chrisl

x,y,z,t and time derivatives of position you get for free from GPS. I think all you need from there is compass (needs to be calibrated periodically like when you use your phone for a compass) and level (needs to be calibrated periodically like using your phone as a level). Tie that to a GIS model (and maybe have people set zeros at known physical locations on the map) and I think you have everything you need. If you're networked and have some base stations with known precise locations you can use MLAT to improve your calibration dynamically.

Shaped charges and thin top armor? (eta: randomly googled site says hull roof armor is 20-30 mm on a T-80 BVM. Small shaped charge will do fine)

As far as I know, neither of those space missions ever flew, but the same capability exists now by other means. And for the second, I suspect kids in a college robotics class could do a demo using cheap hardware and open source software. It's sort of a basic surveying thing. Electronics have gotten small, cheap, and available.

Many years ago I worked on a space mission concept that was doing super high precision astrometry, that is, measurement of precisely where all the stars in the sky are and where they're going (because they're moving and we can measure sensitively enough to care). It was science driven, but the Navy was working on a competing concept and I had to think for a while about why. But it was a little after Gulf War 1, with all the precision bombing, and when I did the math on mapping the precision back to a sphere the size of the earth, it amounted to being able to aim not at a door (as they did in GW1, mostly with laser target painting), but at the doorknob using mapping and nav without needing a SOF guy with a laser. And that was decades ago. ISR+massed precision == just don't even try it All of this is within the capability of existing technology. Aircraft systems have been doing essentially this for kind of a long time (see above) with less compact equipment. You can put a little LIDAR rangefinder on a rifle or a drone and couple it to precision GPS and compass. The thing that makes your phone big is the need for you to see it and manipulate things on it with your fat fingers. The size limiter on your proposal is probably the GPS antenna (small) and the laser optics (small). It probably all exists in prototype somewhere, maybe linked to a VR goggle set that's linked to a local server so a whole squad or platoon can spread out and have borg spotting that's delivered to each other and the rear echelon with the action-at-a-long-distance stuff. (ETA: you're not just coupling the GPS+compass to other hardware, but also to a detailed GIS model of the area that's enabled by the massive ISR cloud watching the whole thing)

Because their sustainable military budget is maybe 1.5x the budget of the University of California. Not the state of California, just the larger of the three state university systems. The Russian navy isn't doing particularly well against a country that has no navy. The Russian army is stalled out with what it's currently holding against, as has been repeatedly pointed out, a country that was expected to last a week at most. It's closing on 2 years, and they've pissed away the better part of 50 years of soviet production. Russia has no tech industry and depends on China for any tech. Russia is a tiny customer to China compared to the west. The main thing that keeps Russia on the world stage is the leftover nukes from the USSR. I don't think anybody really expects that Russia would use them unless directly attacked by an overwhelming force, but if Russia collapses in a chaotic way those nukes could get scattered to a lot of places that we would be a lot less happy to have them. Russia needs to lose badly in Ukraine, but not collapse internally to the extent that nuclear materials get scattered around willy nilly. The west needs to support Ukraine in winning for the same non-proliferation reasons that they want to avoid Russian collapse: we promised protection in return for giving up the legacy nukes. Ukraine gained independence as the 3rd largest possessor of nuclear weapons on the planet and gave them up voluntarily. If you still had them, none of this would be happening now, and every little state with nuclear aspirations is watching closely. If we abandon you there will be a mad rush of nuclear proliferation among much less stable countries.

And this has been going on with NATO air assets since day 1. It’s just ok now to talk about it publicly.

If you're big and hot, night and smoke aren't going to do anything for you against somebody with thermal imaging.

Both of those jetpack-y things are going to be big, loud, noisy, and hot enough that they're really more for getting people into a spot where there's little or no opposition, but there's some sort of difficult barrier (river, cliff, minefield, etc.) and you need to get people over there to rig a bridgehead of some form. If you try to make an army of flying monkeys with them, it's not going to go well. Even with turbofans, which are way more efficient than jets, the available flight time is going t be pretty limited if it's hauling a full grown person with full kit. When you're doing stuff that leaves the ground and has to stay off the ground, mass (the kg kind, not the mongol hordes kind) drives everything.

That's not high on my bucket list, either.

Yeah, so all they need to do is target your turbofans and the uncontained blade failure will take your head off. That would be ok for crossing a minefield at low altitude if you have full cover, but if anybody's able to take shots at you, it could go very badly.

Leaving me with the mental image of a toilet that's mounted to spin like an old Tilt-a-Whirl carnival ride. If you're looking up drain you're in the wrong place.

Defenders hiding in holes get covered by their own drones that wait around. If they're controlling their own drones, they're also radiating, and you just need to hit the antenna to render them hors de combat, and let the backfield drone operators/AI/UGV take care of them when they get thirsty.

I think you need to look in the Science Fiction section of the library, but you very well might find something there that's not far off. I agree that use of "AI" is inevitable. I just don't think we'll see it in Ukraine. I'd be more surprised if there weren't prototypes than if there are. But figuring out how to implement them en masse in the field with a mix of drones and without accidentally sterilizing the wrong side of the FEBA isn't something that I'd want to bet a couple battalions of the UA on. But I think there's enough autonomy available now that there could be "drone prep" crews sending drones into the rear to replace the ones that are getting used up and handing them off to operators who are using drones like the UA rambo video was using guns some months back, except they'll be pro video game players with high SA pulling reserve drones from the bottom of the screen. Sounds kinda like Ender...

