The_Capt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-has-human-brain-evolved/#:~:text=With some evolutionary irony%2C the,important driver of this trend. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2023.1191274/full#:~:text=Von Bonin (1934) wrote%2C,smaller than Pleistocene hominin crania. I do not think one can divorce psychological, physical and social evolution. Again, I think our firmware has been relatively static but our software had changed dramatically. Physically we have undergone dramatic shifts in caloric intake and exposure to diseases - one of the major evolutions over the last 10k years is a resistance to malaria. As to why they have been shrinking...there does not seem to be widely accepted agreement. Then there is the sticky issue of epigenetic impacts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_trauma Regardless, the underlying point is still valid - we have never tried a political power sharing system at the scope and scale of the US, as imperfect as its democracy is. At no time in history has this many people from a single collective construct ever tried this before. There is no guarantees that it will work any more than communism in the Soviet Union. Now this could be a factor of social evolution, but if you are indeed correct in that we really are not physically or psychologically evolving fast enough, then a social evolution on this scale may simply be doomed. In fact one could say that large scale human civilization is in itself a large scale experiment of only around 7000 short years. It may also be doomed, we just do not know it yet. Or conversely, perhaps humans need a burst of artificial evolution (eg AI) to allow these larger social constructs to work.

And on this one, the data really does not support: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-the-state-of-global-democracy-2022/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/how-many-people-live-in-a-political-democracy-today/ Now taking a big picture we are definitely in an era of experimentation: https://ourworldindata.org/democracy But those lines are looking downward.

This part really makes no sense to me. How can physiological and social evolution be disconnected from psychological evolution? We know we have seen significant physical evolution over the last 10k years - eg our brains are smaller. We also have seen dramatic social evolution with the creation of complex societies to sustain much larger populations than we were ever designed for. We have seen macro-social evolutions such as the introduction of monotheistic religions and ideologies on a global scale. And we have seen micro-social evolutions in areas such as male-female pairings. And yet we somehow have had our psychologies existing in glorious isolation from all this change? I have always found this "frozen psychology" argument weak. I can accept that we are living with our "firmware" from 50k year ago but our software is evolving constantly. It is what makes us such an adaptable species. https://hbr.org/1998/07/how-hardwired-is-human-behavior Regardless, your point on "our systems changing to better suite our brains" is inconsistent and illogical. If our brains are truly locked into a 6000BC chassis, then any and all systems we develop are beyond that are by default less-optimal. We had the best systems for our brains before the emergence of agrarian civilization...and by your argument, our brains prove it. We have been coping with unnatural social realities ever since.

What I find truly amazing are the inconsistencies people are willing to hold so deeply. For example: "We can't let in all these immigrants! They will destroy our nation!" "Tear the whole system down!" So on one issue we have to preserve the system while on the other we need to tear it down. So the real issue is "who" is tearing it down and power distribution post-teardown. This inconsistency demonstrates what this whole thing is really about and there is little honorable or aspirational about it. When extremist/reductionist narratives spark up they are filled with these sorts of inconsistencies and paradoxes.

"Tearing it down" will introduce massive collective uncertainty into the last global superpower and roughly 330 million primates...many armed to the teeth. It does not take a "smart and truly good person" to see how that will likely go. The American Experiment is, at its roots, a massive social test. A test to see if our species has evolved to the point where a power sharing scheme like democracy can survive at scale. I would say the jury is still out.

It is potentially worse than that. This sort of dysfunction does nothing but feed anti-democracy sentiment. Democracies die due to abandonment, history demonstrates this quite well. If the system is seen as "unworkable" democracies often choose suicide. This is the threat to the US and global stability. Trump and Greene are symptoms of something far deeper and dangerous....apathy that leads to despair.

