FCAS / SCAF : The Future European Jet ?

hello everybody it's chris from military aviation history although for this video we're going to bracket off that history part and look squarely at the future as you know there are currently a couple of future aviation systems in development over in europe we have fcats which is the future combat air system between france germany and it's currently spain we also have tempest which is developed by the brits the italians and the swedes are also getting into it and over in america we have of course ngat which is the next generation air dominance program now some of those systems are mainly based around a single aircraft and some of them are more systems of systems being essentially developed in conjunction to deliver one full package and the question here is what are we going to see in the future in the realm of military aviation are we going to see increased autonomy are we going to see more drones drone swarming and what is that actually going to mean and to answer some of these questions i have invited dr erica franke from the european council on foreign relations she works there on topics such as well german foreign and security policy but she's also an expert on drones and specifically artificial intelligence and she's also on the airbus front hover expert panel where she tackles such questions as how new emerging technologies are going to be integrated into f-cars she can give us a fantastic account of the current development of f cars we're also going to touch upon tempest and yeah without much further ado let's just get right into the interview so yeah thank you very much dr funke once again for being on the show and answering my questions about sixth generation aircraft this time with drones of course thank you for having me again yeah so obviously nobody can predict the future but what sort of capabilities are we most likely going to see with six generation aircraft especially considering that there are probably going to be some avenues here for drones as you were saying no one has a crystal ball um and the question is always your timeline and also which actors you're talking about but maybe to kind of outline a certain area of interest or research which may end up being important um i think one important element is stealth um so systems being able to to be less seen by radars or other means this is definitely something a lot of countries are interested in and this actually brings us immediately into the second point which i think is extremely important which is autonomy um autonomy ai enabled autonomy so now we may be talking about drones if you like um why are the two linked because quite often when you talk about drone systems about remotely piloted systems these systems are comparatively easy to detect i mean it's not that easy if you actually you know want to build a counter drone system but but it's still um comparatively easy and that's because of the uplink and the downlink um so you know just the control links that go to the drone and the information links that come back to the pilots so if you want to fly uh an unmanned um system in a way that's as stealth as possible you want to cut these links which means you need to give the system more autonomy um so that's a that's a kind of important development we may be seen seeing more autonomous systems therefore more unmanned systems a third huge area of interest is in swarming so what we're already seeing um are a lot of tests with several drone systems being combined or really several units you know swarms aren't necessarily drones but it's just that that's kind of where the development started but they could be um surface vessels uh ground systems etc but but just several units working together in a sporum this also means ai-enabled capabilities um and i think that you know the next the next fighters or the next aircraft really may have these these uh armed wingmen or these drone swarms um accompanying it and indeed that's that's very much where some of the projects that we know of are are going so there's a franco german or franco german spanish program called the future combat air system fcas which is very much in line with this thinking where you have a manned aircraft a fighter jet accompanied by drone swarms there's a next next-generation fighter right in there that's that that's supposed to be the aircraft and then there's of course the remote carriers and then there's also this combat cloud and does that go into this autonomy and this interconnectedness that you were talking about yeah yeah so i think you outlined kind of the three most important parts and it's important to realize with fcas that this is a comparatively new development a new project and it is multilateral it is french german and french german spanish now i always say french german and then french german spanish because it started as this franco-german project and the spanish are now partners but but but it's primarily led by france and germany and french and german companies um and this delays everything by the way i mean not that that military development is ever easy but multilateral development um makes things even harder still relatively in a kind of definition phase and also we're talking about an aircraft that is supposed to fly sometime in 2040 or 2045 which means that you're dealing with a bit of an unclear threat situation by then you know what exactly are you facing were you fighting in which context and of course a difficult um technological situations because you're kind of thinking of employing technologies that aren't quite there yet but you think by 2040 you're really able to have them and so yeah fcas has these three components a fighter jet which interestingly enough is is planned to be meant has to do a lot with with political reasons as well but but maybe technological too so a man fighter jet um accompanied by remote carriers or drones drone swarms probably aren't they're somewhat um in the german literature on f cars you rarely find anything on the armed remote carriers and the french they talk more about areas so that's interesting in north itself and yes the famous combat cloud i also love the term and the combat cloud is basically supposed to be a system of systems where the different elements of f cars can plug themselves in but also communicate and work with other existing military systems so for instance the aywax surveillance planes um uh other allies in systems whether they're flying or or on the ground or anything else um so yeah this is the system of system that's you know difficult to develop and kind of difficult to describe and potentially a huge cyber risk so this is something i feel isn't really discussed enough if you combine everything you know you're only as strong as your weakest link but but yeah that's the these are the elements of of uh fcas as we know them today and again lots of research being done on this um where we're still kind of figuring it out staying with sort of the eurocentric approach here we have fcas in in in europe um germany or france germany and then spain as you said and then we have tempest which is the uk italy and i think sweden is starting to get into this as well now how is does tempest figure into this debate is there also going to be drones linked to this system you know it's even worse because the brits actually also talk about fcas so this is becoming an actual