How AI is coming for our top guns

Telegraph

4 days ago

Like countless other schoolboys, Greg Bagwell dreamed of becoming an RAF fighter pilot when he grew up. Unlike countless other schoolboys, he actually did so – beating thousands of others in a selection procedure as stringent as joining the SAS.
First, recruits must be fit enough to withstand pressures of 9G during flight – equivalent to nine times the force of gravity on the body, and twice what a bobsleigh crew or a Formula 1 driver endures.
Second, they must be capable of complex maths to plot manoeuvres and missile trajectories. Third, they must be able to do all of the above while being shot at.
'Short of becoming an astronaut, there aren't many jobs that are as selective,' says Bagwell, 63, who flew Tornados in Iraq in the 1990s and is now a Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.
'You need the hand-eye co-ordination to fly at supersonic speeds, while also doing the maths that gives you the 3D shaping of the airspace. It's like being a Formula 1 driver while also playing chess; only you're having to make each chess move in split seconds while travelling at nine miles a minute,' says Bagwell.
It is no surprise that air forces seek high standards in fighter pilots. Their jets are hugely costly, and are often the first responders in hostilities, be it military reconnaissance of Islamic State bases in the Middle East, or dropping a bomb.
Tales of their skills are also the stuff of history books and movies, from Battle of Britain aces such as Douglas Bader to space pioneers like Neil Armstrong, who flew combat missions in Korea before his journey to the Moon.
But in a combat arena where the slightest human error can prove supremely costly, the future may lie in removing humans from cockpits – with those like Bagwell replaced by AI-controlled pilots.
Brink of extinction
Such scenarios may sound like the script of Top Gun: Maverick, in which Tom Cruise's ageing air ace is warned that his ilk will soon be replaced by UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). 'Pilots need to eat, sleep, take a p--s,' sneers a tech-minded superior. 'Your kind is headed for extinction.'
This is no case of Hollywood hyperbole: if anything, the Top Gun scriptwriters may be behind the times. For AI-controlled fighter jets are already holding their own against human pilots – as demonstrated in tests this summer carried by Helsing, a German drone maker and AI firm.
In a collaboration last month with the Swedish fighter-plane maker Saab, two Gripen E combat jets engaged in mock dogfights over the Baltic Sea – one jet flown by a regular pilot, the other by a pilot guided by Helsing's Centaur AI software.
While neither aircraft came out on top, Centaur gave its human counterpart a run for its money. Given the rate at which AI learns, it may be just a few years before it gains the edge.
'Right now, there are still pilots out there that will have a chance, but that will change fast,' explains Marcus Wandt, Saab's chief innovation officer, and a former fighter pilot. 'If you need to retrain for a new weapon system or new tactics, it will be difficult to stay on par.'
Helsing was founded as a start-up by German tech entrepreneur Torsten Reil, an Oxford-educated gaming developer, and Gundbert Scherf, formerly an aerospace expert with the German ministry of defence. Their motivation was Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014, which they saw as proof that Europe needed to harness 'autonomous capabilities' to survive against aggressive dictatorships.
Having been proved all too right by the war in Ukraine, Helsing has become one of Europe's biggest start-ups, making advanced air and sea drones. Such unmanned weapons have proved game-changers in Ukraine, helping to keep Russia's far bigger army in check, crippling Moscow's Black Sea fleet, and destroying dozens of Russian bombers recently at an airfield in Siberia.
Helsing is now valued at more than £10bn, with Spotify founder Daniel Ek's investment company having led a £500m funding round in June.
The age of drones
The firm's success has already led some to question whether Western governments should even continue investing in manned fighter aircraft. Britain, for example, is purchasing 12 new US F35-A fighter jets capable of carrying nuclear bombs. The F35 is the world's most advanced fighter jet, yet is still built around the concept of a human at the controls.
Last year, the Tesla boss Elon Musk described the F-35 as a case of Western militaries training for yesterday's war. He posted an image on X of a Chinese drone swarm, saying: 'Meanwhile, some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.' He added: 'Manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones…Will just get pilots killed.'
Defence officials argue that planes such as the F-35 take decades to design, and that AI is still too much in its infancy to design an entire plane around. But Helsing put on a recent demonstration of Centaur's skills at the Global Air & Space Chiefs' Conference, a top-level military and industry forum in London hosted by the RAF.
