US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
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These high end drones where the only ones in active service that we are aware of are GJ-11 and RQ-180 (surveillance ones like WZ-8 and RQ-170 don't count because they aren't "combat" capable). CH-7 is either coming into service or will be very soon. None of these are supersonic.
The Russian Okhotnik/Hunter also is not in service yet and it isn't supersonic either.
The only supersonic UCAV that is on the horizon is the Dark Sword program's platform. That's speculated to be supersonic, no word whether it is.
Most drone warfare now is in the typical MALE drones (and their smaller and cheaper counterparts like TB-2). Drone effectiveness is as much in mass production and cost as it is in performance capability.
Turkey has nowhere near the software, electronics, sensors, and communications/networking technologies as US and China do. Not even as much as Russia, France, UK, Japan, or South Korea. They do not manufacture or develop a single piece of modern computing equipment, modern communications tech. Turkey also has no domestic AESA technology or manufacturing. It has no ability to fab chips. It barely has chip design capability.
Much of a drone's capability is in its autonomous tech, sensors, and comms tech. As much as it's manufacturing, subcomponents for weapons and kinematic performance.
Boeing's Loyal Wingman (they have two types one for US and one made for Australia both very similar) are interesting but exceptionally small. They are about a quarter the size of the Dark Sword's previous models and visualisation material. The Turkish MIUS/Kizilelma is a large UCAV but Turkey will need to buy the medium to high thrust turbofan from another nation. Developing it themselves will take monumental effort, time, and money. Then they'd need to trial and improve it for about a decade before it's comparably good enough to established and now proven ones.
They can't buy the engines from Ukraine now. Russia's UEC might sell. RR might sell. China might sell. Even the US might sell so it's not that much of an issue.
Kratos is quite similar in capability and limitations. Those loyal wingman UCAVs are good for at most two MRAAMs which is a lot if they can get close to targets. Again the value is more in how cheaply and quickly these drones can be produced.
China wants a supersonic large UCAV for J-20S and integrated PLAAF. Dark Sword would have to be supersonic to really perform this role. It's not going to be cheap but unmanned comes with the benefit of higher G loads, space and weight saving on life support equipment and accommodating the human pilot. This all results in net benefits and advantages over manned fighters, not to mention much cheaper and easier training and not risking a life.
However this is where these high tier UCAVs get hard. Only China and US have the software, comms tech, and computing tech available to pull off proper autonomous or even semi autonomous and airborne controlled or faster nearby ground controlled (if required). Turkey has none of those abilities but of course they can buy some second rate entrance into a near equivalent of all that.
TB-2 is like CH-3 level capability and performance. Akinci and Aksungur are like CH-4, CH-5, WL-2, and the dozen other Chinese UAV/UCAV level at best. Turkey has no equivalent of WZ-8, CH-7, or GJ-11. MIUS is a mockup and Baykar claims that MIUS in assembly is a "production development model" indicates it is indeed NOT a prototype. Otherwise it's called a ... well, prototype.
Drone competence is competence in the core subsystems and technologies - software, sensors, ECM/ECCM, computing, chip design and fab, communications tech, engines. Turkey actually while has started all these, they haven't got anywhere near the level of competence Turkish trolls and hyper nationalists claim.
The Russian Okhotnik/Hunter also is not in service yet and it isn't supersonic either.
The only supersonic UCAV that is on the horizon is the Dark Sword program's platform. That's speculated to be supersonic, no word whether it is.
Most drone warfare now is in the typical MALE drones (and their smaller and cheaper counterparts like TB-2). Drone effectiveness is as much in mass production and cost as it is in performance capability.
Turkey has nowhere near the software, electronics, sensors, and communications/networking technologies as US and China do. Not even as much as Russia, France, UK, Japan, or South Korea. They do not manufacture or develop a single piece of modern computing equipment, modern communications tech. Turkey also has no domestic AESA technology or manufacturing. It has no ability to fab chips. It barely has chip design capability.
