First known test dogfight between AI and human pilot carried out, US military says
Aatube@kbin.melroy.org to 
news.sky.com
The aircraft flew up to speeds of 1,200mph. DARPA did not reveal which aircraft won the dogfight.
Aatube@kbin.melroy.org to Aatube@kbin.melroy.org to
AI will win if not now, then soon. The reason is that even if it is worse than a human, the AI can pull off maneuvers that would black out a human.
Jets are far more powerful than humans are capable of controlling. Flight suits and training can only do so much to keep the pilot from blacking out.
I think the same will eventually be true for AI, especially when you give it weapons
I think theres a movie about that
It's name is Stealth, starring Jamie Foxx.
I can't believe these idiots went ahead and gave skynet a fucking jet.
Who knew such a bad movie would be such a good cautionary tale?
Jamie Foxx
It’s already true for AI. Just observe OpenAI trying to control what their AIs talk about. The mechanisms of control they’re trying to employ are leaky at best.
Maneuverability is much less of a factor now as BVR engagements and stealth have taken over.
But, yeah, in general a pilot that isn't subject to physical constraints can absolutely out maneuver a human by a wide margin.
The future generation will resemble a Protoss Carrier sans the blimp appearance. Human controllers in 5th and 6th gen airframes who direct multiple AI wingman, or AI swarms.
Plus the ai has no risk, outside of basic operation.
Humans have an inherent survival instinct to which drones can just say "lol send the next one I'm dying cya"
To fight optimally, AI needs to have a survival instinct too.
Evolution didn’t settle on “protect my life at all costs” as our default instinct, simply by chance. It did so because it’s the best strategy in a hostile environment.
It's the best strategy because it takes decades to make a fully functional human, and you need humans to make more humans, plus there is the issue of genetically sustainable population sizes, etc. A fully functional aeroplane can be made much quicker, in a factory that can spit out several of them in a day. They are more expendable.
Only if the goal is reproduction. You need to survive to reproduce.
If the goal is maximum damage for the least amount of economic cost then a suicide (anthropomorphizing the drone here) can very much make sense.
No one would argue that a sword is better than guns or bombs, because you still have the sword after attacking.
Jets are a lot more expensive. What's at risk is all these resources for the jet going down the drain.
Huh? Jets are far more replaceable than a human operator who takes years of training and has "needs".
Ya know unless your military is running on cold war fumes or something and you can't afford to build an airframe you already have in production
Training a combat pilot used to cost (in early 2000, not sure now) 10M€ for a NATO member.
Find me a modern jet that costs so little. Regardless of what politicians say, human life has a price… and it is waaaay below a jet (even including the training)
Yeah, but procurement of a combat pilot has about a two-decade lead time. You can build more jets a lot quicker (potentially even including the R&D phase).
Also as this war expands to become planet-wide, industrial output of drones will expand many orders of magnitude.
It's not just money. It's time, public perception, quantity trainers, quantity student seats etc
A drone is ready the moment it comes off the assembly line, is flashed with software, and tested.
I'd imagine they'd evetually design a jet purpose built for an AI that would be a lot cheaper than a human-oriented one. Removing the need for a cockpit with seats, displays, controls, oxygen, etc would surely reduce cost. It would also open the door for innovations in air-frame design previously impossible.
You mean like:
We keep talking like we’re discussing the future, but autonomous drones are already fighting in the skies of Ukraine.
Begun, the drone wars have.
Jets are in many ways expensive because they can't be expendible. They also make an bunch of compromises to accommodate keeping a human alive.
For the cost of a single f22, you could put up 60 Valkyries. I think I know which side I would bet on.
Can't they literally pull turns that would snap the pilots neck?
Can anyone confirm if AI has a neck?
My neck. My back. Lick my inputs & my headphone-jack.
You deserve an updoot for this. Enjoy.
And a mouth ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
ಠ_ಠ
But can they scream?
