> Not really. The chance of any sort of aerial dogfighting happening in a war are next to zero. The cost of planes, and pilots, is so high that almost all the effort spent these days is on killing your enemy with over-the-horizon weapons fired from hundreds of miles away. AI-powered dogfighting in aircraft is military marketing.
AI would dramatically reduce the cost of planes and it would eliminate the cost of pilots altogether. If you don't need a pilot then the economics of building planes completely change--you can throw lots of cheaper planes at the enemy and accept that a certain number of them won't come back.
I think that will also change the psychology of AI sorties. If a cheap Russian drone downs a cheap US drone, it will probably feel more like "Russians believed to be behind US government hack" than "Russians shot down a US fighter plane". The latter is a lot more of a casus belli than the former.
No the construction economics are still mostly the same. UCAVs with the range and capacity to replace manned tactical aircraft are only marginally cheaper. MQ-25 unit cost is in the $150M range. No country can afford to build a lot of them.
The small, cheap "swarming" drones have very limited range and endurance. Useful in some limited scenarios but only if you can first find a way to deliver them to the target area
I posit that the costs will continue to decrease as mindshifts change--right now (or more precisely, around the time these drones were designed and purchased) we think about drones as being "unmanned planes" and planes are supposed to be big, reliable, and expensive and the military procedures and culture is calibrated to minimize losses of these planes. As expectations change, I think costs will decline as well which will feed back into a change of expectations (time will tell).
Regarding "delivering them to the target area", it's pretty easy to conceive of a larger transport craft managing delivery.
What's your point? We already have that. Large bombers are used to deliver cruise missiles close enough to the target area. Cruise missiles are drones by another name. But they're hardly cheap. In fact they're getting more expensive.
There have been proposals to build conventionally armed ballistic missiles to fulfill the prompt global strike mission. The problem is that if Russia / China / North Korea detect a ballistic missile headed in their general direction they might misinterpret it as an incoming nuclear first strike and retaliate accordingly. A very dangerous game.
Also it's rather pointless to deploy any sort of "drone" from a long range ballistic missile. It would need a complex and heavy braking system to slow down enough during re-entry to allow for controlled flight. Easier to just hit the target directly with a re-entry vehicle.
The point is that AI has the power to change the ecology of war. Cruise missiles occupy a niche, and yet they haven't obsoleted combat aircraft, so clearly they aren't "drones by another name"--drones serve a purpose today and will continue to diversify (including a blurring of lines between "drone" and "cruise missile"). Anyway, this conversation has taken a defensive tone, so I'll duck out.
AI would dramatically reduce the cost of planes and it would eliminate the cost of pilots altogether. If you don't need a pilot then the economics of building planes completely change--you can throw lots of cheaper planes at the enemy and accept that a certain number of them won't come back.
I think that will also change the psychology of AI sorties. If a cheap Russian drone downs a cheap US drone, it will probably feel more like "Russians believed to be behind US government hack" than "Russians shot down a US fighter plane". The latter is a lot more of a casus belli than the former.