JonS

Presumably this is only true at fairly high latitudes - north of 45°N or south of 45°S?

I mean ... I think that's a joke? But with MT "Empty" Greene (proud veteran of the Bowling Green Massacre) it's really really hard to be sure. That is bat**** enough to have actually leaked out of her ears. Edit: oh FFS. Those really were among the proposals she submitted

The one thing that the US is indisputably great at is logistics. I would say "days".

human autonomous, I suppose, but not machine autonomous. The point, and Tux noted, is that the purpose of autonomy is not to show off how l337 ur hax0rz are, but to preclude the need for comms which can be jammed, spoofed, and targetted.

You mean like a strike package? With some flying CAP, others on EW, some clearing the route in, a couple providing oversight and a comms rebro and BDA, some SEAD, and of course some bearing warheads and payloads? Yeah, of course. That all sounds clever and sensible, especially since it's already proven doctrinal approach to getting aerial effects delivery systems into an AO. It doesn't sound simple or cheap though.

Ok, there's a couple if things to unpack here. Firstly, if they're communicating then they aren't autonomous. Heretofore autonomy has been touted as the nirvana to avoid countermeasures, and therefore assumed as a feature. I'm not going to say the autonomists are right and the communicators are wrong, or vice versa. What I will say - again - is that drones will continue to be full of compromises, will not solve all problems, nor invalidate all existing capabilities. Secondly, "designing" is carrying a bit of weight. My beaver-tailed compadre just recently got a bit pissy about historical precedents because apparently we're only allowed to talk about *this* war, and yet here you are talking about the *next* war, or at least this war next year. More seriously: yes, you probably could improve both accuracy and precision that way (although you seem to be trying to avoid over-killing each targets by avoiding multiple drones attacking the same target, rather than reducing per-drone aiming errors?), but 'we could' is not the same as 'we are.'

Yes, but there is no feedback loop between one autonomous drone and the next, in the way that there is between subsequent rounds from a rifle.

Yes, but it's not like you can back that drone up and try again if the first hit wasn't where you wanted it.

Because I'm not a fan of magic thinking. Look, I have repeatedly said drones are great. But I *also* know they have drawbacks, limitations, and vulnerabilities. Pretending they don't, pretending they can do everything, isn't especially helpful.

It's not four VOG-15s?

Yeah, nah. I'm assuming accuracy as a given (I'm not sure precision is relevant here)

This feels like one of those "pick two" triangles. Range, size, payload. Pick the two you want to optimise carefully, because the other one is going to suck.

Could be useful for the last 10-20 metres, to cope with rapid final jinxing?

@The_Capt take it up with chrisl. I already halved the size of his 22kg drone and you're quibbling with *me*? Also, those cute little whirrwhirrs you keep referring to are *extremely* handy at the tactical edge as mobile mines and for battlefield assassination, but I believe (because physics) they lack the payload, range, and endurance to be much use as part of a fire plan supporting go-forward combined arms maneauvre.

Yeah, weird, right? Now, why would I do that? Oh, right, because Steve seems to think that micro drones are a useful proxy for large drones that can carry a reasonable HE payload. Small things pack small. Micro drones and small arms ammo are examples of this. Heavy things pack heavy. Artillery ammunition is the canonical example of this. Bulky things pack bulky. Load carrying drones are an example of this. Load carrying drones are a lot lighter than artillery ammunition, but they are also bulkier. Ignoring that doesnt make the arguments in favour of drones more compelling.

Ok, well, using that logic I will now simply demonstrate how you can pack a lot of artillery ammunition into a single truck https://images.app.goo.gl/hPN4JLEuvudZ8aTo7 Checkmate, as I believe the kids say.

Defensively; yes it is. Absolutely. Offensively; it seems to be a dead end street

Those arent 10kg drones with 2kg payloads, though, are they?

I take it that the truck in this example is basically the tardis? Ie, despite external appearances it has the internal volume to hold 200 drones plus the crews and equipment required to assemble, target, and launch them, as well as being invulnerable to all types of attack.

PM me your email - I'll send your beaver tail some more recent images to dream about. (Edit: fun fact - TRHPS was written by a kiwi dairy farmer. I'm not sure what that says about the farming community, or the wider country, but I'm going to assume "something disturbing." Very fun movie though )

You do realise we're arguing the same side here? A lot of traditional systems seem broken (or wounded, or at least a bit lame due to a gammy knee) right now; navy, fast air, attack aviation, infantry, armour, engineers, logistics, and yes artillery. That's due to a bunch of things; prolific atgms, prolific pgms, lagging mil industrial capability and production, prolific isr, and yes drones. The way through this dark wood isn't going to be ditching everything and betting the farm on the whirrwhirr. We *know* that artillery is an important part of the combined arms team. We *know* that artillery is crucial to enabling go-forward offensive maneauvre. It isnt working right now, but as always it'll evolve and indirect fires will resume their place in the go-forward team.

WWI? WWII? Korea? Falklands? GWI?

Quite a bit. I havent yet seen a lot of evidence of drones being used offensively as part of go-forward combined arms maneauvre. Instead we see they're being used as mobile mines or battlefield assassination tools. Which is genuinely really problematic, but also kind of a dead end street. Edit: I'm excluding ISR above. That's already generally integrated and supplementing other systems

Drones are part of a system - the whirrwhirr flying thing is just the end point of that system. The system can be attacked anywhere along its chain, and different points in the chain will need different combinations of things to effect an attack. At the moment everyone seems exclusively focussed on knocking down the whirrwhirr. Thats part of it, but so is camouflage, dispersion, armouring up, supply chains, intelligence in its myriad forms, attacking the operators, disrupting comms, deception, etc.

Time. I can be suppressing that tree line 4 minutes from now and start supported arms moving 4 minutes after that, or keep it up for the rest of the day. Achieving either with drones is, ok, lol. This is the same argument as "you don't need to knock out a tank, you just need to knock out the truck that brings it fuel." And it's true; you don't, although it only solves the problem tomorrow rather than right-now-because-omg-the-tank-is-breathing-down-my-neck. But still. It's true. And you know what else the argument works on?