Airbus forms a panel of experts for the responsible use of FCAS technologies
Airbus has collaborated with the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics, based in Germany, to create an independent panel of experts in the responsible use of new technologies to define and propose international ethical and legal “guardrails” for the project. largest defense in Europe: FCAS.
The expert panel, which was first created in Germany in 2019, currently includes stakeholders such as the German Ministry of Defense, the German Foreign Ministry, foundations, universities and think tanks.
The FCAS program reflects a complex and extensive networked “System of Systems,” of which a next-generation manned fighter will represent a key element.
Dirk Hoke, CEO of Airbus Defense and Space, explained: “In many ways, FCAS represents a huge step forward. Not only is it Europe’s largest defense program in the coming decades, but it will foster collaboration between our partner countries. “With FCAS we will significantly up our game in terms of new technologies that will be part of this sixth generation System of Systems.”
These manned platforms will be associated with unmanned ones, called “remote carriers”, which will provide additional capabilities to complete the missions at play. Scalable and interoperable system architectures will enable improved existing platforms to be integrated into FCAS.
“This opens up new opportunities in terms of security policy and helps strengthen Europe’s role in the world. But there are also ethical and legal challenges that we must address,” Hoke added.
Harnessing the collaborative capabilities of manned and unmanned platforms will require an “air combat cloud” that fuses massive amounts of data augmented with warfare analytics and artificial intelligence in real time.
Furthermore, the technologies developed within the framework of this project are also expected to have important beneficial effects for future civil applications.
Professor Reimund Neugebauer, President of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, added: “FCAS is the largest and most technologically ambitious European defense program ever created. An essential question that we are trying to address with this panel is how we can ensure that, on the one hand, such a system meets the necessary requirements of the 21st century mission on a global scale and, on the other, ensures full human control of such a system in at all times and in all circumstances.
“For the first time in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, a major defense policy project is accompanied from the beginning by the intellectual struggle for the technical implementation of basic ethical and legal principles: ‘ethical and legal compliance by design'” .
To reflect the European nature of the FCAS programme, it is planned to eventually expand the panel to more participating nations.
The cornerstone of the FCAS is the next generation weapons system in which next generation fighters are partnered with remote aircraft carriers as force multipliers.
Furthermore, manned and unmanned platforms will also bring their uniqueness to collective capabilities and at the same time will be fully interoperable with allied forces in domains from terrestrial to cyber.
The air combat cloud will make it possible to take advantage of the network capabilities of all the grouped platforms.