On a flight simulator set up in a hotel suite next to the conference centre, two former 'Top Guns' – ex-Tornado pilot Stewart Campbell and ex-French Mirage pilot Benoit Planche – fought two Centaur rivals in 'beyond visual range' combat. This is when the enemy jet is too far away to see, but still within missile and radar range.
That sort of military engagement makes success more reliant on computing heights, trajectories and speeds, to maximise the chances of a missile finding its target. The projectiles have limited fuel time, so if a pilot doesn't fire them at the most opportune moment, the target may dodge or outrun them.
'We want to hit the enemy before they hit us, which means we're running maths in our head constantly about heights, speed, loft and so on,' says Campbell, who left the RAF this year after serving in Afghanistan and the Red Arrows. 'Ultimately, I think you're going to see AI take over because it can do those calculations far better than I can.'
Campbell also points out that, contrary to the impression given in films, the average fighter jet has limited weaponry. His simulated jet has just four air-to-air missiles – fewer than the number of bullets held by the average revolver. 'I can't just fire with impunity; I need each shot to be lethal,' he points out.
'The chances of the AI getting it wrong are much less – especially if you're a stressed-out junior pilot, being shot at in a part of the world you're unfamiliar with,' he adds.
AI advantages
The Centaur AI pilots honed their skills on a simulated platform where they were given a simple reward function: 'Kill the other aircraft and don't die.'
They then played each other constantly, absorbing the equivalent of more than 100 years' flying time in a few days. The process is broadly comparable to Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that took on – and ultimately defeated – chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in the 1990s, evaluating 200 million chess positions per second.
In last week's demonstration in London, Centaur won some of the battles while the pilots won others. Campbell admits, though, that AI also offers other advantages. 'From a risk point of view, you've not got a human being in that cockpit. Nor are you paying a pension or its healthcare.'
A running theme at the conference was the risk that AI could creep up, like a stealth fighter jet, on an unwieldy defence establishment. Several speakers suggested that unmanned AI jets could be operational by 2040.
'The F-35 is the best fighter around today, and will be for a good while yet,' says Prof Kenneth Payne, an expert in strategic studies at King's College London. 'But AI will be able to do what human pilots can well before the next RAF fighter comes into service.
'We need to think seriously about whether that aircraft needs a cockpit,' he continues. 'Some leading AI figures think it will surpass human-level intelligence at many, even most, tasks within a few years. I don't think enough people inside defence are taking that seriously yet.'
The RAF's next fighter will be the Tempest, a joint British-Italian-Japanese venture due in service by 2035. It is expected to offer both manned and unmanned options, although Bagwell seems unconvinced that pilots will be dispensed by then.
'A manned platform can do all kinds of things, from dogfights and escorts through to intercepting an airliner and looking into the cockpit to see if there is a hostage situation. There isn't a machine that exists today that can do all those things,' he says.
'In combat scenarios, planes will also be flying into deeply hostile airspace, with jamming, spoofing and other attacks on connectivity. If you lose that, you may still need a human being in the loop.'
'Besides,' he adds, 'I spent all my life as a pilot being promised stuff that never quite meets the glossy brochure. And in life-and-death situations, where a pilot might be trying to stop a missile attack on the UK, are we happy to put 100-per-cent trust in machines?'
'Our time is done'
Others, of course, argue that the very act of flying requires putting 100-per-cent trust in a machine, and that the whole trajectory of combat aircraft has been away from the reckless 'barnstormer' image of the last century.
Indeed, in a memorable article about a tour of a US Air Force base in 1969, the hellraising journalist Hunter S Thompson mourned the demise of the 'daredevil, speedball' flying ace. Today's pilot, he wrote, was a 'supercautious, supertrained, superintelligent monument to the computer age'.
In that sense, AI pilots may simply be the next logical step – if not taking over entirely, then flying certain missions deemed too risky for humans. And much as men such as Campbell may still represent the elite, for now, he accepts that the Top Gun legend could be about to end.
'When I joined the Royal Air Force, I was told that a time would come when fighters wouldn't be in the cockpit,' he says. 'Ultimately, when we fight a war, we want to win, and if AI becomes capable enough to win, then I accept that our time as pilots is done.'