Warplanes: Killer Software

[Valin]

Strategy Page:

August 23, 2016:

 

Back in 2009 the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (a navy admiral and the senior military guy in the Pentagon) and his boss (the Secretary of Defense) both admitted that the future of combat aviation is UAVs (unmanned aircraft). Senior Department of Defense officials agreed that the next heavy bomber would probably be a UAV. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs believes that the F-35 will probably be last American manned combat aircraft. Since then

 

Now comes an American company (PSIBERNETIX) that has developed software that gives an unmanned aircraft the ability to defeat manned aircraft in air-to-air combat. The U.S. Air Force recently tested the PSIBERNETIX software in a combat simulator against experienced human pilots. The software controlled aircraft could not be defeated, at least not yet. What shocked the experienced human pilots, who had the technical skills to understand what the PSIBERNETIX software did and how it did it, was that the new software, as many software developers have been predicting, can outperform humans because with enough information (from the growing number of sensors available to manned or unmanned combat aircraft) the software can think faster than the human pilot. This is how software eventually defeated the best human chess players and have replaced humans in many jobs that require absorbing a lot of data, sorting it out and making decisions quickly.

 

Air-to-air combat with UAVs was long one topic no one wanted to discuss openly. This was seen as the last job left for pilots of combat aircraft. The geeks have long believed they had this one licked and were giving the fighter pilot generals the "bring it on" look. The American generals were not keen to test their manned aircraft against a UAV, but this will change the minute another country, like China or Russia, demonstrates that they are seriously moving in that direction. Meanwhile the U.S. Air Force was willing to test challengers in simulators, and now they have lost. Russia and China are paying close attention.

 

(Snip)