ArmouredTopHat

A drone zig zagging is not going to be able to dodge bullets like Neo for very long, it might complicate a kill time, but that is probably where airbursts come in for heavier systems against a swarm. Again, layers of defence spring to mind. Evasion becomes harder the closer you get to target as well. 

A light system using a shotgun type weapon would have less trouble given the spread for the real close in defence that might be fitted to something vehicular...or even around one via portable units. 
 
I am not assuming anything here. I am just pointing out we are largely talking about theoretical and we dont know what the practical result of AI swarm vs AI defence might look like because there is nothing close on that front to existing yet, in military terms anyway. This really is a wild west of possibilities. I am not denying that AI swarms are going to be a future consideration, but I do find it odd that you focus so much on the applications of AI for offense without thinking about the defence. Swarms cut both ways. 

I ask again, what is stopping an AI system from using defensive interceptor drones to nullify an incoming attack, with PD acting as a last resort and cleanup?

I am also pointing out that we are currently seeing increasingly smaller point defence systems that are capable of shooting down drones right now. These systems do in fact exist, right now. The technology is practical, its going to evolve just as much as drone munitions will. 
 

I imagine any defence against this is going to involve layers, medium range airburst munitions from the stuff we see operating in Ukraine against Shaeds being the middle aspect of that combined with interceptor drones replacing traditional missile systems that are just simply not economical against smaller drones. 
 
We already see some pretty small anti drone systems, and even this one shown is something I think can be sized down further and simplified. 

This really does make me wonder if mass drone interception of ISR and loitering munitions will give vehicles a bit more breathing space again.
 
 
Comparing a bulky phalanx CIWS that's optimised for shooting down extremely fast targets like ASMs with a gatling system is not really an apt comparison to anything PD related that's going to come down the line for counter UAS, its just what happens to be on hand for immediate use. Any system designed for small drone and loitering munition destruction is going to be much lighter, if only because whatever it ends up firing does not need to be nearly as heavy or fired at the same rate of fire as something like CIWS, you dont need a heavy and sophisticated radar either, most likely a thermal detection system will be more than sufficient (perhaps combined with an acoustic system) With AI this could be a largely automated process of tracking, acquiring and confirming a drone target in the space of a second or two before destroying it.

This means an extremely fast tracking turret in all likelihood and something that's crucially, likely to be much cheaper too in both system and ammunition used for disposal. (At least compared to missiles or heavier PD) There is also the concept of using APS radars to perform the detection as well that was previously mentioned. The current thought is something in the 20-30mm cannon range with airburst munitions, though I wonder if something that is simple enough to fire shotgun or rifle calibre rounds might be sufficient and a cheaper system that you could mount on the top of most vehicles. It does not have to be pretty, just a sufficiently traversable small turret equipped with a shotgun type weapon. This is not exactly rocket science. 

If AI can be used to coordinate swarms, why cant it be used to coordinate counter measures? Defensive munitions (Ie other drones) being used to intercept a swarm while ensuring PD guns are efficiently used to clean up the rest seems just as plausible as a drone swarm on the offensive.  

Declaring PD to be a dead end just because of current generation PD performance against what is a very new threat is a little odd.

https://www.peoplesproject.com/en/9-types-of-anti-drone-weapons/

https://www.asianmilitaryreview.com/2023/05/naval-rws-more-than-just-uas-swatters/

There is a lot of potentially interesting counter systems in play, time will tell what works and what doesn't. 

A little unfair to imply that was all I was saying, but fair enough. I was getting fed up with the way some people were debating at this point anyway. 
 
In better news, the UK general election finally purged Galloway and his frankly disgusting views regarding Ukraine from sight. 

Why is Russia pouring this massive amount of resources and men into Ukraine?  It seems like its this death spiral that Russia, Ukraine and the West are willing to engage in until the last.  And at this rate its gonna be decades before the war ends and I don't think there is a country on the planet that can sustain these kinds of losses for such a relatively small gain.  Russia even has to go to the tiny backward nation of North Korea to get supplies.  What am I missing here? 
  Do they think the West is just gonna eventually crack and not support Ukraine?  I guess earlier this year it looked like it may happen but I doubt that situation will happen again.?.
  I think that Russia is gonna continue to attack Ukraine until the next US election.  Trump may be, in their minds, their last hope, but Trump isn't gonna give in to Russia. The stakes are just too high.  Maybe I'm thinking of it from a Western mind set and just don't understand the near Eastern thought process.
  You guys have gone over and over this topic in this thread, but I am still astounded by Putin's willingness to throw his country down the tubes.

