chrisl
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Posts posted by chrisl
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4 hours ago, Harmon Rabb said:
Bizarre does not begin describing this. Those kids do not look very excited. I just hope they are not forced to die for this nonsense when they are older, by someone else in the Kremlin.
The kind of thing you'd see in a US made eastern European road-trip comedy of the 80s.
Parody is dead.
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1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:
Anyhoo, my point is you don't need precision munitions if you have precision ISR and the ability to effectively leverage it.
Steve
Precision munitions aren't even that useful without precision ISR. Without the ISR you might get nice bombardment patterns, but no guarantee you're hitting anything useful. With the precision ISR you can much more effectively use less precise artillery (and other stuff) as long as you account for the limits of your equipment.
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1 hour ago, JonS said:
Needs a better aspect ratio. And maybe some blockchain...
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38 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Heading in Hobarts Funnies here. How do you keep these guys in a straight line? First strike and they are pretty much done so you would need to follow up with more in a breaching lane. And then there is the terrain problem. The divots from artillery and just plain old rocks will knock these off course. I think you would wind up with lanes all over the place that follow on troops would have to try and follow. This would likely see them slaloming through the minefield, which is bad.
My personal favorite would be UGVs with GPR that have a bunch of small little spider buggers with shaped charges to find and then lay down over top the mines. Detonate all in sequence and then you have a safe lane...right up until the enemies little spider bastards crawl back into the safe lane or they just drop more FASCAM n the safe lane.
Best way to avoid minefields is to kill an opponent before they can lay them to be honest.
I was imagining a whole bunch of them slaloming through a minefield blowing up all over the place. Big, cheap, stupid, and would make a good cartoon.
A more clever approach would be ground skimming drones (not necessarily autonomous) that drop little detonators on any mines that they detect. They won't do well on buried mines, but would at least get the scattered ones.
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5 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
First problem is power. Mine breaching rollers weigh a lot and need a powerful prime mover to push them cross country. Second is likely survivability. If an MBT is taking punches, how long is a truck with a water barrel going to last? Third is exploit. Tank has nice big ol gun which can provide cover to bridgehead force. Truck with barrel has an AM radio, which troops can dance too but doesn’t do much in the way of hurling explosives at counter-attacking forces.
There are other solutions but they are not designed for this war:
Example. That is for AP mines and maybe IEDs. It might be able to take a single AT mine strike which is no good for a high density minefield. Biggest problem is all the money and energy went into IED and route clearing. Our conventional mine breaching has not changed much in 30 years (kinda like engineering in CM).
Reading that inspired me to think of an alternative.
Giant rolling drum full of water with rockets on the ends oriented to make it spin on its own and roll a path through the minefield. Dump a bunch of them off the back of a dumptruck, like depth charges from a rack, and let them roll a bunch of paths.
It could also be powered from an internal motor, but it wouldn't be as dramatic and would cost more.
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56 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:
...It'll buff right out
Needs a bit of Bondo first.
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The Abrams would have each needed to come towing a train of MICLICs to deal with the minefields. Otherwise it would have just been a bunch of detracked Abrams getting towed back alongside the Bradleys.
The small, low flying helicopters noted a few posts back might arguably be more effective than tanks for a mechanized attack. They sort of approximate landspeeders in being able to move rapidly over any terrain without being close enough to the ground to set of magnetic or pressure sensitive AT mines.
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5 hours ago, Letter from Prague said:
I am not so sure.
While we might see more wars like Ukraine son, so far it really looks like the next decisive "world war" will be between "West and Allies" and China - and while that one would have ground component for sure, I think the decisive parts would be questions like "can China effectively hit continental US and EU", "can the Allies effectively blockade China into submissions or will it have built enough energy and food capacity to avoid that", "can the allies replace ships faster than China can replace missile factories", and so on.
Now I am not military strategy mastermind like rest of the people here, and I'm sure lot of the lessons from Ukraine can be useful, but unless someone can make FPV drones go thousand kilometers, I'm not sure everything is directly applicable.
Like the various US/NATO high altitude drones with ~12+ hour dwell times and long range that can be controlled from Florida while they fly anywhere in the world? And are armed with guided missiles? They're not quite disposable-cheap at current prices, but many (if not most) of the tech needed to enable them has come down in cost since they were developed and could be a lot cheaper if produced in large quantities. You'd probably want to have the driver a little closer to the theater, and maybe have a high altitude relay instead of space relay for latency, but it's very doable.
