AI Controlled Aircraft

The X-62A VISTA aircraft, an experimental AI-enabled Air Force F-16 fighter jet, takes off on Thursday, May 2, 2024, at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. The flight, with Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall riding in the front seat, is serving as a public statement of confidence in the future role of AI in air combat. The military is planning to use the technology to operate an unmanned fleet of 1,000 aircraft. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall rode in the cockpit of a fighter jet on Friday, which flew over the desert in California and was controlled by artificial intelligence.

Last month, Kendall announced his plans to fly in an AI-controlled F-16 to the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense panel, while speaking about the future of air warfare being dependent on autonomously operated drones.

On Friday, the senior Air Force leader followed through with his plans, making what could be one of the biggest advances in military aviation since stealth planes were introduced in the early 1990s.      READ MORE...

Precision High-Powered Microwave Weapons

Raytheon, an RTX business, has embarked upon an ambitious endeavor to enhance the defense mechanisms of the US military apparatus by initiating the development of sophisticated high-power microwave (HPM) antenna systems. 

This work is the latest manifestation of the Directed Energy Front-line Electromagnetic Neutralization and Defeat (DEFEND) program, which is primarily concentrated on the formulation and execution of advanced non-kinetic defense systems. 

Raytheon secured a contract amounting to $31.3 million from the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division to begin conceptualizing, engineering, and rigorously testing a duo of prototype HPM systems. 

These prototypes are scheduled for delivery to the US Navy & US Air Force in the years 2024 and 2026, respectively. The primary objective underlying these systems is to harness directed energy to neutralize aerial threats, thereby endowing the United States defense arsenal with a significant technological supremacy.   TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

An Aviation Milestone

An artificial intelligence algorithm developed by DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program flew a modified F-16 fighter jet for over 17 hours in December, officials announced this week.

The jet, a Variable In-flight Simulation Test Aircraft (VISTA), took off from Edwards Air Force Base in California, marking the first time that artificial intelligence has been used to fly a tactical aircraft.

"We conducted multiple sorties [takeoffs and landings] with numerous test points performed on each sortie to test the algorithms under varying starting conditions, against various simulated adversaries, and with simulated weapons capabilities," Air Force Lt. Col. Ryan "Hal" Hefron, the DARPA program manager for ACE, said in a statement.

"We didn’t run into any major issues but did encounter some differences compared to simulation-based results, which is to be expected when transitioning from virtual to live."


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VISTA was developed by Lockheed Martin Skunk Works and the Calspan Corporation for the U.S. Air Force's Test Pilot School.  READ MORE...

2023 Index of US Military Strength

The 2023 Index concludes that the current U.S. military force is at significant risk of not being able to meet the demands of a single major regional conflict while also attending to various presence and engagement activities. The force would probably not be able to do more and is certainly ill-equipped to handle two nearly simultaneous MRCs—a situation that is made more difficult by the generally weak condition of key military allies.

In the aggregate, the United States’ military posture can only be rated as “weak.” The Air Force is rated “very weak,” the Navy and Space Force are “weak,” and the U.S. Army is “marginal.” The Marine Corps and nuclear forces are “strong,” but the Corps is a one-war force, and its overall strength is therefore not sufficient to compensate for the shortfalls of its larger fellow services. 

And if the United States should need to employ nuclear weapons, the escalation into nuclear conflict would seem to imply that handling such a crisis would challenge even a fully ready Joint Force at its current size and equipped with modern weapons. 

Additionally, the war in Ukraine, which threatens to destabilize not just Europe but the economic and political stability of other regions, shows that some actors (in this case Russia) will not necessarily be deterred from conventional action even though the U.S. maintains a strong nuclear capability. 

Thus, strong conventional forces of necessary size are essential to the ability of the U.S. to respond to emergent crises in areas of special interest.

As currently postured, the U.S. military is at growing risk of not being able to meet the demands of defending America’s vital national interests. It is rated as weak relative to the force needed to defend national interests on a global stage against actual challenges in the world as it is rather than as we wish it were. 

This is the logical consequence of years of sustained use, underfunding, poorly defined priorities, wildly shifting security policies, exceedingly poor discipline in program execution, and a profound lack of seriousness across the national security establishment even as threats to U.S. interests have surged.  READ MORE...

"Angry Kitten" System to be Used in Combat

South of Death Valley this spring, the Air Force experimented with electronic warfare. In tests that took place in April at China Lake, California, fighter jets flew 30 training missions, testing the efficacy of an electronic warfare training device called “Angry Kitten.” In an August 3 announcement, the Air Force recommended using Angry Kitten for actual combat.

“Given the success of the pod in training and demonstrated ability to be reprogrammed, Air Combat Command recommended four pods be converted into combat pods to provide attack capabilities against enemy radio frequency threat systems, instead of simulating them,” reads the announcement.

Electronic warfare is a crucial part of modern armed conflict. It involves, broadly, the transmission and obstruction of signals along the electromagnetic spectrum, primarily but not exclusively in the domain of radio waves. These signals are used for communication between pilots; with radar to perceive the location of enemies beyond visual sight; and for weapons guidance. If one side can block the signals of the other side, it can potentially prevent their pilots from communicating, their radar from perceiving, and their weapons from following radar guidance.

The Angry Kitten was developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute to simulate the electronic warfare devices of other country’s aircraft, the kind that the Air Force might encounter in the sky. It is a system that incorporates a software-defined radio, meaning its signal and frequencies can be changed by code. This is in contrast to traditional hardware-defined radio, which is limited by what frequencies the physical components can produce and receive.  READ MORE...

Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) is an experience where designers enhance parts of users’ physical world with computer-generated input. Designers create inputs—ranging from sound to video, to graphics to GPS overlays and more—in digital content which responds in real time to changes in the user’s environment, typically movement.

Augmented reality has science-fiction roots dating to 1901. However, Thomas Caudell described the term as a technology only in 1990 while designing to help Boeing workers visualize intricate aircraft systems. A major advance came in 1992 with Louis Rosenberg’s complex Virtual Fixtures AR system for the US Air Force. 

AR releases followed in the consumer world, most notably the ARQuake game (2000) and the design tool ARToolkit (2009). The 2010s witnessed a technological explosion—for example, with Microsoft’s HoloLens in 2015—that stretched beyond AR in the classical sense, while AR software itself became increasingly sophisticated, popular and affordable.

Under the umbrella term extended reality (XR), AR differs from virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR). Some confusion exists, notably between AR and MR. Especially amid the 2020s’ technology boom, considerable debate continues about what each term covers. 

In user experience (UX) design, you have:

• AR—You design for digital elements to appear over real-world views, sometimes with limited interactivity between them, often via smartphones. Examples include Apple’s ARKit and Android’s ARCore (developer kits), the Pokémon Go game.
• VR—You design immersive experiences that isolate users from the real world, typically via headset devices. Examples include PSVR for gaming, Oculus and Google Cardboard, where users can explore, e.g., Stonehenge using headset-mounted smartphones.
• MR—You design to combine AR and VR elements so digital objects can interact with the real world; therefore, you design elements that are anchored to a real environment. Examples include Magic Leap and HoloLens, which users can use, e.g., to learn more directly how to fix items.      READ MORE...