Ukraine and Iran are both showing it quickly becomes a war of attrition and fancy weapons get very expensive very fast, or run out very fast.
But we would be remiss to pick up on some threads from both Ukraine and Iran.
In Ukraine, the VKS is still able to generate substantial damage (both in tactical support of ground forces, as well as part of the civilian bombing campaign) with glide bombs (carrying 500kg+ class bombs, launched by tactical jets from over Russian controlled airspace).
These tactics are effective, and are able to do things that Shaheds aren't quite capable of doing - for example ensuring destruction of certain targets with a single hit. I imagine Ukraine would love to be able to be able to take glide bombs off the table, but it can't.
It can't because it lacks the air force to conduct an offensive counter-air campaign, and it lacks the long range strike capability to permanently disable relevant airfields, or destroy enough airframes on the ground.
European militaries would like to be able to avoid this situation, and therefore certain relatively exquisite capabilities are needed.
In Iran, while Iran has demonstrated its ability to severely tax the much more exquisite forces of the US+Israel and the Gulf States, the reality is that they have NOT been able to meaningfully degrade the US or Israel's ability to bomb Iranian ground targets at will.
European militaries would also like to be able to prevent the VKS from just... bombing central to eastern Europe at will.
European war aims - which would be to able to defeat Russian forces so soundly and quickly that Russia will forever be deterred, requires exquisite capabilities, that are able to strike the Russian war machine from the front line, all the way back several hundred kilometers in high precision, and high density (in time and in weight of payload), in a way that can actually cause collapse (when combined with ground counter attacks). It cannot rely on a Ukrainian style war or Ukrainian style tactics purely because... well, Russia is infact actually fighting that war right now, and hasn't given up yet.
A Europe that has to fight at all, is a Europe that has already lost. A Europe that has to fight for more than a few weeks or months, is a Europe that has deeply lost.
Using high end jets as delivery platforms for high end missiles is not scalable in a conflict anymore. Likewise most estimates say even the US will run out of Tomahawks within the first 1-2 months of a conflict with China. They are gambling those missiles open up a big enough window to do anything else while their own Navy is under siege in the process.
https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/aerospace-news/2025/ger...
Also, Helsing is apparently a decacorn now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsing_(company)
also you'd want to maximize dual usage (civil/military) of components so that your production capacity can be easily switched back and forth more on demand.
(Otherwise you just end up a stockpile of obsolete drones/weapons)
Doesn't make sense. Esp. since the "Bundeswehr" already lacks personal and the resistance against conscription is huge.
Delaying things has become a typical German thing. They always "check" what to do, debate endlessly without results. (Like with their cartel office: no other European country has seen gasoline prices rise as fast and they're still "checking" if there's an illegal cartel agreement -- and their only solution is to lower taxes on gas, which already didn't work back when Russia attacked the Ukraine) They are still able to improve during disasters, like when they raised the LPG terminals within two years. They have to have their -- as they phrase it -- "Arsch auf Grundeis" (ass on ground ice) first, before anything is moving forward.
It's a crude mixture of conservatism, corruption/euphemism: "lobbying", laziness and old fashioned know-it alls blocking real, obvious innovation.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/6312/why-are-ai...
"Airplanes are riveted, not screwed because they are the product of engineers, not lawyers."
I can see a system like this acting as the sensor and control node for a flight of cheaper drones. We've had cruise missiles for many decades now, and they're drastically more capable than cheap drones, but they didn't deprecate manned fighters. Something like this might.
Also fighter jets are capable of doing so much more than fpv drones, its actually funny that people think drones are the future.
But look at Iran - their air defenses and navy are destroyed. Yet they can inflict massive damage on their neighbors with drones within 10 minutes flight distance, making them hard to stop.
By doing so they’re keeping the price of oil high and are able to put economic pressure on the US completely disproportionate to their military capabilities.
So even though drones are not the full solution, without an answer to them you can’t win either.
Damage. Not massive damage.
Drones seem to have reached their zenith of operational freedom. I’m genuinely surprised the U.S. and Israel don’t field gun- and laser-based anti-drone demonstrators.
With Ukraine, if Russia had been able to establish total air dominance early on, they wouldn't have been stopped in their tracks the way they were. The fact that they weren't able to do that has nothing to do with cheap drones, which became a decisive factor only much later.
In Iran, US and Israel were able to establish total air dominance, but they didn't have any plan to follow on with boots on the ground, which is still necessary to actually defeat an enemy. And most successful hits so far were achieved through ballistic missiles, not cheap drones.
Land warfare is next on the list: https://time.com/article/2026/03/09/ai-robots-soldiers-war/
So this is Skynet v0.1?
I have more trust in Airbus than the PayPal mafia though.
These drones are "helpers" for fighter jets. It's a type of role that is still in development (no one has an operational collaborative combat aircraft as far as I understand), both technically and in concept.
