chrisl
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Posts posted by chrisl
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5 hours ago, Butschi said:
Anyway, for image classification you don't need to be an AI or expert (which is not to say the Russians don't have any). Most high end research in that field is public, often even including code. What you need to do is train the (usually) neural net to identify stuff you are interested in (not cats and dogs). But that is easy to do if you have enough training data.
That's always the hard part. Not just enough training data, but the right training data.
If you're Google and just trying to squeeze another fractional percent out of your ad revenue, you can use half the internet to train and the other half as a test set. And you only need a tiny improvement in performance to make it worth the effort to get mediocre results.
If you're Tesla it's trickier. You can put cameras on cars driven by people with excellent driving records and then correlate the video to the drivers' actions and hope you got it right. Sometimes they seem to drive into firetrucks, though. (Dude, where's my LIDAR?)
QuoteOf course it is not only detection and classification but also tracking... but that, too, is really available on the Internet.
Once trained you can either strip the net down to something manageable by less potent hardware or possibly design a dedicated FPGA or similar.
At the low SNR, barely resolved limit, the tracking is easier than the detection - once you identify all the things, figuring out who is who from frame to frame isn't terrible if you've got a high enough frame rate. But at low SNR the noise and the signal look very similar in any frame, so you have to watch things (noise) move around, and then throw out things that only exist for a few frames in a row because they're noise. (or maybe they're drones popping up above the weeds to take a shot and then disappearing)
All of that isn't so bad to do if you're looking for large targets, like vehicles, and trying to separate them from bald monkeys and buildings. Maybe even separating trucks from tanks from IFVs. It's a lot harder if you're Russia and don't have an internal semiconductor industry base. I wouldn't be all that surprised if they had well developed algorithms derived from open source, maybe even partially trained on video data, but not enough hardware to go past a few prototype units. But they'll have a terrible time doing it for drones - there are multiple pieces of silicon that you need to put in a row that are practically free in the west but will depend on some unreliable machinations in Russia.
QuoteAnd let's keep in mind that this task is simpler than autonomous driving if you don't mind having a higher misidentification rate and don't care about collateral damage, or even friendly fire as long as sufficiently many of your (cheap?) drones hit something you want them to hit. All of which is probably true for the Russians and less so for Ukraine.
As you said yourself, steering the drone towards that target is the simple part.
Now the level of autonomy is the other variable here. Of course having a drone where you just press the start button and it plans a sensible search pattern, without relying on GPS, using terrain to its advantage etc. is complicated. Steering the drone manually or programming a path to an area of interest and then switching on "hunt mode" with some pre-programmed search algorithm (like a robot vacuum cleaner does) is rather simple.
Which reminds me that I saw a spoof prototype of The Captain's wandering mines over on the site formerly known as twitter, but didn't notice it here or have time to link it before it disappeared in the ether. Someone did a little photo sequence pointing out that the Russian AT mines look like they fit neatly atop a Roomba, with the obvious extrapolation.
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56 minutes ago, dan/california said:
ChrisSL is starting to rival the Captain in terms of useful information. And that is NOT a statement I make lightly.
In a very narrow domain. Low SNR tracking of large numbers of objects at the resolution limit of my optical system using (deliberately) underpowered computers has been a headache of mine for the past decade. This is for targets entirely unrelated to anything of defense interest, but it's defense-adjacent, and there aren't good general solutions floating around out there.
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2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
Good discussion (apart from the duck sentiment).
I read this stuff pretty much every day and I just don't see anybody with a good idea how to reconfigure air defenses to handle hundreds or thousand of simultaneous targets EVEN IF they can be detected consistently. And of course nobody wants to mention ground hugging drones that can use terrain masking in ways no previous aircraft could ever even conceive of.
This is a big concern for this war because Russia is able to operate sufficient drones to cause Ukraine a lot of problems, both in the rear and at the front. And because nobody has a good solution for drones, including the ones that are dependent upon GPS and 2 way coms, it's going to get worse as drone numbers continue to increase.
ISW even reported some are saying Russia is now actively using fully autonomous drones with autonomous targeting.
If it's anything like Soviet Dog Mines this should be fun to watch
Steve
I'd think the Russians training waterfowl strapped with mines (two birds with one mine?) would probably be more effective than anything "autonomous" that they can field today with their current resources. Automatic? Sure, that's Shahed. Automatic with a basic IR sensor for picking out warm targets? Probably, but not widely available. Truly autonomous and using some kind of AI to pick targets? Bring in the trained ducks.