Much of a drone's capability is in its autonomous tech, sensors, and comms tech. As much as it's manufacturing, subcomponents for weapons and kinematic performance.
Boeing's Loyal Wingman (they have two types one for US and one made for Australia both very similar) are interesting but exceptionally small. They are about a quarter the size of the Dark Sword's previous models and visualisation material. The Turkish MIUS/Kizilelma is a large UCAV but Turkey will need to buy the medium to high thrust turbofan from another nation. Developing it themselves will take monumental effort, time, and money. Then they'd need to trial and improve it for about a decade before it's comparably good enough to established and now proven ones.
They can't buy the engines from Ukraine now. Russia's UEC might sell. RR might sell. China might sell. Even the US might sell so it's not that much of an issue.
Kratos is quite similar in capability and limitations. Those loyal wingman UCAVs are good for at most two MRAAMs which is a lot if they can get close to targets. Again the value is more in how cheaply and quickly these drones can be produced.
China wants a supersonic large UCAV for J-20S and integrated PLAAF. Dark Sword would have to be supersonic to really perform this role. It's not going to be cheap but unmanned comes with the benefit of higher G loads, space and weight saving on life support equipment and accommodating the human pilot. This all results in net benefits and advantages over manned fighters, not to mention much cheaper and easier training and not risking a life.
However this is where these high tier UCAVs get hard. Only China and US have the software, comms tech, and computing tech available to pull off proper autonomous or even semi autonomous and airborne controlled or faster nearby ground controlled (if required). Turkey has none of those abilities but of course they can buy some second rate entrance into a near equivalent of all that.
TB-2 is like CH-3 level capability and performance. Akinci and Aksungur are like CH-4, CH-5, WL-2, and the dozen other Chinese UAV/UCAV level at best. Turkey has no equivalent of WZ-8, CH-7, or GJ-11. MIUS is a mockup and Baykar claims that MIUS in assembly is a "production development model" indicates it is indeed NOT a prototype. Otherwise it's called a ... well, prototype.
Drone competence is competence in the core subsystems and technologies - software, sensors, ECM/ECCM, computing, chip design and fab, communications tech, engines. Turkey actually while has started all these, they haven't got anywhere near the level of competence Turkish trolls and hyper nationalists claim.
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TB-2 used by Ukraine have been shot down by Russia using a lot of their relatively outdated AD. The Russians are not allowing S-400, S-300 or even Buks to shoot at TB-2s because each TB-2 is less expensive to buy and possibly less complicated to make than a single 48N6 or even 9K37 missile.
They only allow Panstir guns and 57E6 and Tor missiles to shoot at inexpensive drones.
TB-2 is also relatively small and can fly low so that they can fire on their intended targets pretty close to targets without getting detected. Still almost all of them if not all of them have been destroyed for about a month. Any other equivalent drone produced anywhere else in the world would fare no worse than TB-2. Better MALE drones would perform far better but then the Russians would just have to use long and medium ranged missiles on those MALE drones.
Turkish manufacturing and production rate on drones is also not even a fraction of actual drone powers - only USA and China (a major factor in drone warfare and modern warfare in general since attrition and cost is a huge part of it).
They say Israel is a drone power ... LOL. Israel was once only slightly behind US in drone development and manufacturing but has barely moved since then. It's still struggling to make CH-3 or TB-2 level drones.
UK and France has produced nothing more than a few concept studies and cardboard mockups showing their concepts.
US is the true drone power. China since 2010 heavily investing in this domain as well. Turkey a capable third though! But on core subsystems, Turkey cannot match Russia, UK, France, or the other two east Asian nations. Unless Turkey begins heavily investing in all those other core techs, no fruit could come out of it for decades. They can source components though but for high tier drones, they simply cannot make a decent one on their own. How could it until it has at least low thrust turbofan it can produce. If it can reverse engineer a F-110 or F-101/100 with CFM56 core like Americans with those three engines and China with WS-10, it will not be able to easily develop it's own low or mid thrust turbofan from scratch as its first move. Currently it only has one project for a small sized turboprop. China had dozens of programs and handfuls of products just in small turboprops. This stuff takes a tonne of money, time, peripheral industries and science. Even just to be able to reverse engineer a single one.