QuoteEDIT: while I'm happy to see another Russian ship promoted into submarine, I was wondering why the Ukrainians bother with hitting them, since the grain corridor seems to be going well, the threat of the missiles seems to be enough to keep Russians at bay. Wouldn't it be better to
I suppose maybe some of the ammo is just allotted to navy and they hit ships, or they want to have at least some good news.
But also I guess they are hitting Crimea while they still can - if they will be pushed to negotiate away the claim to Crimea soon, they will probably be forbidden to hit it with Western weaponry like mainland Russia.
Eliminate most of the Russian vessels from the Black Sea and there's not a lot of point to them holding Crimea, other than national pride.
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4 hours ago, kimbosbread said:
What is preventing the breakthrough? ISR, small drones, artillery, minefields and infantry manning fortifications. If it was possible to step 3 of these things, in order of hardest to easiest, I think a breakthrough would have a chance:
- FPV drone operators
- Artillery
- Trucks
- Locomotives (and trains in general)
I submit that a single autonomous loitering munition platform is the near-term solution for all of these, and that it could be designed, tested and built at scale in a year’s time:
- Gas-powered, so that it can loiter for 12+ hours
- Thermal + optical plus some zoom
- Substantial onboard processing power (equivalent to a modern smartphone)
- Autonomous, so it goes to a designated area and hunts in that space, or along a route
- Similar or smaller size to Lancet
- Similar or lower cost wrt to Lancet
Except for the “Autonomous” bullet point, one of these capabilities are anything special. Everything exists. And for the “autonomous” part, I think most of it is pretty simple image recognition tasks that could be run on an Nvidia Jetson or similar. Now that my big work project is done, I’ll see if I can toss together a poc and put it on github as demonstration for train hunting over the next few weekends.
To hit FPV drone operators you probably need something that triangulates on an RF signal, but applies geo-constraints - the source would need to be in a geofenced area so you don't hit your own operators and would have to be within some distance of the surface of the earth so you aren't chasing the drone. If you have a stationary reference, you might also require that the target be stationary or slow moving so you don't chase a drone that's skimming the grass.
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3 minutes ago, sburke said:
For folks freakin out about the expenditure from the west, it might be good to have perspective,
In Afghanistan the US alone spent some 2 TRILLION dollars. The gov't sitting in Kabul right now is the umm err Taliban. As of July we had spent about 76 billion in Ukraine..... For the return on investment, it is hard to say the West hasn't got a financial windfall in kneecapping the Russian military.
And much of those $76B are dollars that were spent in previous years to build equipment that was sent and won't be directly replaced by new production of the same or similar equipment. That's some value that's being carried on the books for that equipment, and most of it won't be replaced by new orders. Most of it will likely be replaced on a schedule similar to when it would have been replaced by new designs/technologies anyway. The artillery shells and recent model rockets of various sources are the things most likely to be replaced by new spending.
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2 hours ago, kimbosbread said:
A good amateur cyclist can do 300W sustained per hour. A properly doped up Grand Tour winning cyclist does 500W sustained. A sprinter is doing about 2000W, but over 10-20 seconds only.
Tesla batteries (Panasonic laptop batteries last I checked) are 250WH per kg.
If you can give a soldier for the cost of say 5kg in batteries an extra 50W for 24h, that’s actually a lot of power.
EDIT: This obviously implies 100% efficiency, but even at 50% this is not an insignificant benefit.And if you've ever given someone a little push to get over a hill while using a power meter, or been pushed, a few tens of watts can make a huge difference in your fatigue and recovery by keeping you from having to go over AT and recover repeatedly.
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2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
Automation is yet another thing that needs to be broken down into sub components.
Navigational autonomy has existed since WW2 in some sense (I'm thinking of the V-1) but certainly since the early 1980s (Tomahawk). This allows the weapon to navigate to a designated target without reliance upon Humans or disruptable navigation aids (GPS).
Targeting autonomy comes in two forms; smart and dumb. Dumb is just something that is flung with no guidance, smart involves some sort of sensors that guide the munition to a target. Cluster munitions, for example, started out being dumb but have gained capabilities to be guided by light and/or heat.
When you think of it, we've already had these technologies in use. A 1990s era Tomahawk could be armed with 1990s era "smart" munitions normally packed into cluster bombs. It would be a fully autonomous "smart" weapon in that it could get to a specific point on the map and target objects with a particular signature.
