The era of unmanned dogfights have arrived with drone on drone encounters of the third kind. It's just a matter of time when unmanned aircraft replace manned as the tech's cheaper and the capabilities of the hardware will soon operate beyond the abilities of man to handle. Think G forces and O2 for example.
To whit ...
In the skies over Ukraine, a new epoch in air warfare is emerging: drone-on-drone combat.
These aerial duels don’t involve bullets, missiles or bombs. In some, hobby-type camera quadcopters that are used to spy on enemy positions simply ram each other in a crude aerial demolition derby. In other encounters, highly sophisticated craft use advanced radar—backed by artificial intelligence and the latest aerospace engineering technology—to precision fire nets that snag other drones.
Right now, it's tandem with manned and unmanned aircraft working as a team but that too will change.
And the action in Ukraine suggests that even more novel kinds of aerial conflict—including combat drones armed to fight in tandem with piloted aircraft—are coming to the broader world of warfare. The U.S. Air Force, for example, now envisions a fleet of 1,000 high-performance uncrewed aircraft paired with its most advanced combat jets. This plan is in response to China’s growing challenge to the U.S. military’s 75-year air dominance. Beyond the battlefield, weaponized drones could, from the skies above any city, easily threaten things such as crowd safety at major sporting events, prison security and critical infrastructure. (Of course, much of the underlying technology is also expected to usher in changes for the good in the realm of peaceful applications. Drones have already been successfully used to rush extremely perishable donor organs to transplant patients.)
As often stated, tech never sleeps ... ever.
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