What's going on in India?

[Speaker to Animals]

It's a bunch of nonsense corporatespeak.

Marketing nonsense that could get us all fucking killed in a real war.

Any networked hardware; any overly engineered technology; a potential risk and weakness that can be exploited.

Drones are great, but they introduce weaknesses. They can be hacked, spoofed, or just shut down with electronic warfare.

KISS

[Smitty-48]

Sensor fusion is KISS, 4th generation air combat is complex, 5th gen is simplified.

[Speaker to Animals]

It will work out great when it is hacked or shut down. Then you can kiss your ass goodbye.

It's terrible air war doctrine and the effect of political graft writ large. Merchants run the MIC and they will be the death of it eventually.

[brewster]

Because the AI is still more expensive than birthing, raising and training a pilot.

There's nine million lines of code in the sensor fusion engine, taxpayers are already saying that that is too pricey, to make fully autonomous, would be exponentially more lines of code and so exponentially more expensive.

Once the price of AI to do this job comes down, then the pilot will be replaced, but contrary to popular sentiment, that is still a couple decades away, because the AI has to be fully militarized.

Who said "fully autonomous"? From your own description it sounds like the F-35 could get into the combat zone on it's own, and fight, with minimal remote executive direction, not so different from a Reaper. How much cheaper could they be made without the failsafe systems and efforts to keep a pilot alive at all cost? There's gotta be a similarity to the huge cost difference between manned and unmanned space flight. Besides, the cost of AI is in it's development not the hardware anyway.

[Smitty-48]

No, and no. The Reaper is a remote controlled airplane, can't go into contested airspace at all.

The role of the fighter pilot is far more complex than just shooting things down with abandon, fighter pilots are officers for a reason.

The failsafe systems are not expensive, most of the price of the plane is software code.

[Smitty-48]

The pinnacle for America military AI in the air right now is probably LRASM

Can navigate in GPS denied environment, can tell one type of ship from another so it hits the right ship.

That's a "smart drone" right now.

That's about as complex a mission as an autonomous drone can handle, at an affordable price at this moment.

And those ain't exactly cheap, those missiles are a million dollars a shot.

[Smitty-48]

Reaper ain't cheap, speaking of Reaper.

7 reapers is the same price as an F-35, and again, reaper is just an RC plane with a camera on it.

Reaper is actually hella expensive for the limited job that it does,

Whereas F-35 changes the rules of air warfare entirely in America's favor, for the price of a tuned up F-16

Reaper actually requires two pilots to fly it. It can only fly in protected airspace, and it can't find targets, you have to know where the target is, then Reaper just orbits that and looks at it with a narrow view camera.

The F-35 EODAS is hemispheric staring IRST out to the horizon, sees everything at once, 360 degrees in both axis, points out targets for you. Like that guy over there shooting an AK47, the F-35 sees him and tells you, then asks you if you want to kill him.

Then you can zoom in and see; nope, that's a friendly with an AK, don't kill him.

[Speaker to Animals]

If you just asked the squadron commanders anonymously they'd tell you flat out that you need nothing more than a straight-up air superiority fighter. That means two engines with massive redundancy, a solid weapon load, superior performance and range.

What you get instead are these grifter brass who are angling for defense contractor jobs when they retire, and congressman who are totally bought and paid for, who want the subcontracting gravy train to roll into their district. NONE of those people give a flying fuck about what the USAF actually needs, much less the welfare of the United States. They all put money and personal aggrandizement before their duty and their country.

It's just fucking garbage people, really.

[Speaker to Animals]

Selling a single-engine fighter aircraft to Nordic nations who are going to fly these things in environments where punching out means certain death really shows you how depraved these people truly are.

If your mission involves flying over arctic waters, with fucking ice chunks floating on the surface, then do you really want to fly in a single-engine aircraft, where all the power depends on that one engine, and engine failure of any kind means your only viable procedure is to make an act of contrition on your way down?

The fuck?

[Smitty-48]

The Nords fly F-16 now. The USAF is flying F-35 in Alaska. No problemo.