> Airbus selling ai-operated strike drones.

FTFY

Good! Great to hear! EU needs to grow its domestic military industry, the French were right all along.

There's a funny term some cool kids use for them, "drone", I think? Personally I think it's too short to convey the full utility.

"Begun, the Clone War has." -Yoda

I mused about this back on 2017[^a]. Surely we're well on the way to having this with commercial planes? [a] https://jonathannen.com/captain-ai/

There are multiple interesting developments wrapped together here.

First, these are intended to be "loyal wingman". They'll be commanded (but not really remotely controlled) from manned fighters nearbyish. Presumably, the "shoot authorization" will be delegated down to the pilots.

Secondly, the actual unmanned platform (the Kratos Valkyrie) is also part of a program of record for the USMC (US Marine Corps) to act as a partner SEAD (suppression of air defence) vehicle.

Thirdly, the "MARS" system chattered about looks to be Airbus' open architecture /system of systems pitch that they were developing for FCAS (the European 6th generation fighter program). MARS and all pitches like it are about ways to make individual platforms as software defined as possible, and to get different platforms/instances to really data/function share as much as possible.

If this program goes well, it shows that Airbus' MARS has the flexibility and capability required to just... layer into/ontop of some random other vendor's hardware/software and then "just work". I think it would be major demonstration/validation of the work.

A modern V-2. Nothing could possibly go wrong!

Yeah, I believe Kratos (who is doing this joint venture with Airbus) and AeroVironment are the current leaders in the space. Not sure what happens when Anduril goes public

Is this the EU's version of the Shahed drones? or is it something different?

This seems to be the generally agreed upon direction defense companies are going, but a couple architectural concerns come to mind regarding this "Manned-Unmanned-Teaming" approach:

- Even if the XQ-58 has a low radar cross section, a "swarm" of four drones flying in formation with a non-stealthy Eurofighter significantly increases the aggregate probability of detection. Unless these drones are performing active electronic countermeasures or "blinking" to spoof radar returns, they’re essentially a giant "here we are" sign for any modern radar. I wonder if they've compensated via the flight software to manage formation geometry to minimize the group's total observable signature?

- Anti-air systems will prioritize the "command aircraft" (the Eurofighter) immediately. If the C2 link is severed—whether by kinetic kill or high-power jamming—what is the state-machine logic for the subordinates? Do they revert to a fail-passive (return to base) or -active (continue last assigned strike) mode? Without a human-in-the-loop, rules of engagement issues are abound. (I'm not even accounting for the fact that the drones probably rely on calculations from the command craft, so edge-computing will factor in as well.)

- They're calling these "attritable," but at $4M a pop plus the cost of the sensors, they aren't exactly disposable. Is the "cost-per-kill" for an adversary’s interceptor missile actually higher than the cost of the drone it's hitting? If not, we haven't solved the cost-curve problem; we've just moved it.