Maciej Zwolinski

Gentlemen, I hate to repeat myself but when the drone discussion comes back again and again I cannot withstand the voices in my had screaming "it is in the book! It is in the book". https://www.everand.com/audiobook/636867143/The-Invincible Hard SF from 1964, so give it some slack - there are some typically anachronistic scenes, e.g.landing a spaceship looks like a cross between landing a Jumbo Jet and docking a ship. But otherwise brilliant. Link to audiobook, because English online bookshops for reasons unknown contains spoilers.

To be fair, it is objectively difficult to distinguish between a Russian airfield and a construction waste dump.

On a unrelated note - some of the footage of FPV drone attacks on tanks show the tank moving, making evasive maneuvers, being hit by one drone, still moving, hit again, and again and finally catching fire. It reminded me of something, but I could not define it. Today I found it: the footage of Prince of Wales and Repulse at Cape Kuantan, 1941. After similar experiences, US battleships were developed largely into the direction of floating AA batteries, with secondary shore bombardment role. Maybe that is the direction where the tank will develop as well - a platform with anti-drone weapons, which potentially can shoot up the enemy with a big cannon if it makes it as far the direct LOS.

An actual example. Ukrainians taught urban combat by the English complained that they were trained in accordance with the most recent experience of the army of His Brittonic Majesty, which is Afghanistan. The drills were very careful and would be perfect for a search of a house suspected of having a cache of weapons hidden among the civilians. In the Ukraine, the preference is to demolish a bulding with HE without clearing it at all. If this is not possible and the building has to be cleared, the first visitor to any room is a frag grenade. If the Brits tried to be tactful the above way, that would certainly make them less effective.

I am not sure if western countries already have legislation preventing that, but this is definitely a scary subject and no Western country will just issue an order for autonomous drones without huge debates. Why? Because you have robots hunting people and people are genuinely afraid of that. That is just how the human mind works - we all have a mental image of what other humans may be thinking and are relatively relaxed around each other. But we are scared around large wild animals because we just do not know what they are "thinking". And we have no mental image of what an AI component of a drone seeker is "thinking". For example, from various persons attempts to use Chat GPT I noticed, that it has no compunctions against lying to answer the question. It will make the answer from the whole cloth from time to time. Some US lawyer got into big trouble because of that when he used Chat GPT to draft a pleading to court. Chat GPT made references to precedent allegedly supporting his position but they were completely made up - judgements never made, which the presiding judge obviously noticed. The unfortunate innovator received disciplinary charges for all his trouble. A colleague of mine was testing Chat GPT on routes to various places. The AI made up place names, street names, the whole lot. Is this something specific to this iteration of AI? Can it be avoided? How would that impact targeting processes? No idea.

Which leads the same problem, just in a lower number of cases. I think the real conundrum is drone swarms, if they develop in the direction of really swarmy swarms. Like a hundred+ units. Nobody will have a 100 operators per single swarm, and they will have to be at least semi-autonomous (wingmen oriented on one human operated drone) from the get-go.

Certainly. Even thieves want to have their "property" protected against other thieves. But that is the point of view of the community which creates the rules in the abstract. Once it comes to submitting to those rules in practice, that is a different story, and practically nobody adopts and "all or nothing" approach. Who never broke the local speed limit when being late for work? Or jaywalked in the middle of the night without a car in sight? It is even more tempting in international law, because it is vague and the penalties for breach of it are mostly puny. The famous ICC temporary ruling in the RSA vs Israel case told Israel not to commit genocide. But Israel considers its actions not a genocide, and goes on with the business as usual. In international law, the ability to spin a good yarn, being strong and wealthy, and having strong and wealthy friends will get a country of the hook always or almost always. And that is how it must remain, unless a global government is created. But that digresses to far from the topic.

It is not that. A more pertinent example: currently one of the most effective drones is called FPV - first person view, like a videogame. It is steered by a man behind a frontline via some kind of communications link. However, that link is a source of liability because if it can be attacked by ECM, and if the link is broken, the drone will crash. On the other hand, already now there are automated visual recognition and tracking devices available commercially which could be installed in a drone, which will steer it to the target without the need for the vulnerable link. AFAIK at the current stage of development of electronic warfare, that link is considered to be the only avenue of attack for ECM and without it, an autonomous drone would become completely impervious to ECM. The problem? No man in the loop, as OBJ posted.

That is an extremely unhelpful take on a real problem. Adherents of any kind of order first have to exist, and second have to enjoy decision autonomy for that order to be applied at all. In other words, they cannot be destroyed or subjugated by others. In other words, they have to be capable to win existential wars. That is obvious. And the history teaches us that adherents of rules which restricted their ability to effectively resist an enemy who fought under a different set of rules usually ditch their rules and look for others. Aztecs after the first battles with the Spaniards stopped trying to take them prisoner to be sacrificed. Plains Indians did not try to count coups on US soldiers. To unrestricted submarine warfare and bombing of cities by Germans the British and Americans reacted with enthusiastic adoption of the same measures and being much better at it. That's just human nature. So this is not really a problem of supporting a rules based order, or not supporting it. No piece of legislation would be a serious element of a decision process in case of existential war, I am absolutely certain of it. The problem is 1) whether the advantages of using autonomous system by the "bad guys" can be overcome without resorting to AI on the "good guys" side, and at what cost; and 2) does adoption of AI systems also on the good guys side create more risks than the disadvantage vs. the enemy. These questions are really worth pondering, although I am not sure if we can add anything on the subject right now. PS. The second sentence is probably the most untrue statement one can make in the entirety of the social sciences. People pick and choose what rules to observe literally all the time. I have been working as a lawyer for 20+ years and have seen people do that (or at least trying to do that) during each of the 8+ hours of every business day. The entire judicial system is created because people do that.

