As a martian it is easier to appear human and blend in by discussing politics while I prepare the invasion conditions for earthlings to have their brains harvested. Not sure why everyone else does though.

The NGOs point out that between October 2023 and July 2024 the US transferred at least 14,000 MK-84s and 8,700 MK-82s to Israel. In May 2024 Biden paused the shipment of some larger bombs, but these restrictions were lifted by Donald Trump as soon as he entered office.

One of the functions of the Palestinian Genocide and the conflict with Iran is/was to deplete weapons stockpiles both to make more money for military industrial companies but also to make it easier to make up reasons we cannot help Ukraine more.

The amount of bombs dropped on Gaza is horrifying.

Shout out to the free Librivox recording read by Stewart Wills, it is how I listened to the book and I recommend it.

https://archive.org/details/moby_dick_librivox

For some reason it is not mindblowing to me that the Microsoft AI CEO is astronomically out of touch with normal people.

I think it is probably the behavior of Microsoft as a company that makes me feel that way.

Then unionize! Nothing else will stop this.

If it walks like a Stephen Miller and quacks like a Stephen Miller, it is probably a nazi.

I’m not an aerospace engineer, but I would guess that lots of compromises are built into today’s crewed fighter aircraft as compromises for the human body inside it. This can be as simple as extra armor around the fuselage to protect the pilot from flak, but this armor is heavy subtracting from the range and agility of the aircraft.

I’m also betting that lots of limits are placed upon the design of the aircraft around the 9Gs-10Gs a human body could take for a very short amount of time. Think of the agility and turn radius of an aircraft that could take 12G to 18G maneuvers in the course of a regular day when the design of the aircraft removes the limits of a human body needs to survive.

1. Vulnerable electronics such as electronics warfare and surveillance equipment can be placed to exploit that protection around the cockpit. You could potentially place high value electronics equipment critical for a mission in the seat of the aircraft and eject it as you would a pilot as well. This kind of capability could also be useful for gaining intel on what caused a crash/the fighter-bomber to be shot down in the event it was.

2. I am not suggesting waves of AI Ukrainian F-16s and Mirages dogfighting in complex engagements, and even in that case at this point most of what accounts for success in aerial combat is operational planning, intelligence, and missiles. So what if an aerial platform isn’t designed to turn at the absolute limit because it was only designed for the measly capabilities of humans? The mission parameters I am suggesting are aerial patrols in friendly territory as part of a pack hunting down flying bombs either as an additional missile launch platform for a nearby manned fighter or as simply a mobile radar and targeting assistant to said manned fighter.

Lastly the airframe itself is larger than needed for uncrewed if you’re able to subtract the cockpit, canopy, ejection seat systems, environmental system that keep a pilot able to breath and from freezing to death or roasting alive. All of that removed weight means either more weight for weapons payload, longer range from more available fuel, or a smaller aircraft that is cheaper to build, store, and deploy.

I understand this perspective, but something that is really easy to forget about modern day fighter aircraft is that they are often called fighter-bombers because they truly are bombers. These aircraft can carry thousands of pounds of munitions and equipment, any equivalent unmanned platform is going to still be quite a large, complex heavy aircraft and if anything stripping all of that stuff out of an unmanned adaption of a manned fighter-bomber would only increase the performance of the aircraft. People make the same mistake with utility and attack helicopters, independent of whether they are manned or not, you have to see them from the context of how much payload they can lift, how far and how fast and what that can do for you that a smaller aircraft unmanned or not simply can’t do because of physics.

You are definitely right, there will be types of smaller air superiority highly maneuverable unmanned fighter aircraft designed to do things that a human could never survive, but this isn’t what Ukraine needs. Ukraine needs flying radar, targeting and missile launch platforms with high speed and range and the solution I am proposing also helps protect Ukraine’s living breathing fighter-bomber pilots better because it is far more difficult to identify who is a robot and who is the master controlling the robots when they are all the same kind of airplane.

That makes sense I just wonder how much wisdom there is to building an entirely new unmanned fighter-bomber “wingman” from the ground up when there are fly-by-wire manned fighter-bomber jets with a deep established database of flight data that could be repurposed to be unmanned capable, at least for routine air patrol missions carrying air defense missiles and such. The big problem for Ukraine is that in needs a TONNN of pilots so the large procurement of Rafales and Eurofighters in a sense would be a pipe dream for now even in they were all delivered tomorrow… so why not try to structure the procurement of manned jets so that at least a portion of them can be made unmanned capable and thus can fill out an air defense network even before Ukraine has the larger number of human pilots they are planning for? This would make it easier for Ukraine to obscure how many human pilots it is actually fielding at any one point and where they are concentrated and would play to the immediate interests of the nations and arms companies Ukraine is procuring these manned jets from.