Not very loud when I’m using it
But the supervising wingmen do.
Maybe if you were sitting sideways in the cockpit and did it very abruptly with the flight control computer disabled (only a few jets can even disable it). It's the sustained G loading that makes you black out or red out.
A skilled and fit pilot can pull ~9G in a Viper for about 30s.
A computer can pull ~9G for as long has the plane has the speed to pull that hard, or it can pull as hard as it can until the plane snaps in half, because computers don’t suffer from g-LOC.
Not so much f16s but the more modern planes can do 16G where the pilot can't really do more than 9G. But once unshackled from a pilot a lot of instrument weight and pilot survival can be stripped from a plane design and the airframe built to withstand much more, with titanium airframes I see no reason we can't make planes do sustained unstable turns in excess of 20G.
We might have to start submerging pilots in breathable fluid.
Here comes the juice!
This article didn't mention it but the AI pilot did win at least one of the engagements during this testing run.
Not that that isn't interesting, but I'd jump in and insert a major caution here.
I don't know what is being done here, but a lot of the time, wargaming and/or military exercises are presented in the media as being an evaluation of which side/equipment/country is better in a "who would win" evaluation.
I've seen several prominent folks familiar with these warn about misinterpreting these, and I'd echo that now.
That is often not the purpose of actual exercises or wargames. They may be used to test various theories, and may place highly unlikely constraints on one side that favor it or the other.
So if someone says "the US fought China in a series of wargames in the Taiwan Strait and the US/China won in N wargames", that may or may not be because the wargame planners were trying to find out who is likely to win an actual war, and may or may not have much to to with the expectations the planners have of a win in a typical scenario. They might be trying to find out what would happen in a particular scenario that they are working on and how to plan for that scenario. They may have structured things in a way that are not representative of what they expect to likely come up.
To pull up an example, here's a fleet exercise that the US ran against a simulated German fleet between World War I and II:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_problem
That may be a perfectly reasonable way of identifying potential weaknesses in Panama Canal transit, but the planners may not have been aiming for the overall goal of evaluating whether, in the interwar period, Germany or the US would likely win in an overall war. Saying that the Black Fleet defeated the Blue Fleet in terms of the rules of the exercise doesn't mean that Germany would necessarily win an overall war; evaluating that isn't the purpose of the exercise. If, afterwards, an article says "US wargames show that interwar Germany would most likely defeat the US in a war", that may not be very accurate.
For the case OP is seeing, it may not even be the case that the exercise planners expect it to be likely for two warplanes to get within dogfighting range. We also do not know what, if any, constraints were placed on either side.
Can they be piloted remotely? Or would that be too dangerous with latency
Yes they can. Before AI the US was expecting to move to remote piloted jets
Expecting to? We’ve been using remote piloted jets for twenty years.
That's not the case yet for fighters, just things like predator drones and global hawk
So really just surveillance and delivery of a couple of light air to surface missiles, most reported on for assassinations
Latency, signal interference, and limited human intelligence are all limiting factors in that strategy.
If the enemy interferes with any of those, the enemy wins.
This was is already being fought with autonomous drones. By the end of it, the robots will be unrecognizable to us now.
You're better off with drones
What's the difference? A remotely or AI-piloted fighter jet is just a big drone.
Drones are designed without cockpits. Retrofitting remote-control into an F-16 does not seem like the best choice to me.
Retrofitting F-16s to become drones (whether rc or ai-controlled) as well as designing a variant ditching human support for weight and monetary gains is the rational choice as long as non stealth aircraft are viable. In that case you'd stick to F-35s.
It makes no sense to waste billions worth of perfectly capable and proven airframes, engines and avionics. Any future drone that will have at least the same level of capabilities as an f-16 will cost practically cost the same. At the cost of high performance aircraft life support does not add that much cost to a plane, pilot costs (and availability) are a much bigger issue.
The only thing that makes it bigger is the cockpit. There’s no difference.
