[CapricornNoble]

>>In practice, the US has already demonstrated that its primary airpower projection is via unmanned systems, the manned combat aircraft is the mounted cavalry c. 1920.

1. The US hasn't had to overcome a first-rate Integrated Air Defense System since the 1970s. UAVs, while hard to detect due to their small RCS, have extremely poor overall survivability. It's part of what makes them so cheap.

2. The US is rarely flying drones against an adversary with robust Electronic Attack capabilities. They're pretty useless if their datalinks to their Ground Control Station are jammed and you don't have HARMs on-hand to suppress/neutralize/destroy the jamming source.

3. The future of air power is likely to be a mix of manned fighters with UAVs as wingmen or forward-deployed scouts/sensor platforms, and then further in the rear big (manned) "bombers" with deep magazines throwing missiles into the fight from far away, handing off target tracking to the manned fighter. Even something like an F-15 Strike Eagle or a Su-34 could fulfill that latter role with the right electronics suite and ordnance upgrades...

[whatshisface]

If history is any indication, the future of air power will be three years of absolutely terrible strategies after the next war starts, where the wrong weapons are being manufactured and the right weapons are being deployed incorrectly, then followed by one month of sanity which sets the military doctrine for the next two decades of peace, to remain in place as it becomes obsolete again...

[jcranmer]

A serious question here: what history are you drawing this inference from?

Popular history tends to be a distorted view of history that willfully ignores evidence to the contrary to tell a good story, and military history especially tends to fall victim here. As a good case in point, take WWI. In popular history, WWI is a war of unimaginable destruction because generals were idiots fighting Napoleonic-era tactics with modern weaponry. But that's not really sustained by the evidence. The generals and officer class were aware of how much more effective modern guns and gunnery was compared to the Napoleonic wars, and their battle plans accounted for this. Trenches came out of known tactics--on the defensive, digging in is the most effective way to avoid the lethality of opposing weapons, and an underground trench is more effective than an above-ground static fortification.

[whatshisface]

Any historical claim can be argued with, and I guess this is an example, but I would maintain that WWI involved a lot of things that wouldn't be repeated with modern knowledge. To offer another example, consider actual Napoleonic-era tactics: why was Napoleon running around and defeating everyone with them when the same guns were basically available everywhere? Ideally everyone would have copied his artillery tactics as soon as he used them once, but military leadership rarely moves that fast. If you sent a general from the era to West Point today, they would probably be able to defeat Napoleon.

[credit_guy]

> consider actual Napoleonic-era tactics: why was Napoleon running around and defeating everyone with them when the same guns were basically available everywhere?

More prosaically, Napoleon had much larger armies available to him than his opponents: "You can't stop me, I spend 30000 men a month" [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25qmz6/can_s...

[Aloha]

I would argue that WWI was so deadly because it was modern weaponry without modern medicine to go with it. We made huge strides in treating casualties between the two wars.

[spaceandshit]

Thank you for correcting a common (HN/SW) perspective I've seen recently. "Software will fix all problems, everywhere"

[foolfoolz]

these combat drones are manned, the human is just out in an air conditioned office building in nevada. there’s no reason you’d put someone at risk in a $150M fighter when you could bring 4-5 unmanned fighters with similar weapons platforms. i don’t think there’s any future with combat pilots flying top gun style

[mschuster91]

> 2. The US is rarely flying drones against an adversary with robust Electronic Attack capabilities. They're pretty useless if their datalinks to their Ground Control Station are jammed and you don't have HARMs on-hand to suppress/neutralize/destroy the jamming source.

GPS jamming can be made vastly more difficult by special antenna configurations, and additionally I'd hope that military drones have precise IMUs and star trackers to serve as fallback.