3 ms·

What are loitering munitions capable of against a foe that can jam and shoot them, outside of sleek promotional videos? American army made IEDs much less effect

What are loitering munitions capable of against a foe that can jam and shoot them, outside of sleek promotional videos? American army made IEDs much less effective through jamming, and they need basically one bit of info transmitted, what makes you think that having a bidirectional data link with enough bandwidth for video is going to be feasible?

krisoft 5y ago
> what makes you think that having a bidirectional data link with enough bandwidth for video is going to be feasible? We were discussing autonomy. Which part of my comment gave you the impression that I think there will be a video link? > What are loitering munitions capable of against a foe that can jam and shoot them, outside of sleek promotional videos? Homing on radiation is an obvious first answer. There are many more ideas I have. They each fit into the computational budget of an oldish smart phone, therefore I assume it would be possible to integrate them on a drone. Possibly most of these ideas are bad, but the armies of the world are paying smart people to think of good ones. It would be foolish to dismiss the whole category as "pipe dream or basically bad cruise missiles". But of course you think what you want to think.
- lambdadmitry 5y ago
  It wasn't clear that you mean only autonomous and not loitering in general. If you mean autonomous loitering munitions, they are are basically short lived mines in the sky. We had those in the sea for more than a century, they didn't render seas unsurvivable for ships. And if you think loitering munitions are cheap vs their targets, wait till you hear about inflatable heated "tanks" that such a munition won't be able to distinguish from an actual tank. Indeed, armies are paying smart people to think about those issues. You can notice that those smart people don't plan to get rid of ground armies, instead they build jammers, lasers, and automatic guns. The original claim was about ground war being impossible anymore because of drones, which doesn't really match up with what those smart army people are doing.

krisoft 5y ago

> what makes you think that having a bidirectional data link with enough bandwidth for video is going to be feasible? We were discussing autonomy. Which part of my comment gave you the impression that I think there will be a video link? > What are loitering munitions capable of against a foe that can jam and shoot them, outside of sleek promotional videos? Homing on radiation is an obvious first answer. There are many more ideas I have. They each fit into the computational budget of an oldish smart phone, therefore I assume it would be possible to integrate them on a drone. Possibly most of these ideas are bad, but the armies of the world are paying smart people to think of good ones. It would be foolish to dismiss the whole category as "pipe dream or basically bad cruise missiles". But of course you think what you want to think.

lambdadmitry 5y ago
It wasn't clear that you mean only autonomous and not loitering in general. If you mean autonomous loitering munitions, they are are basically short lived mines in the sky. We had those in the sea for more than a century, they didn't render seas unsurvivable for ships. And if you think loitering munitions are cheap vs their targets, wait till you hear about inflatable heated "tanks" that such a munition won't be able to distinguish from an actual tank. Indeed, armies are paying smart people to think about those issues. You can notice that those smart people don't plan to get rid of ground armies, instead they build jammers, lasers, and automatic guns. The original claim was about ground war being impossible anymore because of drones, which doesn't really match up with what those smart army people are doing.