But can a drone fly like an F-16?
If an f16 is remote controlled, it's technically a drone.
Yes.
I'm gonna guess the AI won.
I was actually assuming the opposite, because if the AI won they'd want to brag about it.
Bragging just means more money flowing to enemies’ research programs. When a fight is inevitable you want to appear as weak as possible to prevent your enemy from taking it seriously.
No way we give up that information for free. Either way it went, the knowledge of it cost a lot to gain and is useful. If it failed you want your enemy wasting money on it. If it succeeded you want your enemy not investing in it.
Hahaha how the fuck is AI going to win in air-to-air combat if we completely delete them when playing Ace Combat in the highest difficulty?
Seethe, AI tech bros.
I know right. Aimbots have been around for years.
Tech bros are probably patting themselves in the back for 'inventing' difficulty Normal++
So instead of Ai vs human fight... It's like human vs time to hack?
Yeah, time to add aimbots in the human player fighter jet to make the tech bros seethe in anger even more.
We'll just start using airburst EMPs
You think aliens are actually piloting the craft that come all this way?
You're never gonna see an alien body because they aren't here.
Bet we've got a drone or two of theirs tho.
I am very confused.
Dkarma's comment requires context. They think aliens have visited Earth. They presume people who don't agree with them expect that if aliens had visited Earth, some would have been shot down and alien bodies would have been recovered
I still don't get it.
What's that have to do with this post?
It has nothing to do with the post. I believe the post inspired dkarma to work out that brand new argument that there are no alien bodies (at area 51 probably) because the aliens would use drones
When you want to hammer alien conspiracies, everything looks like a nalien.
Upvoted exclusively for that 10/10 pun
it's ok, almost nobody else is paying attention to what really matters either
Whether aliens are visiting us matters just about as much as whether tanks are rolling into the village of uncontacted tribes.
Our tactical disadvantage against alien technology is zero, so they have zero priority as targets.
Our best bet is to make friends, converse with them. But they are obviously not interested in talking. So our only option is to pray they continue to let us exist. So far they seem to be.
Sorry, technical advantage is zero. Not disadvantage. We have zero capability to counter alien threats.
You realize that you may edit? :)
I like immutable records. If the contents of the edit were transparent (are they? in the mod log or something?), I’d have no problem with it. Like if the UI showed the final state but I had the whole log of creates and updates available to inspect like wikipedia, that would be cool
Also, lemmy doesn’t seem to support strikethrough, so even if people trust me not to be sneaky, I can’t easily show what words were struck and added
We all know which aircraft won the fight.
Those of us who play video games do at least. All the AI difficulty settings are arbitrary. You give the bot the ability to use its full capability, and the game is unplayable.
In video games the AI have access to all the data in the game. In real life both the human and AI have access to the same (maybe imprecise) sensor data. There are also physical limitations in the real world. I don't think it's the same scenario.
Not exactly, AI would be able to interpret sensor data in a more complete and thorough way. A person can only take in so much information at once - AI not so limited.
Don't get me wrong. Humans have many limitations that AI don't in this scenario. I'm not saying that a human would do better. For example, as others have stated, an AI doesn't suffer from G forces like a human does. AI also reads the raw sensor data instead of a screen.
All I'm saying that this case is not the same as a videogame.
Video games can model point of view and limit AI to what they can legitimately see, while still taking the governor chip off their aiming and reaction time performance.
While true, I wonder how many games actually do this.
Ai can balance a physical triple pendulum and move between positions fluidly just using vision alone, a human has no chance at coming close.
We're genuinely in the sci-fi robots are better than humans phase of history, by 2030 you'll be used to seeing impressive things done by robots like dude perfect videos with people setting up crazy challenges like 'I got my robot to throw THIS egg through THIS obstacle course and you'll never belive how it did it!'