Ok, I am still not entirely clear on your theory of change here to be honest. We can focus on C-UAS but then why would we not also focus on UAS themselves for offensive operations as well? Superiority means “freedom of own action while denying same to enemy”. We want to stop their autonomous systems cold and allow ours to maul them with impunity. This gives me deterministic options for both deterrence and compellance. Otherwise I am stopping their UAS cold and then still have to risk human lives to finish them off which is not going to be politically acceptable. Now if I can demonstrate autonomous unmanned superiority from the outset the war doesn’t even need to start (I.e. deterrence)…no? But superiority has to be for both offence and defence. And offence is going to involve those nasty ones. Fear is the arbiter of these things and our fear of losing lives will likely drive us toward more fully autonomous solutions as opposed to regulating them. We will likely try to manage these systems under existing LOAC frameworks and create collateral damage calculus to mitigate. Outliers and rogue actors will of course let the damn things off the leash and do all sorts of bad. I honestly do not see a total weapons ban standing (the existing one or a new one) based on the wind direction. Super C-UAS will spin off more super UAS that can go in and do the killing at a distance. The quest will be to the badest complete system on the battlefield.

I think the major flaw here is that somehow we can “routinely counter” unmanned systems to the point that their utility comes into question and therefore the moral ethical “rightness” can hold sway. Like other disruptive technologies unmanned will go far and wide (already has) and likely remain a competitive space for decades, if not centuries. There is no “whelp that was unpleasant” followed by “now we can go back to the way things were”. It does not apply to military application nor regulation. We cannot unsee or unknow what has already happened. There is no magic wands to make it all go away. Even unmanned counters will remain a highly competitive space where arms races to counter-counters will occur all the time. Hoping that unmanned weapons will somehow disappear is like hoping bullets disappear because we invented body armor. This paradigm shift has been decades in the making. This war has only demonstrated that it has arrived. We will likely try to regulate - hell we try to regulate every new weapons technology, but like air power, cyber and space the punchline is inevitable. So what? Dive into the game and be better and faster than opponents. Blunt the effects and understand what unmanned superiority means. Shape future battlefields now through rapid smart adoption. Not military cultural conservatism or pinning hopes on the “better angels”. We are in a new age of warfare, there is no getting past that. All that remains is how well we can navigate this new reality.

That is one hopeful theory but I think history is not entirely onside. As we see in Ukraine, warfare is not simply political, it is personal. So if/when an opponent’s unmanned bubble collapses they may very well refuse to accept defeat and fight on. They will do so by various means that will cause you casualties. There will be a lot of pressure to reduce those casualties. Autonomous weapons will be one of the best ways to do this. So I do not see a winning side simply switching modes mid-war. In fact attacks on the will to fight are very often pointed directly at populations…we are literally seeing this unfold everyday in both Ukraine and hr Middle East. So fully autonomous as terror weapons against civilian populations is tragically predictable. Further, just because one can collapse an opponent’s unmanned systems bubble does not mean it will stay collapsed without destroying that opponent’s ability to access/produce more systems. That will mean attacks on deep industrial infrastructure and varying degrees of resistance. Trying to managed semi vs full autonomy based on ethical grounds in this sort of environment is a challenge few nations will do and even fewer will do well. And this assumes the war stays a clean standup fight and does not go hybrid. Insurrection, partisan resistance and guerrilla warfare will ensure that fully autonomous stay on the forefront of any modern force. But it will also be very attractive to hybrid resistance for all the same reasons - can’t jam/EW easily, faster and more lethal, range. The advantages are too strong, the effects too deterministic, the stakes too high.

And here we have the downward slope. A cheap and effective C-Unmanned system is most likely other autonomous unmanned systems. Having a person in the loop for every c-drone drone, is just going to slow things down and likely give advantage to an opponent. So my guess we are looking at a fully autonomous forward edge (in 3 dimensions) of fully autonomous systems for peer sides. Those edges will collide and supported by other legacy systems will try and knock each other out. Deep strike plays in here etc. Once a sides bubble collapses...they are dead. Collapse enough bubbles and they lose the war. So we are back to fully autonomous race to the bottom. A lot of friction in warfare is human-based. Remove the human with a good enough AI and lose the friction. The moral high ground will always give way in the face of existential threats...this is why nukes work.

