Gregory's ServerYikes. We seem to be going through a revolution in small-unit military affairs the like of which we haven't seen since 1914-18 …
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 @cstross A lot of those videos show stuff that is more like executions than warfare. And unlikely that any Geneva conventions will ever fix this. I even expect the bans on cluster munitions to be rescinded, they are too damn effective.  @BashStKid The weight of kit an infantry soldier can carry in battle is about 30kg. More than that and they can't fight/move. Armor … it shouldn't surprise anyone that a suit of full white plate circa 1600, with weapons, weighed 30kg! The next generation's going to need motorized joints and fast-swap battery packs. @cstross @BashStKid That's the real "War. War never changes." throughout the millennia. You can stick 30 kg of stuff on an infantry soldier. It's only how you use that budget that varies. There is some reason to see the revolution as reaching a climax in 1914-18. The new technology emarging now might be closer to the emerging technologies of the Second Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War. The pace of the emergence is much faster, comparable to the weapon development run by the SOE in WW2. There are two distinct "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare" books and Giles Milton is better for that side. That is likely my bias.  @cstross People get way too excited about drones. From 1860 to 1914, the decisive force is rifle regiments; you see things like the reconquest of Sudan where enemy forces are shot to pieces at ranges above 1000 m. 1915 and subsequent, the continuous front and concentration means anything seen gets ground up by artillery from beyond rifle range. It's a pure mass contest. (and "mechanised warfare" dilutes by making the continuous front move. 1939-1945 is an historical anomaly.) @cstross What we're seeing with drones is the collapse of the loop between "see" and "hit"; the diffusion of fire which increases specific lethality (individual weapons are much closer to just enough); and the beginnings of the ability to do reconnaissance-by-fire in a literal way. ("seek until found", then kill it.) Thing is, this is an asymmetric mass contest; Ukraine has cultural machinery Russia doesn't. If it's analogous to 1915, it doesn't reflect what 1918-equivalent will look like. @cstross Nothing says you can't build or power a mobile jammer that puts out several MW; nothing says you can't build defensive drones, nothing says the sensor quality contest has even happened yet (can the attacker spot the target before the target spots the attacker and responds?), nothing says the trend to precision fire over volume of fire can't produce precise volume of fire. (the move to precision is economic.) @cstross And, crucially, drones do not function as decisive mass; they may never, since drones are slow, as well as cheap. We can see that in Ukraine very clearly; Ukraine struggles to convert their drone advantage into victory. Things are going well so far in the current excursion because they decided to abandon a political convention to exploit the opportunity to maneuver. "Assault troops shooting the shit out of disorganised rear-area troops" has been the ambition of cavalry for centuries. @cstross So, yes, this is obviously an extension of several things (awareness, capacity for fire, contested volume) and it's a challenge to training and doctrine, but the analogy is the WWII European air war; resource intensive, causes a lot of casualties, and not in any way decisive unless or until one side collapses and stops being able to counter. It's not predictive of future patterns because it's not an alteration of classical patterns, and those assert that there's always a counter.  @graydon @cstross Some of the anti-drone solutions evolving in the Ukraine conflict are distinctly low tech, like dangling chains from your tank for the drone to bump into... https://www.rferl.org/a/anti-drone-evolution-ukraine-war-russia/33020303.html @m @cstross Drones are a way to convert manufacturing capacity into dead enemy soldiers (useful) and reconnaissance (vital). It's really unlikely there's an effective passive counter; armour exists to get knowledge about how you fucked up off the battlefield. It isn't ever going to provide a functional counter to reconnaissance. Aka, drones are expendable cavalry. (That IS new; cavalry is traditionally a scarce, expensive, prestige asset.) All the traditional cavalry things apply. Yeah, we don't know where measure/countermeasure is going with drones, yet. The article mentions body armor, but as you note there are other possibilities. Jammers have some inherent limitations - they're completely ineffective against wire guidance, which is already in use, and wire guidance could be enhanced with towed kites and laser comms (the kites provide altitude for direct line of sight at long range). I think hard kill air defense has more potential 1/2 We already have a time tested weapon good at taking out small highly maneuverable flying things - the shotgun. Currently, infantry are equipped with assault rifles, but replacing the assault rifle with a powerful shotgun might make sense. An automated sound/visual drone detection/tracking network could tell the infantry where to aim, and the shotgun does the rest. Ammo is cheap compared to the drones. 