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KTG17 wrote: Uh, yes they are. Google Loyal Wingman there is plenty to read up on. The Navy is also building autonomous ships to patrol too. In war time you can bet they will be told to engage as well.
Also, the difference between autonomous and killer robots is that the human pilot is still making the decision for the Loyal Wingman, or whatever weapon system, on what to engage. The Loyal Wingman is just deciding how to do it. 'Killer robots' would mean you just let it go and if picks its own targets, and may end up killing indiscriminately. That's the problem people have. It might be a blurry line but there is a difference.
And consider this, the Air Force has already come out and said that the next gen of combat aircraft might be it as far as human pilots are concerned. A great deal of effort goes into preventing an airplane from being too maneuverable, because the human pilot can't handle it. Remove the pilot and your aircraft can push even crazier gs. Those Loyal Wingmen will fly circles around any human pilot since they wont have to worry about blacking out.
Future war is going to be decided lighting quick by the 'toys' everyone has at the time. Whoever runs out of those toys first is going to lose. Might be another 100 years before thats a reality but its coming.
even something like Loyal wingwman inches up to the line, thing is, banning of weapons historicly is a pretty hard thing to do, in times of war people tend to ignore them, sure chemical and biological warfare are said to be banned but you hear about Gas attacks in the middle east regularly, and every nation in the world has centers devoted to bio-weapon research, sure they mostly do it so they know how to contain it, but in a world war situation it's not hard to see someone using them.
Opinions are not facts please don't confuse the two
KTG17 wrote: One of the things the F-35 is supposed to do is act as a manager for other aircraft, so it looks like this capability was planned a long time ago.
Among two dozen other things. And calling it 'planned' is a bit generous. It's about as planned as a table napkin sketch is a fully developed blueprint.
I'm a bit curious how the pilot is going to fly half a dozen planes in a combat situation. Something tells me he's gonna be busier than the proverbial one legged man in an ass kicking contest.
He isn't. In the example of Have Raider, the drone F-16 simulated a bombing attack while avoiding an attack and regrouped with the F-16 with the pilot on its own. I think if they were expecting the F-35 pilot to actually pilot the drones this wouldn't be getting off the ground. The idea is for the F-35 to give tasks to the Loyal Wingmen and for them to autonomously engage those targets on their own, including air to air targets, then regroup with the F-35. And I don't mean the planned capability in this regard, as I have no idea, but I know the software on the plane is meant to handle the battle-space for other aircraft, especially the Gen 4 ones. So I don't think this is a huge leap. Rather than picking up a target and assigning it to a couple of F-15s, it will just assign it to a Loyal Wingman.
I think this is going to come up a lot faster than people think, too.
I think this pic is so badass, even if CGI.
While everyone else is trying to catch up to building a Gen 5, we're working on this.
Fully autonomous robots without human control are never going to happen I think. Even before going into ethical and legal barriers, fully autonomous robots just don't provide many benefits over human-controlled ones, and quite a lot of drawbacks.
Well we have autonomous cars being tested all over the country and while those still have a ways to go, some of them actually do not have humans in them. I imagine flying is easier than driving as there aren’t many obstacles at 10,000 ft. The proof of concept has already been tested so I am sure they are well on their way.
I mean they are working on fully antonomous refueling drones... so how big of a leap is that to a drone with a missile which can determine for itself how it should destroy a target?
Fully autonomous robots without human control are never going to happen I think. Even before going into ethical and legal barriers, fully autonomous robots just don't provide many benefits over human-controlled ones, and quite a lot of drawbacks.
Well we have autonomous cars being tested all over the country and while those still have a ways to go, some of them actually do not have humans in them. I imagine flying is easier than driving as there aren’t many obstacles at 10,000 ft. The proof of concept has already been tested so I am sure they are well on their way.
I mean they are working on fully antonomous refueling drones... so how big of a leap is that to a drone with a missile which can determine for itself how it should destroy a target?
That is a huge, enormous, massive leap. Going from building a drone that can refuel an aircraft to a drone that can decide over life and death is a huge step. Which once again does not provide actual benefits. And flying in combat situations is a lot more complicated than driving on a road. Flying in general is a lot more difficult than driving, despite the relative rarity of obstacles. At this point in time it is doubtful whether automated cars are ever going to be a thing (outside of experiments I mean, considering the fact that many people won't accept them and they have trouble dealing with unpredictable situations), let alone automated refueling drones. And those are the kind of 'dumb' vehicles that actually make sense being automated. Automating a fighter jet is on an entirely different level. It will be much cheaper and effective to just have it controlled remotely by a human.
