I think about this video all the time. This is the future of warfare, and it's coming. Like it or not, this is where the world is going to go.
Recently, I listened to a podcast about the second civil war in America (It Could Happen Here), and it was chilling. It showed the warfare is asymmetric now, and a 2B bomber is useless against a motivated attacker with 20k worth of drones. The future of warfare is through 3D printing and ML tech; and, the future is here.
I don't agree with it, but understanding that is the position many of the machiavellian natsec experts are coming from really helps in having more productive conversations.
It's worth looking at video evidence of drone usage examples from the recent conflicts.
We've seen small drones dropping mortar rounds in trenches simply by flying above the correct spot near the entrance to a bunker and releasing it. We've seen ammo dumps being ignited by drones carrying thermite loads. We've seen long-range drone attacks on oil processing facilities, getting through expensive anti-air defences simply by sacrificing many cheap drones. Etc.
The currently ongoing Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict in Arcah/Nagorno-Karabah (in some aspects, a proxy "test" of Turkish tech vs Russian tech) is worth looking at, since drones/UAVs are a key part of military activity there.
EW: Electronic Warfare; any action involving the use of the electromagnetic spectrum (EM spectrum) or directed energy to control the spectrum, attack an enemy, or impede enemy assaults
CIWS: Close-in Weapon System; a point-defense weapon system for detecting and destroying short-range incoming missiles and enemy aircraft which have penetrated the outer defenses, typically mounted shipboard in a naval capacity. A gun-based CIWS usually consists of a combination of radars, computers and rotary or revolver cannon placed on a rotating, automatically aimed gun mount.
Wild Weasel: an aircraft, of any type, equipped with anti-radiation missiles and tasked with the Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses. In brief, the task of a Wild Weasel aircraft is to bait enemy anti-aircraft defenses into targeting it with their radars, whereupon the radar waves are traced back to their source, allowing the Weasel or its teammates to precisely target it for destruction.
TTP: Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures; The role of TTPs in terrorism analysis is to identify individual patterns of behavior of a particular terrorist activity, or a particular terrorist organisation, and to examine and categorize more general tactics and weapons used by a particular terrorist activity, or a particular terrorist organisation.
To be a little more specific, what we’re seeing in Nagorno-Karabakh seems to be focused on using drones to disrupt sustainment and movement by attacking convoys, so a lot of doctrinal innovation is likely to be based on how to protect against drones while on the move, which will, of course, trigger further counter-counter-drone innovations.
I think that we don't have effective countermeasures now; you just have to expect and tolerate drone strikes just as you have to expect and tolerate artillery strikes.
CIWS systems are rare, bulky and expensive - you can use them to protect certain high-value targets (e.g. ships) but they don't scale to protect infantry emplacements, moving vehicles or the perimeter of large bases.
Anti-air missiles work against the larger (and more dangerous) UAVs, however, the problem is that if you have to shoot down cheap drones with the current very expensive missiles, then you still lose on a cost/efficiency basis.
The role of aviation a couple decades ago involved a limited amount of very effective but very expensive aircraft - and we have effective but expensive countermeasures. The current situation involves lots of cheap aircraft hitting expensive targets (e.g. tanks and various vehicle-based weapon systems). So we need either to have lots of cheap countermeasures, or accept the drone reality which means that high-value targets don't survive, so instead of a single great but expensive tank you'd need perhaps four quadbikes with rocket launchers, or a dozen small unmanned tracked vehicles.
Eagles.
I have a lot of such happy thoughts.
It's incredibly old 'tech'.
- ed - oops! I see that's right there in your link.
Also, you only care about getting the thing into position and then dropping its payload - it doesn't much matter what happens to it after, so your energy requirements don't need to require landing. Heck, the drone itself could be considered a secondary payload.
Also there are unmanned autonomous ground vehicles that can launch these like the mission master[1].
It's merely a force multiplier for soldiers. Not some indiscriminate killing machine. Imagine a slaugherbots video based on conventional fighter jets or bombers. They would show them used indiscriminately too. The video is mostly FUD. Any military that gives AI the authority to designate targets is no longer in control of their weapons so it would never happen.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzzOH5fBAqw [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_O85m6VXn8
Recent news was China building a 48x drone suicide swarm launcher[1], yikes. Meanwhile robotic wingmen seem to be increasingly talked up everywhere, everyone wants em.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2020/10/14/china-...