Or close enough so that the fuel air mix seeps in. TOS 1 comes to mind.

Thermobarics were invented for that sort of thing

Definitely. I once asked about a toilet at a petrol station on a Russian highway, IIRC somewhere near Rostov on the Don . The guy behind the counter made a sweeping gesture with his hand and with a great pathos declared: "U nas tualiet...priroda" ("Our toilet is...the nature"). Can't get more gender neutral than that.

Funnily enough, salmonella epidemics used to be a thing during late Communism. IIRC the dynamics were somewhat different - instead of a few concentrated deaths there were many (hundreds?) of people sick in the whole country, because the contaminated eggs got into general trade and were popping up in different places, triggering regional panic waves. Quite disruptive.

That is basically the only option which can result in meaningful territorial gains in this war. A proper Cambrai moment - right now, we are sometime in 1915-1916 wondering if there is going to be a technological solution allowing breakout of the trenches and revival of maneuver. Is it gas? Underground mining? Or those lumbering tractor-like contraptions that the British are fond of?

The issue of advantages and disadvantages of democracies vs autocracies at war is in general a very complex one and admits a lot of subtle arguments. However, in the case at hand the test seems quite simple: autocratic Russia had blundered into a war, where it managed to piss away its entire standing military, and then turned that war into a repetitive peformance of head-on assaults, exchanging high casualties for minute territorial gains of a village here, half a village there. Their theory of victory mostly consists of outlasting Ukrainian artillery ammunition stock. If they succeed because Western countries cannot maintain focus on this war for more than a year or so, and Russians win by default by just being there - then (without unnecessary generalisations) I would say at least this set of democratic countries sucks big time, at war, policy, everything.

Very importantly, they are inaccurate (the Russian expect them to hit anywhere in a city). So whenever S300s are launched, Ukrainian ADA faces targets which are: 1) very fast; 2) on a very difficult approach path; 3) unlikely to do much damage, unless due to random bad luck. My guess is they just do not bother to try to shoot them down, hence the 100% success rate

Those guys can do wonders. I was driving once near Ternopil (IIRC) with a very old and badly kept UAZ and the car started shaking. I stopped and sent off my mates for help. Turned out the easiest thing in the world - literally the nearest building to the road was the local kolkhoz tractor shed, where the local Mykola guy quickly identified the problem (it was the Cardan shaft coming loose),fixed it and fixed our other problem with the gearbox for good measure. incredible work. Besides, at that time Hryvnia stood very low and what we paid for that incredible service looked like nothing in Polish money. I am full of respect to them.

I am sorry, thinking is very slow today, but is this a rhetorical question or the normal kind?

So let’s everybody raise a traditional toast in honour of the Black Sea Fleet- bottoms up!

Amen, and thanks! I was harping on this pet idea of mine but I could have no hope of supporting it with such wonderful calculations, as I have no way with numbers. But I was the voice calling in the wilderness and along came someone who is mightier than I, and I am unfit to untie the thong of his sandals.

In order to clear mines, do they need to explode in unison/ in a beginning-to-end sequence, in the same way that fuse burns from one end to the other, or is it sufficient that the constituent charges are placed in specifed distance from one another so that enough pressure gets directed at all points of the surface being cleared - without regard for the fact that e.g. the charge #1 blows first, then #5, then charges ## 3 and 4, and the charge#2 blows last? In the second case, individual triggering seems less of the problem and the crucial issue seems limited to accurate placement of charges, right? I mean that if we do not need to align charges on the ground perfectly to try and mimic an actual line before we blow it in unison, each drone can just signal its charge to detonate after a delay of X seconds after placement, and even if the delivery vehicles arrive at the target out of synch and start blowing up out of synch, the breach can still be made.

Are you sure this is not some kind of "Ender's Game" situation and by "playing" it you are actually blowing actual katsaps to the great kolkhoz in the sky?

I am sorry if this has been proposed and dismissed already, but would not the entire operation be massively simplified if instead of using air mobility systems to move soldiers above the minefield, one used air mobile systems for creating an explosive breach? I mean an explosive breach is just blowing up explosives placed on the ground. Why not have them placed by drones? If you release say fifty or a hundred drones whose only job will be to touch down for a second, deposit an explosive charge and skedaddle that is going to be massively more difficult to stop than trying to make a breach with a few tank sized vehicles which automatically draw fire from all ATGMs, PGMs and other AT systems in the vicinity. In a sense it would exploit the same principle as tank did during WW I and II- instead of having the attack conducted by infantrymen,who can be killed by all weapons, the tanks were vulnerable only to a small subset of weapons, which in effect could be overwhelmed. Now AT weapons are ubiquituous, but AA not so and could be overwhelmed by a swarm of drones.

Is this a military department a new thing? When we had a compulsory military service under communism and a few years thereafter once you finished your studies, you were conscripted and sent to an oficer candidate school instead of a line unit somewhere in a forest garrison, as happened to the guys without higher education. I thought it was a universal model for post-Warsaw Pact militaries.

I think we are going to see a practical test of this, quite soon.I think that sometime this year public support for Ukraine in countries other than Ukraine will cool down to the point where it will be as good as evaporated. Yet I am moderately optimistic and think that the Ukraine will still be supported by the Western governments - because of the underlying political interests. Public opinion support is not everything and not every war is 100% a moral crusade.