Except that you have the delay in the pilot sending a signal to the drone, where as if its autonomous, it decides it pretty quickly.
I know we has some ways to go here, but lets not forget how quickly we went from the first plane, to WWII fighters, to putting a man on the moon. I think these things will come a lot quicker than we realize.
KTG17 wrote: Except that you have the delay in the pilot sending a signal to the drone, where as if its autonomous, it decides it pretty quickly.
I know we has some ways to go here, but lets not forget how quickly we went from the first plane, to WWII fighters, to putting a man on the moon. I think these things will come a lot quicker than we realize.
A delay of a few milliseconds isn't going to mean anything because the distances involved in aerial combat are quite large, and because the delay between an AI providing the control input and the aircraft actually reacting would already be much larger than the delay in sending a signal to a drone. Anyways, we are talking about milliseconds which is totally irrelevant.
Wait, you are saying that a pilot sitting in a shipping crate on a base in the US piloting a drone somewhere over the middle east is going to be able to send a signal through satellites faster than an autonomous's cpu can give itself?
Waiting for my shill money from Spiral Arm Studios
KTG17 wrote: Wait, you are saying that a pilot sitting in a shipping crate on a base in the US piloting a drone somewhere over the middle east is going to be able to send a signal through satellites faster than an autonomous's cpu can give itself?
No.
No. What he said was that a few milliseconds doesn't matter.
Now a human will have a slower reaction time than a computer, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. We want a human to make the call on stuff like this. We don't want an AI getting trigger happy and blasting something erroneously.
Self-proclaimed evil Cat-person. Dues Ex Felines
Cato Sicarius, after force feeding Captain Ventris a copy of the Codex Astartes for having the audacity to play Deathwatch, chokes to death on his own D-baggery after finding Calgar assembling his new Eldar army.
Which is why these things won't be full-bore AI's. They'll be more like missiles. The controller tells the onboard computer 'kill that' and it engages that target until either the target goes down, or it does. The only difference will be that the computer will have subordinate computers (in the missiles and gunsight) to do the actual killing instead of going for a kamikaze run itself.
A better comparison might be the Predator drone. A person back in HQ gives it a course, and the onboard computer flies the drone. A person back in HQ does the targeting and launches any missiles the Predator might happen to have. The primary difference will be that the Loyal Wingman will be able to maneuver for a better shot and fire at the optimal moment instead of depending on someone else to determine position and timing. It won't - or at least shouldn't - be capable of determining WHAT it wants to go after.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/09/23 00:13:03
Vulcan wrote: Which is why these things won't be full-bore AI's. They'll be more like missiles. The controller tells the onboard computer 'kill that' and it engages that target until either the target goes down, or it does. The only difference will be that the computer will have subordinate computers (in the missiles and gunsight) to do the actual killing instead of going for a kamikaze run itself.
A better comparison might be the Predator drone. A person back in HQ gives it a course, and the onboard computer flies the drone. A person back in HQ does the targeting and launches any missiles the Predator might happen to have. The primary difference will be that the Loyal Wingman will be able to maneuver for a better shot and fire at the optimal moment instead of depending on someone else to determine position and timing. It won't - or at least shouldn't - be capable of determining WHAT it wants to go after.
Let me put it this way: if the expectation is for the F-35 pilot to control these, in combat, then everything you just said is incorrect. If the pilot is flying the plane in combat, trying to fly the drones in the way you suggest will get him killed. It's not like the enemy isn't going to be smart enough to 'focus on that guy'. So either these things will be smart enough to engage on their own, or they're a hundred million dollars of worthless.
Fate is in heaven, armor is on the chest, accomplishment is in the feet. - Nagao Kagetora
The pilot of the F-35 designates a target on radar and tells drone A to kill it. Drone A then maneuvers against the target while the F-35 pilot is free to do other things. It's no different than targeting a missile, only it comes back after the target has been dealt with.
But at no point does the drone decide that it's going to engage a target WITHOUT the pilot telling it to.
The pilot of the F-35 designates a target on radar and tells drone A to kill it. Drone A then maneuvers against the target while the F-35 pilot is free to do other things. It's no different than targeting a missile, only it comes back after the target has been dealt with.
