Photo credit: U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Emily Kenney.

From Popular Mechanics

The U.S. Air Force turned an F-16 fighter into an autonomous combat drone capable of flying combat missions on its own and then returning to fly alongside a manned aircraft. The program, known as "Have Raider II," could lead to older U.S. fighters acting as semi-disposable wingmen for more modern planes, conducting missions too dangerous for manned aircraft to carry out.

The program was recently validated after a two week exercise at Edwards Air Force Base involving the Air Force Research Lab, the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School, Lockheed Martin, and Calspan Corporation, according to a press release by Lockheed Martin.

During the exercises, the F-16 planned and executed an air strike according to "mission priorities and available assets." The F-16 also managed "dynamically react to a changing threat environment" while managing "capability failures, route deviations, and loss of communication".

The Have Raider program is part of the Air Force's Loyal Wingman project to create autonomous aircraft that are paired with manned aircraft and can take on delegated tasks. Have Raider I focused on having an F-16 autonomously leave its manned lead aircraft, conduct an air strike, then return to flying formation. Have Raider II went a step further, forcing the F-16's software make decisions based on operational parameters and then changing them as the situation was updated.

The program is broadly part of the Pentagon's Third Offset Strategy, which plans to use existing equipment in new ways to maintain a technological and numerical edge over countries such as China and Russia. The U.S. Air Force will shed more than a thousand F-16s as the F-35A enters service. While older, the F-16s have the advantage of being cheaper to fly and semi-disposable.

In the future, Loyal Wingman could see a single F-35 accompanied by one or more autonomous F-16s on a strike mission. As the aircraft near the target, autonomous F-16s could be dispatched to take out advanced air defense systems. Survivors could then join up with the F-35 and proceed to strike the main target. Future wingmen could be purpose-built stealthy drones, but for now the Air Force has plenty of F-16s that are free, the only cost being to convert them to operate autonomously.

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