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FUTURE FIGHTERS
- Aviation Features
- Future fighters
15th November 2018
FEATURE
The market for manned fighter aircraft has been estimated to be larger than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Jon Lake looks at some of these programmes and explains why the long-predicted ‘rise of the machines’ has not materialised in quite the way many had expected, and how tomorrow’s fighters might differ from today’s combat aircraft.
”New fighter development projects have begun, or are being defined and drawn up in the US, the UK, Germany, France and Sweden, as well as in Russia and China.”
Until surprisingly recently, many believed that the era of the manned combat aircraft was drawing slowly to its close. It was often mooted there would be no manned fighter after the F-35, and that future military air power would be the exclusive domain of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs). But some were always more sceptical, believing that human eyes in a cockpit would always have superior situational awareness – detecting a glint of light or trace of smoke in peripheral vision in a way that a remote operator, relying on a sensor with a relatively narrow field of view, never could.
Others argued that bandwidth limitations would always mean that an on-scene human decision-maker would be useful, at least… if not essential. In his paper for the Air and Space Power Journal, ‘The Next Lightweight Fighter’, former USAF fighter pilot Col Michael W Pietrucha outlined some of the limitations of UCAVs, which he maintains: “will not replace the manned fighter aircraft” because “we cannot build a control system to replicate the sensing and processing ability of trained aircrews”. Some air power experts came to the view that the jamming, denial, disruption or spoofing of data links, and of GPS systems, would frequently make unmanned operations problematic – and this has indeed proved to be the case in operations over Syria in recent years. Others contest that the most profound limitations of unmanned systems are more societal than technical or technological, with rules of engagement (RoE) likely to favour manned platforms in many situations, and with a deeply held and growing public distaste for ‘drone strikes’ and ‘killer robots’.
In 2000 the US National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2001 predicted that: “by 2010, one-third of the aircraft in the operational deep strike force aircraft fleet will be unmanned.”
But this expectation (and many similar predictions about the inevitable ascendency of unmanned combat aircraft) has proved to be premature. Recent studies by Airbus Defence and Space showed that unmanned technologies will probably not be sufficiently advanced for a future combat air system capability to be provided by a completely unmanned solution, and it’s now intended that a new-generation manned combat aircraft will be at the heart of any future combat air system
This Boeing artist’s impression of a single-seat sixth-generation fighter emerged in late 2016 as part of the firm’s Penetrating Counter Air (PCA) studies. The tailless fighter has thin swept wings and conformal shaping that suggests a stealthy, penetrating aircraft with the potential to fly at supersonic speeds. Boeing
The prediction that there would be no more new manned combat aircraft development programmes has thus already been proved to be unfounded.
New fighter development projects have begun, or are being defined and drawn up in the US, the UK, Germany, France and Sweden, as well as in Russia and China. Meanwhile Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey are also embarking on their own indigenous advanced fighter initiatives, while existing (generation 4.5 and 5th-generation) combat aircraft programmes are planned to continue well into the 2020s.
Decisive drones
Despite all this activity on manned warplanes, UAVs and UCAVs will still have a vital, and indeed a growing role to play in tomorrow’s military air operations. There’s a train of thought that the single thing that will differentiate tomorrow’s manned combat aircraft from the fighters in service today will be the way in which they will operate with unmanned assets in a carefully co-ordinated manner.
While some forward-looking air arms have explored the idea of manned/ unmanned teaming, tomorrow’s fighters will embrace this as a core part of their concept of operations (CONOPS).
Unmanned platforms will augment and support manned platforms as part of an air combat ‘cloud’. They will be used to ‘scout’ ahead, providing targeting and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), or as sensor platforms, extending the area of battlespace that can be reconnoitred. Equally, they could be used as weapons platforms, going further into harm’s way than manned aircraft, especially in the kind of anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) environment that might force manned aircraft to operate at a greater standoff distance.
Unmanned aircraft might serve as flying arsenals, augmenting the payload of accompanying fighters. Sometimes unmanned aircraft could be used for communications relay, and others may operate entirely autonomously. A manned fighter could team up with one or two unmanned ‘loyal wingmen’ or with larger numbers of ‘swarming’ UAVs or ‘mules’. Some unmanned aircraft will incorporate a high level of autonomy, employing artificial intelligence and machine learning.
