Discussion

Airbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft from Kratos for first flight with a European mission system

markdown: Airbus preparing strike drones is a better title.

sourcegrift: There's a funny term some cool kids use for them, "drone", I think? Personally I think it's too short to convey the full utility.

maximinus_thrax: Good! Great to hear! EU needs to grow its domestic military industry, the French were right all along.

Mistletoe: "Begun, the Clone War has." -Yoda

colechristensen: The worry being that war will be a lot easier to stomach when none of the combatants are alive.

jwilliams: I mused about this back on 2017[^a]. Surely we're well on the way to having this with commercial planes? [a] https://jonathannen.com/captain-ai/

dlt713705: But a robot war is an endless war. There will always be more robots to fight until the economy is completely exhausted.

borski: Not necessarily. If the factories that build the robots are taken out, for example. Someone (even a robot) still has to build them.

icegreentea2: There are multiple interesting developments wrapped together here.First, these are intended to be "loyal wingman". They'll be commanded (but not really remotely controlled) from manned fighters nearbyish. Presumably, the "shoot authorization" will be delegated down to the pilots.Secondly, the actual unmanned platform (the Kratos Valkyrie) is also part of a program of record for the USMC (US Marine Corps) to act as a partner SEAD (suppression of air defence) vehicle.Thirdly, the "MARS" system chattered about looks to be Airbus' open architecture /system of systems pitch that they were developing for FCAS (the European 6th generation fighter program). MARS and all pitches like it are about ways to make individual platforms as software defined as possible, and to get different platforms/instances to really data/function share as much as possible.If this program goes well, it shows that Airbus' MARS has the flexibility and capability required to just... layer into/ontop of some random other vendor's hardware/software and then "just work". I think it would be major demonstration/validation of the work.

busterarm: The EU already has the 2nd, 4th, 6th and 10th largest share of global arms exports. Losing the 8th place slot due to Brexit.

dom96: Is this the EU's version of the Shahed drones? or is it something different?

chaostheory: [delayed]

dlt713705: What if the factories are located in foreign countries and the belligerents are only buying off-the-shelf products ?Wars are always bad news and robot wars are very bad news. Many countries will fall into an endless war economy.

twalichiewicz: This seems to be the generally agreed upon direction defense companies are going, but a couple architectural concerns come to mind regarding this "Manned-Unmanned-Teaming" approach:- Even if the XQ-58 has a low Radar Cross Section, a "swarm" of four drones flying in formation with a non-stealthy Eurofighter significantly increases the aggregate probability of detection. Unless these drones are performing active Electronic Countermeasures or "blinking" to spoof radar returns, they’re essentially a giant "here we are" sign for any modern AESA radar. I wonder if they've compensated via the flight software to manage formation geometry to minimize the group's total observable signature?- Anti-air systems will prioritize the "Command Aircraft" (the Eurofighter) immediately. If the C2 link is severed—whether by kinetic kill or high-power jamming—what is the state-machine logic for the subordinates? Do they revert to a fail-passive (return to base) or -active (continue last assigned strike) mode? Without a human-in-the-loop, rules of engagement issues are abound. (I'm not even accounting for the fact that the drones probably rely on calculations from the command craft, so edge-computing will factor in as well.)- They're calling these "attritable," but at $4M a pop plus the cost of the sensors, they aren't exactly disposable. Is the "cost-per-kill" for an adversary’s interceptor missile actually higher than the cost of the drone it's hitting? If not, we haven't solved the cost-curve problem; we've just moved it.

blobcode: (1) Aircraft rarely fly in anything close to formation in combat - large gaps are the norm (1-10 miles), and one would think that increased distance is something that could be exploited by an unmanned platform (able to take more risk, etc.)(2) Remains to be seen.(3) Individual Patriot missiles are around that price point, with S300/S400 anywhere from 500k-2M depending on capability. One would think that cost-per-kill would be favorable considering the increased capability granted.

d_silin: In terms of military technology we now have aerial and naval drones clearly outperforming previous generation of ships and aircraft in "bang for buck".Land warfare is next on the list: https://time.com/article/2026/03/09/ai-robots-soldiers-war/

esafak: None on the offensive side, perhaps.

