kimbosbread

Off topic re US border: The democrats are being handed a gift here by their republicans where they can materially change their border stance to something more reasonable (ie anything not wide open is literally facism) long before the election. The Republicans are either too stupid to wait to spring this until say mid-summer, and/or the situation at the border is that bad (it is).

Depends how big the minefield is. If you have multiple fields hundreds over meters deep over several km, your soldiers crossing the breached area will still get hammered with artillery, presumably. The problem is supression enemy fires. If your cleared lane is immediately clogged up because 2x NLOS ATGMs took out a few vehicles, then you are in for a bad day. Vs air-mobile distributed infantry will move faster and have no single point of failure as a force (other than a drone swarm, which a single point of failure, but for everything). EDIT: If you can of course detect and take out the minefield from the air and not get shot down, amazing. But let’s say it’s 500m deep for the first field, and you want 3m wide, that’s a fair amount of explosive for your drones to carry in a small space, that might get hammered with artillery and get drones shot down, which would leave some spots potentially mined, and then you end up stuck in the middle of a minefield again.

Yeah I think we covered that with the badgers EDIT: A robot mole would be cool, but I don’t think it’d have the power to dig through a few km to pop up and then kill things. Maybe to find mines?

Loitering munitions and long range artillery/airstrikes sanitize the area first, jump troops establish positions and continue sanitizing, and force enemy to focus on them and not the breach.

One unsolved user interface problem for the soldiers being lifted/flying is they don’t have a HUD/FPV goggles, and this will be a pain with a helmet/earpro/eyepro/etc. Could slimmed down VR goggles be retrofitted to fit onto a NVG helmet mount? Could a google glass style corner-field-of-view be enough to provide relevant info? If full-on-VR-goggles are too heavy, what about a pass-through-monocole that fits just one eye? It can be much lighter and smaller, and still give all the HUD info. The cool thing about a monocole is it could be used to aim weapons around a corner, etc.

To push supplies and heavier equipment forward. Eventually you’ll need to clear a lane and establish yourself and dig in, so you have to do it when the enemy is temporarily inconvenienced.

Well, maybe… the drone-carrier attack needs to be backed up with a regular breach, presumably. Send 20 drones each carrying 100 loitering munitions, release them for 1-2 hours loiter time, return to base This provides cover for 100 drones carrying 100 soldiers and their equipment, and return to base Now the drones continue to bring loitering munitions, supplies and soldiers forward At the same time, forward soldiers can leapfrop behind enemy positions or to cut off reinforcements (or just throw another 100 loitering munitions in their path) Breach starts Drones continue pushing supplies forward EDIT: This won’t work with small jet engines. They require too much fuel and maintenance. The British torpedo drone is exactly what I was thinking of when we were discussing this yesterday.

It also works for deploying a lot small loitering munitions another 10Km further forward, giving them another 10 minutes of flight time.

On-topic, insofar as future warfare looks to be lifted from cyberpunk novels of the 80s and 90s: NASA has all beat with Dragonfly, which is a nuclear-powered drone planned to land on Titan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(spacecraft)

Disadvantage is fuel consumption, heat, cost/servicing and explodability. If you need to drop your cargo, have a tether. Interestingly enough the guy behind Kiva was researching autorotation for landing large Quadcopters (ie rotating around one rotor), which could be interesting from a saftey perspective.

Neal Stephenson called it a “Chevaline”

Instead of a jetpack, use a heavy lift quad/octocopter. Should cut the cost a lot. Same platform for manned, unmanned where it basically has a payload attachment to carry a supply container, a UGV or an infrantryman. The soldier shouldn’t have the lug the whole thing around; just clips in gets whisked to their destination at very low altitude and then the drone flies back to swap batteries/fuel and pick up the next soldier/UGV/supply. EDIT: Obviously they’ll be autonomous EDIT2: The interesting thing is if you have on-demand organic airlift for small groups of infantry that can move them say 5-10km with full combat load in a few minutes. Is maneuver back?

Yeah for suppression an AGL, and for mobile fires a self propelled mortar UGV. Since the recoil from the mortar pushes down (mostly), it’s much easier for light vehicle to handle.