But the basic idea is that you'll have drones that can somewhat keep up with your fighter jets and help it do stuff that might be too risky. Maybe fly ahead, or be the one with the active emissions or sensors or whatever. Or maybe it's just a way to increase the amount of ordnance/sensors you can fly per sortie / generate from a given amount of training/flight hours in a year.
* 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 capable
Elsewhere, Boeing Australia's Ghost Bat seems to be doing well as well.
There were more wars before any type of mechanisation of warfare, with the only slow down really happening after nuclear weapons were developed.
yes 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:
Cities were routinely razed and famines and disease killed scores of people in historical warfare as well - we have the accounts, we know it happened. The "difficulty" of implementing any of this was enormous given the lack of modern logistics or simple things like refrigeration to keep armies resupplied.
How does this support your argument though? World War 1 increased the level of danger and destruction of warfare and...then we had World War 2. If the hypothesis was that making war easy leads to more wars, then no example presented shows that because WW1 was at the time the most destructive war in history and simply set the stage for an even more destructive war.
(I'm pretty sure Musk could make them reusable. /s)
- 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 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 (kinetic kill, 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?
(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.
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.
Hard to win at jamming, when you're further away and the opponents are frequency agile.
1. They can use directionality more effectively to their advantage
2. Inverse square law works against you (unlike e.g. jamming GPS where it works for you).
3. They can be frequency agile, strongly rejecting everything outside of the 20MHz slice they're using "right now"-- and have choices of hundreds of those slices.
Fighters already have radars that they expect to "win" with despite that being inverse fourth power, a longer range, and countermeasures. They can send communications-ish signals anywhere over a couple GHz span up near X-band. Peak EIRP that they put out isn't measured in kilowatts, but tens of megawatts.
My concern is less total link loss than what happens under degraded or intermittent connectivity. If the wingman still depends on the manned aircraft for tasking or weapons authority, then the interesting question is how it behaves when the link is noisy rather than gone.
That feels like the real hinge in the concept.
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.
If the unmanned aircraft are the ones flying far ahead, taking the risk, and extending the standoff envelope, then why is the human still sitting in the forward fighter rather than supervising from a safer node further back?
At that point it seems like the architecture is optimizing for tactical latency and current doctrine, not necessarily for the cleanest end-state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multifunction_Advanced_Data_Li...
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.
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.
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.
>or else we wouldn't need hundreds to thousands of drone operators in the Ukraine war
I don't think this is the reason the systems are not fully autonomous right now ("fully autonomous" here meaning that they can complete the kill chain independently, no HITL). Even if we assume it true that the drones are not "good enough" to be at parity with a human operator, if you had an essentially limitless amount of them, would you really waste the manpower on operating them in FPV mode? You would not, you would completely saturate the battlefield with them. Thus, as it was in the beforetimes and ever shall be, logistics wins wars.
Disrupting the signal for a normal-sized aircraft is much harder. If you're flying at 10s of thousands of feet and have a line of sight to multiple satellites it's going to take some serious weaponry to disrupt that.
The G forces are another thing. I wonder why they aren't stsrting wth missle platforms instead.
Sure, winged flight has uses, but taking a missle platform, adding small munitions instead of a big bang?
Regarding your missile platform question, there are several companies that already manufacturing loitering munitions, and long-range loitering cruise missiles are on the roadmap, so to speak.
Price and ease of manufacture. Missiles are expensive and hard to build.
I'd hate to be part of the clean-up crew when that war ends. Broken fibre is nasty stuff.
So a drone boat with good/secure signalling pulls up and a bunch of fibre optic drones launch from that point penetrating inland.
Also dogfights are much rarer now, most people just fling rockets at each other (so you know how much these cost, a b200 seems cheap in comparison)
Only if every mission is absolutely critical. If disruptions are rare then you don't need autonomy.
The said that about the 5th though. Like I've personally talked to people who were actively working on the F35 and they were saying "last manned aircraft" in like 2011ish.
I expect autonomy to be a long steady improvement of taking on additional subroutines of increasing complexity of decisions being made along the way. Fly here, land there, kill that, go over there without being detected, etc, etc, until humans are making only a select set of decisions that will probably be randomly sprinkled at the high and low levels.
Kind of like how when we build a brick wall the "vision" and the actual laying of bricks still get done by human but all the intermediary steps are drudgery that can be trivially automated (not to say they are all automated, just that they could be if labor $$ vs software $$ penciled out that way)
Obama didn't announce the "pivot to Asia" until 2012. A lot of the world was still believing in the whole unipolar moment thing. The F-35 hadn't even started training squadrons in service yet. 6th generation probably felt really far away. 2016 onwards has been a major acceleration in all sorts of ways.
In my eyes, 6th generation was really ignited by the focus on China. The PCA/NGAD/F-47 was first out the gate, and really set the tempo and got everyone else going.