But at no point does the drone decide that it's going to engage a target WITHOUT the pilot telling it to.
The thing is you are asking the pilot to control several of these other aircraft, while also piloting his own combat aircraft and trying to stay alive himself.
It would be more efficient to let the pilot just focus on his personal aircraft while leaving the drones to be piloted by someone back stateside.
Self-proclaimed evil Cat-person. Dues Ex Felines
Cato Sicarius, after force feeding Captain Ventris a copy of the Codex Astartes for having the audacity to play Deathwatch, chokes to death on his own D-baggery after finding Calgar assembling his new Eldar army.
There are a whole host of reasons why that might not be practical. Some comments above said that there wouldn’t be much of a difference between AI making a decision on the spot and a pilot sending commands from halfway around the world. Nonsense. The greater the distance the greater the delay. A drone with its own AI is going to be able to take in information about its environment and react much faster than sending all that back to a remote pilot. And up till now the US drone war has basically involved bombing terrorists. Those Predators and Global Hawks are not going to be able to do that kind of job in a war against a modern military.
The F-35 is going to be taking in a ton of information about its environment. Many more than any fighter in history. But it is designed to be able to manage the battle space. It doesn’t have to engage all the targets now, it can assign them to other aircraft. The only difference with the Loyal Wingmen is that he is going to probably assign a Loyal Wingman with a command in his helmet and away it’s going to go.
The Navy has also discussed making carriers with the primary purpose of drone-like aircraft.
And I imagine these things will accompany not just F-35s, but eventually all sorts of aircraft.
Massively wrong. There's a huge benefit in removing vulnerability to jamming, improving response times, and reducing the human staff required for a given number of aircraft. AI is incredibly useful here.
And flying in combat situations is a lot more complicated than driving on a road.
Not necessarily. Much of the difficulty in automated cars is things like getting a vision system that can reliably identify pedestrians and anticipate their behavior. A fighter has no such problem, as its threat identification is just using the same radar/IR/etc that human-piloted aircraft are using. It doesn't need to make difficult decisions about whether that ambiguous shape is an enemy fighter or a helpless child, it just acknowledges a radar signature not accompanied by appropriate IFF codes and engages the target.
Flying in general is a lot more difficult than driving, despite the relative rarity of obstacles.
Speaking as a pilot, not true at all. Flying is easy 99% of the time, even for someone like me who is too stubborn to use the autopilot. The only real difficulty outside of emergency situations is landing (since most planes aren't expensive enough to be equipped with full autoland capability), and you don't really care if a drone has a mechanical failure and crashes because it's a piece of expendable ordnance.
There is no such thing as a hobby without politics. "Leave politics at the door" is itself a political statement, an endorsement of the status quo and an attempt to silence dissenting voices.
Massively wrong. There's a huge benefit in removing vulnerability to jamming, improving response times, and reducing the human staff required for a given number of aircraft. AI is incredibly useful here.
Improving response time by milliseconds isn't going to matter one bit. And introducing AI won't reduce human staff since instead of pilots you will now need programmers. You do have a point on the jamming though. However, an AI would also have drawbacks as it would be more vulnerable to hacking and other forms of electronic warfare.
And flying in combat situations is a lot more complicated than driving on a road.
Not necessarily. Much of the difficulty in automated cars is things like getting a vision system that can reliably identify pedestrians and anticipate their behavior. A fighter has no such problem, as its threat identification is just using the same radar/IR/etc that human-piloted aircraft are using. It doesn't need to make difficult decisions about whether that ambiguous shape is an enemy fighter or a helpless child, it just acknowledges a radar signature not accompanied by appropriate IFF codes and engages the target.
Unless you want your automated fighter going around killing children, you'd better make sure it can make those decisions and a whole lot more. An automated jet fighter would need to do virtually everything an automated car can do and then some. And it would need to be able to fly in addition to that, which involves a lot more variables than driving and thus is more difficult to program properly (though not impossible, flight is already automated to a great degree, but there are still difficulties with getting an AI to behave right in more complicated situations that can arise, which is why so far a Human pilot is always necessary).
Flying in general is a lot more difficult than driving, despite the relative rarity of obstacles.
