kimbosbread

Yeah, like you’ve been saying so they push and take some territory with big losses, but then what? Unless they can push on a broad front, they won’t be able to sustain their push, and it’s not clear they forces capable of this. This isn’t a pocket they are trying to close. So what’s next? The arrival of F16s now that the air defenses (and radars in particular) in Crimea have been degraded?

Yeah, that’s the real question: “How smart do you need it to be?” Recognizing useful targets, navigating using visual references, cooperating with other drones to attack a group of targets, attacking weak points of targets… that all seems within the whole budget side of things. For example, a model that is accurate for identifying all extant armored vehicles and their weak points (including rolling garden sheds), that’s just not that big of a model. Fits on a phone easy peasy.

Meh they are really different. Disinformation is psychological warefare, where your vector for achieving your aims is making people think differently, and thus acting differently. Cyberwarfare, your vector is computer systems, and using that to deny some capability to the enemy; their banking system, their power grid, distributing photos of dear leader with young boys etc. Neither are really a real-time thing; EW is kind of the real-time version of Cyberwarfare, but I think automated intrusion systems a la William Gibson might be a thing very soon, where your near-future company might have a box with them (perhaps the size of a large cellphone), and maybe strap it to some antennas, or maybe send it up on a drone, and it would attempt to take control of enemy drones or computer systems it can find in the field. Or land in a substation, and jack into whatever can be jacked into?

Yeah, think of the drones as replacing Javelins and mortars, except with the range of artillery. You are basically pushing mini cruise missiles down almost to the squad level. If a lot of squads have these, and coordinate, you can in fact get density of fires. Why prohibitively expensive? A modern phone has all the processing power you need; equivalent to laptop basically. These chips aren’t expensive and are produced at massive scale. Autonomy and machine vision don’t mean general AI, they mean the ability to tell a drone “go over here, and find targets that match X, Y, Z characteristics”. For recon, why does a comm link need to be expensive? If we can do starlink to phone, then we can do starlink to drone. If there’s too much jamming, the designated anti-radiation drone can go find the jammer (or a bigger munition can be dedicated to that). And the jammers don’t seem to have that great range, especially the more portable ones. So you just head up a bit higher, no problem. I don’t see this as a deal breaker at all. Sure, but likely it’ll operate more like a submarine where the command channel is mostly listening. Moreover, it will be along a wide frequency band, and this will force the jammer to be much noiser and more visible.

Which gets me to my next point- is there even a practical way to quickly detect and identify small autonomous drones flying at 0.5-1000m, and at 1-200kmh? The Dune quote is sooooo relevant. What do we even do if the drones learn that the slow approach is completely ignored by AAA? You can’t shoot everything slow moving around you! Or what if the drones approach at 1m height? These things have completely wide open flight evelopes.

I gotta be honest, I’m not convinced by “Jewish Space Lasers”. In principle, I get that you can blind and destroy optics, but in practice, this means you need LOS, and way to detect the drone quickly. Assuming these work, which I don’t think they will due to autonomous, low flying drones, there are all sorts of operational and logistics issues with this kind of systems. To charge the capacitor bank and batteries, you need a generator. That means noise and heat. That makes you a nice big target. Apparently soldiers are not a fan of the testbeds: https://breakingdefense.com/2024/05/army-soldiers-not-impressed-with-strykers-outfitted-with-50-kilowatt-lasers-service-official-says/

Offensive real-time cyberwar is a really interesting concept, but I’m not sure how close that is. You’ll basically need to build a general purpose automated attacker, think HackGPT or something. You won’t have anybody in a trench or AFV who knowns nmap from ssh from vim, so it needs to be completely automated and basically have a natural language interface in which to communicate with its masters in- hey I broke into this drone, what do you want me to do with it?

To expand on this, the computing cost to get to partial autonomy is a non-issue. People simply don’t understand the capabilities that cheap compute unlocks. We already carry around phones that have as much compute power as a laptop from a few years back, and they are cheap. Look at what Intel and NVidia sell- we are talking a few hundred dollars for their embedded/small form factor compute solutions. Quadcopters weren’t even feasible until about 20 years ago due to guess what… compute limitations. Now we are at a point where smaller LLMs can be run on phones. Ignore this fact at your peril. Visible light cameras and simple SDRs are even cheaper. You only start getting expensive when it’s thermal (starting at a few hundred and going to a few thousand for the cheap but good enough cameras) or fancy antennas and associated signal processing, and even then this can be done cheaply and well. For example, look at Starlink terminals. Anybody who tells me Spacex couldn’t build similar hardware for drones for a few hundred dollars, but with the antenna repurposed for other uses is lying to themselves.

What about a small drone with a shaped charge, that can burn through a helmet and thus “blow the mind”? EDIT: I still think less-than-death, or alternatively horribly painful death is better: Eunuch-make drones, or aiming for legs and feet deliberately to cripple.

Combo drone attacks; one can very well imagine how these work against an APS: Attack from two directions at once with two drones each, first drones deploys a cloud of chaff/aluminum powder, second drone punches through.

To be fair, many Germans marched to Moscow and back on foot due to lack of vehicles, and as we know the front within 10km is considered dangerous for vehicles. If there are no minefields and sparse defenders, it’s not a bad choice necessarily. I do wonder how re-supply will work if they push more than a few km on a broad front.