Since you assume the attackers to be networked, I do the same for the defenders. So the defenders know where their own are. Easier for the vehicles than for the squishies of course. But when I doubt, shoot it. The explosives on the drone will do more damage.
For any numbers of defenders, there is always an 'inside' and an 'outside'. Unless the drone can pop up 'inside', you shoot outwards. There are of course any number of circumstances where this is not true or at least debatable. But in most cases it will.
You know I'm critical about lasers. I just used them wrt the video, because I doubt this PhD would be allowed to use more than a laser pointer in his experiment.
Laser are simply too expensive to use them on a 'PD-for_everyone' solution.
Why? Drones emit a very distinctive sound. They are hot. They may emit radio signals. And last but not least, they are fast moving objects in front of a mostly static background.
Sound will be reduced in the future, as well as the IR signal. Fully autonomous drones will not emit radio, but swarms will need to communicate somehow and that may be detectable. But they will never be invisible.
AI (I say AI and mean ML...) advances in image recognition and pattern detection are simply insane. If you can see it, the AI has seen it 10x and with good optics even better. Optical detection of stuff has been a hard problem in the past and has recently shifted to easy. That will find its way into military sensors.
That is your interpretation of what I wrote, and I think you are wrong.
 
Some ballpark calculations about drone evasion:
Assuming a muzzle velocity of 1000 m/s for the PD, that is 1 s time of flight at 1000 m range. Let's assume the drone can pull 6 g perpendicular to the PD (I haven't found any data about angular velocity of racing drones, so this is just half of the 12 g we had). For 1 s that is 3 m of movement. That sounds survivable for the drone.
At 500 m that is 0,5 s TOF for the bullet and only 0,75 m for the drone.
Half that again to 250 m and 0,25 s and the drone moves just 0,19 m. And that puts it already inside a buckshot circle.
Although the zigzagging of drones looks insane to humans, it is not that fast wrt to bullet speeds.
 

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-****ing-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/
On the topic what AI can and can't do.
 
 

PD is for that last desperate bit of defense if you have a multilayered thing that will statistically remove a huge fraction of the attackers before they get to you.  It's an officer's pistol.  
Artillery/rocket/airborne delivery of drones is a way to get lots of smaller drones farther faster than they could get on their own due to battery energy density limits.

All of this is true, but before we spend tens of billions to equip the ground force with a sytems that claims it can do this the testing needs to be savage. The worst possible place is to spend a bunch of money on drone defenses that don't work, and then develop doctrine that assumes that they do work, and then lose the next war in a day.

Today's Gallioti, he says the British election is unlikely to make much difference. His far more interesting point is that there are only two conditions where Ukraine can truly quit fighting, at least this side of more or less total defeat. Either it smashes Russia out of every inch of Ukraine, and breaks the Russian military in the process, or it gets admitted to NATO with full article five at the peace conference. There really is  no third choice for a good outcome. To clarify he say that NATO membership would allow Ukraine to agree to a settlement where it gives up territory. Nothing else really will. So if we want this war to stop anytime soon...

If you think its entirely down to a consistent effort from numerous defence industries and nations to preserve a status quo that are all in on it despite many being adversaries then at that point I have to wonder if you believe in conspiracy theories. 

Of course you think my arguments were trounced, you are arguing against them! That's not a refuting point at all. You could at the very least respect or concede I am making points at least valid enough to be used by the worlds militaries in this regard.  

I would view the decision from Lithuania to invest into tanks as one example here. The Baltics are pretty up there when it comes to innovation and support for Ukraine, their entire force structure was built around light infantry and surviving until the rest of NATO turns up to help them. They have been pretty big on the drone scene as well. The fact that Lithuania have now decided they need more hitting power despite their limited budgets tells me a lot about how important they view having tanks / armoured platforms. They would not be making such a hefty investment otherwise. 

How about Poland, who has decided that it wants to extensively expand its tank fleet and build towards a Polish version of a K2?

Finland has some pretty extreme terrain, yet continue to wield an armoured force that is pretty large for its size and budget. Are they wrong too?

Have China, Iran or Russia declared tanks to be useless despite their drone programs? Why is China actively seeking to increase its numbers of tanks and vehicles in general?

What about Ukraine? You would think the nation leading this FPV revolution would be happy to consign their tanks to the scrap heap if they are so useless and said FPVS can supposedly do their job. Yet they go to the trouble of making their own tanks, constantly ask for vehicles from NATO and actively repair and refurbish the ones they have. This is hardly supportive of the notion the tank has no purpose on the battlefield. They have more reason than anyone to be extremely careful about how they spend their resources, yet they choose to ensure they have tanks in the field. 

Its been two years of 'the tank is dead', you would expect to at least see some shift at this point. I think people here including you might be undervaluing vehicle based firepower a lot. Is your counter point against this simply that everyone is wrong?

