Fighter Drones!

But they aren't for the brown skies above the tip of the spear where they are most needed

When drones can attack fighters with highly trained pilots, sending drones out to fight those threat drones can help preserve the contribution of those highly trained pilots. Until the drones exceed human pilot skills, I suppose. But I’ll kill that digression right now. Back in 2018 I called for Army unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), as UAVs were called then, to function as fighter drones over forward combat units in close combat.

Air Force friggin' fighter drones!

“We have two prototypes of Collaborative Combat Aircraft that were on paper less than a couple of years ago,” Allvin said. “For the first time in our history, we have a fighter designation in the YFQ-42 Alpha and the YFQ-44 Alpha—maybe just symbolic, but it’s telling the world that we are leaning into a new chapter of aerial warfare.”

CCA drones are designed to be “loyal wingmen” that can fly alongside new and existing crewed fighter jets, including the F-35 Lightning II. The Air Force believes a single manned fighter can control a larger number of drones than originally envisioned and can do so using less-sophisticated autonomous technology.

Our piloted fighters can conduct ground attack, too. Are these intended to be multi-purpose or are different drones intended to be the ones that go toe-to-toe with ground based air defenses to hit ground targets?

This is good and part of the projected path technology is enabling and requiring to remain competitive, as Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, commander of Air Combat Command, explained:

But while the Air Force uses “quite a bit of uncrewed platforms to do our business in the day to day,” the service currently doesn’t “have the artificial intelligence that we can plug pilots out of aircraft and plunk AI in to the degree that the AI can replace a human brain,” he said. “Someday we will have that, I trust, but right now we don’t. And so it does require this manned and unmanned teaming as we go forward.”

Indeed, when systems go belly up, he believes we will always need humans capable of taking control. But AI pilots will certainly be a bigger part of the air arsenal.

But they are blue sky fighters and not the much-needed brown sky fighters I proposed in Army magazine back in 2018. Blue sky fighter drones simply expand (or preserve) Air Force capabilities in the blue skies. That is necessary but not sufficient, as I observed:

The Army should adapt the Navy continuum to the air domain to better improve air defense for Army ground troops in light of the problems the Air Force has in moving away from the blue skies where air supremacy has been fought for traditionally. the Air Force could lose the black skies of space to a potential independent U.S. Space Force. the brown skies low over the battlefield where dust, smoke, and fog dominate the air domain are a challenge to the Air Forces’ ability to fully protect the Army from aerial threats.

I noted the then-new threats of swarming drones now made famous by the First-Person View suicide drones in the Winter War of 2022:

Jules Hurst predicted in a 2017 Joint Force Quarterly article that “flights of fixed-wing swarms will provide persistent autonomous air support as they orbit the battlefield like flocks of angry birds.”

Hurst was wrong in failing to see quadcopters rising for that role, but he was spot on for the role. What should the Army do when that threat is the reality and beyond the reach of Air Force assets patrolling and controlling the blue skies? I proposed one means that allows small maneuver units to focus on their mission of closing with and destroying the enemy, without the distraction of air defense:

Clearly, units at the company level and below need a better means of controlling their own brown sky airspace. Yet rather than burdening lower-level units with additional ground-based air defense gun and missile systems, air-to-air combat UASs would provide better air defense than either high-flying advanced fighter aircraft or distant higher-echelon air defense weapons that will have difficulty identifying and tracking small aerial threats—let along engaging them—before the threats strike and return to enemy positions. … the Army must have friendly combat air patrol swarms for defense and to clear the enemy brown skies for the Army’s own attack and surveillance UASs.

Note that elsewhere in the essay I also mentioned electronic counter-measures as a defense. But I clearly didn’t see them as being man-portable. And I didn’t foresee suicide drones.

We are starting to see fighter drones in the skies over Ukraine. But so far they seem to be suicide drones that smash into enemy drones. How long before they are reusable with their own weapons to shoot down enemy drones?

The need at the tip of the spear is still unmet:

While a top priority for Army leaders, countering unmanned systems on the battlefield is presenting challenges and lagging behind other key modernization initiatives, according to the commander of the 101st Airborne Division, one of the service’s most elite and storied units. …

Counter-drone technology is one of three primary focus areas for Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s “transforming-in-contact” initiative, which aims to use deployments and troop rotations to test new equipment — mainly commercial off-the-shelf gear — that could allow units to be more responsive on a dynamic battlefield. The effort is also focused on UAS and electronic warfare.

The Air Force is still focused on the blue skies—and lost the black skies to that separate service that became reality—while the threat in the brown skies from large numbers of small suicide and recon drones has arrived on the battlefields of Ukraine.

It’s up to the Army to transform a little faster before it is in contact.

NOTE: I made the image with the Substack capability.