GOLAN: This is the Future of War (Future War)

by FX Holden

  So Shelly’s amazing autonomous SUV plowed straight into the deer, the deer flew through their windscreen, the car put on its emergency indicators and kept going down the highway, only slowing to a stop once it was sure it wouldn’t be tail-ended, while Shelly fought off a thrashing, half-gutted deer which gave Erik Jensen a solid kick in the head that knocked him out and earned him six stitches and way too much sympathy from a good-looking student nurse in the emergency department. Who he later went on to marry, which you could safely add to her post-incident trauma list.

  But you might think it was a pretty acceptable outcome, all things considered. Both she and Erik survived a potentially fatal collision, no one else except the deer was injured, and theirs was the only car that got damaged. The hire car insurance company was pretty pleased, that’s for sure.

  Except Shelly was convinced a human driver would have taken a bigger risk and tried to nail the gap between the two cars in the lane beside them, expecting those drivers might also react, and maybe they could have got out of it without anyone hitting anything or anyone too badly. Not to mention a human driver would have stopped the car quicker, and yeah, maybe they would have gotten tail-ended, but she would have swallowed a lot less deer blood.

  So, the idea of giving an aircraft AI full control over guns and missiles in a hot combat zone?

  She’d rather have a human in the loop.

  Bunny had spent the next four hours deep in study, poring over the Fantom’s defensive algorithms. Even in ‘semi-autonomous mode’ the drone was responding to commands from the human pilot in control of it. Rather than flying it, she or he used a playbook to provide it with scenarios and the drone’s onboard AI flew itself and deployed its sensor and weapons systems based on the scenario the pilot programmed. Bunny found the defensive playbook included everything from just keeping formation and avoiding incoming missiles to being able to automatically seek out an attacker and return fire if fired on.

  She saw with satisfaction that there was a lot of wiggle room in Kovacs’ definition of ‘semi-autonomous’.

  Her cockpit was a lot more roomy than the one she’d grown used to in the F-35. Built inside a transportable trailer, it featured a large, curved screen that gave her a simulated view from the center of her Fantom that followed her head as she moved her helmet, allowing her to see 360 degrees around and ‘through’ the drones’ airframes. The same view from her wingman was shown as a window inside her own view. She had no physical instrument panels, just a series of heads-up display panels for both aircraft that she could swipe through with a gesture, and command sequences she could invoke with a tap of the fingers on her left hand on a touch pad beside her throttle. It was a workspace designed for someone like her … a former computer gamer with a talent for continuous partial attention. As the trailers were patterned on the designs used for older drones which had required a human pilot and systems officer sitting side by side, there was also room for an observer or manufacturer’s engineer. Today, the jump seat was taken up by Kovacs.

  And she didn’t actually fly the Fantoms … not really fly them. The inputs from her flight stick, pedals and throttle had to be squirted into space, bounced off a satellite and back down to the aircraft she was controlling. Which all happened at the speed of light, and was fine for controlling a drone doing lazy circles over a target halfway across the globe taking photos, but not for a combat aircraft. So though she kept her hands on her stick and throttle out of habit, most of the work was being done by Bunny’s fingers tapping the keypad, as she thought herself into the future and issued commands to her aircraft that would put them where she wanted them, when she wanted them, doing what she wanted. The Fantom’s AI took care of the ‘routine’ business, like making sure they didn’t fly into each other, or the ground … or a missile.

  As she guided her two Fantoms out of Al Azraq toward the exercise range over Jordan’s rugged mountains to the south, she had already decided she was going to approach the challenge without subtlety or elegance. The scenario called for the opposing forces to enter the 100-mile by 60-mile exercise area at opposite corners of the diagonal at an altitude of 20,000 feet, any time inside a two-minute window. Their mission was simply to find and kill each other, which the F-22s had managed to do 23 times so far, to the Fantom pilots three. The ‘hard deck’ for the exercise – the altitude pilots weren’t allowed to go below or their aircraft would be deemed destroyed – was five thousand feet, which meant Bunny wasn’t going to be able to make use of the Fantom’s excellent terrain-following capabilities.