2/2 @isaackuo @cstross The thing you're trying to counter is the reconnaissance. (Whether it's on "massing for assault" scale or "is that $POLITICAL_FIGURE?" scale.) For that, you most want to break the comms loop; you next want to destroy the drone beyond its range of resolution. Kinetic solutions against individual drones need more range than a shotgun because the range of resolution is greater than shotgun range. (Hence 30mm smart rounds as the reflexive solution.) Heavy shotguns are a countermeasure against enemy killer drones/bombs, not looker drones. If you want to take out lookers, anti-drone drones seem to be the most promising approach for now. A 30mm smart round could easily be more expensive than the target, and also more expensive than an anti-drone drone.  @dr2chase @cstross @isaackuo You can do image recognition with insect hardware. It's why I don't expect we're going to see a "recognise faces" approach. Think "biting insect"; it's got several sorts of toxin and enough circuitry to go "is it warm?" and "does it have a heartbeat?" and some way to prefer stinging skin to armour. Add in a few simple eusocial rules and some return-for-reload capacity if you can, but even as a one-way munition, the cost per corpse is likely much lower this way. @graydon @dr2chase @isaackuo Yup. Another thing: I think we're going to see the end of standardized uniforms/rank insignia, sooner rather than later. We've already seen the end of officers in braid and distinctive uniforms on the battlefield (snipers) but this is going to be orders of magnitude worse. I don't think we're going to get rid of uniforms. The potential benefits of trying to pretend to be local civilians are not going to be great when you've got a helmet, weapon, heavy backpack full of stuff, night-vision equipment, etc ... Well, it's certainly possible to try and visually break up the "standard" appearance of your helmet or service rifle. But a uniform already looks really different all the time just from the movement of limbs and different angles. Personally, I like to ponder audio sensing (with hidden ground based sensors). Disguising the clinking of your rifle isn't going to be so easy. @isaackuo @cstross @graydon @dr2chase If you're an evil fucker then it depends on whose civilians you're trying to pretend to be: you'd be an irregular and thus not protected by most of the laws of warfare, but your opponent's false positives amongst their own population will be a thing. Plus the helmet's probably about to be a lot less useful and light, stowable weapons are still a thing when you're not on anti-armour duty. Given you're probably recon...  @pettter @dymaxion @cstross @graydon @dr2chase @isaackuo I don't think either party is fully adhering. I also do think there are glaring violation to them by Russia that are orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine's. Then there's also the Genocide Convention that is also clearly being violated by Russia and not by Ukraine. So this is a "Both sides are not equally bad" situation.   @dymaxion As if ruZZia cares much about conventions. They shell and bomb nuclear power plants, kindergardens, schools, hospitals! @wonka Shockingly, there are reasons for many of these laws and reasons why states signed them that don't have anything to do with human rights, too. @dymaxion @wonka @graydon @dr2chase @cstross Yeah, I didn't want to get into the legal and ethical considerations, since there are practical reasons to consider that I felt like diving into. Now, the thing is ... we don't have to just speculate on autonomous munition fratricide machines. We've had them for some time in the forms of mines and homing torpedoes. And these are still relevant as the heavy use in Ukraine shows. Basically, it's about defining a kill box. Mines are, of course 1/2 @dymaxion @wonka @graydon @dr2chase @cstross passively limited to an initially set kill box. Homing torpedoes, in contrast, need navigation capabilities to be able to use a kill box. But the idea is quintessentially the same as a mine field - the torpedo will try to kill anything it finds in the kill box (possibly with additional sensor profile parameters), but it will NOT try to kill something outside the kill box. This system isn't perfect, but it's a starting point. 