I agree with your estimation of the likely development path. I expect that approach to merge/converge from the other direction - I expect there to also be a parallel path of fully autonomous systems growing to occupy ever greater mission sets. Imagine telling a drone "I need an ELINT mission in the area and timeframe" (and it plans its own launch time, flight route, calculates fuel loads, communicates with ground staff), or "I need you to airdrop this supply pallet".
I mean, they wouldn't think that, would they? It would put their pilots out of a job. But most flying has been done by autopilot long before AI, and even if/when you need a human in the loop, why would you want to put that human in the cockpit rather than safely in Virginia?
Ultimately a carrier strike group could achieve many of the missions a F35 can through cruise missiles, ballistic missiles etc.
What an F35 provides is a sensory platform deep into enemy airspace.
But with the F35 being very expensive, and required to stay silent in RF to maintain stealth it's further desirable to have a loyal wingman out there.
The whole thing becomes one large sensor network with th added weapons.
It makes most sense in a near adversary situation and as it stands that particular scenario is why the F22 is not exported.
If you can outsource the radar on a jet it is not a huge leap in logic to put the very hot missiles onto a unmanned aircraft. All of these concepts where written up 20 years ago by both china and the US
What benefit does a human pilot offer in this case? Are going to be using their eyes to track their location or see a Chinese fighter jet launching a standoff antiair missile at them? Drones can do AWACS and deep sensor roles, with a pilot and sensor operators far away from the planes.
> All of these concepts where written up 20 years ago by both china and the US
Defense contractors and the gov planners are often the same group of people, the same small community, there's not that many vendors. They show up at defence trade shows and see what industry is offering them. They tend to stick with the same big safe companies that change slowly. Bold ideas are infrequent. The smaller countries can take those risks easier than America.
'loyal wingman' gives the kill / no kill decision to an Air Force officer. And having the decision maker geographically close eliminates jamming, delays, and the requirements to have a satellite infrastructure (like is required for Predator UAV's).
i hope we never assign a piece of code, AI or not, to be the decision maker.
This is already a past station, just not at Airbus.
Airbus has publicized that it is working on a Project Maven style project with France's DGA [0][1].
Thales also publicly launched and demonstrated SkyDefender a couple days ago [2].
Mistral AI also announced in January 2026 that it is working with the DGA to productionize it's models for military applications [3] - ironically similar in manner to how the DoD was using Claude but is now using Gemini and GPT.
No country is going to leave networked, autonomous offensive and defensive capabilities on the table.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/airbus-wi...
[1] - https://www.janes.com/osint-insights/defence-news/defence/ai...
[2] - https://www.janes.com/osint-insights/defence-news/air/thales...
[3] - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/marjorietoucas_were-happy-to-...
https://www.vp4association.com/aircraft-information-2/32-2/m...
A landmine has no friend-or-foe-or-noncombatant decision engine, it will kill you or maim you just like it will kill or maim the guy that laid it or any other passer by.
The 'signature' bit is interesting, but I'd still not label that AI, and neither does anybody else. It is a loitering munition, I'll give you that, and I think that that brings it closer to the 'mine' definition of things than the 'AI killbot'.
https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/proposed-dod-princ...
Same with the idea that drones can't have high end radars and other stuff which requires a fancy human jet in the loop. Decidated single purpose drones with high end sensors can solve a similar purpose with a much lower risk and cost.
Drones like they have in Ukraine are more like cheap missiles, they don't compete against fighter jets, and they can't do anything to them once they have taken off.
Just in the invasion in Iran we all saw Apache handling drones with ease. They can probably put on the minigun or even microgun on an MQ-9, which is a drone, but not like the ones discussed here. Or someone might realize a turret on a Super Tucano is cheaper than the Reaper ground control trailer. My point is, Ukraine and Russia throwing drones at each others is not a sure sign that that's the war of the future.
A Shahed drone costs $20K each. The Patriot missile interceptor costs $4 Mil each.
And the inevitable result is that the interceptors run out first
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-war-israel-tells-us-...
https://www.economist.com/international/2026/03/13/gulf-stat...
https://bsky.app/profile/mekka.mekka-tech.com/post/3mgrvx5gr...
The only lasting solution to low-cost drone attacks is low-cost defences. Ukraine knows this. The US apparently does not yet. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/10/what-are-the-ukrain...
But the end result is not "low-cost drones are just a fad." it's drones vs. more drones vs. yet more drones.
Military calculations are very different. Every military asset - most definitely including humans - is disposable, and all wars are (in some dimension) wars of attrition. Holding mission success constant, when the cost x capability x ability to manufacture for autonomous platforms becomes cheaper than all that plus training / replacement cost of human pilots, then human pilots will disappear. The logic of war being what it is, I expect HITL decision-making to very quickly be dropped as soon as it is seen to be retarding the progress of a cheaper option.