Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

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Small drone warfare?

The Ukraine / Russian conflict has degenerated into trench warfare with thousands of 155mm / 152mm artillery being shot into each other's positions per day.

These are the kinds of conditions where tanks excel. Humans who try to walk at 3km/hr get blown up by shrapnel, even 100m away is "close enough" to cause a significant injury and take a human out of a fight.

Tanks? They pretty much ignore everything except a direct hit (within 2m) of the target. All that shrapnel just bounces off the tank. We've gone full circle back to WW1 trench/artillery warfare, where tanks were invented to break through the stalemate.

Other vehicles (even armored cars) don't have thick enough armor to survive the shrapnel reliably. APCs, IFVs, Humvees still get shredded by artillery and air-burst munitions.

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How do you beat artillery? You travel at 50km/hr, so you're hard to aim (a 20km shot takes 1.5 minutes to land. Easy to kill a human who can only travel a hundred meters in that timeframe, especially since its +/- 100m target size since the shrapnel blast is so huge).

Tanks / vehicles on the other hand, move too fast to be targeted by dumb artillery. Smart artillery still kills you, but its relatively rare on the battlefield (due to the high costs of computer parts needed to make a smart shell). The vast majority of these holes are dumb artillery.

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This isn't the landscape of "drone warfare". This is WW1 style dumb-artillery wars.

I simplified the argument for brevity, but drones are critical to the artillery war right now because of spotting and fire-correction.

Artillery is far more lethal in 2022 than it was in 1945 because you can spot and kill individual infantry units from ten miles away.

That's just drones serving the role of forward-observer though.

The underlying tactic of someone, or something, out in the field, issuing radio messages back to home-base to coordinate artillery has been around since WW2, maybe earlier. Drones represent an evolution to the forward-observer paradigm, not a revolution.

In WW2, those were paratroopers, commandos, or other scouts who were performing those forward-observer duties while hiding inside of a treeline.

Sure, they were Morse code messages over a radio powered by a 20lb lead-acid battery pack with terrible encryption, but the fundamental tactic hasn't changed (especially because said forward-observer team would rarely be spotted... since they aren't firing their guns they're really hard to find)

I think there's a meaningful difference here, and it's very incorrect to consider it an incremental change.

An infantry squad dug into foxholes in some forest in WWII was really quite safe against artillery. A forward observer can maybe spot a tank or artillery battery (sometimes). A drone can scan an entire battlefield and identify infantry 10 miles behind a line of trenches, and coordinated artillery strikes can wipe them out.

That's hugely difference! It vastly changes the lethality per unit of artillery, and the relative risk for infantry units who aren't in obviously-fortified positions.

ten? i think its closer to 30 miles.

If memory serves me correctly, my brother said the cannon he captained was capable of incredible accuracy at 30 miles.

Yeah, agreed, NATO gear is. Russia and Ukraine mostly aren't using guided shells right now.

In support of your statement, I'm impressed that Russian doctrine seems to rely so much on good ol' trusty massive artillery, of the dumb kind.

I guess, if it works...

Puts the whole Seoul situation in a new light - there's something about just massive amounts of shells being thrown that's hard to deal with.

And dumb is cheap. Cheap can be king, especially if you can keep making them. The US had the same thing in WWII, the Panzer tanks were better than the Shermans in nearly every way - except cost and repairability.

Yes. This is also a lesson the Red Army learned in WWII, and why not continue with it? Simple systems that can be mass produced are better than complex, harder to repair ones.

The complex, hard to repair ones are great if:

1. You're selling them.

2. You have absolute complete superiority and are trying to minimize your casualties

There's a country that fits those parameters very well.

Both Russian and Ukrainian, also grad rockets. They're pretty much fighting each other with the same weapons.

Whenever people talked about "suicide drones", I felt like they haven't studied the history of warfare.

A surprising number of conflicts: WW1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam, degenerated into artillery slugfests. You can't get much cheaper, faster, or more effective than guns shooting dumb explosives 20km away.

Only when the opponents were stupidly overmatched by US Air Superiority (Afghanistan / Iraq) did things change. But even with Air Superiority over say, Vietnam, USA still degenerated into an artillery slugfest.

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Its hard to beat 100lb shrapnel bombs delivered 20km away. Logistics wise, trucks carrying shells is just far cheaper than any other delivery mechanism. This fact has been true since WW1, and no technology has ever really changed the calculus. (Adding li-ion batteries, cameras, remote-control and other features so that you can turn the delivery mechanism into a drone is just unnecessary chips in most cases)

> But even with Air Superiority over say, Vietnam, USA still degenerated into an artillery slugfest.

I just finished James Holland's Normandy '44 and I'd say, according to his book, that sentence pretty accurately describes pretty much all of the WW2 Normandy campaign as well.

Said massive artillery fire is directed from the drones. You hear a lot about Ukrainian Bayraktars, but the most mass-deployed combat drone in Ukraine right now is actually Mavic 2 & 3 - on both sides! In fact, it got to the point where there's a shortage of them in Russia because DJI stopped importing them, but units fighting in Ukraine constantly demand and get more via crowdfunding.

(For the curious, here's a blog post from the Donbas separatist side that talks about drones and their combat use and maintenance, among other things: https://kenigtiger.livejournal.com/2140772.html)

However, Ukrainians have learned to embrace the drones in 2014-15 already, and have had a lot more experience with them since. Russia is still learning that lesson in the field.

BTW, the same blogger also wrote a post recently that specifically discusses the differences in how Russian and Ukrainian forces employ their artillery. Also worth a read:

https://kenigtiger.livejournal.com/2148946.html

(I would generally recommend this entire blog for those curious about the tactics and the logistics of the conflict, because it's one of those rare cases when a guy who is directly involved in the war, and has a long-standing reputation as one of the prominent hawks, is consistently writing posts that are critical of his own side - which criticism is far more likely to be accurate than propaganda from the other side.)

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