This guy has his finger on the pulse. Good for him.
But I am wary of involving Silicon Valley at the front end of defense planning or inventing. They are not weaponeers or fighters; they are geeks, with idealistic visions of how things might be done.
An example of how this collides with reality would be the Future Combat Systems program (2001-2009). Hugely ambitious, with many subsidiary systems in development under an over-arching architecture that envisioned an "internet of the battlefield." During early discussion of such a scheme, I shook my head and made the objection that this would be like developing a fighting animal will all its nerves on the exterior of its body. Puzzled looks. I said, "If I were Kim Jong Un and had just one nuclear weapon, do you know what I would do with it?" (slow head-shaking) "I would loft it to high altitude and set it off for an optimal electromagnetic pulse to knock out all the robots and communications." (raised eyebrows) From that point, it appeared to me that a massive communication architecture was destined to fail, and the only survivable approach would be to invest in artificial intelligence sufficient to enable fully autonomous subsystems, and communicate by packet switching: short-range, point-to-point, non-interruptible links from subsystem to subsystem.
It was not taken up. The communication guys threw themselves at the problem with great industry and solved it. When they ran it out to test, it turned out that the operating system required about 70% of the available channel capacity as overhead, to sustain its own functions. Shortly after that realization, the program was canceled.
There are solutions, but you need to understand the fight in order to understand the fighter. Having eyeballs in all directions is conceptually straightforward. Cameras are small and cheap. Phased array radar in millimeter wave can be small and proliferated. If the drone is given the intercept software of an AMRAAM and a high turn acceleration, it can outmaneuver a manned airplane...because the human pilot is subject to g-limits much lower than inanimate electronics. But who listens to this?
I like what this guy has been saying. my father, who passed a couple years ago, was an electrical engineer that worked the majority of his career in aerospace as well as cellular communications, hated the F-35 joint fighter program from the start. he always claimed it was a money grab by the military contractors who made the F-22 prohibitively expensive. had they worked out making the F-22 much closer in price to the F-35, the US would be in much better shape. they are making the f-35 out to be a jack of all trades platform. remember, a jack of all trades is usually a master of none...
This guy has his finger on the pulse. Good for him.
But I am wary of involving Silicon Valley at the front end of defense planning or inventing. They are not weaponeers or fighters; they are geeks, with idealistic visions of how things might be done.
An example of how this collides with reality would be the Future Combat Systems program (2001-2009). Hugely ambitious, with many subsidiary systems in development under an over-arching architecture that envisioned an "internet of the battlefield." During early discussion of such a scheme, I shook my head and made the objection that this would be like developing a fighting animal will all its nerves on the exterior of its body. Puzzled looks. I said, "If I were Kim Jong Un and had just one nuclear weapon, do you know what I would do with it?" (slow head-shaking) "I would loft it to high altitude and set it off for an optimal electromagnetic pulse to knock out all the robots and communications." (raised eyebrows) From that point, it appeared to me that a massive communication architecture was destined to fail, and the only survivable approach would be to invest in artificial intelligence sufficient to enable fully autonomous subsystems, and communicate by packet switching: short-range, point-to-point, non-interruptible links from subsystem to subsystem.
It was not taken up. The communication guys threw themselves at the problem with great industry and solved it. When they ran it out to test, it turned out that the operating system required about 70% of the available channel capacity as overhead, to sustain its own functions. Shortly after that realization, the program was canceled.
There are solutions, but you need to understand the fight in order to understand the fighter. Having eyeballs in all directions is conceptually straightforward. Cameras are small and cheap. Phased array radar in millimeter wave can be small and proliferated. If the drone is given the intercept software of an AMRAAM and a high turn acceleration, it can outmaneuver a manned airplane...because the human pilot is subject to g-limits much lower than inanimate electronics. But who listens to this?
listens to what?
Such ideas.
I like what this guy has been saying. my father, who passed a couple years ago, was an electrical engineer that worked the majority of his career in aerospace as well as cellular communications, hated the F-35 joint fighter program from the start. he always claimed it was a money grab by the military contractors who made the F-22 prohibitively expensive. had they worked out making the F-22 much closer in price to the F-35, the US would be in much better shape. they are making the f-35 out to be a jack of all trades platform. remember, a jack of all trades is usually a master of none...