We've moved away from this sort of stuff lately because adding a Human back into the loop provides a LOT of benefits. And it would have been incorporated into V-1s and Tomahawks back in the day if the technology had been available.
Now that "Human in the loop" and satellite guidance are being countered it's sensible to look at improving the "smarts" to the extent that a drone can get to and find its own targets so as to strike them precisely using advanced sensors and AI in combination. This is what gives people, smart people at least, cause for concern.
One thing that could help bridge the gap until we have AI we can "trust" is to revisit the older types of autonomous systems, add better sensors, and call it good enough for now. Think a drone with LIDAR and a range of targeting sensors that can reasonably identify whatever it is tasked with destroying. It wouldn't be able to go after Humans unless authorized before launch, but there are circumstances that would be perfectly fine. For example launching the drone against an enemy training base or a frontline position.
Just thinking that full autonomy doesn't necessarily have to be the super scary stuff that we have every right to be super scared about.
Steve
Those older systems are really automation, rather than autonomy. The systems are given explicit instructions on route and destination and they follow them based on their navigational sensors (dead reckoning for the older ones, GPS and maybe terrain relative nav and star trackers for some more recent ones). They're not making decisions about anything other than where to turn, and those are based on either something really simple (clock time and airspeed or groundspeed) or something slightly more complex like error signal relative to external nav information (stars, GPS, terrain maps). They might have an IR sensor that turns on at the end so that they get into the general neighborhood of something big and hot, then target the first hot thing (like a tank or a ship) that they see. They're not really making independent decisions. These systems don't need trust - they're point and shoot, where the pointing is a little fancier than LOS.
Autonomy is more mission oriented and you give a thing some general goals and it makes some sort of decisions based on a merit function: "I see a TOS and a T-72, I'll blow up the TOS", or "I see a bunch of vehicles, and based on some fuzzy training I have, I'm going to take out that one that looks like a command vehicle". These systems need trust (or a human in the loop) because you're just sending them out on their own and don't want them to decide to specifically target civilians or friendlies out of all the stuff they see. And what you describe is one of the first levels of autonomy that we use even for non-deadly things - let the robot sift through enormous amounts of data that may not be familiar and present what's likely the most interesting thing to the human operator for evaluation. It typically also will send other samples (at regular intervals, or random, or from particular clusters) as a secondary check that it's doing the right thing and not missing things.
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12 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
I was thinking more of that SMArt strike we saw yesterday. But the point still stands. One cannot "fix" on threat without becoming highly vulnerable to another. It is a confluence of Illumination, Precision and Persistence - all at a much cheaper cost than anything that can be fielded to break that confluence.
Yeah, but those are old tech. The new version will be artillery launched like that, but be able to loiter until a target is visible in case it has the ability to pop out, shoot, hide faster than you can get shells there. Like in old Bugs Bunny cartoons.
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3 hours ago, The_Capt said:
It isn’t the bullets. Drones are cheaper than the things firing all them bullets to sweep the sky clean. And firing all said bullets at the Face of God is going to leave an ISR signature that will ensure retribution. Same goes for lasers or EM.
It is classic military dilemma. If I stay quiet my opponent will hunt and kill me with UAS. If I blaze away at them, my opponents artillery launched UAS will
targethunt and kill me.Fixed that for you.
In the limit of perfect ISR and "if I can see it it's dead" combined with autonomy, you start to only need a maximum of one munition per opposing "unit" where "unit" is one vehicle or person. The way it gets hard is where each of the units is a difficult to detect autonomous UGV/UAV itself.
I think in Star Trek the society that could do that just gave up and rolled dice and sent people into literal meat grinders.
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4 hours ago, acrashb said:
Weight appears to be more of an issue than power. Ground pressure goes up and soldiers sink into soft terrain; stairs built to code are designed for (in the US) 510 lbs, which assuming that the soldier weighs 225 leaves less than one would like for exoskeleton, power source, full-coverage armour, weapons, ammunition, and a 3-day pack.
There could be breakthroughs in armour weight.
How about an angry, murderous sumo wrestler? Nuclear EFPs could be built today, and will be when someone thinks it is necessary, although more likely in the space domain than ground, sea or air.