They only allow Panstir guns and 57E6 and Tor missiles to shoot at inexpensive drones.
TB-2 is also relatively small and can fly low so that they can fire on their intended targets pretty close to targets without getting detected. Still almost all of them if not all of them have been destroyed for about a month. Any other equivalent drone produced anywhere else in the world would fare no worse than TB-2. Better MALE drones would perform far better but then the Russians would just have to use long and medium ranged missiles on those MALE drones.
Turkish manufacturing and production rate on drones is also not even a fraction of actual drone powers - only USA and China (a major factor in drone warfare and modern warfare in general since attrition and cost is a huge part of it).
They say Israel is a drone power ... LOL. Israel was once only slightly behind US in drone development and manufacturing but has barely moved since then. It's still struggling to make CH-3 or TB-2 level drones.
UK and France has produced nothing more than a few concept studies and cardboard mockups showing their concepts.
US is the true drone power. China since 2010 heavily investing in this domain as well. Turkey a capable third though! But on core subsystems, Turkey cannot match Russia, UK, France, or the other two east Asian nations. Unless Turkey begins heavily investing in all those other core techs, no fruit could come out of it for decades. They can source components though but for high tier drones, they simply cannot make a decent one on their own. How could it until it has at least low thrust turbofan it can produce. If it can reverse engineer a F-110 or F-101/100 with CFM56 core like Americans with those three engines and China with WS-10, it will not be able to easily develop it's own low or mid thrust turbofan from scratch as its first move. Currently it only has one project for a small sized turboprop. China had dozens of programs and handfuls of products just in small turboprops. This stuff takes a tonne of money, time, peripheral industries and science. Even just to be able to reverse engineer a single one.
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That's because Orion isn't an advanced UCAV. It's years behind something like WL-2 (which itself is not a very complicated machine). The fact that it has taken this long for Ukrainians to shoot down something that simple should tell you the usefulness of drones. They are great, because they can stay in the air forever and take advantage of weak points in group troops and air defense. If Russians had 50 WL-2, a couple of WZ-7s and KJ-500s, it'd be able to pretty much pick off Ukrainian trop movement as it pleased. This type of UCAVs can already threaten any country that does not have sufficient protection of its air speed.
When we talk about future of US UCAV programs, they'd want something far more advanced than this. They were pretty clear here
It needs to be low cost and attributable and be controlled by high end manned aircraft. Of course when we are dealing with the US military, low cost becomes high cost very quickly once they realize the lower cost platform can't do the things they want them to do. But the general idea is there. If you want to keep the cost low against modern air defense system, then you need to go for something that has all around stealth against lower radar band (like L, S band radar) and probably high subsonic cruising speed. You probably don't want engines with afterburners, since that would be a lot harder to shield completely. I would contend that such platform would be very hard to deal with for an air defense. Even in the case of China that has multi-layered air defense radar and EW systems long with 24/7 KJ-500 presence, the sheer number of stealthy UCAV would be a problem. Because UCAV can simply fly a lot longer and poke weak points of air defense. The question to me is the cost vs capability ratio here.
The first generation of buddy/loyal wingman type of UCAVs are just test flying now. I don't think they are that capable. The Western ones (XQ-58/MQ-28) look pretty stealthy, but unlikely to be as stealthy as F-35A. They have a pretty small payload. It's not clear to me if this is the type that USAF wants to put into production in large numbers.
To me, GJ-11 has greater payload (but still not sufficient) and is generally more stealthy as a flywing type and should have longer endurance. However, I think it will have lower maximum/cruising speed than XQ-58. So, it's not the ideal UCAV you would want to be controlled by J-20. I think it's more ideal to be controlled by bombers.