  Studying previous engagements, Bunny had learned the US Raptor pilots liked to fight like an old tennis player facing a younger opponent – slug it out from the baseline and wait for their opponent to show themselves and make a mistake. They usually took up a staggered position in a corner of the range, somewhere between 30 and 40,000 feet, which meant they could cover the entire range with their passive radar detection system, waiting for an electronic squeak from their adversaries.

  As soon as a Raptor picked up a radio or radar signal from a target, it had a bearing down which it could conduct a narrow beam radar search, get a lock, and shoot.

  One advantage of the Fantom should have been that its pilots didn’t need to use radio signals to communicate with each other and coordinate their actions. They were ground based, their trailers parked next to each other in the sandy soil of Al Azraq, talking over optical fiber cable. But they were controlled by satellite and shared data with each other – radar, position and targeting data – that they squirted to each other through the ether. They’d tried blanking as much of that energy as they could, but it hadn’t helped. Bunny had a theory that something in the satellite comms link was giving away the Fantom’s positions to the F-22s, and she was about to test it.

  For the benefit of Kovacs and the DARPA team monitoring the engagement, she kept up a running commentary.

  “Fantom 1 approaching Red Flag entry point. Heading one niner three, altitude 20, speed six seven zero, setting Fantom 2 to low-follow, emissions dark.” Her wingman would enter the exercise area at the same altitude as her, but then immediately dive for the hard deck and stay low, ten miles behind her, its radio and radar shut down.

  “Going high,” Bunny said, sending her Fantom through 30,000 feet to 40,000. “And dark.” With a tap of her fingers she fed navigation and posture data to the lead Fantom and cut its satellite link.

  “What are you doing?!” Kovacs asked, shocked. “Both of those aircraft are now inside the Red Flag range and out of our control!”

  Bunny gave her a smile and sat back. “I know. Terrifying, isn’t it?”

  “We have no idea what they’re doing!”

  “Wrong. They’re doing exactly what you programmed them to do, and exactly what I told them to do. One of them is weaving across the exercise area at 40,000 feet, sniffing for electronic signals. The other is following it, down low, doing the same. If either of them gets a target, they’ll phone home to momma. In the meantime they are as close to invisible as I can make them.”

  Kovacs was used to seeing data flood across her screen – avionics, engine state, fuel state, radar data – but for the next few long minutes, all she had were the voices of her team back in the DARPA hangar asking her what the hell was going on.

  Five minutes went by.

  Kovacs was biting her thumbnail, staring at her empty displays. “I can’t stand this,” she said.

  “You think you’ve got it bad?” O’Hare asked. “It’s worse for those Raptor pilots. This just might be the first time they’re feeling a little worried. By now, they’ve usually picked up telemetry signals from at least one of your Fantoms on their passive arrays. I’m guessing they’ve got your satellite comms frequency dialed in and every time they go out there, they’re looking for it. So, no sat-comms, no Fantom.”

  “It’s not a game of hide and seek,” Kovacs said. “It’s a combat air engagement. You can’t just hide from them, you have to kill them to win.”


  “To kill them, I have to get into knife fighting range,” O’Hare told her. She pulled up a tactical screen showing the Red Flag area and drew a line across it with her joystick. “Our girls will be about here by now. Halfway across the ops area. How many times have you gotten this deep into their territory?”

  “Three,” Kovacs said tightly. “Out of about twenty.”

  “Right. And each time, you got a kill.”

  “We got a kill, but we lost our aircraft anyway, to one of the other Raptors.”

  “Not today,” Bunny said, with a confidence she didn’t quite feel. “Today it’s going to be two for zero.”

  As she finished talking there was a chime inside the trailer and a red dot with a line behind it appeared on the tactical display. “Contact!” Bunny said. “Radio energy. Right where I thought, high and deep.”

  The red dot disappeared as quickly as it appeared.

  “We lost it,” Kovacs said. “Why didn’t you engage the Fantom’s phased-array radar, get a target lock, send a missile at it?”

