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Comment by ethbr1 | Hacker News Reader

> future of warfare

Color me skeptical. It feels like what we're seeing now is a local optimum: new systems (drones) designed to asymmetrically win ($) against legacy systems (mechanized vehicles) designed for very different goals.

We'll see what things look like once the post-drone evolution cycle has turned on the armored side.

That said, I do think the Marines are right, in that distributed agility/logistics from temporary and frequently relocated basing is going to be the new normal.

Russia doesn't have particularly advanced long range fires and Ukrainian inventory is limited.

But conflict against China or the US would be dominated by cruise or ballistic missile strikes against any concentrated, persistent target.

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> We'll see what things look like once the post-drone evolution cycle has turned on the armored side

I'm not convinced this is feasible in the short term; drone warfare is predicated on launching not just cheap drones but many of them. The new armor isn't steel or iron to survive the blast, but to shoot down attacking drones before they can explode. Most current defenses are ground-based missile batteries that can't really be directly protected by armor. Long-term, the most promising options are laser-based batteries, which today have insufficient power sources to stuff into mobile armored platforms.

Shaped charge warheads begat reactive armor begat tandem charges begat active protection systems.

I could see microwave-based APS (probably powered by a high energy consumable?) proliferating.

It's already being done. Check out these Russian improvised "Turtle Tanks"[1]. A big, light, metal canopy to keep drones from exploding next to the tank.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDfkwlMaK7g

It's the evolution of the 'cope cage' that grew out of the shortage of active armor plates.

Ukraine hunted that tank down and destroyed it by drone, btw.

Is there ever a world (other than sci-fi) in which drones become a useful countermeasure against other drones?

I mean it seems pretty likely that a smaller, lower range, kill drone could be developed that is designed for the express purpose of identifying other small flying objects and entangling them causing them to drop out of the sky.

The harder part I see is friend/foe identification, rather than just attacking anything else that's small and flying slowly.

They're using drones as killbots against individual infantrymen, actively chasing them down rather than taking a lucky grenade drop. That changes everything about force deployment on the ground.

While this does create dramatic videos, it does not represent much of an actual change. Most of these small drone operate well within the range of traditional infantry-killing weapons such as mortar shells. The tactics have changed, but the idea of an infantry unit killing another infantry unit at a couple miles distance isn't a revolution.

The impact on logistics is at least somewhat revolutionary. Previously it probably took several cases of mortar shells to inflict one casualty. Now that can be done with a couple of drones. Much lighter.

Yes and no. Ammunition is important, but from a logistics standpoint it will be much less burdensome than the food/water/fuel that must be provided to men on the field. Even in a hot war, an infantry unit is not engaged in full combat 24/7. But it never stops eating.

But autonomy explicitly decreases the human logistics burden too, by multiplying the effectiveness of each human.

Where in Civil War times you would need to clothe, feed, camp 100 people, now you have that firepower in a single soldier's weapon.

And when you remove the need for even a single human, you also remove their logistics footprint.

> Where in Civil War times you would need to clothe, feed, camp 100 people, now you have that firepower in a single soldier's weapon.

Which doesn't reduce the number of troops you need against a given foe with peer equipment, it just increases the durable equipment and consumables per soldier

> Previously it probably took several cases of mortar shells to inflict one casualty. Now that can be done with a couple of drones. Much lighter.

Do you think it's 1, 2, or 3 drones to get 1 kill?

Jamming and dying batteries make the odds much worse than that.

Look up how many drones have been expended in Ukraine. Then look up how many casualties there have been. Finally, understand that not all casualties ate caused by drones, and do the math.

Firing traditional artillery makes you vulnerable to counter-battery radar. Since rockets, mortars, howitzers, etc all fire in a predictable ballistic trajectory, you have to quickly move or risk being shot at before your rounds even hit their target. An anti-personnel drone can move in any direction and can operate much lower to ground to avoid radar so no one will know exactly where it came from. You don't get as much of a bang but it's much more stealthy.

Ya, but the drone operators emit radio. So too the drones. They are visually stealthy but are more visible electronically than an oldschool motor team. From what I have seen, the Ukrainian drone teams have to "shoot and scoot" in much the same way as the motor/artillery teams.

Part of the exposure is also due to the limited range of some smaller drone control systems, meaning those drone operators have needed to be much closer (a few km) to their targets than artillery crews (several dozen km).