Not sure how comfortable I would be in a row boat of or Cessna around an active CWIS but fair points. I think these problems are definitely going to have problems, some unintended and some very much intended. Some bad actors will gleefully employ them on civilians to terrorize and as part of an overall genocidal campaign. In reality there is no real difference between a cruise missile striking a civilian housing complex and a cruise missile carrying a bunch of assassination drones. The drones will be far more effective and vicious but are basically doing the same job. I am saying that banning fully autonomous drones is a fools errand. Hell, regulating them is going to be pretty damned hard. Why? Because they are potential war-winners right now. Unmanned systems of all types are deterministic of outcomes. As such they become, in an existential war, non-negotiable. Some nations will try and remain on high horses - no doubt Canada will - but this will be as hypocritical as the nuclear equation. Canada has no nuclear weapons and shakes a finger in haughty disapproval of them, but our very survival has rested upon the safety of the US nuclear umbrella…that we are not even paying for. Unmanned will be the same beast in many ways. Some nations will reject them but will be first in line to have them protect any troop contributions to a western coalition. The one thing I do not know is if unmanned stand as a 3rd shift in the nature of war yet. Their impact on the battlefield is pretty much undeniable by this point.

I think it is very safe to say that NATO (and pretty much all western) doctrine is going to need major re-writes after this war.

If one cannot hide a fortified position then wire is probably not doing much for defenders in the first place. Enemy can hammer the position until wire is gone because he can see it from space. We have seen dug in defence in this war and it got severely pounded. Dispersion and mobile defence may be a better way to go. The other reason may be that most infantry killing is happening at distance. We have seen some trench clearing but a lot of the engagements are happening well out with infantry running away. I am sure dismounted infiltration is still happening but if they can see all the wire, all that effort won't do much. Wire can be tossed out but building an effective obstacle with it is labor intensive and takes a lot of time. My guess is that most troops are either not trained to do it, or have decided it is a waste of time.

That is a lot of squeeze for probably not much actual juice. ISR means fake positions are easier to spot as well. Punji sticks and all that crap looks good in the movies but really does little in reality. Wire is heavy, takes time to lay out (all out in front of enemy ISR) and can be blown through pretty quickly...likely from the air now. Based on how easy it is to make, I can only guess that it has had limited utility for both sides in this war and why they are not using it a lot.

Given the ISR environment, not sure having a bunch of wire in front of a position is such a good idea.

So this is why I think artillery is not really going anywhere. Let’s say China (or the US) come up with a snazzy APS system that can stop all strike drones cold. A system like this can still standoff 10kms+ and light up traditional conventional units. No tech exists to create a massive bubble of protection for small UAS out that far and if it did ground warfare itself would be changed forever regardless. So this system plus precision artillery, plus strike drones, plus next-gen ATGMs creates an enormous denial pressure on the future battlefield. The cost to even try to maneuver goes up exponentially. The losses will be very high compared to previous wars for doing the same tactical action. As both artillery and drone ranges get longer we are going to see an entire over-the-horizon battle before real people even get near to each other.

I read the doc and RUSI actually hits some pretty salient points. The mainstream thinking is that unmanned systems as we are talking about here are an addition to conventional warfare. An emerging capability to be added to our extant capability portfolios and expenditures. Unmanned systems are an undeniably part of the future warfare military algorithms and focus should be on how to combine them best within our current approaches to create advantages. I think this does not go far enough. I believe that unmanned autonomous systems will emerge as the core pillar of a future military operational system. We will then build the remaining systems, some legacy others also new, around these new unmanned capabilities. We will fund and equip the unmanned forces first, along with C4ISR and PGM strike. We will then need to figure out from the money left what to resources with respect to heavier conventional manned systems. This takes the entire approach to force development and generation and flips it. More plainly, tanks will survive if they can demonstrate that they can shape, support and/or exploit the main unmanned battle…not the other way around as RUSI and others suggest. This era we are in reminds me of the introduction of machine guns. Militaries of the day immediately brigaded them like cannons and relegated them to a support-to-infantry role. The reality is that within a few short years the role of infantry was to protect the machine guns while they exerted firepower effect, and then the infantry would exploit that effect by taking and holding ground…so they could move up the machine guns.

