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Comment by vardump | Hacker News Reader

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vardump·

The era of tanks, military troop transport vehicles and attack helicopters might be coming to an end.

Unless, of course, reliable countermeasures can be developed.

But due to cost imbalance, drones being so cheap, it doesn't look good for the military vehicles.

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Lighter, faster, smaller, more numerous, and more mobile vehicles might make sense because the era of the slow moving castles near the front on land, sea, and air seems about dead.

Drones of all sorts out front with more numerous "ripsaw"-like vehicles with shoot-on-the-move mobile artillery (RCH 155) and air defense (AAA like Skyranger 30 and SAM like M-SHORAD) just behind.

Drones are, by and large, the same thing as missiles.

Those haven't made manned tanks obsolete yet.

There's going to be value in having a human "on site" to make decisions about engaging targets for quite a while from now.

Drones are fundamentally better than subsonic-Mach 4 missiles because they're 100-1000x cheaper, several times smaller, have a much smaller RCS, and have loiter ability. They're slower and pack tiny warheads relatively, but they're key to taking out mobile forces and other drones.

For fixed targets, that's something artillery and Shahed-like cruise "missiles" can deal with.

> subsonic-Mach 4

How is it subsonic and mach 4?

I interpreted it as a range of missiles, with subsonic on the low speed end, and Mach 4 on the high speed end.

I thought making a manned tank obsolete is the use case for a drone with the highest value possibly in deciding to trade it with an Abrams.

Microwave arrays seem like a pretty effective countermeasure to drones. Not for jamming, for frying the actual circuits. Look up the Epirus Leonidas.

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