Small scale autonomous drone swarms (group of 2-5) working hunter-killer groups where drones are 5-10kg with 2-6 hour flight time, going after radars, trucks, trains etc? Absolutely doable by 2025EOY in some volume. But if you are using a hundred a day, you have to be producing 100k per year. China could do this easily; I have less confidence in the US due to the fact we don’t build most of the components here. Larger swarms of smaller drones, where you expend 100 or 1000 drones on one small section of front in an engagement? Science fiction until we have the means to produce enough of them. EDIT: One workaround is of course less expendability, and more payload- an autonomous drone bomber for example. But drones just don’t last that long in the field under hard use.

Drones cannot hold territory, at least in their present form. If there is bad weather, that will ground all small drones. Obviously UGVs with enough power to last a few days and that are essentially autonomous, moving turrets, that complicates things. 1. Drone swarm is expendable. Most drones don’t last long anway, like a few flights. Treat it like a munition. 2. Dug-in infantry, UGVs, mines 3. If the drones are autonomous, it’s gonna be really hard to detect them. I like the idea of loitering interceptor drones you launch to clear the air and that hunt via SDR, small radar and optical, but that seems like you may need a lot more interceptors. Lasers for point defense sound great but are expensive and complex, any sort of active radar is going to get detected and bring unwanted attention, fast. I think counter-battery drones against the launchers. Small fixerd-wing electric drones might only have 1-4 hours loiter time, so if the enemy is not able to put new ones in the air, that’s a problem for them. Or anything they can put up with enough endurance won’t have enough of a warhead to blow up a properly fortified position (logs with dirt on top, for example).

Is the problem the minefields, the dug in defenders, the fortifications, their artillery or their drones? If one of these were removed, would the whole thing collapse? Which one would be the easiest to remove? Flying over removes the minefields + fortifications, but requires a lot of flying infrastructure. 10k heavy lift quadcopters to move 1000 soldiers, many of which will get trashed… that’s a big ask. Drone swarm of autonomous death that kills anything with a few km squared it can find (including landing and waiting for hapless defenders to peek their heads up)… this is technologically feasible, and probably less expensive than many artillery systems + their accompanying logistics and training requirements. But it doesn’t exist yet.

Exactly this. If you have 1km minefields, then some fortifications, and then repeat a few times, any attacking force will get bogged down. And if your higher tempo is slowed down, it is all for nothing. And there we have it. Many km of defenses, even manned sparsely and backed up with less drones + artillery than the attackers slows the attackers down and attrites them enough the attack fails.

Go after either: 1) Scarce resources that have long lead times… Aircraft. Locomotives. Large transformers. Refineries. 2) Things that will shut down cities: Water treatment plants, power plants, bridges, airports.

Interestingly enough, a friend of friend once worked on a system which was a submerged version of this- basically a container of small torpedoes that could be activated remotely, and would then take out a group of ships that sailed nearby. But basically yes. Autonomous mid-range ship-missiles would protect Taiwan completely in the outright war scenario, if built at scale. However, it doesn’t help if China just decides to do a “non-violent” blockade…

You are missing 3) Send a message to Taiwan that we will protect them. Because if we don’t do (3), then (2) becomes much more likely as everybody worth note is rexamining the need for a “strategic weapons program”, as Pax America is dead and done.

Good worries about Russia being butthurt about ATACMs, while Russia mines the whole front, trains prisoners as combat troops, launches missiles at apartment buildings and tortures prisoners.

I have a better idea: Take out the power and everything else in Rostov-on-Don. Make it impossible to get trains in. Take out all the trucks going in. Give Russia’s logistics apparatus the choice of feeding Rostov, or supplying their army.

I mean, this already exists for all consumer drones, presumably (both sounds and characteristic emissions). I like Capt’s idea of passive patches and paint.

Acoustic modems are a totally viable solution: I designed a system like this for IOT a decade and a half ago!

How exactly is IFF supposed to work for autonomous systems that don’t emit signals? I know nothing about sub warfare… how do our subs tell a hostile sub from another? Prop noise? Patrol routes? Hull colour?