off with a 1-in-3 chance of death for that flight and a probable survival time of a month. One day we will face that kind of situation again, and we will have to recalibrate our ideas of horror and unacceptable loss.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @06:32AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @06:32AM (#813107)

    If you are preparing for that sort of war, then you are preparing for a general nuclear war. There is no way that the US won't use an all-out nuke strike in that scenario.
    I think that the USA would in fact use nukes in the face of any successful or sustained military invasion of the USA mainland.
    If China or the the Arabs land a million troops in Oregon, they are going to get nuked, and so is every known nuclear launch site or major military concentration. Boomers and mobiles would be held back for a second strike and/or to deter others, but the military that attacked would be glassed.