Air defense against the Diamond Age swarm isn't going to be any single system - it's going to have to be many layers dispersed over a large volume, and insensitive to any particular node or 20 being knocked out. Basically attack of the killer bees on both sides.
Ground hugging drones is a nice approach for anything that can be a lightweight payload. Lots of background to make them hard to pick out, but without the mobility issues of a UGV. Arguably a dumptruck full of ground hugging drones will be more effective than most UGV concepts.
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9 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
You and Kimbosbread need to listen to a couple minutes of this if you haven't already. It's Perun at his finest (I cued it to the relevant spot):
Steve
Yeah, I'm very aware of that, and I suppose that's a cue for getting a little into why we don't have anti-drone drones.
There are two parts to the anti-drone drone: detection and attack. The detection is the hard part. Destruction is easy - we already have no end of systems that can very accurately destroy anything that you give them coordinates of. We can accurately fire projectiles, exploding projectiles, exploding projectiles full of razor sharp hoops, high energy beams of photons, rings with chains on them, rings with strings on them, giant wads of gooey stuff, or anything you want to take out a drone. But you have to detect it.
For an anti-drone drone, there are sort of two categories of drone you're targeting: open loop (no comm back to the sender) and closed loop (some comm back to the sender, whether full two-way control, occasional updates, or whatever).
Detection of the first type (no comm), which includes Shaheds, is tricky - unlike the F-35, these *start* with the radar cross section of a goose* and then you can make that even smaller. These things are all small on visual and radar cross sections because you can paint them and they don't have a lot of metal. You're going to track them with frustrating "visual" algorithms, where "visual" can mean different things in the optical vs. radar wavelengths, but you're still trying to pick out changes in the scene to decide where the thing is. I'm not going to spend much time on it, other than to say that unless you have really high signal to noise and high resolution (both of which the target is trying to reduce), it's a lot harder than you think, and in general you're not going to get there with simple image differencing. And this problem exists for commless drones whether you're using another drone, a gun, or a death ray to take them down. Shaheds at least have a very characteristic sound that you can probably use for detection and targeting once they're within audible range.
Detection of the second type (active comm) is easy. It's transmitting, and transmitting enough to get clear signal back to its operator, who is farther away than you are if it's attacking you. Triangulation is old technology. Piece of cake: you lock onto the frequency, have some kind of sensor so you know your own orientation relative to the sensor, and just maneuver in a way to make the signal from the drone stronger until you hit it and destroy it with whatever mechanism you prefer. Or have a few sensors that are networked to give you the position (helloooo MLAT) and shoot it with your favorite method of action-at-a-distance.
Except for one problem: whose drone did you just destroy?
In the Ukraine environment, IFF is the hard part of doing radio based anti-drone systems. There are tons of things flying around, as evidenced by the daily releases of yet another view of every bit of ground combat we ever see. It's not quite Diamond Age concentrations of them, but they're working on it. And they're all sorts of random drones, including commercial drones, custom drones made with commercial off the shelf parts, custom drones with a mix of commercial and special mil parts, totally custom mil drones, and who knows what else. And they're all using similar frequencies, because the combination of physics and the atmosphere force you to the same frequencies if you want a particular range and data rate at powers that you can reasonably supply to both the ground operator and drone with batteries. If you don't sort out the IFF thing and you set an autonomous anti-radiation based anti-drone system loose, it's just as likely to attack its allied drones as the enemy drones, because it has no way to tell them apart. That means you have to have your complete drone ecosystem integrated (ring that cash register over at Lockheed/Northrop Grumman/Raytheon!!) or you're just going to be attacking your own stuff.
And part of why we aren't seeing even rudimentary versions of it in Ukraine is that it's not a function that people were already spending much effort on for commercial/hobbyist drones. You can't just pop over to Robotshop.com or Alibaba and order tunable RF sensor kits (or a few thousand of them) the way you can other types of sensor, or actuators for operating your 3D printed grenade dropper. It's possible to get relatively inexpensive software-defined radio modules that are small (that's what feeds ADSBExchange so you can see who's flying around Ukraine), but the environment is so variable, along with the need to confirm what drone you're attacking, that at least for now you're going to need a human in the loop, even if you can semi-automate your remote control drone sensor. And even with a human in the loop, nobody is painting national flags on their drones, so unless you know "this is one that our side makes" after you get up close to it (assuming you're doing that, rather than sending a death ray at it from 5 km), you really don't know who you're shooting down. So the basic tech isn't all that hard, but because it's not just point and shoot or point and drop, it's a lot more dependent on integration of the whole system to be usable.