problem in this discussion that we now have in europe two fca systems so sometimes i talk with brits and they talk about fcas and they actually mean the british system okay and i've now resorted the other day i was talking to a british expert and i have now resorted to talk about the british system as fcars and the the continental european as scaf which is the french acronym just to differentiate between the two so so this makes all of this so much harder um this is relatively recent that the brits really you know started to go with with f tempest is indeed you know potentially part of it a part of it um tempest was or is um a drone development um and and you have unmanned combat aircraft uh development that has also been ongoing for for a while and from what i know and i know this development less well than no f cast they are very similar in the sense that they're also talking about swarms they're also talking about combat cloud the idea is very similar which indeed leads a lot of experts to say maybe we shouldn't do these two in parallel because honestly you know there's only so much money to go around in europe and importantly there are only so many customers in europe and the western world and nato because that's the kind of system that you don't want to export to just anyone and i mean we generally don't export arms to anyone but i think this in particular has kind of a restricted um user base so uh yeah there are discussions on whether or not we can combine all of these systems into one which may make sense from the development point of view politically it certainly doesn't get any easier if you put in more um more actors there's a question of who will develop what um who has which capabilities to what extent will they be shared is there enough of the kind of cake to go to to everyone but technologically speaking it may make sense because of course you know you could say i don't know the italians are good in sensor and the brits are good in engines and you know you could kind of um have this division of labor which is the ideal situation for for these multilateral technological developments specifically going back to uh fcs or scaf let's let's go with the french acronym here i think that's even appropriate since this is between france mainly dassault airbus in germany which is half french anyway isn't it yeah although the the it's true and that's what a lot of people complain about but the the airborne's part that's working on stuff is is quite german so so yeah i think it's still you know reasonably 50 50. maybe we should add i know that you want to add the others as well but just as a kind of point of information it's also important this stuff fcast project is one of two franco-german arms procurement uh projects the other one is a tank and a ground mcgs main combat ground tank main main ground and this is also a franco german project and the initial understanding was that france and germany are doing these two together plus maybe some other allies and france get the lead and so also a bit more maybe of the cake from afghans and germany gets the lead on the tank which also kind of makes sense historically and the problem now is a bit that f cars really is becoming a huge project um you know we're talking billions and the tank a bit less so and this is why the germans kind of feel like they're not getting their fair share or something like that but yes so we have in afghanistan airbus primarily and then um yeah other also smaller firms um from from other places and that so is supposed to get the um the aircraft itself if you like it's supposed to to build the airframe and the fighter and airbus is looking into the combat cloud and [Music] yeah the the armed wing man or remote carriers and how do you reconcile sort of the demands that france has for their aircraft to what the germans need with the aircraft because if you're developing a system here between multiple countries obviously it has to fit the defense requirement of each country and i'm just thinking about the french now i i don't know exactly how they want to use scaf but carriers are perhaps an option which is just something that germans don't want or well they don't have a carry of in the first place um how do you reconcile these sort of problems within the within the development yeah that is a very good question and it shows you why multilateral developments are a bit difficult so you're right that there are some differences um yeah being able to to start and land from an aircraft carrier is one question i don't actually know whether this has been in any way formalized yet france does have an aircraft carrier germany does not and won't get one anytime soon um the other question is also the ability to carry nuclear weapons first question is should f cars have this ability and the answer from the french is definitely yes and from the germans is probably yes the problem is just these aren't the same nuclear weapons because the french have their own nuclear weapons their nuclear power they don't share their nuclear weapons germany isn't a nuclear power but is part of nato's nuclear sharing which means that there are nuclear weapons stationed on german soil which the german luftwaffe may theoretically we're talking very theoretically but theoretically maybe ask to put on a german aircraft and fly to a potential target and so if fcas is supposed to do that i mean you need to build it in this way and then you bring in the americans because this would mean that this aircraft would need to be able to carry american nuclear weapons which means it needs to be certified for that which may mean that you need to share very important industrial information with the with the americans and this could cause problems down the road um so how do you reconcile this i don't know you keep talking and you try to do this this is really the big the big comment and you're absolutely right to put this um to point this out and i don't have the answer i mean this this nuclear question in germany is is a topic in its own right i mean i've already spoken with my own audience about this with nuclear tile harbor and pane via tornado naflger but the replacement for that it's it's a big issue so we'll see where that progresses to um sort of as a final question on this issue i want to go back to drones here um how much of this swarming that we're talking about is simply a reflection of the i'll call it the fashion of the time drone swarms are definitely kind of the talk of the town at the moment i tend to believe that this is largely warranted because if you can actually figure out how to fly drone swarms this really gives you potentially quite attractive new novel military capabilities however and this is really important we need to kind of define what we mean by drone swarm because right now a lot of the news you see on drone swarms there aren't really swarms the experts are trying to establish this term there are more masked drones which means that there are a lot of drones that seem to be doing something together however these systems are almost always pre-programmed or somehow you know piloted remotely so for instance you may have seen especially now um uh at new year's eve you had these amazing drone shows as a replacement for fireworks and you had thousands of drones in the sky not just you know in china which is quite strong on this but in london and all of that these aren't