Yeah, the US in particular is incapable of doing anything for a reasonable price, be it infrastructure, weapons, transit etc. I stand by my claim if the US withdraws from this, Europe will give up in short order.

I assume some of it got blown up at the very least; at lot of this sort of aid is highly consumable unfortunately. At least for munitions, we regularly see scenarios where two squads fighting run out of grenades, and I assume that extends to grenade launchers, machine guns, and fancier things as well. Radio shortages are well-known. Sure, there will be your vanilla corruption, but I imagine that’s only a small part of it. EDIT: Oh, and replacements for infrastructure getting blown up etc. too. We haven’t had a war like this in a while in an industrialized country, so we get to see how expensive it is.

It depends on what you think the force composition is. Is the primary killer drone swarms, and then infantry to hold ground, and the vehicles merely exist to ferry infantry around? Maybe at the squad level an MRAP or UGV will have a 50cal coax with a few of these cheap missiles on it, but a little mortar robot won’t have room… you’ll need another robot with the fitty. Yeah this 100%. The radars/EW can be on your CAP drones orbiting at 1500m; your vehicles probably just need short range sensors.

Dude. Go buy a hobby drone. These things have much different flying characteristics than a helicopter. A quadcopter can travel in power under any direction. It can go up and down fast. They can dive, as well as just go straight down because that’s what happens when you have 4 props. And a fixed wing FPV drone like Lancet can in fact dive quite well. Have you not watched any videos?

No, you don’t seem to get it. For point defense, you want a much smaller, lighter and cheaper weapon with plentiful ammo. A giant 30mm turret is not going to provide cheap defense. You can’t mount this turret on any small vehicles, and it’s a big giant target that is hard to hide, and it won’t be able to do anything about the purpose built combat drones that will pop and fire NLOS munitions like Brimstone once their picket drones get downed. Air defense is a series of bubbles, and for 200m-2km, a lightweight fast moving munition makes a lot more sense, and will likely be cost-competitive with 35mm smart shells (not to mention the whole stupid turret). See China Lake’s poverty missile for $5k with a 1lb warhead at 5lb weight, or any FPV drone being used in Ukraine. For longer range, we already have missiles. If Rheinmetall was so confident, they should build a bunch and send them to the front lines, or ship one to the US where we have test ranges that are as big as entire EU countries, and go against a few Ukrainian drone operators. But no, they built a 90s weapon for a 2030s fight.

So yeah, why not just have paper targets and some schnitzel and riesling and be done with it. This is a convincing sales pitch to absolutely nobody. Some duck hunters could do about the same in the same time. And dropping grenades and whatnot from the top. This is a ****ty demo. It’s worse than the homebuilt RC turrets people stuck paintballs and airsoft guns to 10-20 years ago that were computer-vision driven. Those things could at least track fast moving targets.

I want to watch that video with the drones coming in not as a giant bunch. I’d pay money to watch several Ukranian drone operators vs a few of these Rheinmetall units, and I know who I’d bet money on.

Unfortunately, pretty much all future munitions, especially the really cheap ones do in fact perform diving attacks. Actually, they can attack from any direction they choose, at any speed they choose. What if the APS doesn’t handle a target going slower than 20mph? Every single small drone will be programmed to reduce speed on final approach. Based on what we are seeing in Ukraine, you will need APS turned on if you are within 20km of the front line. Otherwise, what’s even the point of having it in the first place?

Yeah if you have to scan actively, it won’t work. An optical/acoustic auto-shotty turret for $150k, that’s at least passive. But if you are constantly emitting, anything with some antennas and software (say an RTL SDR and some antennas for $60) is gonna know where you are immediately. That’s no bueno.

Yeah, we gotta be realistic about what works, and what is delivering kills per total $ (inclusive training, logistics, medical issues due noise, blasts etc) while not being killed. Dismounted infantry is definitely still in. Stick them in powered armor and combine with UGVs, and we have something that pack a lot of boom while being hard to kill en masse, and that can dig in. Consolation for the tanks- mortars are may also be obsoleted in favor of more precise, longer ranged and more flexible weaponry.

I agree with the sentiment that APS is really hard, especially against a variety of threats (fast moving missiles, vs slow drones, or combinations of drones), and that it is likely to be too expensive to be economical. Shotgun phalanx, that might be doable though, but I doubt it would cost less than $100k per unit. You need a little turret, you need something like a belt fed shotgun, you need sensors, you need software to detect the target.

If I were the Russians, I’d do my best to make Kharkiv not worth holding for Ukraine. Completely level it a la Grozny. I don’t know if they have enough KABs or artillery within range to do it, but I guess if they were able to hit power and water and take it offline reliably, that would go some towards achieving the effect.

I could see Western Europe throwing in the towel pretty easily, honestly, in the same of “oh the humanity” and cheap gas. In fact, I’d bet even if Trump was willing to sell weapons, the Germans would fold and push for “peace”. They’d be happy to get more non-African young population for sure. That said, I’m not completely convinced Trump would abandon Ukraine, and I’m also not convinced Trump has that easy a path to winning, since probably 25% of his own party will not vote for him under any circumstance.

Don’t kink shame me.