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Top-level
 @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.) 71 comments
@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.  Those quadcopters make quite a bit of noise. I can imagine cheap mini missiles might be able to target them by their sound.   @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 ... @isaackuo @dymaxion @wonka @dr2chase @cstross The problem is incredibly hard. Rested, trained humans aren't good at it. (and in a conflict like Ukraine, with similar troops, uniforms, and equipment, it's even worse.) The capability to do "artificial biting insect" is near-term, if it's not poorly-distributed-present. I expect someone is going to go for what they can build. It's how we got chemical warfare in the Great War; it's at least a chunk of how we got napalm and cluster munitions. @graydon @dymaxion @wonka @dr2chase @cstross I don't really know precisely what you mean by an "artificial biting insect", but Ukraine is already using pretty much the least expensive FPV drones practical. If you want something smaller, it'll be more expensive and have much less range and endurance. @isaackuo @isaackuo Ukraine's adapting commercial hardware, like early Great War aircraft using rotary engines originally designed for motorcycles. A state-equivalent actor starting today and setting out to make an invader's costs unbearable isn't going to start there. There's work going into "looks like a bird", "smallest practical flying robot", and so on. "How small and cheap can something be and have a 5% PK against human targets for a day?" isn't a quadcopter. @graydon @dymaxion @wonka @dr2chase @cstross How do you know it's not a quadcopter? A quadcopter is extremely simple and cheap. The monospinner is even simpler and cheaper, but it's much slower and less maneuverable. There are a lot of cheap RC toy drones, including drones with only two props and motors. But these aren't maneuverable enough to attack a target. The quadcopter seems to be the cheapest option that's also maneuverable enough to be used as a guided weapon. 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. Conversion efficiency into RF is not going to be great, and that's without considering the need for frequency agility and target identification. ECM (these days ESM and ECCM) really _is_ a four letter word. 3:O)> > anything seen gets ground up by artillery from beyond rifle range. It's a pure mass contest. Not only is this true, but I suspect from a purely strategic point of view that "drones", like "aircraft" before them, are essentially just a special case of "artillery". @archangelzeriel @cstross That's the offensive function. The most important function of aircraft AND drones is reconnaissance. Second most important is preventing the other guy from doing reconnaissance. Offensive functions are strictly tertiary. |
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@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.