So just spitballing: A platoon of M1A2 Sep V3 come in around $100M to just buy the platforms. To this add logistical costs (fuels, parts and repair tail). Force generation costs - training areas and exercises. Force projection costs (strat to op lift reqrs). Pers costs - 16 crew, plus logistics, plus admin overhead. And weird intangibles like route and bridge repair in training areas. This all scales up very quickly. A fully autonomous UAS swarm Bn may need a staff of 16 and a logistics tail but is not going to weigh roughly 300 tons that has to be transported and fueled. Even at 1 million a pop, a hundred fully upgunned and militarized fully autonomous drones are starting to look pretty damned competitive against current “beyond-Night One” systems.

Uneconomical compared to what?

The issue with fully autonomous is that it offers superiority for a deterministic system. That driver will pretty much ensure any attempts at regulation/proliferation are going to fall apart. Now if autonomous systems achieve the level of a WMD with a MAD component, perhaps. But the best counter to stop fully autonomous weapon systems...are other fully autonomous weapon systems. We already have this in maritime warfare with missiles and point defence systems. The CWIS is entirely autonomous once someone flips the switch. They can target and engage on their own. Why? Because a machine can react far faster than a manned gun. I don't think it is a question of Warhawk shrugging, it is the recognition that the odds of regulation that 1) we can agree upon and 2) sticks, is simply very unlikely. Nuclear proliferation is a bad example because the morale imperative is not why the major powers did it. They did so they could exclusively remain the major powers. The other examples really are somewhat historical anomalies that we are also likely to walk back from as wars become more existential in nature. Probably the best example is bio or chemical weapons, but we also know that neither of these really stuck either. Trying to outlaw weapons is like trying to outlaw warfare. We believe we can because we think that war is solely a political extremity and we can use political legality to control a political mechanism. The reality is that the nature of warfare we currently subscribe to is the 2nd generation. The 1st generation was "war is an extension of survival by violent means." That is the older darker nature of warfare that Clausewitz all tried to forget...right up to the point it throws itself in our faces. In reality, we live in a third generation nature of warfare - "viable violence to achieve political ends." The introduction of nuclear weapons put us all in a box whereby we can only really wage warfare in a constrained manner. Go too far and one faces mutual annihilation. The problem is when 3rd generation collides with the first one. So I fully believe in and adhere to the Law of Armed Conflict. I think we should definitely aspire to be better than we really are. But I know an existential capability when I see it. And fully autonomous weapon systems are definitely on that list.

After this war....definitely a race to the bottom. Ukraine had a $6B defence budget in 2021 - Russia had a $60B+ budget. Ukraine's ability to stop Russia, push them back and now hold again is in no small part to employment of unmanned systems. No government on earth is going to "just say no" on that level of disruption based on humanitarian or ethical reasons unless they are so secure that they can somehow take the high ground...looking at places like Iceland. What a lot of people in the AP mine and Cluster munitions camps did not understand is just how secondary or even tertiary these systems are to modern militaries. Or maybe they did and were good with pushing the needle where they could. Regardless, precision unmanned systems are by definition not indiscriminate. Will they be abused, most definitely. But the opportunity/risks to the very legal and moral frameworks that would try to outlaw these systems is simply too high. Fully autonomous systems are not a force multiplier, they are a deterministic weapon. And as such, we are definitely headed towards them.