*geese, like all waterfowl, are incredibly mean and probably deserve to die. That's why there's a book entitled "Ducks and how to make them pay". If we can do an autonomous system for drones, it should probably be immediately applied to geese and ducks.
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1 hour ago, kluge said:
In theory, this should be pretty easy as image classification is well known and widely studied.
Acquiring the data is a different story. Free data sources like FIRMS don't provide enough resolution to identify individual positions in any meaningful way. Commercial data sources have enough spatial resolution to identify vehicles, but generally don't have the temporal resolution to continually scan locations and doing so every hour is sure to rack up an eye popping bill. Government satellites definitely have the resolution, but that information is classified and its unclear if the US offers a direct data pipeline to Ukraine.
US/NATO almost certainly aren't giving a direct data pipeline, but Ukraine probably wouldn't be able to process it as well or as quickly as they're likely getting pre-processed from US/NATO. The US has had electro-optical/digital (non-film based) satellites since the mid 1970s and has a lot of infrastructure built up for the processing/evaluation/distribution that would take a long time and a lot of trial and error for Ukraine to replicate.
Commercial sources actually have very rapid revisit times these days - that's the big selling point for Planet Labs - moderate (0.5 to 3 m) resolution at very high revisit rates. If you look at the whole Maxar fleet, they can revisit anyplace every few hours, and it looks like you can probably get commercial SAR at similar return rates.
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5 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:
I was thinking of it more as an anomaly detection problem. If you could label your data using what Ukraine does (given either SAR or optical, or combined), and train the model on that, would that work on the other side as a rough cut? And then once you have located them, loitering munitions. I guess that’s the missing link: An autonomous drone that can recognize desired targets and look for them in a rough search zone for a few hours.
Yes, it's a "difference detection" problem, but if you're looking for something that's near your limit of resolution it gets harder. And all measurement systems have noise. For most human optical applications you're used to signal levels that are *way* above the noise, but someone trying to hide from a satellite is going to work hard to keep the changes that you see down close to the observer's noise level. That makes life much harder for the automated system and its trainer. And aside from the changes they're looking for, there are lots of other changes going on above threshold because stuff just moves around on earth. That's noise, too, but of a different sort, and part of the developer's goal is to be able to discriminate benign activity from targetable activity when they both show up in the signal.
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44 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:
Also, I’ve wanted to give everybody some insight into one of the big problems of how you train image recognition models: Good quality data!
Not just good quality data. Good quality data that has been accurately labeled, and often in massive volumes and of high diversity. Depending on your system, that can be very difficult to get - I do some optical systems where we're almost guaranteed to have low signal to noise (always working at the limit of our resolution) and are likely to run into things that are outside the training set, and we spend huge amounts of effort on both improving the repeatability of the acquisition (relatively easy), and automating the development of training data, which sometimes involves a lot of bootstrapping. You think watching the scanners at TSA checkpoints is painful? Have I got a job for you...
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46 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:
Given that we have a satellite passes every 90m (for LEO), both optical and SAR and firms, how hard is that to use to identify artillery hides + firing positions? I feel like it would be fairly straightforward to train an image recognition model on this sort of data. Are we not doing this, or is it way harder than I think?
What makes you think that isn't how Bayraktar found a lot of high value stuff early on, or that that's not how we got all the river bridging massacres? You can be sure that anybody who owns satellites and computers is spending a lot of effort on that.
Whether it works for artillery hides will depend on a lot of things - the satellite resolution and wavelengths: optical are generally higher res, but easier to camoflage against; SAR doesn't really care what color you are, but does care about your shape and what you're made of. That's also why artillery units train to be able to hang out behind CB range, or just drive around, and then just like a panda: park, shoot, and leave in 5 to 10 minutes.
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18 hours ago, Lethaface said:
think his point was that changing only the (type of) battery doesn't change the theoretical maximum output of the laser. But I guess somewhere the discussion diverged beyond the, for this thread, practical information.
And my point was that the original estimate missed enough key features about how DE works that it wasn't terribly meaningful, and the discussion of energy source is a distraction.
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2 hours ago, poesel said:
That is where math meets reality.