 

Way easier with missile launched systems.  We call that "tuesday" around here.
Think about just about every rocket that's ever left the earth.  Every guided missile since what, the 1960s? Little kids can launch cameras in homemade rockets.  It's not even old technology, it's just a regular day.

Those swarms will be more effective on defense than offense because it will be much easier to lay a defensive drone field than to maintain a bubble around the attack that's resistant to massive amounts of cheap autonomous stuff.
About the best drone defense I can come up with is flying my own enormous drone army dangling bird block.  A ginormous mobile cope cage, but to stop propellers rather than shaped charges.

No, but years ago I visited a production line of a weapon system that was fired out of a 155mm arty barrel.  Designed specifically to take the shock of firing.  It had microcontrollers in it. So the technology exists for that kind of weapon deployment for, at least, decades now.  Just have to design a drone to fit.

Aerovironment has done recon drones that launch from regular mortars.
Drone-40 puts a drone in a standard 40 mm grenade launcher package (not artillery, but accelerated with a bang)

This really does make me wonder if mass drone interception of ISR and loitering munitions will give vehicles a bit more breathing space again.
 
 
Comparing a bulky phalanx CIWS that's optimised for shooting down extremely fast targets like ASMs with a gatling system is not really an apt comparison to anything PD related that's going to come down the line for counter UAS, its just what happens to be on hand for immediate use. Any system designed for small drone and loitering munition destruction is going to be much lighter, if only because whatever it ends up firing does not need to be nearly as heavy or fired at the same rate of fire as something like CIWS, you dont need a heavy and sophisticated radar either, most likely a thermal detection system will be more than sufficient (perhaps combined with an acoustic system) With AI this could be a largely automated process of tracking, acquiring and confirming a drone target in the space of a second or two before destroying it.

This means an extremely fast tracking turret in all likelihood and something that's crucially, likely to be much cheaper too in both system and ammunition used for disposal. (At least compared to missiles or heavier PD) There is also the concept of using APS radars to perform the detection as well that was previously mentioned. The current thought is something in the 20-30mm cannon range with airburst munitions, though I wonder if something that is simple enough to fire shotgun or rifle calibre rounds might be sufficient and a cheaper system that you could mount on the top of most vehicles. It does not have to be pretty, just a sufficiently traversable small turret equipped with a shotgun type weapon. This is not exactly rocket science. 

If AI can be used to coordinate swarms, why cant it be used to coordinate counter measures? Defensive munitions (Ie other drones) being used to intercept a swarm while ensuring PD guns are efficiently used to clean up the rest seems just as plausible as a drone swarm on the offensive.  

Declaring PD to be a dead end just because of current generation PD performance against what is a very new threat is a little odd.

https://www.peoplesproject.com/en/9-types-of-anti-drone-weapons/

https://www.asianmilitaryreview.com/2023/05/naval-rws-more-than-just-uas-swatters/

There is a lot of potentially interesting counter systems in play, time will tell what works and what doesn't. 

This really does make me wonder if mass drone interception of ISR and loitering munitions will give vehicles a bit more breathing space again.
 
 
Comparing a bulky phalanx CIWS that's optimised for shooting down extremely fast targets like ASMs with a gatling system is not really an apt comparison to anything PD related that's going to come down the line for counter UAS, its just what happens to be on hand for immediate use. Any system designed for small drone and loitering munition destruction is going to be much lighter, if only because whatever it ends up firing does not need to be nearly as heavy or fired at the same rate of fire as something like CIWS, you dont need a heavy and sophisticated radar either, most likely a thermal detection system will be more than sufficient (perhaps combined with an acoustic system) With AI this could be a largely automated process of tracking, acquiring and confirming a drone target in the space of a second or two before destroying it.

This means an extremely fast tracking turret in all likelihood and something that's crucially, likely to be much cheaper too in both system and ammunition used for disposal. (At least compared to missiles or heavier PD) There is also the concept of using APS radars to perform the detection as well that was previously mentioned. The current thought is something in the 20-30mm cannon range with airburst munitions, though I wonder if something that is simple enough to fire shotgun or rifle calibre rounds might be sufficient and a cheaper system that you could mount on the top of most vehicles. It does not have to be pretty, just a sufficiently traversable small turret equipped with a shotgun type weapon. This is not exactly rocket science. 

If AI can be used to coordinate swarms, why cant it be used to coordinate counter measures? Defensive munitions (Ie other drones) being used to intercept a swarm while ensuring PD guns are efficiently used to clean up the rest seems just as plausible as a drone swarm on the offensive.  

Declaring PD to be a dead end just because of current generation PD performance against what is a very new threat is a little odd.

https://www.peoplesproject.com/en/9-types-of-anti-drone-weapons/

https://www.asianmilitaryreview.com/2023/05/naval-rws-more-than-just-uas-swatters/

There is a lot of potentially interesting counter systems in play, time will tell what works and what doesn't. 

