Air Combat Will Look Like in 2030? Here's the US Air Force What Think

As part of a broader initiative to invigorate its advanced science and technology work and promote increased partnerships with academia, the U.S. Air Force has released a short video depicting how it thinks aerial warfare might look by the end of the next decade. It’s a futuristic, but in many ways incomplete vision full of advanced stealthy manned jets, semi-autonomous unmanned combat air vehicles, lasers and other directed energy weapons, and a potentially artificial intelligence-enabled network backbone that brings it all together.

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), one of the service’s top research and development arms, put the clip online earlier in March 2018 as a “call to action” for the Air Force 2030 project. Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson first announced this plan at the Air Force Association’s main annual convention and exhibition in 2017, which also marked the Air Force’s 70th year in existence.

The first scene depicts an F-35A Joint Strike Fighter working together with six stealth unmanned combat air vehicles, or UCAVs. For years now, the Air Force, and AFRL in particular, has been working on this type of manned-unmanned teaming, which it has referred to as the Loyal Wingman” concept.

Similar operating concepts could apply in air-to-air combat, as well, with the drones acting as missile trucks, engaging targets based on information from the controlling F-35 or another manned or unmanned asset loaded with sensors. It could also potentially help with the Air Force’s chronic pilot shortage by significantly expanding the capabilities a single manned aircraft can bring to bear across a broad area.

Beyond that, though, networked systems will also give pilots and increasingly detailed picture of the battlefield during actual operations by fuzing together different types of data from various sources. Advanced artificial intelligence may be able to help parse that information, as well, speeding up a pilot's decision making process by weeding out low-priority data and focusing on the most significant threats.

As we at The War Zone have written about in depth many times before, these swarms have the potential to offer intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities over a broad area, as well as the ability to confuse or otherwise disrupt enemy defenses. Depending on their exact size and capabilities, they might also be able to function as munitions themselves or conduct non-kinetic attacks using electronic warfare jammers or other systems.

Together with Boeing, AFRL has actually already demonstrated the first capability in tests of a weapon known as the Counter-electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP). This system used the body of an AGM-86 Conventional Air Launched Cruise Missile (CALCM) to carry a still classified payload that uses microwave pulses to disable electronic devices

Since then, the Navy appears to have taken the lead on this project, which it refers to High-power Joint Electromagnetic Non-Kinetic Strike, or HIJENKS. The Air Force remains actively involved, though, and reportedly is responsible for the payload that will go into the prototype weapons.

The inherent ability of a laser focus its beam narrowly on a particular point could improve overall accuracy and help limit collateral damage during air strikes, especially in constrained environments such as densely populated urban areas, which is itself an increasing topic of concern across the Pentagon. Depending on the exact nature of the power source, it could also offer an effectively “bottomless magazine,” allowing an aircraft to remain on station and armed for a protracted period of time, even after engaging multiple targets.

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