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Someone shot down a $200 drone with a $3M Patriot missile
- SlipperySlope 10y agoShould events in the South China Sea heat up would not be surprised if a 50 million.dollar nuclear torpedo sinks our trillion-dollar aircraft carrier.
- busterarm 10y agoAnd this is a perfect example demonstrating why no one will ever win a protracted war against an entrenched insurgent population.
- astrodust 10y agoAsymmetric warfare 101 right here. America prevailed over Germany in large part because the US could produce more weapons for fewer dollars. It probably helped that American factories weren't being carpet bombed, and that they had all the resources they needed domestically, but the design of the weapons was also a factor. German tanks and artillery were notoriously complex. Now the shoe's on the other foot. There's $200 drones dropping home-made bombs on $100M tanks.
- ryanx435 10y agoIf you think asymmetric warfare applied to any war where it was the us vs germany you do not understand asymmetric warfare
- astrodust 10y agoIt's a sliding scale from perfectly matched sides (equal numbers of troops, equal training, equally good equipment) to completely mismatched. It's often implied to mean a small group of people that are hopelessly outnumbered fighting a much larger, well equipped force (à la Lawrence of Arabia) but insurgent groups are much larger than back then. I'm just talking about the equipment and training angle, where humble, practical weapons can prevail against sophisticated, expensive ones if the right strategy is employed. Sometimes the shitty, cheap thing can be pounded out in such numbers that the expensive counter is no longer practical or effective. American tanks were toys compared to the German top-tier ones, but they were also made in such massive numbers they couldn't be stopped. So the America that prevailed by coming up with humble, practical, cost-effective solutions to fighting a war is now under seige by adversaries fighting them with the same approach: Cheap, practical, easily mass-produced weapons. While you're right that America vs. Germany wasn't asymmetric, these crazy expensive weapon platforms are making modern asymmetric engagements way harder to win. Hell, at $3M a pop, simply getting that weapons platform to fire is a victory of sorts.
- closeparen 10y agoI'm going to guess it doesn't take much to defeat the communications and sensor package on a $200 drone. I expect the RF spectrum around disputed territory and secured installations to become useless, if not actively misleading. I suppose eventually we'll have commercial drones that can fly missions autonomously on cameras only when GPS and communications are unavailable. I don't think we're there yet.
- danielvf 10y agoActually, protracted wars against entrenched insurgent populations have been won, both historically and recently. The Huks in the Philippines in the 1950 for one. The Tamil Tigers, inventors of the sucide belt, holders of the world record for killing heads of state, and pioneers in crashing civilian aircraft into government targets, were put down in 2009 after thirty years of war. There's nothing magic about an insurgeny - most die stillborn. There's a whole lot of survivorship bias when looking at this. Defeated insurgencies don't make the news.
- wahern 10y agoThe Malayan Emergency? I think in Vietnam the U.S. copied some of the successful tactics the British developed, like moving farmers into barricaded villages for their "protection", with opposite and disastrous results.