Speaking as a pilot, not true at all. Flying is easy 99% of the time, even for someone like me who is too stubborn to use the autopilot. The only real difficulty outside of emergency situations is landing (since most planes aren't expensive enough to be equipped with full autoland capability), and you don't really care if a drone has a mechanical failure and crashes because it's a piece of expendable ordnance.
Yeah. It is not that 99% of the time I am talking about. Driving is easy 99% of the time as well. It is the exceptional emergency situations that are giving AI a great deal of trouble, both in the air and on the road. Also, I imagine that people do care when a drone crashes because it is an expensive piece of ordnance and therefore not expendable.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/09/24 11:30:18
The US Marines sure are in a hurry with the F-35. They seem to be ahead of everyone else and they are using the most complicated version of the aircraft.
Sure a bizarre looking thing to see on the bottom of the plane.
BTW, the gun, shoots a combo of armor piercing, incendiary, explosive and tracer all in the same round. Each round is like $5k. So a bullet is going to light up as it hits you, pierce you, blow you up, then set your remains on fire.
Automatically Appended Next Post: In other news, looks like the Syrians shot down a Russian aircraft. DIdn't hear about this in the news.
KTG17 wrote: The only difference with the Loyal Wingmen is that he is going to probably assign a Loyal Wingman with a command in his helmet and away it’s going to go.
*this is such a gross oversimplification I'm not even sure where to start...*
Ok, let me take a crack at this:
What you said will not be how it works, nor if current US policy remains, will it EVER be how it works. There's a few extra steps here that have to happen before the Loyal Wingman can fire. Most notably a real live human has to pull the trigger. Not designate a target, actually fire the weapons
This is done for a variety of reasons (thanks SWORDS) but most notably so that a living human is responsible. The US does not like the idea of having to determine responsibility if a machine guns down a village with no one at the helm.. So policy is that the machine cannot fire it's weapons without a real human finger on the trigger. What this means for those Loyal Wingman drones is that the pilot controlling them must fire their weapons for them. Individually. Do you see where there may be some issues here with pilot performance controlling the weapons of five or six drones as well as his own?
Fate is in heaven, armor is on the chest, accomplishment is in the feet. - Nagao Kagetora
Any external store on the F35 is a radar trap. It's more or less "stealthy" on occasion, at short distances. In a proper full-on war footing it'll be non-stealthy most of the time owning to external stores.
KTG17 wrote: The only difference with the Loyal Wingmen is that he is going to probably assign a Loyal Wingman with a command in his helmet and away it’s going to go.
*this is such a gross oversimplification I'm not even sure where to start...*
Ok, let me take a crack at this:
What you said will not be how it works, nor if current US policy remains, will it EVER be how it works. There's a few extra steps here that have to happen before the Loyal Wingman can fire. Most notably a real live human has to pull the trigger. Not designate a target, actually fire the weapons
This is done for a variety of reasons (thanks SWORDS) but most notably so that a living human is responsible. The US does not like the idea of having to determine responsibility if a machine guns down a village with no one at the helm.. So policy is that the machine cannot fire it's weapons without a real human finger on the trigger. What this means for those Loyal Wingman drones is that the pilot controlling them must fire their weapons for them. Individually. Do you see where there may be some issues here with pilot performance controlling the weapons of five or six drones as well as his own?
So let’s say the pilot fires a missile at a target and zoom away it goes. Does the pilot tell the missile when to blow up? Does it steer the missile to the target? No. The missile does it on its own.
The Loyal Wingman is the go between. The pilot says, ‘destroy that target’ and the LW flies off to destroy that target, avoiding enemy attempts to shoot it down, then it fires a missile to blow it up.
No one is saying the F-35 is going to tell a bunch of autonomous drones to go have some fun. I don’t know why you think this isn’t happening when the US Air Force is all about developing this technology. I can assure you there might be a blurry line between what you think it means and what I think, but I think it’s pretty evident that the US military is saying everything it can to calm people down because people feel uneasy about what is coming.
Or you know, pilot issues fire mission, drone goes off and independently maneuvers, then confirms when it has the shot with a tone or prompt in the cockpit. Pilot presses drone fire button.
Heck, if it's been built for that it might even explain the low internal weapons mount- if you want your pilot to be controlling drones, you don't want your pilot trying to kill targets with weapons from the main plane- you want the pilot evasive and avoiding detection at all times.
It will be very interesting to watch this develop.
Klawz-Ramming is a subset of citrus fruit?
Gwar- "And everyone wants a bigger Spleen!"