  “Because that would get us killed,” Bunny told her. “Fantom 1 phoned home, sent the targeting data to its wingman and then hung up the phone straight away. If that Raptor saw anything, it saw a blip of radio energy that disappeared as quickly as it appeared. Fantom 1 has changed heading now. It’s still working the target on its passive sensors. It’ll be circling around to flank its target from the east while its wingman down low flanks from the west. They’ll be arming their missiles. I’ve set engagement range for 15 miles.”

  “It can’t engage autonomously!” Kovacs said.

  “It won’t.” Bunny looked at her watch. “Give it thirty seconds.”

  Thirty seconds came, and went. Bunny was starting to feel a little less confident.

  “They’re dead,” Kovacs said in a flat voice. “But because we don’t have a sat link, we can’t see it yet. I am deeply uncomfortable with this.”

  “If they were dead, you’d hear Raptor pilots jeering,” Bunny said, fingers drumming on her keyboard. “Get ready. This could get a little crazy.”

  As she finished speaking, several things happened at once. The 270-degree screens mounted on the walls around the trailer flashed to life, showing the sky around the lead Fantom. High on the starboard quarter, a red box was drawn around a tiny black dot. Bunny’s heads-up display showed a target locked and missiles armed. Without hesitating she jabbed her finger on the missile trigger on her flight stick.

  “Fox 1, Fox 1,” she intoned as she launched two simulated Peregrine hit-to-kill missiles at the F-22 which had just been locked up by the Fantom’s targeting radar. “Splash one!” Bunny called in delight seconds later as the red box on the screen turned into a red cross, the Red Flag umpires marking it as a kill. “Oh, shit.” Her fingers flew across her keyboard. “Enemy radar lock. Missile! Evading.”

  A simulated Peregrine fired by the second Raptor was spearing toward her Fantom at a nominal 2.5 times the speed of sound. No human pilot could have reacted in time to evade it, but the combat AI aboard the Fantom was no human AI. Firing tinfoil chaff and infrared countermeasures, blasting radio energy at the missile to disrupt any targeting data it was getting from the aircraft that fired it, the Fantom spun on its axis and dived for the hard deck in a maneuver that would have broken the neck of any human unlucky enough to be sitting in a cockpit inside it.

  As it did, its wingman down low got a lock on the second Raptor. Bunny’s fingers flew, enlarging the view from the second Fantom, which showed another small black dot, also low on the horizon, framed in a red box.

  “Fantom 2, Fox 1,” Bunny said. “Fantom 1 maneuvering, reacquiring.” Her right hand gripped her flight stick, twitching it involuntarily, fingers on her left hand dancing like a pianist’s as she bullied the first drone around so it was pointed at the Raptor that had just ambushed it. “Fantom 1, Fox 1. Splash two! He’s toast.” The second red square turned into a cross. Bunny jumped from her seat, startling Kovacs as she leaped in the air and punched the ceiling of the trailer. “Yeah baby! What I’m talking about!” She collapsed into her seat and pulled the helmet from her head, turning to Kovacs with a sheepish expression. “Sorry about that. Got a bit of history with bloody Raptors.”

  “I guessed,” Kovacs said.

  Bunny looked up and saw she had put a small dent in the roof of the trailer. She rubbed her knuckles. No, nothing broken. Kovacs was looking at her like she was one die short in a game of Trouble. “What?”

  “Nothing. I guess I’m just used to a little more … calm in the cockpit … kind of thing.”

  Bunny was still rubbing her knuckles. “This is combat, Shelly. Kill, or be killed. Literally. Not algorithms, not computer code. It’s bloody, horrible, undignified death and dying. Screw being calm. If you don’t get a bit emotional about that, you aren’t wired right.” O’Hare had flown with pilots who did their jobs like it was another day at the office. Who delivered precision munitions on command, able to abstract themselves from the thought of who or what lay in the crosshairs of their cruise missiles. She admired and respected them. Truly. But she was not one of those. “So now you see what your babies can do. Are you a little less uncomfortable now?”

