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Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

The key learning from the Ukrainian conflict from a military standpoint is the use of hobby drones + old artillery. You can either drop artillery rounds or use the drone as a way to direct artillery fire. This has totally changed the game. The switchblade is amazing, but, realistically they wont be built in any quantity to matter.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/wa74hd/ukrai...

https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/wamxri/ua_dr...

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To give an indication 4,000 of these things were deployed in Afghanistan since 2013, I'm not sure if that counts as a significant quantity. I've no idea what their manufacturing capacity is now, but that's an average of about 600 a year.

I think Ukraine and the Russians have learned to track consumer drone signals with aeroscope https://www.dji.com/aeroscope. There are a few videos out there of drones taking off then artillery shells arriving very soon after.

It’s real easy to root device and disable aeroscope but there are jammers on the market that equally easy land/home your device

This has been done in mass in syria and karabakh before and no not a game changer.

I think the interesting question is how they will "compare". If they compare favorably to that key learning, as "this kind of thing, but a better iteration on it" it won't much matter the quantity. As the article points out, it's not about this conflict, it's about the next one.

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