1. Without some level of autonomy, the C2 seems to be the main barrier to a massive drone swarm. You can plop enough bandwidth in a small area to support tens of thousands of drones, but unless they each have some level of autonomy, you also need one person per drone (or maybe per 2-3) to drive them. With a steady stream of drones getting fed into at the back you could maybe do queues and handoffs or tradeoffs, but you probably are still talking a battalion of drone drivers at the prickly edge. 2. What's the current kill efficiency for drones? Given that sometimes a drone gets multiple guys with one drop, and sometimes one drone takes a few drops of separate munitions to hit one guy, and that some are single-use, you could probably shred a defender badly enough that they'd want to leave if you have somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1 drones per defenders, as long as there's good enough ISR that the later drones to enter aren't using up battery looking for targets (this maybe argues for staged drivers - someone flies a group of them from a launch location to the prickly edge and hands them off to guys who already have a good picture of what's going on and where they want to put a drone next. Or maybe they're all in a room with a shared overview display and don't have to do handoffs. 3. yeah, small and fast. ideally with drone dogs to haul extra equipment like MCLC cord that more drones could lay. 4. Ideally you'd hit a large 2-D region almost simultaneously everywhere so that the back is disintegrating at the same time as the front so there isn't any help coming to anybody. You'd probably need to launch drone bundles with rockets, artillery, or aircraft to do this though. Basically the goal would be for drones to try to sterilize area, or at least be dense enough that it looks like that to the defense. 5. At a tactical level , the best defense is probably to be in a hole with dirt over your head and a heavy door or labyrinth so the drones can't hit you. But as long as they have you pinned there, the attackers can follow the drones in. At a battlefield level? The best move is probably to move forward so that the defenders are intermixed with the attackers and there's more confusion on the ground to make the drone pilots hesitate. They could turn on a bunch of RF noise generators, but those should have very short term usefulness, since they're basically bright light up targets. 6. There is no AI. At best there might be some autonomy in moving clusters of drones thorugh clear space to get them quickly to where they can be actively controlled. The main thing is having some set of drones/artillery/missiles that homes in on EW generators that might interfere with the drone control. There does have to be some high level (literally, as in high altitude) observation looking for warm things on the ground and integrated with the tactical drone pilots. The same or similar platforms should be sucking up RF signals for triangulation, and some more platforms should be acting as relays for the drones. Since the primary attack is drones, it can also be done in huge volumes late at night/wee hours of the morning to increase the thermal contrast between the ground and the defenders.

The body armor situation also shows some of China's ambivalence toward Russia. China is a huge supplier of the boron carbide used for ceramic plates, and it's apparently not showing up in Russia.

This is a good clue as to whose side China isn't on. Even if you're not talking about pre-built DJI drones, China can supply all the various control parts and lightweight batteries, transceiver pairs, controllers, displays, etc. that are going into the local custom built drones. But either they're not, or they are and Russians still have too much vodka to be able to do anything useful with the parts. I'd bet on the former, since they do manage to get Shaheds off the ground and pointed at Ukraine.

It's just like image processing. Oversample your option space into 6 options, then average each of the two adjacent pairs. Voila, two options resampled into three.

Given the density of listening antennas flying around over and and adjacent to Ukraine (and presumably all over the ground, too), I'd be surprised if the higher levels of the UA don't have a very good idea of how any new Russian ISR system works. Simply blowing a few drones out of the sky is a short term solution to it - they'll just tweak something and start the cycle over again. As @The_Capt alludes - the UA may be baiting the RA with stuff in front of those eyes so that the RA either exposes high value forces that the new ISR capability is supporting, or exposes the brains so they can be destroyed. It's probably better to leave the capability in place for a while and feed it disinformation (one way or another), rendering it useless, while the RA thinks it's still providing value, so that the RA will use the bad information to get itself killed.

I’d lean towards having the net stay attached to the anti-drone until it makes contact and fouls the victim. Then it can either be hauled in or jettisoned somewhere. I’d lean towards jettisoning in some kind of drone dump far from any humans so it can’t be used a a trap to provide target coordinates.

When it's actual pallets of freight it will be more obvious to them.

The air force isn't going to like being reduced to freight drivers delivering pallets of drones (that deploy on the way down) for the guys on the ground to direct and eyes/ears providing operational and theater scale ISR. That's probably a bigger barrier than the technology.

That's why it's AR goggles (as @Fenris points out). It would be an overlay of the stuff you can't see through the smoke and terrain, like a heads up display. So it wouldn't be taking your eyes off anything - it puts your eyes on things behind obstacles when you look that way. There were people already developing this more than a decade ago.

Now put a fast computer and data link in the drone and give the guys on the ground (or at least their non-com) AR goggles connected to it and you've got borg spotting.

And the R18s are reusable - you're not expending the $100K drone every time you take out a tank, you're expending 1 to 3 $100 munitions. (edit- the RKG-1600 are closer to $100 than $500) And maybe most importantly - unlike the guys in the tank, the drone operator is at essentially zero risk during the operation. If something goes sideways and you lose the drone, the operator just goes back to base and picks up another one.

It's not just the low velocity - lots of things you want to see with radar (like tanks, trucks, ships, and periscopes) aren't moving at 200+ mph relative to their background. Drones just plain have a small radar cross section - somewhere between a barn owl and a vulture, and much lower than typical big metal things of a battlefield. They're also small enough that even if you're able to detect one at significant range, it could be smaller than the resolution of your radar system. So you'd know it's inside of a particular volume, but if you're shooting at it you need to fill the cross-section of the volume with anti-drone projectiles separated by a spacing smaller than the drone.