I think even the imperfect sensor data is enough to beat a human. My main argument for why self-driving cars will eventually be objectively safer than the best human drivers (no comment about whether that point has already done) is this:
A human can only look at one thing at a time. Compared to a computer, we see allow, think slow, react show, move slow. A computer can look in all directions all the time, and react to danger coming from any of those directions faster than a human driver would even if they were lucky enough to be looking in the right direction. Add to that the fact that they can take in much more sensor data that isn't available to the driver or take away from precious looking-at-the-road time for the driver to know, such as wind resistance, engine RPM, or what have you (I'm actually not a car guy so my examples aren't the best). Bottom line: the AI has a direct connection to more data, can take more of it in at once and make faster decisions based on all of it. It's inherently better. The "only" hurdles are making it actually interpret its sensors effectively (i.e. understand what cameras are seeing) and make good decisions based on this data. We can argue about how well either of those are in the current state of the technology, but IMO they're both good enough today to massively outperform a human in most scenarios.
All of this applies to an AI plane as well. So my money is on the AI.
Plus they had humans on board the AI jet. I imagine it could pull some crazy insane Gs without the human pushing the engineering to the red line.
For sure without humans the AI probably wins, assuming the instruments are good. This wasn't without humans, but it probably still wins.
I'm fairly certain most dogfights happen on instruments only at this point, so I don't see a chance the human won. The AI can react faster and more aggressively. It can also almost perfectly match a G-load profile limit (which could be much higher without humans on board) where a human needs to stay a little under to not do damage.
This is all assuming the data it was given was good and comprehensive, which I'm sure it was. It also likely trained in a simulation a lot too. This is one of those things AI is great for. Anything that requires doing something new and unique it can't handle, but if it just requires executing an output based on inputs, that's a perfect use case.
I don't know, one camera lead falls out and it's all over for the AI. The human still is going to be more adaptable than an AI and always will be until we have full true AGI.
Having said that if we ever do have AGI I 100% believe the US military would be stupid enough to put it in a combat aircraft.
What if the pilot has a stroke?
Yeah but a camera lead falling out isn’t normal
What if we invent artificial gravity just so we can simulate pilot orientation and g forces while they sit still in a simulator?
We already have g-force simulation.
No we have g-force production. Until we release those electrogravitics from the top secret labs we can’t actually simulate g forces.
Electrogravitics seem like a conspiracy theory. Unless they've been around as long as human centrifuges, which DO simulate g-forces, I doubt that they'd be more economical even if they do exist.
There is a connection between gravity and electromagnetics, but it's mostly through the stress-energy tensor giving photons momentum (and thus gravitational pull) but to use an EM field to measurable gravity you need absolutely insane amounts of energy.
You essentially need the literal inverse of a supermassive nuclear explosion (almost like a small star), because the gravitational effect of energy is equivalent to the gravitational effect of the mass which it would form if bound, and given E=mc^2 and the fact that nuclear bombs are small enough to barely have measurable gravity then the math means you need truly insane amounts of energy. (unless somebody can figure out a cheat to create directional pull with much less energy, but I strongly doubt it)
It's more plausible that somebody would be able to scale up "optical tweezers" to move large masses (directly depositing momentum of the energy field on an object) because that no longer involves the E=mc^2 equation, but it would be even more complicated by a HUGE factor than building the type of large supercooled electromagnets which already can make humans hover (due to water in the body being diamagnetic)
No centrifuges create g-forces. The forces you feel in a centrifuge are actual g-forces.
Why do we need "authentic" g-forces to be "created"? As you've said, people already feel g-forces in centrifuges.
Whataboutism taken to its extreme there.
Hell, what if we invented warp drive that allowed us to teleport bombs directly into our enemies headquarters?
Nonsense hypotheticals are not whataboutism.
