I did read a while ago that a war on on mainland china would be expected to be fought largely underground. This is due to unstoppable, cheap drones and loitering munitions on both sides basically making the surface unusable for combat.
I assume they mean it will be fought between two dudes in an underground bunker for the last can of food. It is hard to imagine how an outside attack against mainland China could lead to anything but nuclear escalation.
Loitering munitions are already capable for much more than a “bad cruise missile”.
I wouldn’t dismiss autonomous drones that easily. The trick is that they don’t have to be perfect, just probabilistically good enough for them to be worth their cost.
We were discussing autonomy. Which part of my comment gave you the impression that I think there will be a video link?
> What are loitering munitions capable of against a foe that can jam and shoot them, outside of sleek promotional videos?
Homing on radiation is an obvious first answer. There are many more ideas I have. They each fit into the computational budget of an oldish smart phone, therefore I assume it would be possible to integrate them on a drone. Possibly most of these ideas are bad, but the armies of the world are paying smart people to think of good ones. It would be foolish to dismiss the whole category as "pipe dream or basically bad cruise missiles". But of course you think what you want to think.
If you mean autonomous loitering munitions, they are are basically short lived mines in the sky. We had those in the sea for more than a century, they didn't render seas unsurvivable for ships. And if you think loitering munitions are cheap vs their targets, wait till you hear about inflatable heated "tanks" that such a munition won't be able to distinguish from an actual tank.
Indeed, armies are paying smart people to think about those issues. You can notice that those smart people don't plan to get rid of ground armies, instead they build jammers, lasers, and automatic guns. The original claim was about ground war being impossible anymore because of drones, which doesn't really match up with what those smart army people are doing.
That's just not true. Rheinmetal has their Skynex, everyone and their dog does lasers, and jamming is basically free. Phalanx (and its land equivalent) is also a thing, updating their targeting doesn't seem insurmountable.
I'm not aware of any "hot zones" lately where a war was even close to being decided by drones, much less everyone being forced underground. Even in Ukraine with absolutely hapless Russian army drone ops are mostly harassment. For an advanced army drones just aren't that big of a deal really, there are plenty of detection, disablement, and destruction modalities available.