Interceptors it is!

'up to 12g'... - that is in the axial direction of the 4 props and probably right at the start when the torques of the motor is highest. It does not mean the copter has 12g anytime in any direction.
I'm not saying the copter is not nimble. But building a two-axis gimbals that can follow this bird wrt to angular speed is no problem. Servo motors allow very, very dynamic movements. If your sensors are up to it, a laser pointer on that gimbals in the same room would paint the copter during its whole flight.
Put enough power into the laser or replace it with a gun, and the copter is down.
I've read this here several times, that a ground based gun could be overcome by attacking from two sides. But I think this is not true. You can turn a gun like an M2 (just as an example) by 180° literally in the blink of an eye if you want. It comes down to the factors: speed of the drone, range of the gun and accuracy how many drones you need to overcome one gun.
Let's assume your gun has a range of 1000 m and the drone flies with 50 m/s that is 20 s in the range of the gun (without time spent for evasion). How long does a gun need to take down one drone? I don't know, but I guess it is much less than 20 seconds.
Of course, there is the question of how accurate the sensors are. I don't know this either, but these are problems with known solutions.
Drones have come to stay, but they are not the end of everything else.

I personally think that the tank is potentially replaceable, just that currently there isn't really something that can do so right now, for reasons I have explained earlier. Clearly the majority here think the tank is dead, that is fine and everyone is more than titled to their opinion of such. I dont mind playing devils advocate in that regard.

My counter point would be the points made previously, that and the continued investment into tanks by numerous countries. This all just rings eerily familiar with previous 'tank is dead' arguments and those did not exactly turn out to run their course. Time will tell and the battlefield and its equipment will continue to evolve. 


While its undeniable that FPVs play a major role in loss rates currently, I do find the fact that the majority of hits to vehicles are usually damage and not acute kills quite interesting. These snap shots of data also indicate the majority of FPV strikes are on abandoned vehicles, ie something else has knocked out the vehicle. 

We covered this before but the major undeniable advantage of drone / FPV has been the denial and destruction of armour that would otherwise be recovered. Though it looks like increasingly FPVs are now responsible for the majority of both kills and mission kills. This still could be survivorship bias at work but its clear they are doing some serious heavy lifting now. Bear in mind this is due to a pretty herculean effort on Ukraine's part, their production numbers are truly impressive at this point, though its hard to determine who exactly has more FPVs as both sides go between saying they are outnumbered by drones to outnumbering. I suppose its a factor of concentration. 

I just find it a little premature and odd to single out a particular weapon system and decry its obsolete based on the tactical usage from one country in one conflict (even if it is a pretty damn big one), especially when said conflict is evolving constantly. We are seeing snippets of drone counter UAS already, what happens when a battlespace is filled with drone interceptors that are denying both ISR and FPV strikes? We already know that a lot of FPVs miss for varying reasons, pretty wide range of hit %s based on who you ask. Things could very much change in ways we do not expect. Ukraine certainly seems to be pretty quick when adopting and using their drone arsenal. For all we know this could be a 'happy time' where FPV drones are enjoying an environment that might become much more constrained in the future.  

What is undeniable to me is that Ukraine have a very unique reason to go so hard into FPV drones, they lack the traditional parities in artillery, tanks and vehicles in general and so have levelled the playing field against a force that has pretty heavy advantages in the aforementioned areas. The cautionary note I point out is simply that what works for one country might not work for another when it comes to defence needs. This -could- mean that everyone needs to change radically, as seems to be the prevailing argument here. It could also mean a potentially more hybridised approach as I feel, with overhauls made to current and future vehicles to reflect the new environment and to try and maintain the possibility of mechanised warfare whilst also acknowledging the key role drone munitions now have on the battlefield, which clearly seems to be what NATO at least wants to go for overall. 

To surmise, I am not trying to decry what some people are suggesting here, I find people are making very good points that have certainly made me think things over. I am simply pointing out that everyone has not quite dropped all their vehicle priorities and gone into drones......yet. If countries start dropping tank numbers or tanks entirely then I would be happy to concede that it is indeed 'dead'. Given tanks are actively proliferating right now at least when it comes to NATO, I am not so certain. 
 
 

Some good news at least

A little unfair to imply that was all I was saying, but fair enough. I was getting fed up with the way some people were debating at this point anyway. 
 
In better news, the UK general election finally purged Galloway and his frankly disgusting views regarding Ukraine from sight. 

I thought the scooters were just a meme...

https://mastodon.social/@ChrisO_wiki/112715687961441423
After golf carts we are now at electric scooters...