alt Hacker NewsAirbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft
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I misread “uncrewed” as “unscrewed” and for a moment this became a much stranger, better aerospace story. Not autonomous aircraft, but aircraft apparently liberated from screws. A future of pilotless aircraft is plausible enough; a future of screwless aircraft is much weirder.
Does this just continue the ‘western way’ of spending a crap load of money on each military item, instead of getting good at making A LOT of something really cheaply?
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.
In terms of military technology we now have aerial and naval drones clearly outperforming previous generation of ships and aircraft in "bang for buck".
Land warfare is next on the list: https://time.com/article/2026/03/09/ai-robots-soldiers-war/
Let's see how this turns out. The hyped Anduril "cheap" anti-drone tech didn't work in Ukraine and evidently does not work in the Middle East.
I have more trust in Airbus than the PayPal mafia though.
Top Gun Maverick was kinda right.
> MARS also contains an AI-supported software brain called MindShare which not only replaces the missing pilot, but is also capable of coordinating entire mission groups by being distributed across many manned and uncrewed platforms.
So this is Skynet v0.1?
"uncrewed combat aircraft"? it is basically an autonomous drone that is trained to act like a wingman. Just a natural evolution of where military drones are heading.
Airbus' Ghost Bat equivalent?
Is this the EU's version of the Shahed drones? or is it something different?
Yeah, I believe Kratos (who is doing this joint venture with Airbus) and AeroVironment are the current leaders in the space. Not sure what happens when Anduril goes public
There's a funny term some cool kids use for them, "drone", I think? Personally I think it's too short to convey the full utility.
Good! Great to hear! EU needs to grow its domestic military industry, the French were right all along.
Wouldn't uncrewed aircraft, and (hypersonic) missiles merge technologies and become the same at some point? Why are we engineering the two separately? Are missiles by definition exploding themselves rather than releasing payloads?
(I'm pretty sure Musk could make them reusable. /s)
A modern V-2. Nothing could possibly go wrong!
Did they pick the word "uncrewed" to not use the word "unmanned"? If so, I'm not hopeful. Might be another EuroDrone disaster.
This seems to be the generally agreed upon direction defense companies are going, but a couple architectural concerns come to mind regarding this "Manned-Unmanned-Teaming" approach:
- 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?
There are multiple interesting developments wrapped together here.
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.