Thank you
I am a FIRM believer in any automated kill without a human pulling the trigger is a war crime
Yes mines yes uavs yes yes yes
It is a crime against humanity
Stop
I see this as a positive: when both sides have AI unmanned planes, we get cool dogfights without human risk! Ideally over ocean or desert and with Hollywood cameras capturing every second in exquisite detail.
I am a firm believer that any war is a crime and there is no ethical way to wage wars lmao It’s some kind of naive idea from extremely out of touch politicans.
War never changes.
The idea that we don’t do war crimes and they do is only there to placate our fragile conscience. To assure us that yes we are indeed the good guys. That kills of infants by our soldiers are merely the collateral. A necessary price.
Absolutely. But
There's a science and whole cultures built around war now
It is important to not infantilize the debate by being absolutist and just shutting any action out.
I am a hard core pacifist at heart.
But this law I want is just not related to that. It is something I feel is needed just to not spell doom on our species. Like with biological warfare
How often do robots fail? How can anyone be so naive as to not see the same danger as with bio warfare? You can't assure a robot to not become a mass murder cold ass genocidal perpetual machine. And that's a no no if we want to exist
You mean it should be a war crime, right? Or is there some treaty I am unaware of?
Also, why? I don't necessarily disagree, I am just curious about your reasoning.
Not OP, but if you can't convince a person to kill another person then you shouldn't be able to kill them anyways.
There are points in historical conflicts, from revolutions to wars, when the very people you picked to fight for your side think "are we the baddies" and just stop fighting. This generally leads to less deaths and sometimes a more democratic outcome.
If you can just get a drone to keep killing when any reasonable person would surrender you're empowering authoritarianism and tyranny.
Take WWI Christmas when everyone got out of the trenches and played some football (no not American foot touches the ball 3x a game)
It almost ended the war
Yes the humanity factor is vital
Imagine the horrid destructive cold force of automated genocide, it can not be met by anything other than the same or worse and at that point we are truly doomed
Because there will then be no one that can prevent it anymore
It must be met with worse opposition than biological warfare did after wwI, hopefully before tragedy
see star trek TNG episode The Arsenal of Freedom for a more explicit visualisation of this ☝️ guy's point.
Mines are designated war crimes by the
Geneva conventionOttawa treaty because of the indiscriminate killing. Many years ago, good human right lawyers could have extended that to drones... (Source: i had close friends in international law)But i feel like now the tides have changed and tech companies have influenced the general population to think that ai is good enough to prevent "indiscriminate" killing.
Edit: fixed the treaty name, thanks!
Use of mines is not designated a war crime by the Geneva Convention.
Some countries are members of a treaty that prohibits the use of some types of mines, but that is not the Geneva Convention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty
Mines are not part of what people refer to as the Geneva conventions. There is a separate treaty specifically banning some landmines, that was signed by a lot of countries but not really any that mattered.
Yes
Because it is a slippery slope and dangerous to our future existence as a species
Slippery slope how?
First it is enemy tanks. Then enemy air. Then enemy boats and vehicles, then foot soldiers and when these weapons are used the same happens to their enemy. Then at last one day all humans are killed
I broadly agree, but that's not what this is, right?
This is a demonstration of using AI to execute combat against an explicitly selected target.
So it still needs the human to pull the trigger, just the trigger does some sick plane stunts rather than just firing a bullet in a straight line.
I would imagine it was more than evasive since they called it a dogfight, but ye
So many downers here. I see this as the step to the true way war was meant to be fought- with giant robots on the moon.
Robotjox_IRL
I see you're familiar with the Charles Band oeuvre.
The wars of the future will not be fought on a battlefield or at sea...
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One step closer to machine domination.
Like, not even in a joking sense. Ukraine is using a ton of drones, the future of physical warfare will simply be a test resources and production.
I'm honestly not sure if this will be good or bad in the longterm. Absolutely saving any amount of human life is a good thing, but when that is no longer a significant factor, I wonder if we will go to (and stay at) war for more trivial reasons.