"a 1 kiloton yield warhead could propel more than 21.7 tons of metal at the target at 9 km/s."
https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/05/nuclear-efp-and-heat.html
We talk a lot about near-real-time ISR from satellites. In the next peer-to-peer war, space will be a warfighting domain. Which will likely cause a Kessler syndrome, and we'll go back to communicating with tin cans and string.
That results in denying yourself space-based ISR, too. Anti-satellite without making a big mess is possible, and for most satellites (i.e. those not designed to avoid a predatory satellite) probably not really much more difficult than doing it the messy way. Possibly easier, because you can do it with higher certainty.
The problem with the pre-war Russian attempt is that they wanted deniability with respect to taking out US/NATO allied satellites and so they had to make a big mess out of one of their own so they could say "oh, noes! we didn't mean to make that big mess that took out all your fancy electro-optical systems. We were just trying to remove our sad, useless satellite from the sky so it wouldn't bother anybody else, but Igor grabbed the wrong jar, and now here we are..."
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5 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
Agent Smith from the Matrix would be even better, but the Borg could work as well.
Steve
Borg vs Matrix, like the old monster movies.
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9 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
Regardless of if it's for mobility or protection or both, it's a truly distributed system. One of the keys to surviving on tomorrow's battlefield is having redundancy at the lowest level. Going the Nazi German route of "if it isn't big and heavy enough, then build it bigger and heavier" concept is as dumb as it is expensive.
Steve
So basically the Borg.
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6 minutes ago, poesel said:
I don't think that IFF for drones is a problem. A quick search gives this:
https://www.unmannedsystemstechnology.com/expo/iff-transponders/
https://insideunmannedsystems.com/identify-friend-or-foe-iff-capability-for-small-tactical-attritable-defense-uavs/There is a market and solutions. These examples seem to be a bit too big for small drones, but there is no reason why smaller IFF devices can't be made.
Drone to drone combat is nearly hand-to-hand combat. Transmitters for shorter ranges need less power and are smaller.It's certainly a doable thing - it's by no means a magic technology, and probably doable with public/private keys without even having to add another transceiver. The catch is that you have to implement it across all your drones, and the dronespace seems to be too diverse and moving too fast for it to get integrated without being in the way in Ukraine.
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23 minutes ago, Butschi said:
You are mixing up a few things here. Camera and LIDAR are about detecting and tracking objects, localisation (e.g. finding my position in relation to known landmarks) and finding out how many lanes there are on a road and on which you are (in case you don't have an HD map). The task of driving itself is (usually) not learned via camera or lidar directly but using trajectories which involve odometry (which can include above sensors, though).
And about building up a model of what's around them and what not to run into. There will always be things outside the training space that the system has to realize it needs to avoid. And I was really just taking a potshot at Tesla's difficulty in detecting stationary emergency vehicles using its camera-only system.
QuoteNitpicking aside, loads of training data are important but you can, and really have to, use synthetic data, i.e. simulation, too. This is because your autonomous system will experience situation that excellent human driver hasn't shown you and it won't know how to get out of such a state. And you get there just by small compounding errors from localisation, odometry, etc.
The more relevant part for our discussion: You don't need bazillion tons of real life training data. If you have good simulation, the variation you get from that can offset the inaccuracies. What's more important, though: Again, we are really not talking about autonomous driving. Missing a truck in 1% of the cases kills people and ruins your company. So 99% accuracy isn't enough. But if my drone gets the tank in 50% of the cases and otherwise misses it hits something else I'm fine with that. And you can get there with way less than half the Internet for training data.
Sort of. Driving is also a much more defined and controlled environment than a battlefield (fully acknowledging that the driving environment is absolutely packed with unpredictable, uncontrolled things). At least you have a model of roads, standards for lanes and markings, standard signage and traffic controls, rules that you can expect other objects to mostly follow, etc. So anything that's a deviation from that model has to be deal with, but things that comply with the model you can "ignore", or at least treat as normal operating conditions. In the battlefield environment, the whole environment can be changing rapidly, and generating meaningful simulation data may be almost as hard as getting real training data. If you're training to hit big, expensive, slow to change things like tanks and trucks, you can train based on "find things like this and ignore other things". If you're training to find and hit things that only fill a pixel or two and don't stand out from the background (a drone at distance), it's trickier.