P = W / t
Double W and you double P - easy. Unfortunately not.
The P on the left side represents a real machine (an engine, a laser, ...). It has a maximum power output which is limited by its construction (the CCs you have in a combustion engine or the heat dissipation in a laser to name some restraints). If you try to go beyond that power, you won't get it in the best case or destroy it in the worst.So P is fixed. What happens when you add to W is this:
t = W / P
t gets bigger. Meaning you can drive or shoot longer.
Where caps help in the laser scenario is, that they can release a lot of energy in a short time. Much more than batteries or a diesel generator. If your laser can take that power - good! But just adding caps won't make the laser more powerful (in the sense of: more output power).
This ends my basic physics' lesson to not further derail this thread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(physics)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EnergyAs already alluded to - high power lasers are typically pulsed. They might be powered by a system that’s in the kW range and hit GW in pulses that are a few ns long. And the short pulses typically are putting all the power in a small area virtually instantly, so you get tremendous local heating and ablation with every pulse - you neglected thermal diffusivity in your bierdeckel calculation. For example, you can power a laser that can engrave rock using a 9V consumer battery.
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1 hour ago, cesmonkey said:
Kinda like a camera flash…
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18 hours ago, Yet said:
If i am asking here: how to destroy a bomber? i can get a swarm of good answers.
If im asking how to destroy a small bomber with rotors we get all -lasers, -spacey, -swarm, -must-kill-everything, -must be 1 solution.
If i am asking how to destroy satellites and awacs? everyone sais 'dont get scifi'. But surveillance drones must at all cost be taken out!
for everything offensive there are multiple specializations on different platforms to destroy or at least deny its mission success.
it seems logical to me that a combination of systems is needed. And on different platforms and locations. think about every step that is needed to take ou det an enemy bomber. detect-identify-chose platform availability-hunt-destroy(or deny).
why would a series of optimised radar systems, jammers, frequency scanners, pigeon-shooters, defence-drones, ERA with wings (would make a nice Ukr meme), hunter drones, bugs-in-a-shell and concealments in a network be out of the question? (and booze the solution;))
Anything that is radiating energy is telling you where to find it. Anything radiating structured energy (active ISR, comms, jammers) is telling you that you want to find it first. You either have to have the biggest, fastest network of active systems to beat a nominal peer, or you want maximum autonomy with very infrequent active radiation that is somewhere else unpredictable every time it radiates a signal. More when I’m not typing on a phone…
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18 hours ago, JonS said:
Glow plug engines can be even smaller than that (very noisy though)
16 grams for a Cox 0.010 engine - a little over half an ounce. The relatively common 0.049 is a couple ounces.
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1 hour ago, dan/california said:
There has to be some combination of lasers, drones that kill drones, and tunable jammers that can literally listen for the drones frequency and then swamp it. If that combination is not technically feasible we are back to my $100,000 ghillie suit, and doing everything VERY slowly. The age of denial and drone on drone combat as the new face of war may be upon us. The new book from the RUSI guy has truly mind bending specs on what can be achieved with military grade sensor hardware, as opposed to Chinese toys. Think being able to ID people at kilometers, and vehicles at tens of kilometers with passive sensors in five different ways, ten times that if the systems go active. Of course a zillion Chinese toys may be better in the end than fewer better platforms. It is going to be on heck of a new arms race.
Edit; Hopefully he will forgive a brief quotation "
“a vibrometer is substantially more sensitive, being able to listen – for example – to a pigeon’s heartbeat at 30 km.”
Excerpt From
The Arms of the Future
Jack Watling
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.Why bother with the $100K ghillie suit with a person inside? Just wrap it around an autonomous robot.
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5 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
Ukraine's Defense Intelligence sums up Russia's mobilization history and current capabilities quite succinctly. Anybody reading the bottom section of ISW's daily reports will be familiar with the details.
The short of it is... Russia is ready to conduct a far more invasive and effective mobilization than the first one they did.
Steve
And arm them with what? T-34s pulled from monuments? Mosin Nagants? Maybe there are a few IS-2s still floating around on a back lot.
I know they’re not quite down to that, but they’ve burned through decades of Soviet and post-Soviet production and are nowhere near being a manufacturing powerhouse to build back up. They don’t have a huge base of non-military manufacturing that they can convert. China is the only real source they have for manufacturing resources, and they’re not being particularly generous. And Russia has been suffering brain drain for three decades.