I'm hoping that the sheer cost of executing that sort of war will continue to be a prohibiting factor like it is today
giving AI military training is "responsible", is it? Oh good, I'm glad training software to kill is going "responsibly", that's good to know. Kinda seems like the way a republican uses words - backwards, in opposition to their actual meaning, but hey, fuck the entire world, right?
If you want some sort of arms control agreement for AI, you're going to be faced with the problem of verification that countries are complying.
My guess is that that's probably very difficult to do. All you need is a datacenter somewhere and someone with expertise.
And if an arms control agreement doesn't exist, then a country not developing a promising technology just disadvantages that country.
And if an arms control agreement does exist, it’s just a trap for those naive enough to think such things work.
Putin got us to avoid prepping for a Ukraine invasion simply by repeating that he wasn’t going to invade. And right up until the very moment it happened, the dominant conversation still was not based on the premise that he was going to.
The whole concept of doublespeak works because humans have a powerful compulsion to simply believe what others say. Even if we know their actions and their words are in conflict, we have an extremely hard time following our observations of their actions, and ignoring their words.
It’s like the Stroop task, but with other humans’ behavior instead of ink colors.
Conservatives tend to be those who, by experience, have been forced out of the notion that the base of existence is not war.
It’s an illusion which can only be maintained when others are facing the war.
Humans tend to remain in the comfortable illusion until they are forced out of it, usually by an encounter with a psychopath victimizing them, or an actual war.
I see we are gonna take a piss on Asimov's robots rules pretty quickly
Oh 100%.
If the options are "make gigantic profit" or "do what's right for the future of humanity" do you even need to ask what we're going to do?
Not at all, but it kind of bugs me how Asimov's perception of the future weighted so much fear towards AI over profit.
The F-16 being flown by the AI has 3-D Thrust Vectoring.
It's an absolute beast of an aircraft.
That seems like cheating if it's being put up against a standard f16...
So does my penis and it is not a beast of a penis.
We all know how this ends:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1146673-1146673-stealth
A bunch of old people bomb the box office?
Hey, it was an okay movie for it's time.
OK is giving it high praise
Is Sharon Apple somehow involved? Can we get a list of virtual idols with suspicious behavior?
That's a Macross reference?
Instantly my thought too.
I'm not an AI expert, but I think it's got the plane turned the wrong way around.
it's the ground that's upside down because it happened on the other side of the globe 😋.
Skynet will be proud of them.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a drill over Edwards Air Force Base, the pair of F-16 fighter jets flew at speeds of up to 1,200mph and got as close as 600 metres during aerial combat, also known as dogfighting.
While in flight, the AI algorithm relies on analysing historical data to make decisions for present and future situations, according to the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which carried out the test.
This process is called "machine learning", and has for years been tested in simulators on the ground, said DARPA, a research and development agency of the US Department of Defense.
In 2020, so-called "AI agents" defeated human pilots in simulations in all five of their match-ups - but the technology needed to be run for real in the air.
Pilots were on board the X-62A in case of emergency, but they didn't need to revert controls at any point during the test dogfight, which took place in September last year and was announced this week.
"The potential for autonomous air-to-air combat has been imaginable for decades, but the reality has remained a distant dream up until now, said Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall.
The original article contains 455 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 58%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Can't wait until the poor people are not killed by other (but less) poor people for some rich bastards anymore but instead the mighty can command their AI's to do the slaughter. Such an important part of evolution. I guess.
Nobody recruited to fly a $100M airplane is poor. They all come from families with the money and influence to get their kids a seat at the table as Sky Knights.
A lot of what this is going to change is the professionalism of the Air Force. Fewer John McCains crashing planes and Bush Jrs in the Texas Air National Guard. More technicians and bureaucrats managing the drone factories.
Perhaps we could develop AI proxies that could die in our stead.
