kimbosbread

I’m surprised “Team APS” hasn’t just gone and claimed they’ll install anti-proton shield generators or some other ridiculous thing on every armored vehicle.

Yeah, traffic jams of big vehicles are exponentially worse. Even if the column had some traffic cops with it to help direct things, that’s not going to do much on a small road narrower than the length of a truck, while under attack!

Maybe not with F16s and ATACMs or Storm Shadows, but I think once Ukraine runs out of refineries and radars to blow up with long-range drones, they might go back to these sort of actions. They don’t need to take out every plane, but if they can destroy a few percent every few months, that will have an effect.

Having a correct, or at least good enough model of how the world works is critical. I imagine actuaries, logistics people, operations research mathematicians and code monkeys like me who bang our keyboards and design and build distributed, eventually consistent software systems at scale have a good foundation for this kind of situation where what we observe are secondary and tertiary effects, and we then have to hypothesize what the first order thing is. As an aside, civil engineering models traffic as a series of springs and masses and dampers in introductory traffic engineering… this is probably very applicable to military actions as well in the most basic sense.

If you want to feel worse about procurement, just read about the mess the Constellation class has become. It makes Douglas McGregor seem sane.

To quote my favorite political philosopher: ”…came the realisation that nothing turned, say, a slightly talented musician, into a towering genius faster than the problem of encroaching deafness. And nothing turned a perfectly normal, healthy individual into a great political or military leader better than irreversible brain damage.”

Fortunately private industry (and civic minded investment funds, especially the Saudis) have poured well over 100 billion dollars over the last 2-3 decades to make self-driving cars a reality. Remember who kicked a lot of this off… this technology was something desired by military planners in the US enough that 20 years ago that they even had a big competition!

I feel like that just wouldn’t be that hard to build: A mesh network system that lets the mines work out their relative positions and quantities without needing to be overly chatty. Some sensors to detect “we got breached yo” or sappers. Some compute power on the order of a ****ty smartphone Batteries, maybe a solar panel if this gonna sit out there for a while. Legs or tracks that let it slowly move a few feet. If they need to dig themselves in again, that’s also tough. In wars technology tends to advance more quickly. And in the run up to a war (as with China), there appears on all sides a large appetite to go for unmanned systems.

I think that’s totally fair. FPV drones by their very nature are the most media-friendly weapon ever designed, and there’s certainly massive selection bias due to this. However, the reports you read from the front are that drones are a huge problem, and are forcing troops to walk to the front on both sides because vehicles have a high chance of getting destroyed because of the proliferation and range of the damn things. There is some latency, but that’s honestly least concern because there always some to be another observation drone up in the sky, and that will let you see the vehicles approaching say 15 minutes before, and your drone latency is 5 minutes, and the vehicles will only be able to fire in the last 5 minutes LOS. Obviously that’s hand wavy, but ISR is what allows the drones to efficiently be dispatched, and ISR is the thing (to me) that makes the tank dead when combined with cheap weapons. Yeah, but most FPV drones are COTS with an RPG warhead or a brick of HE. You start putting a Javelin warhead (ie Switchblade 600) and I suspect things look different. That said, plastering a robust vehicle with ERA is certainly a mitigation, and I think passive measures like these are much better bang for the buck than APS. As I’ve almost certainly said in the last few hundred pages, I have two points of disagreement: 120mm gun with LOS Rapidly to position The former I think replaced with a NLOS option, say a breech-loading mortar or mini howizter is more flexible. You still get the direct fire option, but you also signficantly extend your range and use cases, particularly around quickly delivering precision munitions. The latter is the real killer for all future weapons systems: What is the probability of survival while you get to position and deliver whatever effect you are trying to deliver? You have a big noisy hot target you need to get to within LOS of a target, and there is ISR everywhere. EDIT: TLDR persistent ISR combined with cheap, flexible weapons makes tanks obsolete in terms of $$$ for boom

Please elaborate on the correct use, especially the part where the tank can live long enough against $500-5000 drones that can attack from any angle from 10+km range, long before the tank has LOS to its target.

Interestingly enough, that big Radat appears to be pointed to the Middle East, not Europe. Any implications of that? https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1793943806808862877/photo/3

Yeah, we kind of pissed away our chance of increasing supply in bigly fashion. However, destroying Russian refining capabilities means Russia will have to pay out the nose for these products, so same same but different, just a bit late. That said, with the judicious application of long range weapons against refinieries, substations, locomotives and other useful assets that are hard to replace, have long lead times etc., Russia will just cease to operate properly. If it isn’t clear, I think the way to get to Russian collapse is simply prevent them from functioning as a modern industrial state.

But muh guns!

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.