There can be a long wire between the (cheap) radio and the person operating it. You probably don't mind if you lose the radio or the drone.

This is very different to artillery which is too expensive to lose to return fire and even more expensive if you try and make it operable remotely.

"Ya, but the drone operators emit radio. So too the drones. They are visually stealthy but are more visible electronically than an oldschool motor team."

Which is why it is very unlikely, that we can avoid fully autonomous killer drones.

(if they are not already deployed in experimental settings)

This seems just completely wrong. The trend for drones is that features and capabilities are increasing and costs are decreasing because they're based on cheap software and cheap consumer hardware. The trend for unguided mortar rounds or artillery shells is that they're as cheap as they're ever likely to be at thousands of dollars a round, plus the cost of the gun and its replacement barrels and crew. (guided artillery shells or missiles are so expensive they're a separate conversation)

If these small drones provide capabilities that are, as your comment implies, not new but they do it with a cost effectiveness that blows away anything that came before, that's a pretty big deal.

Capabilities are not the same thing as effects. A drone represents different capabilities at different price points, but the net result observed on the battlefield are not all that different that past infantry engagements. If enemy infantry knows your position, they can today reach out and kill you at similar ranges as they did in wars past. The how has changed, not the what.

Aren't these "cheap" drones tens to hundreds of thousands each?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136

in Ukraine the FPV infantry killers are modified hobbyist drones, in the ~$500 range

the economist: https://www.economist.com/interactive/science-and-technology... https://archive.is/nJYJ0

There are also modified commercial drones that just drop explosives, and that is what is mentioned here. Those drones drop their payload and may return to reload if not shutdown. Those drones aren't "hundreds of thousands each", but around $500 each.

As for the drone you linked - we don't know how much it cost Russian to produce Geran-2, but definitely less than you imagine.

Even this is almost certainly an underestimate. Open source intelligence that just the bill of materials for a Shahed is more than the tens of thousands previously estimated. These are probably more on the order of ~$400k [0]

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2024/02/07/375000the...

This comment thread is about cheap drones hunting down individuals. They are not using Shahed for that. You can easily build a small drone capable of carrying a grenade for under $300.

As always war is a rock paper scissor.

As we have seen, the russians have been very good at electronic warfare and have increased their capabilities in fighting and jamming drones from sensible distance.

This doesn't change what a mess "modern" war is when both sides have relatively good equipment and none can claim air superiority: symmetrical war of attrition.

Ukraine is constantly inventing new techniques that are re-thinking what drones can do.

Recently they have been using them to drop spikes to slow vehicles which are then hit by a second set of drones.

At some point soon these drones will have specialised capabilities and will go out in swarms to autonomously figure out how to take down objects.

Aren’t these drones regular cots drones with some modification? Wouldn’t taking the door off a microwave and pointing it at the drone cause it to fall to the ground? Surely it’s more complex than that and I’m missing something.

Obviously Russia is already doing massive amounts of radio interference, that has always been a problem, which Ukraine has partly overcome. Partly. Googling for it you can see that it is massively diminishing the usefulness of drones for Ukraine.

Jammer hunting drones already exist. In fact that was the idea behind the Shaheed predecessors in the first place. Set a course, then home in on strong em devices.

Frontline on both sides is saturated with electronic warfare system which are essentially microwaves with open doors. Both sides put them on trucks, armored vehicles, set up near trenches and even carry on their backpacks. There were absurd cases like this https://imgur.com/a/4LqgLED

Drones evolve under this pressure. Dynamic frequency changes, computer vision, maneuvering (like "go up when lost signal") and many more counter measures are adopted on both sides.

Consumer drones already deal with a hostile RF environment well. Finding the frequency with the least interference, using a wide bandwidth for control, and a different one for video, and programmable signal-loss behaviour.

Cities are hugely hostile to low power transmission, especially in the 2.4 and 5ghz frequencies.

The effective range of cheap DJI "mini" drones in cities is measured in kilometres. If you get away from the city, you can double and triple your effective range.

We are not talking "interference", but an enemy actively looking for your signals and overpowering it with massive high powered RF.

Flying your drone around in a city is not the same as flying it against an opponent skilled in electronic warfare.

Most drone RC systems use FHSS. Those make them resistant to naive jamming. You can get fancy with jamming, but so can the way the FHSS works.

No. That’s been tried already lol.

You can jam the signal, but you can work around signal jamming in software by having it back off or gain altitude.

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