  “Not really. You didn’t break the Rules of Engagement, but you bent the definition of semi-autonomous to breaking point, O’Hare,” Kovacs said. “You gave those aircraft their orders and then cut their sat links. For all intents and purposes, they were fully autonomous at that point. That’s not standard procedure.”

  “Those sat links were getting you killed – I just proved that. Standard procedure might be fine against 4th-generation fighters, but against a 5th-gen fighter like the Raptor, or a Russian Felon, you have to use every trick you’ve got if you want to win, and to hell with ‘procedure’.”

  Kovacs spun her chair around, deep in thought. When she stopped, she leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “I wasn’t sure whether bringing you into this program was the right idea, O’Hare,” she said. “But while you were prepping for this exercise, I got word that our field trials are being terminated anyway, so I guess we’ll never know.”

  O’Hare felt her small victory turn to ashes. She had a sudden vision of herself parked behind a desk on Cyprus. “Sorry, what?”

  “I just got told that our aircraft are being assigned to the USAF 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing, based out of your favorite airfield, Akrotiri.”

  “Marines aren’t going to like that.”

  “General Garrett authorized it.”

  Bunny’s shoulders slumped. “Oh well, at least I’ll be able to get a lift back to Cyprus.”

  Kovacs smiled. “Oh, I can guarantee that. We still need pilots to fly them. I can see if I can get you reassigned to the 432nd, if you’re interested.”

  “Are you going?”

  “I have to. These experimental aircraft are still DARPA assets until there is an official handover to Marine Corps Aviation. Assuming the Air Force doesn’t trash them all.”

  Bunny nodded. “Alright. I’m in. On one condition.”

  Kovacs laughed. “Condition? I already got you out of a jail cell and now I’m saving you from death-by-desk-job, how can you have conditions?”

  “You promised me a hex. You definitely said I’d be flying six birds at a time and now you’ve seen what I can do with two. I’m not going back to Cyprus unless we’re putting six birds in the air at a time.” She gave Kovacs a conciliatory wink. “Semi-autonomous, I promise.”

  Kobani, Kurdish-Controlled Syria, May 17

  “You saved a lot of lives down there, Bell,” said ‘Gunner’ James Jensen, Marine Gunnery Sergeant, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines, to the Marine combat corpsman sitting opposite him in the belly of the Bell-Boeing Big Boy twin rotor as they lifted up and away from Combat Outpost Meyer in the Kurdish-held northern Syrian city of Kobani. Bell-Boeing had originally envisaged an entirely new quadrotor design for the Big Boy but it had proven easier for the manufacturer to take the pilots
out of their piloted V-22C Osprey design than build an entirely new aircraft. The V-22DU Big Boy could carry 20,000lb. of cargo, or 24 troops, and it flew with only a single crewman, an airman who functioned as both comms operator and loadmaster.

  The young ginger-haired corpsman sitting next to Jensen had his duffel bag stowed above his head, his ever-present medical pack slung over his shoulder and resting in his lap, and his M27 rifle upright, butt on the ground between his boots. He too was watching the hilltop base that had been their home for nearly six bloody months drop away and, if anything, he showed even less regret in his bloodshot eyes than Jensen felt.

  “Maybe I did, Sarge,” Bell acknowledged. “But there were plenty I didn’t.”

  After several months of siege, the hundred remaining ‘Lava Dogs’ of 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines had faced a battalion-level assault by Syrian forces which had included a barrage by thermobaric rockets, and by the time the smoke had cleared and the Syrian ground troops had been beaten back, although they still held the hilltop, they’d lost around thirty Marines.

  It hadn’t felt like a victory.

  Over the following weeks they’d evacuated first their wounded, and then their dead. Following the ceasefire between Syria and Turkey, Jensen had stayed on as part of a small force to complete the closure and handover of the US outpost to Kurdish forces at Kobani. The Second Lieutenant in charge of their company and most of the remaining men had been lifted out a couple of days earlier, and Jensen and the platoon-sized remnant he was attached to had packed up the last of the equipment and put it on transport rotors.