The Economist - USA (2020-11-21)

TheEconomistNovember 21st 2020 71

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lassic dogfights, in which two pilots

match wits and machines to shoot

down their opponent with well-aimed

gunfire, are a thing of the past. Guided mis-

siles have seen to that, and the last record-

ed instance of such duelling was 32 years

ago, near the end of the Iran-Iraq war, when

an Iranian f-4 Phantom took out an Iraqi

Su-22 with its 20mm cannon.

But memory lingers, and dogfighting,

even of the simulated sort in which the

laws of physics are substituted by equa-

tions running inside a computer, is reck-

oned a good test of the aptitude of a pilot in

training. And that is also true when the pi-

lot in question is, itself, a computer pro-

gram. So, when America’s Defence Ad-

vanced Research Projects Agency (darpa),

an adventurous arm of the Pentagon, con-

sidered the future of air-to-air combat and

the role of artificial intelligence (ai) within

that future, it began with basics that

Manfred von Richthofen himself might

have approved of.

In August eight teams, representing

firms ranging from large defence contrac-

tors to tiny startups, gathered virtually un-

der the auspices of the Johns Hopkins Ap-

plied Physics Laboratory (apl) in Laurel,

Maryland, for the three-day final of

darpa’s AlphaDogfight trials. Each had de-

veloped algorithms to control a virtual f-16

in simulated dogfights. First, these were to

be pitted against each other. Then the win-

ner took on a human being.

Dropping the pilot?

“When I got started”, says Colonel Dan Ja-

vorsek, who leads darpa’s work in this

area, “there was quite a bit of scepticism of

whether the aialgorithms would be up to

the task.” In fact, they were. The winner,

created by Heron Systems, a small firm in

the confusingly named town of California,

Maryland, first swept aside its seven digital

rivals and then scored a thumping victory

against the human, a pilot from America’s

air force, in five games out of five.

Though dogfighting practice, like

parade-ground drill and military bands, is

a leftover from an earlier form of warfare

that still serves a residual purpose, the next

phase of darpa’s ace(air combat evolu-

tion) project belongs firmly in the future,

for it will require the piloting programs to

control two planes simultaneously. Also,

these virtual aircraft will be armed with

short-range missiles rather than guns. That

increases the risk of accidental fratricide,

for a missile dispatched towards the wrong

target will pursue it relentlessly. Tests after

that will get more realistic still, with lon-

ger-range missiles, the use of chaff and

flares, and a requirement to deal with cor-

rupt data and time lags of a sort typical of

real radar information.

The point of all this, putative Top Guns

should be reassured, is not so much to dis-

pense with pilots as to help them by “a re-

distribution of cognitive workload within

the cockpit”, as Colonel Javorsek puts it. In

theory, taking the pilot out of the plane lets

it manoeuvre without regard for the impact

of high g-forces on squishy humans. An

uncrewed plane is also easier to treat as

cannon-fodder. Still, most designs for new

fighter jets have not done away with cock-

pits. For example, both of the rival Euro-

pean programmes—the British-led Tem-

Aerial combat

Virtual mavericks

Fighter aircraft will soon get aipilots. But they will be wingmen,

not squadron leaders

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