icegreentea2: I think the USA has ~3ish airframes/systems that are roughly in this category:* The Kratos Valkyrie with the USMC in a SEAD role* Anduril (YFQ-44) and General Atomics (YFQ-42) are battling it out for the USAF's CCA Increment 1 contract (we're apparently supposed to get a decision on that this year) - with Increment 2 probably getting spun up pretty soon* USN has the Boeing MQ-25 as an drone tanker... once that gets up the speed, I'm fairly certain it's going to morph into something strike capableElsewhere, Boeing Australia's Ghost Bat seems to be doing well as well.

twalichiewicz: At 10-mile intervals you're maintaining a high-bandwidth, low-latency mesh network in a contested electronic environment. If the command aircraft is 10 miles away and the enemy is jamming the link, the drone is going to be making split-second (potentially) lethal decisions without the pilot.You're right about them both costing about the same, so the real leverage only comes if these drones can stay out of the engagement envelope while sending cheaper submunitions (likely using something like these Ragnaroks (~$150k) https://www.kratosdefense.com/newsroom/kratos-unveils-revolu...) to do the actual baiting.

girvo: Airbus' Ghost Bat equivalent?

emregucerr: Did they pick the word "uncrewed" to not use the word "unmanned"? If so, I'm not hopeful. Might be another EuroDrone disaster.

tomasphan: They are reprogramming a US built drone to the German datalink equivalent with some AI sprinkled on top. Unfortunately far away from a real industry.

bluegatty: That's how it was always done. Nobody invented the whole thing from scratch.

bluegatty: They are already on in Ukraine.

bluegatty: Stealth is less effective against long range radar, stealth is more effective closer in against targeting radars.When you're high up you can have pretty long 'line of sight' so it's not unreasonable that these could fly way way ahead. 100 miles and way more is not unreasonable.You basically get 'double standoff'.I can see this as being almost as effective as manned stealth and if they are cost effective they could very plausibly defeat f22 scenarios.Once you add in the fact that risk is completely different (no human), then payload, manoeuvrability, g-force recovery safety, all that goes out the window and you have something very crazy.3 typhoons with 2-3 'suicidal AI wingmen' each way out ahead is going to dust them up pretty good at minimum. It's really hard to say for sure obviously it depends on all the other context as well.

XorNot: The history of warfare, hell the literal current warfare happenijg in Ukraine makes this entire argument unbelievably specious.There were more wars before any type of mechanisation of warfare, with the only slow down really happening after nuclear weapons were developed.

xp84: Even the absence of a person could potentially become offended, I suppose.

dmix: Why do I get the feeling that the market shifted beneath their feet to drones and these old aircraft companies are using "loyal wingman" to make a half-hearted half-way play between old/new products to stay relevant, which just buys them time to keep selling expensive jets... until pure drone upstarts start eating their lunch.Like when Blackberry tried to make BlackBerry Storm after iPhone and Blockbuster tried to make Blockbuster Online after Netflix.Technology shifts rarely wait for these stodgy middle ground transitionary products to find a market.

hnipps: > MARS also contains an AI-supported software brain called MindShare which not only replaces the missing pilot, but is also capable of coordinating entire mission groups by being distributed across many manned and uncrewed platforms.So this is Skynet v0.1?

Barrin92: >There were more wars before any type of mechanisation of warfareyes but they weren't comparable. With the exception of ancient Chinese wars which are a bit of an odd case given the population sizes and that they kept sending farmers to the front until everyone starved, European pre-modern wars consisted of small armies and relatively low civilian casualty ratios.It's this and the late 20th century that saw civilian death ratios climb up to 80-90% in mass bombing campaigns and urban warfare environments. People like to use 'medieval' as an insult but the medieval age was quite constrained compared to Gaza. And if you take the pilots out of the equation and fully automate this, that's probably only a taste of what people will do to civilian populations.Because a picture says more than words, this is the kind of thing you can probably look forward to:https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G_63OmTawAABeIg.jpg?name=orig

icegreentea2: Roughly everyone excepts the 6th generation fighters (the ones currently in development like F-47) to be the last manned generation. Most observers expect many/most 6th gen fighters to become optionally manned within their life span.The real question is basically - is full autonomy both technically possible and culturally/politically acceptable within 5, 10, or 20 years? Because full autonomy isn't really ready now (or else we wouldn't need hundreds to thousands of drone operators in the Ukraine war). And at least the USAF doesn't think remote control will let them do what they need (which is to fly from Japan to Korea or Taiwan, or Philippines to Taiwan, and contest/control the skies in the face of a basically peer adversary).Because no one knows that answer, everyone (governments, militaries, manufacturers) is hedging, and CCA is part of that hedge.