It would be tempting to assume that tomorrow’s manned fighters will mark a significant advance over today’s in each and every respect – that they will be more capable, stealthier, faster, more agile, more heavily armed, with longer-range sensors and more effective defensive systems, and with a superior human-machine interface (HMI).
But this may not always be the case. Ambitious initial requirements are often scaled back in the face of cost or technological problems. When the ‘fifth-generation’ designation was first used as a marketing tool for the F-22A Raptor and the-then X-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), the ability to supercruise (to reach and sustain significant supersonic speed without recourse to afterburner) and super-manoeuvrability were said to be defining capabilities. But both of these features were quietly dropped from the checklist of what constituted this class of fighter when it became clear that the JSF would be unable to achieve either! Stealth, fused sensors and connectivity then became the key distinguishing features.
Beyond the fifth generation
This Boeing concept for a single-seat canardequipped F/A-XX fighter emerged in 2013. At the time, the company was pitching the tailless twinengine stealth fighter in manned and unmanned forms. The design features diverterless supersonic inlets (DSI) similar to those on the F-35. Boeing
Stealthy fifth-generation fighters have become central to USAF doctrine, connecting electronically both to each other and to advanced UCAVs and legacy aircraft and allowing the force to shape a distributed air operations capability even when operating in contested airspace. By using and fusing onboard and networked offboard sensors, the pilots of fifth-generation fighters gain an unmatched and consolidated situational awareness of the battlespace. The synergy of stealth, sensor fusion, automatic target tracking and complete situational awareness allows these aircraft to roam anywhere in the battlespace – even within sophisticated integrated air defence system (IADS) environments.
The case for stealth
For ‘first-night-of-the-war’ missions, a lowobservable platform is of course useful for ‘kicking down the door’ by destroying an enemy’s IADS. But if accompanying unmanned assets are going to penetrate the most heavily defended airspace there may be no need for a manned fighter to have a very low radar crosssection (RCS) from every aspect, and there may be other ways of achieving the same effect.
The recent US-British-French operation against suspected Syrian chemical weapons facilities were undertaken on the assumption that Russian surface-to-air missiles and radars in the area could intervene. But rather than using fifth-generation assets, conventional, non-stealthy attack aircraft were used, armed with stealthy long-range cruise missiles.
Similarly, very high levels of agility may not be necessary if all-aspect weaponry and sighting systems are sufficiently effective and reliable. Tomorrow’s fighters will be armed with a new generation of weapons, perhaps including missiles capable of reaching hypersonic speeds, and potentially even including directed-energy weapons, which damage a target using a ‘beam’ of highly focused laser, microwave or particle beam energy. Such weapons will require huge electrical power-generation capabilities, and will pose a real thermal management challenge, adding to that caused by new sensors and avionics systems. They are unlikely to have sufficient performance to be of much use for long-range offensive use but could conceivably be useful for short-range engagements. Putting every capability on every platform would be prohibitively expensive, and many air forces require ‘mass’ as well as capability. Increasingly, customers want to ‘break the cost curve’, and this will mean acquiring cheaper fighters than the F-22 and F-35. Some cost reductions will be achieved through more efficient manufacturing and through better programme management, but some capabilities may also be traded out in the pursuit of lower cost.
Northrop Grumman presented this concept of a future fighter in an ad shown during the Super Bowl in February 2016. Noteworthy are the high degree of wing sweep, high-mounted air intakes for low observability and a forward fuselage somewhat reminiscent of the company’s YF-23. Northrop Grumman
Shown in US Navy markings over a supercarrier, this is a vision of a Northrop Grumman sixth-generation fighter design. Company officials have spoken of the importance of resilience to cyber-attack and hinted at the possibility of sacrificing all-out speed for increased endurance. Northrop Grumman
In 2015 Northrop Grumman presented this vision of the NGAD, shown firing a directed-energy weapon. The design combines features of the company’s B-2A bomber and X-47B drone and company officials stressed its long range and weapons carriage capacity. Northrop Grumman
Shown in a brief video clip last year, this NGAD concept from Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works suggests a relatively small and agile manned fighter. Exotic concepts, such as morphing metals, ‘self-healing’ capabilities and laser weapons have all been mooted for NGAD. Lockheed Martin
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