Now who is waving magic wands. EW is definitely not infinite nor a perfect counter. Pumping buckets of energy in all directions on the battlefield is the best way to get targeted and blowed up. We have also seen plenty of HIMARSed EW platforms that prove this. Also there are other ways for machines to communicate and synchronize than standard comms. Image recognition algorithms, point to point low energy lasers and sound, to name a few. The reality is that right now half the planet wants unmanned-power to be able to do what Russia is currently failing at - achieve superiority. While the other half wants them to do what Ukraine is doing - create enough denial friction to stop a major power. This means there will be enormous money thrown at this entire sector. And UGVs are just peeking out from the bushes.

I believe the term being employed was “checkmate”….

No but the second one can…that would be precision. Accuracy is how close to true target one was. https://www.ssusa.org/content/accuracy-vs-precision-sharpen-your-shooting-skills/ The question is not one of “magic drone wand” it is “how large is the impact on warfare?” When this thing started I was impressed by the fact we could see Russian columns from kms away via UAS. That alone plugged into a decent C4ISR complex would be enough to go “wow”. It would be enough to make anyone in the business take notice. A small cheap tac whir-whir just gave cheap multi-spectral ISR that can see out kms down to the Company/Platoon level. Those feeds can all be linked to unit/formation creating an incredibly fast and hi res targeting complex. If that was all UAS did we would still be looking at major “so what’s?” As battlefield near-total illumination became reality. And then some teenager went “Hey sir, what would happen if we tied a grenade onto one of those things?” We watched simple drop targeting evolve as operators got better and better at this, but we’re still largely regulated to killing already abandoned vehicles. Their biggest contribution was ISR but one could not argue the potential. Then another teenager went, “Hey they have these first person thingys…what if we strapped an RPG round onto one of those and flew straight at the target?” Now we are watching f#cking drones chase soldiers around trees and bag multi-million dollar tanks by hitting the back deck. And the UA significantly upscaled them to offset artillery shortages…and it appears to have worked, at least for now. So this is not a discussion on whether or not this emerging capability has or has not had en effect; we are really past that point. It really should be about “what the hell is going to happen next?!” We have maritime surface drones taking out ships. Very long range drones hitting airfields, dry docks and oil industry in Russia…and electricity infra in Ukraine. Next up on my list is scope and scale where drones can make offensives happen. I am not even sure what that will look like but if it happens then unmanned systems not only created Defensive Primacy, they broke it…in months. At this pace no one can really say where this thing ends. If we stop right now and don’t see anything new these systems have changed warfare forever. No military can go out without UAS cover…at least for ISR. Western militaries will spend billions on trying to stop drones. China and other will spend billions to make them even more potent. These are game changers already, Now just how much, how far and how deep? All remain to be seen.

Right now FPVs have anywhere from 5-10km range. How much father they can push is a function of energy density and payload. A 5kg warhead is on the heavy end - the tandem warhead maybe. A standard RPG 7 is about half that…and this is overkill as the warhead does not need to carry propellant. Small loitering munitions with 40-100 kms already exist, we have just not seen them at scale because the UA has a limited supply. Once FPVs start using purpose made warheads those loads are going to get lighter, not heavier. Once those tac UAS can reach out to 20km…and some already can…they are overlapping artillery ranges to support forward edge fire planning. They do not need a heavy payload if they can hit with the accuracy we have seen. The fact that Russia is now building turtle-tanks is a clear sign that those FPVs can hit all aspect to effect. Keep in mind the UA is currently using commercial drones they are buying online. None of them have been optimized for military application. After this war so you honestly think that military R&D is not going to go nuts on pushing ranges and payloads to max out military effect? These “cute whir whirs” have killed more T90s than anything else right now. We have watched them stop company sized armor attacks cold. They are hunting artillery and C2 nodes. They are hunting individual infantry. It would be a mistake to put UAS into the “nice hat for combined arms”. They are proving themselves to be a lot more than an “nice additive”. What we do not know is how deep this rabbit hole will go.