At first glance it looks as if the remote carriers are only the “junior partners” of the new generation fighter. However, it could turn out that, together with the Combat Cloud, they will be among the elements of the Future Combat Air System that will provide greater innovation and greater impact in the long term.
As is well known, the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) is intended to combine all existing and future elements of the air forces of France, Germany and Spain into a "system of systems" that is also capable of working with the entirety of its own armed forces (according to today's reading, this includes the... “Domains” of land, air, sea, space and cyber) and the armed forces of allied nations to work together “seamlessly” to a degree previously unattainable. One of the future elements is at the center of the conceptual development of the FCAS and was originally synonymous with the entire system: a fighter aircraft of the next (then probably the sixth) generation, now referred to as a New-Generation Fighter (NGF). In order to expand its range of capabilities, the new-generation fighter itself should possibly be able to be used unmanned, but in any case it should be supported by unmanned aircraft, so-called remote carriers (RC). The combination of New Generation Fighter and Remote Carrier is called Next Generation Weapon System (NGWS).
The element of the FCAS, which is intended to ensure the cooperation of all assets and forces involved in an operation on the basis of a common, dynamic situation picture, is the so-called Combat Cloud. The impact of the cloud extends to all necessary information acquisition, processing and transmission processes. This includes both internal processes such as the interaction of new-generation fighters and remote carriers as well as cooperation with external elements from other domains, which is why Airbus Defense and Space (Lead, Main Partner for the Combat Cloud) has moved to this Use the name Multi-Domain Combat Cloud (MDCC).
The amount of data generated across the cloud's entire sphere of influence will be so large that the goal of getting the right information to the right user at the right time and generating a comprehensive, cross-domain situation report tailored to the respective management level cannot be achieved using conventional means can be. There are therefore great hopes for the use of artificial intelligence (AI), which, among other things, uses novel algorithms optimized for machine learning and automated cooperation to bring the identification, processing, distribution and presentation of the data relevant to an operation to the required level.
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