A real danger is that some country that has enough industrial base to make cheap cars will start mass producing thousands of cheap UAVs, with the idea of an air armada overpowering their enemies’ small handful of ultra high tech aircraft.
A high tech fighter can engage six enemy simultaneously, but then it is out of weapons. What happens when it faces six hundred enemy? By the time it can land and rearm, the drones have destroyed its airbase.
The best use for such expendable UAVs would be as “buzz bombs”, with primitive guidance to make them relatively invulnerable to ECM. Just a 1,000lb bomb with an engine, fuel tank, crude “fly by wire” guidance and a simple low tech computer brain to tell it to make any course corrections. If the brain is fried, no problem, it just continues on its hard programmed course, with a little loss of accuracy of its 1,000lb bomb.
Others could carry a short range air-to-air missile, to throw a barrage at the enemy high tech aircraft. Out of a dozen such missiles thrown at you at once, somebody is bound to get lucky.
Exactly. As Stalin correctly observed, quantity has a quality all its own.
We are moving in the direction of having only a handful of super whiz-bang planes in the USAF. Yeah, they're GREAT planes, but if just a few of them go down we are toast.
The scenario that will emerge is a ‘fighter/bomber’ shepherding a fleet of UAVs against a fleet of UAVs controlled from the target.
Oddly, yet again the B52 is a perfect candidate!
Air combat going assymetrical is maybe something to take seriously.
If Japan launched 6,000 WWII Kamikaze Zeroes against a single current US carrier, what would happen?