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2 hours ago, The_Capt said:
IDF and Hamas are not symmetrical conventional warfare, which is good news for hybrid warfare and insurgents. Urban hybrid warfare is still unknown with respect to impacts….I guess we will see. If the IDF had 1 million next gen UAS capable of autonomous targeting, backed up by some nightmare Boston Dynamics thing out of Black Mirror I suspect it would be a lot easier to take Gaza.
Having swarms and the C4ISR backbone behind them is not necessarily decisive…however, it is undecidable. UAS currently cannot take and hold ground. They have limited range but that is changing. As such they are purpose built for denial. We are seeing massive mutual denial in Ukraine right now and in 10 years this war will look like WW1 era AirPower with respect to technologies such as UAS and PGM…way too much at stake to not chase those.
What we have not see is the full potential of swarms on offence. Here they will likely be part of an arms team - lighter infantry and deep fires seem to be the most likely suspects. Corrosive warfare is a theory, and it has limits. Manoeuvre warfare is nearly impossible if one’s opponent has working swarms you cannot counter and a C4ISR backbone behind it. We have seen more than enough examples of why this is. One could go for good ol Attrition warfare, seems to be Russias game. But these new systems are just so damned cheap. Short of Total War and crippling an opposing nations entire industry, it looks like one can swat UAS all day and never run out of targets. PGM are also getting cheaper, as is data.
So we basically have a Big Undeciding in warfare. Air Superiority, Maritime Superiority - both metrics of Control vs Denial. Ground warfare was supposed to be the Domain of Decision, but it has become undecidable…until one can break an opponents C4ISR/PGM/Unmanned system while sustaining your own.
An Undecision is a powerful thing.
So you want to start a new US/Canadian defense company?
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2 hours ago, Tux said:
First of all this was really interesting and clearly-written. Thank you.
Secondly, while solving the IFF issue will clearly confer an advantage, I’m not sure it’s necessary for early-generation drone fleets. Instead I imagine a world where a fleet of Anti-Drone Drones (ADDs) is released to ‘purge’ the sky over a battlefield at a set time on a set date, designed to catch as many enemy drones in action as possible. Orders to ground all friendly drones will ensure that the vast majority of ‘kills’ are of enemy drones. All the ADDs need to be able to do is to tell ‘an ADD’ (so one specific image) from ‘not an ADD’ (nADDs?).
This could obviously lead to all sorts of efforts to spoof the enemy into deploying their observation/FPV drones en mass so that you get a solid opportunity to “hit them in the nADDs” and hopefully achieve a short period of drone superiority for your own forces.In that world IFF lends a significant advantage, enabling you to go for full drone supremacy over the battlefield, but it’s not absolutely necessary.
The Dalek approach to a defined area crossed my mind while I was writing, but I didn't address it. As you point out, it has some rather spectacular failure/spoof modes.
If you don't solve the IFF problem, could end up with the "baby spider" situation, where they all just eat each other until there are one or two left, without regard for whose side they're on.
(btw - I've seen *actual Daleks* patrolling the new Economy Parking garage at LAX. You have to be really careful getting to the shuttle)
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1 minute ago, Hapless said:
Apparently:
His replacement is apparently going to be Teplinksy. Didn't Teplinsky end up as the Russian's 2iC in Ukraine or something?
If so, looks like they're starting to worry about the Kherson front.To be found dead in a fall from a window in 3.....2.....
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10 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:
Why not gasoline? Those micro-turbines and whatnot gives way better endurance. I’ll grant that batteries have other advantages however.
Sure. Some of those gas motors are even kind of cute.
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17 minutes ago, dan/california said:
It really seems to me that at least 75% of the work needed for a competent drone swarm was done to build this thing. You just have to have each submunition delivered by a quadcopter. Also, the should start making a new version of this for both HIMARS and ATACAMS/PRISM.
Later versions even have a laser rangefinder in the submunitions.
Enough pieces already exist to do lots of these things we're talking about, at least as far as the swarm of loitering platforms goes. For most of them it probably just comes down to someone in DOD getting the motivation to throw some money at doing it and making it a big enough pile of cash that the MIC frees up the right engineers to do it.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
You either need very accurate pointing (i.e. sensing) so you can hit it in a single burst, or you have to haul around an enormous mass of ammunition. And you need very fast bullets if the thing is zig-zagging unless you're at very close range.
Anti-drone-drones are among the best solutions, but they need a bunch of work so that you aren't killing your own drones with the drone-killier-drones.
(drone drone drone, he droned on...)