Does supersonic help? Sure. But if being supersonic means they have to be 2 or 3 times as expensive and not be as stealthy from behind, would that be worth it? So, I'd be very interested in seeing where the next generation UCAV go. In the near term, I think an ideal UCAV would be one that can cruise at high subsonic speed (say mach0.7 to 0.8), have all around stealth against lower frequency air defense radar, can hover for over 10 hours and carry at least 1t of payload in the weapon bay. If you can get a large number of UCAVs like this for low cost, it would do wonders to your ability against even modern air defense system.
The next step would be to develop UCAV with more A2A capabilities that have low endurance and higher speed to protect your Air defense from these intruding UCAVs/bombers. Maybe that's when you will see supersonic UCAVs. They probably will not have as much payload (just carry maybe 4 MRAAMs), but will need enough endurance to stay in the air for a long time. We will need more AI development since UCAVs need to patrol the air without a manned aircraft giving them directions. They probably also need higher thrusted engines to be able to achieve supersonic speed without using afterburners. I'd put this as something that's achievable when 6th generation fighters start to join service (so over 10 years from now).
they were testing it in Crimea just before Ukraine operation aerial target shoot down at 4km at 10hours flying time. so we can presume that Orion drones already participated in this conflict.
ukraine shoot will be either mechanical failure or Russians deliberately fly low to test the systems. landing seem fast.
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
In conventional as well.
That depends on how they are employed and built and defended. Besides if you want to make the argument of air defenses then plenty of super sonic aircraft have also been shot down. Surveillance drones are if anything a huge threat to any force. They allow targeting and are often followed by strike missions be it Artillery, Missiles, bombers, infantry and armored forces.
I think it's important to clarify what we mean when talking about drones. From the Ukraine war, there's been roughly 4 classes of drones.
1. Surveillance - Orlan-10/30 by far the most common. They are small and relatively cheap, they could conceivably continue to be turboprop based. I don't think the Ukrainians have had one until the new Turkish one
2. UCAV/strike drones - Orion/TB-2. These are the current gen of drones and what most people mean by combat drones. Neither has been very impressive in my opinion.
3. Decoy drones - Pulsejet powered with 3 point reflectors, IR targets and deployed by the Russians. If you recall at the start of the war the Ukrainians made a number of claimed kills of Il-76s, Mi-24s which turned out to not be false. I think it was because of the use of decoy drones. I imagine NATO radars were quickly able to filter them out and they stopped being deployed.
4. Loitering/kamikaze drones. Ukrainians now have the switchblade, the Russians have a few of their own.
You've also got the DJI type consumer drones, but they are deployed on a squadron level.
Each is completely different and arguing that strike drones will still carry on in the form they are because surveillance drones did ok is missing the point. Could a TB2/WL2/Orion or any similar platform still be useful in some circumstances? Yes, but that's like arguing WW2 bombers would still do a number on the Taliban.
Combat drone design will quickly evolve and it'll happen much faster than aircraft in the 50s and 60s did because it's largely a case of reinventing the wheel for countries like America.
For countries like Turkey they'll quickly hit a dead end unless they are prepared to put billions into research, or have an ally provide key technology components.
I think the reason it took so long before an Orion was shot down was because they haven't really been deployed until recently.
Agreed with most of what you said but I think stealth will be less important with drones.
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
See now you are getting it. Your original statement above lacked nuance.
Now we have the nitty gritty. Where before it was a blanket statement. Different missions have different needs. Next most drones ( fixed wing ) are small. A handful are as large as a mid to large Biz Jet. I don’t mean the quad captor or infantry models either. Being smaller is an aspect that works for stealth. Being smaller is a good starting point, farther you don’t have to ask questions like what is the reflection from the Pilot’s head. Cruise missiles were the original suicide drone and they already have stealth. It’s just a question of how intense the stealth treatment is. Cheap drones may skip it in favor of exceedingly small size low altitude.
Longer endurance may implement with at a small size with blended wing to get an even smaller RCS.
it give no information what altitude drone was flying.