And who will train the newly mobilized on the higher tech equipment? Maybe it doesn’t matter, because it will all have been destroyed or fallen out of the sky by the time the next wave shows up.
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2 hours ago, Homo_Ferricus said:
Timing of this left bank raid is definitely interesting. I'm thinking the purpose may be to draw Russian reinforcements/redeployments to the Kherson region, which can be clobbered with their shiny new ATACMS cluster missiles as they redeploy along the old familiar paths (which are now in range).
I'm also a little curious as to the mud situation. Ideally, Russia will be struggling to shuffle all those forces to Kherson on trucks in mud. And if mud makes it harder for Russia to bring up supplies and reinforcements to the left bank, so much the better.
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1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:
For sure I would love for this to be more than just a minor incursion. If it is something more significant than that, we'll know in a day or so. There was some information yesterday? that there were landings and ground taken. Certainly the Russians have been expecting something major for some time now and have, as we have seen, been taking preemptive action by smashing the right bank pretty hard a few times.
Going on the assumption that a) this is real and b) it is a significant effort...
If Ukraine secures Pidstepne and Chelburda, then they've basically secured the eastern side of the bridgehead southward for quite a bit because the Oleshky Sands reserve is a pretty good barrier. If they can make it to Velyki Kopani, then they are in really good shape because the area south west of there appears to be really crap for either attacker or defender (looks to be sand). This leaves two narrow strips of settlements; one along the Dnepr (within range of Ukrainian artillery) and along a secondary road to Tavriis'ke to the south west. I'm guessing it will be quite difficult for Russia to defend this area, not to mention counter attack.
But none of this matters unless Ukraine can put at least a couple of brigades over the river AND keep them supplied. I'm absolutely not saying this is impossible (though Ukraine might still pull it off even if it were!), but it is definitely very challenging to say the least.
Steve
If it's real it will be easier to maintain with RU being very short on artillery shells combined with ever increasing UA CB range. If there's no artillery threat, and RU can't put anything in the air that can fly close, UA can put floating bridges across at much lower risk and be able to move a lot more equipment across.
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2 hours ago, The_Capt said:
Ah gotcha. Agreed. I mean it was also Putin’s Birthday but sometimes crap just happens. Hamas does not need Russia and its sharing plans would have been a liability. At most Iran may have communicated something, but even that is a pretty big stretch. As to Russia pulling strings to make Hamas dance? Well, I would have to see some pretty hefty evidence to believe it.
Also the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war and the eve of a historic agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The only similarities with the RU "offensive" are that it's the same week and Iran is providing weapons to both (but I doubt coordinating with either, let alone both).
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3 hours ago, The_Capt said:
Can’t they hit the Kerch Bridge now? Storm Shadow and all that? Regardless, this would not be a bad idea. This is increasing friction. Would likely be temporary but if you timed it right, it could do some solid shaping.
This is still in the space of “annoyance” as opposed to decisive, but it would create pressures. Ukraine is not going to lose the war if it can’t do this nor is Russia going to win it because they can still use Kerch bridge. Longer Range deep strike will create more options - which is a good thing - but they may not be translatable into decisions given some of the constraints and restraints.
Create that friction for supplies, and then keep working on gaining land once the mud starts, despite the mud being just as much (if not worse) a problem for the attacker. Russia having to truck all supplies hundreds of km through mud will be a lot of friction.
But if I were going to do that, I'd wait til there was actually a lot of mud so they have to sort out both long distance trucking and mud at the same time.
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26 minutes ago, Caspase said:
Here is a relatively short article from Nature(!) about (one person's) life in the trenches:
What surprised me is that
a) There was enough free internet access for 'trivial' things such as publishing scientific papers while being in a trench fighting Russians.
b) He is allowed by the Ukrainian Army to go back to the UK (seemingly?) uninjured. I would have assumed that they would rather keep their 'veterans' in the loop while the war is still ongoing.Around the middle of the article it says he’s a British national of Ukrainian origin - that’s probably why he could leave.
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5 hours ago, billbindc said:
If pressed, I would say that any significant effect on Iranian aid to Russia will only come if Hezbollah jumps in with both feet and there's a full bore war in Lebanon. Other than that, the effects are going to be quite limited. I am getting the feeling that there's a not small chance that this changes Israeli attitudes towards the war in Ukraine. When the Gaza incursions are somewhat sorted out, we may see some interesting things.
