The US Air Force wants to have at least 1,000 unmanned aerial vehicles that can operate autonomously thanks to artificial intelligence. This should help contain China.
The Wall Street Journal reports this.
The soaring cost of existing military aircraft and the development of flight control software are said to be forcing the Air Force to shift its focus to a new generation of unmanned aircraft to strengthen its fleet.
Now watching
The first hundreds of UAVs are planned to appear in US service within five years.
— They will escort and protect manned aircraft such as the F-35 and B-21, carry their own weapons to attack other aircraft and targets on the ground, and act as reconnaissance and communications nodes in the sky, — the message says.
They will be able to fly at speeds just below the speed of sound.
The new aircraft reflect advances in flight software that uses artificial intelligence to create programs based on thousands of hours of combat flights, the WSJ points out.
The development program budget is $6 billion. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics and Anduril Industries are working on it. By the summer, the Pentagon may decide on two companies with which they will enter into an agreement.
Not having a crew allows UAVs to perform riskier maneuvers that are physically impossible for a pilot to handle, Air Force officials and flight software developers say.
The Air Force is targeting a price tag of $20 million to $30 million for each unmanned aircraft, although industry executives expect it to eventually drop to around $10 million or less.
For comparison, the F-35 costs about $100 million, and the new B-21 bombers cost more than $750 million.
Earlier, the US Senate Armed Services Committee said that the total number of nuclear weapons of China and Russia could exceed the number of nuclear weapons in the United States if Beijing and Moscow are “amazingly fast” develop this industry.