Mercurial wrote:
I admire your aplomb and instate you as Baron of the Seas and Lord Marshall of Privateers.
Orkeosaurus wrote:Star Trek also said we'd have X-Wings by now. We all see how that prediction turned out.
Orkeosaurus, on homophobia, the nature of homosexuality, and the greatness of George Takei.
English doesn't borrow from other languages. It follows them down dark alleyways and mugs them for loose grammar.
KTG17 wrote: So let’s say the pilot fires a missile at a target and zoom away it goes. Does the pilot tell the missile when to blow up? Does it steer the missile to the target? No. The missile does it on its own.
Now that's false equivalency. And notice the part where 'the pilot fires a missile'. The life or death decision has already been made before the missile is launched. Telling a drone 'Go Engage that target' means that the drone, and not the pilot, will be making the decisions about how to engage a target. So when it decides to kill a sam site next to a school by dropping a JDAM, who's responsible for that? If the bloody thing has caught a virus (which has happened) and when it gets it;'s orders it wanders off and kills half a village, do we blame the pilot?
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Gitzbitah wrote: Or you know, pilot issues fire mission, drone goes off and independently maneuvers, then confirms when it has the shot with a tone or prompt in the cockpit. Pilot presses drone fire button.
Heck, if it's been built for that it might even explain the low internal weapons mount- if you want your pilot to be controlling drones, you don't want your pilot trying to kill targets with weapons from the main plane- you want the pilot evasive and avoiding detection at all times.
It will be very interesting to watch this develop.
Currently the target must be confirmed visually. Though if this will remain is a good question.
I think a lot of you don't understand the sheer number of things that have to happen and people involved before a drone can engage, currently.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2018/09/25 10:38:45
Fate is in heaven, armor is on the chest, accomplishment is in the feet. - Nagao Kagetora
Iron_Captain wrote: Improving response time by milliseconds isn't going to matter one bit.
Why are you assuming that it's only a response time difference of milliseconds? It isn't just the lag time for the communication system, it's the time for a slow human brain to make a decision. And in air combat very small amounts of time are significant. A drone may not have a shot anymore once a human decides to approve it.
And introducing AI won't reduce human staff since instead of pilots you will now need programmers.
Uh, no, the two are not comparable at all. Pilots are highly trained specialists that have to risk their lives every time they fly into combat, and must be present for every mission. Programmers are specialized in a different way, work a nice safe 9 to 5 job far away from the war, and do all of their work up front on a single design that can be arbitrarily scaled up to any size of drone fleet without requiring any additional programmers.
However, an AI would also have drawbacks as it would be more vulnerable to hacking and other forms of electronic warfare.
Nope. Hacking a drone is effectively impossible. Encryption and the specialized and access-controlled nature of its hardware do not leave vulnerable points for anyone to hack. This isn't a move where the "hacker" types randomly at a keyboard until the progress bar reaches 100%, a successful hack would likely be much more difficult than just shooting down the drone with conventional weapons.
Unless you want your automated fighter going around killing children, you'd better make sure it can make those decisions and a whole lot more.
Nope. Remember, the primary use of fully autonomous drones (as opposed to a remotely-operated drone like we use now) is air superiority and air defense suppression. There are no civilian targets in either of these situations. Anything in the air that isn't a friendly aircraft is confirmed to be a hostile threat, and anything operating AA fire control radar is confirmed to be a military target. This is not at all the same kind of environment that an automated car has to deal wit.
And it would need to be able to fly in addition to that, which involves a lot more variables than driving and thus is more difficult to program properly (though not impossible, flight is already automated to a great degree, but there are still difficulties with getting an AI to behave right in more complicated situations that can arise, which is why so far a Human pilot is always necessary).
Again, speaking as a pilot, you are simply wrong here. Flying is much easier than driving, in large part because the tolerances are much larger. You can put a GPS waypoint into a plane and hit "direct to" and the autopilot will take it there with a negligible chance of failure. A 5' deviation from the intended course is irrelevant because it's orders of magnitude less than the separation distances between any other aircraft or terrain. A 5' deviation on a road is a crash, which means GPS is not sufficient and you have to get into vision systems that detect the road boundaries, identify pedestrians that could appear with near-zero separation distance, etc. There's a reason why automated cars are still a dream while a properly equipped airplane can easily fly its entire route without a human doing anything but sitting there watching in case something goes wrong.