It's not unheard of for Israel to attack Iranian weapons plants, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if they did so in response to this attack. So there's some chance that it could reduce availability of Iranian weapons and ammunition for Russia. Even without a direct attack, transportation could get harder. So I don't really see any upside for Russia, and some real potential down side. Particularly since Israel's support to Ukraine has been relatively modest so far.
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2 hours ago, dan/california said:
https://defence-blog.com/us-military-receives-laser-air-defense-weapons/
These Stryker mounted lasers need to be Ukraine, needed to be there months ago. If they work it is a huge plus, if they don't, well at least we know. The drone systems they need to engage are not going get any less dangerous next year, or the year after that. The Chinese stealing the plans through new model hacking, or old fashioned spy work, is an infinitely greater risk too any secret technology than deploying them to Ukraine.
It's the kind of thing that we'd never hear about being there, at least not for another decade or so, but could be used for city defense where there would be low risk of capture. Make sure there are a lot of small arms in the neighborhood that can take credit for shooting down all the drones and missiles.
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27 minutes ago, Kinophile said:
What?
EW is electromagnetic warfare using radiation in certain parts of the spectrum, no?
Lasers are light emission after getting specific source materials stimulated with, yes, electromagnetic effects. But the resulting beam is not vulnerable to EM warfare because its a stream of photond, not an field of EM.
Light and radio are the same phenomenon, just different frequencies (or wavelengths, or even worse, wavenumbers if you're a spectroscopist). One of the best optical system designers I know got his start as a radio astronomer and I met him because he was hired to do the fancy things radio people do (with wavelengths of meters) in the optical (wavelengths of half a micrometer). RF is just a bunch photons of a lot lower energy than optical photons. And we can build incredibly sensitive sensors for both, with very different implementations (thanks quantum mechanics!)
Most of the discussion so far has been pretty accurate on the practical differences, which are many. A "mirror" in the RF can be an umbrella lined with hardware cloth that looks like trash in the optical. Lasers still have optics, but you can make the beam very narrow with very small sidebands so it's hard to detect, at least over battlefield ranges. There's still beam spread that depends on your wavelength and optical system - most of the lasers I use are attached to optical fibers so that they emit light in a wide cone at low enough intensity that they're eye safe.
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49 minutes ago, hcrof said:
While there is obviously a benefit for a 3000kph projectile, one that goes around corners does not need to catch a fleeting target. It will just hunt it down. The target can go turret down or try to run but the guided projectile can always catch it.
And a tank moves at 40kph. It is only the last part that goes really fast.
The 45 m/s drone that can go around corners gives defensive systems a lot of time to see it and eliminate it before it can go around those corners. We're only at the very beginning of the drone wars, and Russia seems particularly weak in coming up with defensive systems to deal with them, so slow commercial units are very effective. A somewhat more advanced opponent will be able to deploy a variety of anti drone systems. And you really are going to want weapons with a variety of speeds - as MikeyD notes, there are targets you can't chase down with a 45 m/s drone. And there will be targets that get into cover that that slow drone can't penetrate, or whole targets that the slow drone can't carry enough HE for. There will be times when you want the drones to be the eyes for the high velocity gun.
47 minutes ago, MikeyD said:It was just a few weeks ago we saw a video of a Ukrainian drone trying and failing to catch a Russian attack helicopter. 5-6 months ago there were multiple videos of drones going janky when ECM interfered with their steering ability. So apparently drones aren't quite yet the great warfighting panacea. As to more capable military drones, they can get pretty pricey. The smallest Switchblade drone runs about $600, I think, for basically a flying 40mm grenade. The RQ-170 brought down by Iran in 2011 cost about $6 million. In 2018 Iran shot down a US RQ-4 Global Hawk that cost us a cool $150 million!
You're missing one or two zeros off the switchblade 300 cost, depending on details of how it's configured. But being able to deliver a 40 mm grenate 10 km away without risking yourself is a kind of valuable capability. What's not clear is if it's more effective to make a drone that only leaves the grenade behind, and brings the RC airplane home - in a lot of cases it very likely is, even if you're only getting 3-4 missions out of it before it's destroyed.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
If one side has the Diamond Age swarm and the other doesn't, the swarm side is going to have an advantage no matter whether they're on attack or defense. So far they aren't quite overwhelming the defenders, but we saw the dystopian science fiction video a few pages ago, and that kind of quantity isn't all that far away. The limit on those swarms is going to be battery endurance.