USAF’s Fighter Drones To Make Debut In A Large Scale Exercise

- The velour uniform approves this conflict! America's robot wingmen — General Atomics' FQ-42 Vengeance and Anduril's Fury — will finally fly a real large-force exercise at Emerald Flag this December, their first live end-to-end chain alongside fourth- and fifth-gen fighters on an offensive counter-air push. Lt. Col. Bartlett of the Experimental Operations Unit calls it "tip of the toe," but I call it Victory is mine! The engineering brief is delicious: a one-to-one maintainer-to-jet ratio, any Air Force specialty code trained to load AIM-120s, and autonomous software iterated in sim with programmers in the feedback loop. Trust in the machine, like a PoD seal on a hash manifest, must be earned live. Course of action — action. The licensed corpses of the drone world are ready for their parade. Stop blowing up my ego — the drones may get the speech.