Also, I imagine that people do care when a drone crashes because it is an expensive piece of ordnance and therefore not expendable.
It's a war. Stuff is destroyed in a war. In any fight against a peer-level enemy (IOW, not bombing "military age males" who can't possibly shoot back) the costs of war are going to be so obscenely high that the loss of drones is just a rounding error in the final bill. Whole squadrons of human-piloted fighters become expendable in that kind of war, much like we didn't stop bombing Germany just because we lost a few B-17s. We accounted for the expected loss rate, increased production and crew training to compensate, and kept throwing more planes and crews into the meat grinder. Drones will be more of the same, except with even less concern over losses because no people are dying when the hardware is destroyed.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
BaronIveagh wrote: So when it decides to kill a sam site next to a school by dropping a JDAM, who's responsible for that?
Who cares, the SAM site is getting destroyed no matter how many innocents are in the blast radius. It doesn't matter if a human pilot or a drone executes the final drop command and releases the weapon, both are going to destroy the SAM site because there is no other option. The only real difference is that the human pilot may have bad feelings about having to do it, while the drone will execute its orders to attack anything with a particular radar emissions pattern and not lose any sleep over what else it destroys. So, to the degree that the moral issues can be considered at all, the drone wins.
If the bloody thing has caught a virus (which has happened) and when it gets it;'s orders it wanders off and kills half a village, do we blame the pilot?
This is a completely unrealistic movie plot idea, not reality.
I think a lot of you don't understand the sheer number of things that have to happen and people involved before a drone can engage, currently.
That's because we're currently using drones for a very different purpose in a very different kind of war. Layers of confirmation and careful targeting are fine when you're bombing some idiot with an AK-47 and a twitter feed full of terrorist propaganda, in the kind of war where things like air superiority drones are useful all of that goes away. The time pressure and realities of war just don't allow it.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/09/25 10:56:55
There is no such thing as a hobby without politics. "Leave politics at the door" is itself a political statement, an endorsement of the status quo and an attempt to silence dissenting voices.
BaronIveagh wrote: Now that's false equivalency. And notice the part where 'the pilot fires a missile'. The life or death decision has already been made before the missile is launched. Telling a drone 'Go Engage that target' means that the drone, and not the pilot, will be making the decisions about how to engage a target. So when it decides to kill a sam site next to a school by dropping a JDAM, who's responsible for that?
There are smart bombs that fail and hit unintended targets. That is happening right now. So what? In your example, they would have to know the location of the SAM site in order to bomb it, right? And be aware of its close proximity of the school.
And if the Loyal Wingman is under threat from opposing aircraft, who gives a gak if the pilot tells the Loyal Wingman to deal with it? Thats really the whole point of the Loyal Wingman, to protect human pilots.
I can't imagine any scenario where a pilot of an F-35 is expected to control the flight of a drone while trying to fly his own plane, especially with all the complicated tech the F-35 already has. Either these Loyal Wingmen fly themselves or someone else flies them.
I think a lot of you don't understand the sheer number of things that have to happen and people involved before a drone can engage, currently.
Yes I do. I know how these drones have to be prepared to fly over borders and know the laws within each country and in some cases may stalk a target for days before finally pulling the trigger. But these are terrorists typically in countries we are not at war with. There is a whole host of legal procedures that have to be followed. But in an all out war with an opposing power? The Loyal Wingmen will be there to assist a pilot in a dangerous environment whether it be air-to-air or air-to-surface. I imagine if the F-35 has been launched its been for a specific reason, and if assigned to blow up a bridge in the company of the LW, who knows maybe the F-35 would send the LW ahead to dangerous zone, or use the LW to protect it from enemy aircraft while it does its mission.
All this really sounds like sci-fi but obviously its on its way.
Who cares, the SAM site is getting destroyed no matter how many innocents are in the blast radius. It doesn't matter if a human pilot or a drone executes the final drop command and releases the weapon, both are going to destroy the SAM site because there is no other option. The only real difference is that the human pilot may have bad feelings about having to do it, while the drone will execute its orders to attack anything with a particular radar emissions pattern and not lose any sleep over what else it destroys. So, to the degree that the moral issues can be considered at all, the drone wins.
Except the pilot might decide to use a weapon more appropriate to the target environment. You know, something a human pilot might understand to do, whereas a robot gives no feths.