2/2 @dymaxion @wonka @graydon @dr2chase @cstross Yeah, there's definitely limitations. It's like using artillery laid mines, although these could probably be reused so that alters the logistical calculations. I'm just pointing out that it IS possible to employ fully autonomous killbots, in a manner that is already familiar to military users, even without IFF systems. @dymaxion @wonka @graydon @dr2chase @cstross There's this vision that many are fascinated by, of locust swarms of drones sweeping the enemy off the battlefield. I can understand the appeal to Raytheons and Raytheon wannabes. Selling millions of expensive drones to the US military sounds like a pretty sweet way to rake in megabucks, right? But I'm more puzzled by how much this idea dazzles ordinary folks. Without full autonomy, massive drone swarms are a C3 non-starter. With it ... ehh ... Certainly autonomous tracking in case of communications loss is already a thing. But so is wired communications - an easier brute force solution, even if it obviously comes at the expense of payload and range. Both of these are in _current_ use in the war in Ukraine (not a few years from now - today). The thing is, they make the drones more expensive, and it's a tough balancing act both sides have to deal with - balancing drone expense vs capability. Several megawatt output on a mobile base is pushing things a bit far, I think. OK, there are 35MW transportable (as several loads) gas-turbine units, and Diesels in the 1 - 9MW range, but none of them can be considered "mobile", and the jammer itself will be no lightweight (and require a large and complicated antenna system), making it an excellent target. @Cadbury_Moose @graydon 1MW = 1340 horsepower, well within reach of today's supercar gas engines (c. 250kg). Add a Tesla sized battery and circuitry for recharging it off the gas engine and you've got 1MW sustained, with bursts to much higher power levels, in something that'll fit in the back of an HMMWV. @cstross @Cadbury_Moose @graydon unless the jammers become very sophisticated they will be a short lived resource. High power emissions would be a very bright targeting beacon for a drone/missile to home in on with as simple logic as if control is disrupted move to strongest signal and detonate.  @cstross  @cstross I contemplate Chinese container ships pulling up to the US coasts and simultaneously deploying millions of autonomous drones against military and political targets. Pearl Harbor times 100 and entirely within their industrial capabilities, though the likelihood of nuclear retaliation would be very high. Israel might be in the last phase of acting as a colonial power as well - had Hamas waited another 5-10 years things could be playing out much more to their advantage. (1/2)  @simonbp @cstross something like that, though the implication in the novel was that it was deployed by an individual as I recall - not a $150K weapon requiring a much more expensive launch platform and a satellite infrastructure. That said, Ukraine has done drone strikes targeting command staff, using much cheaper platforms. The real fun comes when Nazis can get these off the shelf at Wal-Mart (or Alibaba).  @cstross Yes. Current body armor works fairly well against current rifles but will not provide much protection against the equivalent of a grenade in the face. The US and China are likely to be the first militaries to transition to fully effective drone use and defense, and for many decades, they're going to have an absolutely outrageous advantage against whoever they fight. @cstross side comment: as Trent has pointed out, drones are particularly effective against Russia, although drones do mean quite a big shift in cheap / high volume firepower. Also: the US mil/ind complex struggles with drones because they disrupt BAU “big iron” spending - hence the //extreme reticence to support UKR// and thereby evidence a changed requirement for defence spending. @grievousangel The mil/ind opposition is prone to shift: consider if you will the contrast between the B-21 and other gold-plated bomber programs and the RAPID DRAGON system which turns any old tactical transport plane into a cruise missile carrier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Dragon_(missile_system) There's a tension between keeping the pork barrel full of prime cuts and getting the job done by bulk buying at wholesale prices. I foresee the resurgence of shotguns as military weapons, you're going to get specialised anti-drone specialists in every infantry squad. Also, I think this thread severely overestimates fuel-air explosives, you don't need Space Marine armour to protect soldiers against FAE barotrauma, you need to protect a soldier's respiratory system, the rest is pretty resilient. @Leszek_Karlik @cstross Standard shotguns have the range of 50-150 metres, depending on type of ammo, and that doesn't sound like enough. I'm not sure how far you can extend the range before the weapon stops being portable.  @cstross |
@cstross Just recently learned that people fighting on the Ukraine side are going all in for additional side protection for their torso since artillery and drones combined are by far the main threat vs getting shot. (Thermobaric didn't come up yet, though.)
And that there's a lot of infantry-on-drone friendly fire since insufficiently communicated drone movement does not allow for the luxury of asking first.
Plus a *lot* of frequency jamming, making FPV final approach guesswork.