ntil surprisingly recently, many believed
that the era of the manned combat
aircraft was drawing slowly to its close.
It was often mooted there would be no manned
fighter after the F-35, and that future military
air power would be the exclusive domain of
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or unmanned
combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs). But some were
always more sceptical, believing that human
eyes in a cockpit would always have superior
situational awareness – detecting a glint of light
or trace of smoke in peripheral vision in a way
that a remote operator, relying on a sensor with
a relatively narrow field of view, never could.
Others argued that bandwidth limitations
would always mean that an on-scene human
decision-maker would be useful, at least...
if not essential. In his paper for the Air and
Space Power Journal, ‘The Next Lightweight
Fighter’, former USAF fighter pilot Col Michael
W Pietrucha outlined some of the limitations of
UCAVs, which he maintains: “will not replacethe manned fighter aircraft”
because “we cannot
build a control system
to replicate the sensing
and processing ability
of trained aircrews”.
Some air power experts
came to the view that
the jamming, denial,
disruption or spoofing
of data links, and of GPS
systems, would frequently make
unmanned operations problematic –
and this has indeed proved to be the case in
operations over Syria in recent years. Others
contest that the most profound limitations
of unmanned systems are more societal
than technical or technological, with rules of
engagement (RoE) likely to favour manned
platforms in many situations, and with a
deeply held and growing public distaste
for ‘drone strikes’ and ‘killer robots’.In 2000 the US National
Defense Authorization
Act for Fiscal Year 2001
predicted that: “by 2010,
one-third of the aircraft
in the operational deep
strike force aircraft fleet
will be unmanned.”
But this expectation
(and many similar
predictions about the
inevitable ascendency of
unmanned combat aircraft) has
proved to be premature. Recent studies
by Airbus Defence and Space showed
that unmanned technologies will probably
not be sufficiently advanced for a future
combat air system capability to be provided
by a completely unmanned solution, and
it’s now intended that a new-generation
manned combat aircraft will be at the
heart of any future combat air system.U
Beyond the fi fth generation
62 // DECEMBER 2018 #369 http://www.airforcesmonthly.com“New fi ghter
development
projects have begun,
or are being defi ned
and drawn up in the
US, the UK, Germany,
France and Sweden,
as well as in Russia
and China.”