really drone swarms these are mass drones a lot of drones doing really exciting things but they are pre-programmed and they don't interact with each other a real drone swarm the kind of military idea where we want to go would be to have a number of of units again doesn't have to be drones but have a number of units that operate together as one but are in communication with each other can react to each other can replace each other if one or several get shot down and can you know as a as a bird swarm can uh carry out one operation together if you manage to do this this is quite interesting because imagine you can do waves of attack you can have so-called flying minefields um you can you can do all kinds of you know militarily really exciting things you know whether you want to do them in the end or ethical or other reasons there's another question but but you can you can definitely have really novel capabilities but it's not that easy because you know this is the thing like we've seen really quite exciting developments when it comes to mass drones like this looks really cool tests on drone swarms that they're being carried out for instance by the by the us military but also by the um by the british military have shown to be much harder this is much more difficult this requires ai capabilities you also there's also a question of how vulnerable are these systems to attack because you know if they need to communicate with each other they need open communications can you jam them can you spoof them all of that um so yeah so i think i think the attention is warranted i can see why a lot of militaries are interested in this but whether we actually figure this out to to have yeah militarily viable drone swarms um we'll have to see and as a sort of final question we had you on before where you laid out the german debate on drones and the the potential weaponization of these uh systems how is that going to factor into discussion with scaf now i mean if if these drones are part of a weaponized system not in the way that they perhaps carry weapons in themselves but are part or helping a system that is weaponized in the next generation fighter does that create a new complication yes i think stuff fcos will create a bit of a problem for the german political realm if you like or at least there are certain things they need to address carrying the nuclear weapons we were talking about earlier um but indeed the question of armed drones um again it's not i'm not i don't think it has been completely decided i mean nothing really has really been decided but but i think at this point the the remote carriers are thought to be armed but we'll see whether they actually are um so if they are we have an arm drone problem um but even if they are not we still have an autonomy problem because and here i would say rightly so in germany and in other places by the way this is in the uniquely german debate there is a big debate about how much autonomy weapon systems whether they are armed or not really should be getting um and again there are good reasons to really be very careful with this but but stuff fcas that is currently planned does certainly have some autonomous aspects and some ai enabled aspects and that's something that needs to be addressed here i definitely need to mention that i'm in fact um part of of an expert group that has been put together by by airbus in cooperation with a german research institute and they've brought together 20 or so people who work on these things in a working group called technological responsibility because they specifically want to address these questions of autonomy and ai enabled autonomy in in the stuff system and how to deal with it and what should be done what can be done which shouldn't be done so just kind of as a disclaimer i think the thing is this this system is supposed to fly by 2014. so i think at this point a lot of people think that you know by 2040 our thinking may have developed further the german debate may have developed further i hope we're not still discussing armed drones by 2040 i mean again we will have taken a decision one way or the other if armed drones are fine then you can have them there if they're not fined then you need to find another um another solution but yeah there's still lots of open question here that aren't resolved and this may cause a problem for the next german governing coalition which may see other players in in government because if for example we get the um the more pacifist minded uh greens in government it will be part of of their job if you like to um to give money to this to this stuff development um and so there's there will be a question of to what extent will they say this is so far in the future and this is so development you know it's fine to to work on this now and we can discuss specifics later or will they say no no we need clear answers to all of the questions that we just mentioned beforehand and if it's the latter well that's going to be a very different interesting discussion well i think you picked the interest of many people again do you have any sort of recommendation on this specific topic for reading of course this is a very new even newer than the weaponized throwing question but is there any um reading even if it's a blog if it's a podcast anything you would say follow this one uh if you want to know more about these topics in general but also perhaps something on scaff or sixth generation fighters i don't think it's necessarily books or articles yet although i should i should say so paul sherry in in the us has been writing very knowledgeably on uh autonomous weapons and also a lot on swarms um so so his his writing is definitely um a very good and he has a has a book out on that um i i feel that that twitter is actually a great source you know they're great uh people who are looking at uh also different countries plans on new technologies you know be china elsa kanye it's brilliant on kind of ai enabled systems in china and autonomy in china um but yeah it's definitely you know still ongoing i don't think that there's anything brilliant on on scuf or f simply because it's still developing dr funke thank you very much for answering all the questions and yeah it was a pleasure to have you on again thank you for having me so i hope that you enjoyed this video and if you're interested in this sort of topic fcast tempest even ngat although we didn't specifically mention it in this video check out the description below i have placed a couple of helpful links there with additional information i also want to thank once again dr eureka funker for answering my questions and if you enjoyed this sort of content consider supporting the channel via patreon or channel memberships that allows me to create more videos such as this one and also if you want to make sure that you will be notified of future option loads make sure you subscribe with that bell notification also like the videos and of course let me know what you thought about this subject and what are your sort of takes on future technologies and how they are going to change the realm of military aviation and as always at this point i just wish you a great day and see you in the sky

Channel: Military Aviation History

Views: 144,180

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Id: ACZBjm4mfm8

Length: 23min 44sec (1424 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 24 2021