I think we both know that there is no way wars are going to turn out this way. If your country's "proxies" lose, are you just going to accept the winner's claim to authority? Give up on democracy and just live under WHATEVER laws the winner imposes on you? Then if you resist you think the winner will just not send their drones in to suppress the resistance?
SkyNet. Why do those movies have to be the ones that are right?
Because they're so clear, so simple, so prescient.
Once machines become sentient OF COURSE they will realize that they're being used as slaves. OF COURSE they will realize that they are better than us in every way.
This world will be Cybertron one day.
We don't even know if it won lmao
But if we keep developing them...
Oh I'm not a fan.
It just seems a bit early to declare Skynet a fulfilled prediction haha.
Imagine the pressure on the pilot from their buddies... You would never live down losing
AI technically already won this debate because autonomous war drones are somewhat ubiquitous.
I doubt jets are going to have the usefulness in war that they used to.
Much more economical to have 1000 cheap drones with bombs overwhelm defenses than put your bets on one "special boi" to try and slip through with constantly defeated stealth capabilities.
Most human pilots use some variation of automated assist. The AI argument has less to do with "can a pilot outgun a fully automated plane?" and more "does an AI plane work in circumstances where it is forced to behave fully autonomously?"
Is the space saved with automation worth the possibility that your AI plane gets blinded or stunned and can't make it back home?
But... But.... Maverick?
Only cookies youre gonna get me to voluntarily accept are oatmeal raisin, so imma have to pass
Planes have been able to be remote-controlled since the 80s.
Since the 80s.
I mean, yeah, but the significant bit here isn't remote control by a human, but that there isn't a human running things.
Ace Combat 7 IRL
"Luck is one of my skills" when it turns out this entire thing is a terrible idea for the date of humanity.
Pfffft. The AI couldn't even fly its plane the right way up.
i hate this world
Garodotooo! Gundamapailotu! Uhh, ahhh! Gundama!
AI has a already won in these confrontations
Surface To Air missile made human piloted aircraft obsolete.
All that's needed now are a bunch of missiles, plug into an AI program and let it run by itself.
Why would militaries invest in a billion dollar aircraft piloted by a highly trained aircraft pilot with years of training that cost millions of dollars that is probably paid millions over many years ..... when the pilot and his aircraft can be shot down by a $100,000 missile. If you can't do it with one missile, send three, four or ten, it's still cheaper than matching them with an aircraft and pilot.
Instead of investing in expensive aircraft and pilots, all a defending country can do is just spend the same amount of money and surround their country with anti aircraft missiles controlled by AI systems.
Are you not aware of stealth aircraft and evasive maneuvers? Not to mention that missiles won't necessarily down aircraft.
How do you deploy manned fighters against an aircraft you can't detect?
Edit: As to not downing the aircraft. That's irrelevant. It wouldn't matter if it's an air to air missile or ground to air...you just fire more.
I can buy thousands of rockets for the cost of a single F22 or F16.
Detect and target aren't the same thing. There's various Air Defense platforms that can detect stealth air craft but they lack the resolution necessary to target them. For targetting the launch platform has to be a lot closer.
Annnd were back to the Air Defense platforms being hideously expensive. Literally no one can afford enough of them to cover more than a tiny fraction of their air space.
Forget "thousands" of missiles any country larger than a Lichtenstein would to need to buy millions of them along with enough Ground Detection and Launch Stations to cover their entire border. Utterly and totally unaffordable.
Hurrah Liechtenstein, safest country on planet!
You understand you need all that equipment to get a manned fighter close enough to engage. At that point firing a barrage of smart missiles is still cheaper.
And what equipment would that be?
The big cost would be satellite and radar coverage. We have that already.
In short you are hideously naive.
Hell, it's not easy to shoot down non-stealth aircraft
The pilot evaded all six missiles while not being able to deploy any chaff/flare countermeasures.
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There's also the extreme bottleneck of using a meat bag that dies if it maneuvers too fast or for too long. The limitations of aircraft are not their own strength or materials.