The next step forward in air combat is almost here

[Toad]

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/disposable-military-drones-air-force-lcaa

...The Low Cost Attritable Aircraft, or LCAA, has been in a development since July 2016. That's when AFRL awarded Kratos, a San Diego drone-maker, a $41-million contract to work alongside the labs to design and demonstrate what the government described as a "high-speed, long-range, low-cost, limited-life strike unmanned aerial system."

Less than a year later, Kratos had produced at least one copy of the new drone, using its existing XQ-222 concept as a starting point. AFRL first began talking about the LCAA during a May 9, 2017 conference at the labs' headquarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. A little over a week later, the Defense Department circulated the first public photo of the roughly 30-foot-long drone.

The LCAA has sharply-swept wings, a narrow air intake, panels with sawtooth-like edges and a silvery, likely radar-absorbing paint job—all hallmarks of stealth aircraft. The LCAA could prove as difficult to detect as the Air Force's F-22 and F-35 manned stealth fighters are. But that's not what's really special about the drone.

What's special is its price. AFRL expects each LCAA to cost just $3 million. For comparison, a single F-35 costs around $100 million, not counting research and development. An F-22 costs around $150 million.

The high prices of the manned fighters have limited how many the Air Force can afford. The flying branch got just 187 combat-capable F-22s before production ended in 2012—fewer than half of what it wanted. The Air Force planned to be buying up to a hundred F-35s per year, but has only been able to budget for a few dozen annually....

[Serenity]

Well, there goes MY job...

[PR3D4TOR]

No worries. You'll be a grandfather before this thing is operational.

[bustr]

In Japanese animation of future global wars or even flash backs and prequels to give context for the current story line, this has been a long standing concept from movies and series as far back as the 80's. The more complex and powerful your war tech gets, the faster you can burn through soldiers and pilots. So augmenting one soldier or pilot with a squad or squadron of unmanned weapons is logical. Still the last part of the linked article is the money quote to the future of this.

But as the small, disposable drone enters testing, there's a risk that the Air Force could ruin its critical features—its simplicity and cheapness. "Technocrats have a tendency to undervalue the operational impact of systems like this, writing them off or dismissing them as toys or 'hobby shop' projects," Dan Ward, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and author of The Simplicity Cycle, told Motherboard.

"The other tendency is to add new features and make it more complicated in the name of improving it. If we're not careful, these additions will end up making the thing heavier, larger, more expensive, more complicated and more fragile rather than making it more effective in accomplishing its mission."

Right now, the LCAA is still experimental and no firm timeline has been established for its potential deployment, but if and when it arrives, it seems poised to usher in a new era of more expendable drone warfare. 

[Mongoose]

"The other tendency is to add new features and make it more complicated in the name of improving it. If we're not careful, these additions will end up making the thing heavier, larger, more expensive, more complicated and more fragile"

  This could easily happen.  I remember 8-10 years ago when netbooks were all the rage.  They were supposed to be small, light, mini-computers that you could use to access the web, much like tablets are today.  But people kept trying to use them as full powered computers, and manufacturers kept adding features that people wanted.  Pretty soon the cheap netbook was gone.

[pembquist]

Not trying to be argumentative as I agree with your premise but I think the chrome book is the acme of net books and it is available for 200 or less. (Or more if you want.)

[Devil 505]

A cheap and disposable drone?

We've had those for years. They are called cruise missiles.

[Mongoose]

Not trying to be argumentative as I agree with your premise but I think the chrome book is the acme of net books and it is available for 200 or less. (Or more if you want.)

  Yes.  But because of the proliferation of tablets, fewer people expect it to be a full computer.  But there are still those that will buy a Chromebook and then return it because it's not a full-powered laptop.

[Mongoose]

A cheap and disposable drone?

We've had those for years. They are called cruise missiles.

Yes.  But this one can be flown like a plane, and fires its own weapons before hitting the target.  The best of both worlds.

[bustr]

If you had a squadron of those being flown remotely with 1-3 human piloted aircraft as a last measure against a target. Then you could swamp the zone with them to get one or two into the target with a high destructive payload. The losses would be much cheaper. The human piloted aircraft standing off then could launch things like cruise missiles or other smart munition as a second wave to swamp the zone if the unmanned were wiped out.

The premise of the automated assembly line running all the time seems like an industry trying to PR the idea of keeping themselves in business for a long time. Small, fast\maneuverable, and cheap, so you can flood the combat zone with them. Sounds too good to be true. You could stuff aircraft carriers full of them, then sit in the middle of the Med and Indian ocean, or closer to hot spots and shut down the airspace and ground vehicle movements with hoards of them that constantly cycle out with fresh hoards to refuel and rearm.

The answer in animation series was to carry a hoard of tiny munitions designed specifically to intercept the hoard of unmanned weapons. Or you have something that comes in at very high alt, looks down, and identifies the hoard and lunches munitions to target the hoard before your hoard enters the zone. Wonder how much collateral damage you would get after your hoard killing munitions destroy the unmanned hoard over it's home country as all the debree and unexploded ordinance starts landing on the ground.

If these things have really good stealth technology, just run them NOE where humans don't expect to see a hoard of fighter type aircraft, then they popup under the defenses, swamp the zone with no worry about losses. If you have enough of them and the factory back home is pumping them out 24x7, just keep running in waves.         

[Rich46yo]

Its only a matter of time until we have fighter aircraft with AI flying on their own. I always thought the F35 would be the last fully human piloted fighter we'd build.

[HPriller]

If anything, the implementation of this concept is long overdue.   Not to mention scaling it down even further.  Why not a swarm of 1000  $3000 quadcopters with an RPG sized payload lol, instead of 1 of these 3 million dollar drones or 1/50th of a single f35 (not including pilot and all his associated costs).

Manned air power is overdue to be relegated a historical weapon system, like the bow and arrow, or horse drawn artillery, etc.

[icepac]

[HPriller]

Those RC jets look and especially sound incredible.  However, as an RC pilot, I wouldn't want one without a pretty extreme FPV video rig.   I don't understand how those guys fly those things sometimes, because it can literally cover enough ground in a couple seconds to completely disappear from view.   Every time I've seen these in person the pilot is constantly just doing vertical turns back and forth across the field, if he goes in a straight line for more than a few seconds he'll lose sight of it.

[ACE]

I literally laughed out loud when the air force said they want something cheap