This is already being done with helicopters both by militaries and defense companies, for example for the US it makes far more sense to develop the blackhawk into an optionally unmanned platform than it does to develop a new equivalent capability medium lift utility unmanned helicopter from the ground up. I would think if anything this would be easier to do with fighter jets so long as they were flying fairly simple and safe missions and routes. Yes I suppose that means you are probably going to be using mostly used equipment but I would argue the volumes of flight data from decades of flying established manned aircraft platforms is extremely relevant to the development of unmanned platform in a way that an aircraft designed from the ground up can’t rival.

I think you make a great point about the wisdom of developing an umanned wingman drone domestically to accompany manned fighter-bombers, I just think Ukraine should start doing that with F-16s and Mirage 2000-5Fs for its very high performance aircraft before they try to start building them from scratch. I know this approach isn’t all the rage and hype right now, but I think that is actually kind of foolish of militaries if they aren’t quietly investing in this capability. Who cares if the unmanned jet is perfectly optimized to have no cockpit and designed from scratch for unmanned flight when you can take a F-16 and know pretty much everything you could want to know about the aircraft’s performance from the get go when you started designing autonomous flight capability for it? The advantages of humans having blazed the path forward flying countless hours on F-16s seem to me to far outweigh the disadvantages of having to work around a cockpit designed for a human. Same goes for the Mirage 2000-5F, Rafale and Eurofighter jets. We call it Big Data for a reason!

I don’t agree primarily because who says you have to only have one or the other in an aircraft?

They look like flares, maybe an onboard counter missile system?

That feeling when you invade a “pushover” country for a 3 day operation and then they turn out to be a regional military power that fields advanced military equipment from partners pissed off about your invasion from all over the world.

Whoopsie!

The Russian war effort is existentially reliant on fighter-bomber launched glide bombs and while I don’t think Ukraine will begin instigating long range air-to-air engagements anytime soon the timeline established by these contracts puts any possible longterm reliance on glidebombs for precision guided frontline artillery/air support into serious doubt for Russia.

Good thing North Korea isn’t running out of good quality artillery shells to share! … oh wait

I know the pain you feel and I recommend watching Majority Report videos that make fun of Ben Shapiro as a balm for it.

Yeah I am not disputing that China is part of the problem.

It’s The Artillery Stupid could be a factually correct byline to a history of modern war textbook… this is fantastic news!

I mean “logistics” maybe fits better than artillery but the most scalable way to leverage and focus a logistics advantage is artillery.

I can’t stand all the conservative war hawks who are hellbent on going to war with China and divert any peripheral conversation around it to “China Big Bad and Hate Freedom” and yet those same people traffic in or at least support the defense tech circles selling China the vitally necessary technology to oppress its people. This is all a risk board game to these losers where we are automatically the good guys and the point is to profit off of fear to sell more war and I can’t stand it.

How many conservatives here on lemmy have wasted my time detailing how evil China is and yet not a FUCKING peep on this…

Evil lives in systems not countries and conservative warhawks traffic in the same evil China does as this article emphatically underscores.

I am stuck in the hellhole known as the US and I hate cars.

This article confirms my rage, thank you lol.

You know how Russia is relying so heavily on glide bombs?

With Russian air defense coverage turning to swiss cheese and Ukrainian flying bombs and cruise missiles becoming increasingly effective, the relevant question becomes how can Russia protect its fighter-bombers it is relying on so heavily to launch glide bombs? Not while they are in the air, while they are on their ground.

Distance is no comfort, Ukraine has proven that.

What I am saying is the benefits to Ukraine taking these out is strategic. Holes in the wall become the genesis point of devastating counterattacks, they are opportunities to exploit.

I mean, this article unlike the original leak seems like part of a military/government approved press release so idk, I feel like they probably thought that through before they ok’d it.

You have been programmed to treat all Israelis as a monolithic thing, AND THAT IS ANTISEMITISM.

1. I said all Israelis not a target of Genocide are to some gradational degree complicit in the Palestinian Genocide. This is not the same thing as seeing Israelis as a monolithic thing in any broader sense.

2. Israel is not the same concept as judaism, one is a country the other a religion, so no what you accuse me of saying would be a toxic generalization of a nation’s populace and conflation of it with a nation’s government, not antisemitism, neither of which I am doing for the record.

How many damn times does someone have to make point 2 to you before you stop talking and listen?