Drones and air warfare
Drones and air warfare
How is the future of air warfare going to change? Lets us think about it.
India is adding Heron 2 drones (Israeli) to its arsenal of Heron 1, Reapers (US), Rustom and Tapas (Indian). This is good news and a good time to share a way to look at development in air warfare.
Fighter aircraft and aerial battles have evolved.
Since World War I, the aircraft, its roles and air warfare itself have changed drastically. You will find many expert papers and perspectives on this topic. The Imperial War Museum has a decent primer. However, I want to look at it differently over three phases.
In the first phase, you had things being added to the aircraft. We added a ton of weapons, sensors, radars, countre-measures, early warning systems, fly-by-wire systems, auto-recovery systems, computers and processing power AND engine power (to run all that stuff). The culmination of this phase was in aircraft like F14 and F15. In this phase, the aircraft was like an advanced computer armed to the teeth, with self-protection systems built in.
In the second phase, we realised it does not matter how much stuff can be carried if the enemy can shoot you down. The game changed to information asymmetry - situational awareness, satellite monitoring, stealth and electronic jamming, battlefield coordination, etc. The game changed to sensing early, computing early and executing early.
This meant the aircraft might be required to alter roles, carry a combination of weapons, etc. We have multi-role, swing-role aircraft in this phase. The number of sensors increased multi-fold.
Communication systems were added so that aircraft talked with base computers to have a complete picture of the battle all the time.
Sensor requirements increased manifold. You have ever longer-range radars, infrared detection, missile warning systems, countermeasures, electronic countermeasures, jammers etc.
In this phase, the aircraft was like a mega supercomputer with some weapons and lots of self-protection mechanisms and backups.
In the third phase, we will deconstruct the entire air weapon systems.
We will keep the pilot some distance away from the main area of action.
We will deploy many more sensors near and beyond the main area of action (either through the use of loiter drones, LEO satellites, etc.) It is possible we have something similar to landmines of old, just these ones collecting and relaying information securely.
We will carry weapons on separate vehicles/platforms and bring them closer to the main action area. So instead of one aircraft, you will have an aircraft, pack of sensor drones, pack of weapon drones, cruise missile group and other vehicles flying with just one plane.
We may also call upon weapons from the home base. These could be precision missiles (normal or hypersonic), special long-range targetted weapons through mobile missile systems, drone systems etc.
The future is Aircraft Group.
The third phase seems to be a one-man-multiple-machine coordination phase. In the movie Terminator 3, the Terminator T-X controls multiple vehicles to coordinate an attack on its target. I believe the aircraft of the future will be similar to T-X.
I see a parallel this with the aircraft carrier strike group that US Navy operates. The aircraft is similar position as the aircraft carrier ship, and the other drones will perform the duties of all other ships in the carrier group - some for attack, some for defence, some for information etc. Here the role of the pilot will be that of a human decision-making element on the battlefield. The aircraft will be a very high-performance computing unit - taking in, analysing and relaying the information for his drone and other devices.
In a Twitter conversation, Commander Sandeep Dhawan has talked about Pawn Strategy, which I think will be an advanced option we must think about. I am sure he will make the video he promised very soon.
https://twitter.com/InsightGL/status/1690980579414876160?s=20
Why is this important?
The nature of air war will determine what kind of aircraft, weapon systems and sensor technology we will develop. Thus, in the future, we may need bigger planes to act like platform aircraft rater than nimble fighter planes. OR may be we need many drones and no planes at all. We may go with remotely piloted planes and remote and AI-deployed drones. The future is indeed exciting, and India needs to leapfrog the technology if it wants to dominate in the next generation of air warfare.
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