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He was heavily mentioning drones in the Foreign Affairs piece [1] he wrote in the spring of 2023: "Innovation Power - Why Technology Will Define the Future of G
by paganel 3y ago
He was heavily mentioning drones in the Foreign Affairs piece [1] he wrote in the spring of 2023: "Innovation Power - Why Technology Will Define the Future of Geopolitics"
> Drones offer distinct advantages over traditional weapons: they are smaller and cheaper, offer unmatched surveillance capabilities, and reduce soldiers’ risk exposure. Marines in urban warfare, for example, could be accompanied by microdrones that serve as their eyes and ears. Over time, countries will improve the hardware and software powering drones to outinnovate their rivals. Eventually, autonomous weaponized drones—not just unmanned aerial vehicles but also ground-based ones—will replace soldiers and manned artillery altogether. Imagine an autonomous submarine that could quickly move supplies into contested waters or an autonomous truck that could find the optimal route to carry small missile launchers across rough terrain. Swarms of drones, networked and coordinated by AI, could overwhelm tank and infantry formations in the field.
My take on this is that lacking direct combat experience everything the Americans (and the West more generally) will come up with in terms of drones will be hugely inferior to whatever the Russians are now building, heck, it would be inferior even to what the Ukrainians have managed to build locally (one of the targets the Russians hit recently was an Ukrainian drone factory in Kiev).
[1] https://archive.is/wvhck https://archive.is/wvhck
- csdvrx 3y ago> My take on this is that lacking direct combat experience everything the Americans (and the West more generally) will come up with in terms of drones will be hugely inferior to whatever the Russians are now building So what? As someone famous said, "Quantity is a quality on its own"
- paganel 3y agoDon't think that the West will go for "quantity over quality" in its arms' race with China/Russia, it has stopped doing that for at least 30 years (since they scrapped most of the Cold War-related arms industry).
- dilyevsky 3y agoquality will have a diminishing return over time as your enemy adapts as has been shown with excalibur and even himars in this conflict. wunderwaffe don't win wars
- PoignardAzur 3y agoThere are so many assumptions packed in that post it feels weird to try to unpack them; eg, the implication the "local" Ukrainian equipment would be by default inferior to Russian equipment, which doesn't seem obvious at all to me. But empirically speaking, the idea that Russian equipment will be better than OTAN equipment because of their combat experience is pretty bold considering the current domination of OTAN equipment in the Ukraine-Russia war.
- fhub 3y agoWhat is OTAN? NATO?
- dboreham 3y agoSee: UTC
- htrp 3y agoFrench for Nato Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique nord
- edgyquant 3y agoOTAN is the acronym in French
- ziddoap 3y agoApparently it's the French term for NATO ("Organisation du Traité de l’Atlantique Nord"), directly translating to "North Atlantic Treaty Organization". At least according to some random website I found after a search. I wish there was a rule that forced people to spell out an acronym the first time they use it, regardless of how much they think the acronym is common knowledge.
- subandi 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO It kinda is common knowledge though, the French version is right on the official flag and displayed all the time.
- malfist 3y agoHave you read the book Forever Peace? I think it's a foretelling of this, in part. The book doesn't have drones, but what it does have is mechs that fight wars with human remote pilots. War in the book essentially boils down to who can spend more money building more mechs. No humans get killed except by accident, or if the war happens to be against one of those impoverished nations barbaric enough to use human soldiers.
- pests 3y agoI think since at least WW1 war has been fought between economies and production, with soilders just the proxy.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> My take on this is that lacking direct combat experience everything the Americans (and the West more generally) will come up with in terms of drones will be hugely inferior to whatever the Russians are now building America doesn't lack direct combat experience with drone warfare, on either the side using drones or the side being targeted by drones.
- bbor 3y agoCould you explain? I think we’re having a different discussion than the million dollar predator drones that shot missiles at western Asia from a mile up. And to say that defending against ISIS/Houthi/Etc. drones is in any way similar to the experience Ukraine and Russia are getting seems wrong. But I’m probably misunderstanding? In general I’m not 100% convinced by “they use drones so they’re better with them” but it’s plausible. We’re also involved with the Ukrainian side, to say the least, so I imagine we’re getting some detailed intel on their effectiveness and shortcomings.
- happytiger 3y agoAmerica doesn’t lack combat experience with small drones. > The fighting in Ukraine has provided "reinforcement and validation" of what US troops have learned about drones in the Middle East, Gainey said at the conference, echoing Army leaders who say the drone war in Ukraine is influencing their planning — particularly for how to counter the one-way attack drones that Russia has used widely. > "In some cases, yes, what we're sending to Ukraine are also going to fit into our future plans," Douglas Bush, the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics, and technology, said at a press conference in early August. Further: > "There's no one silver bullet. There's no one system that we can call out and say, 'This is a system that's going to defeat every threat,'" Parent told Insider. Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-ukraine-fighting-drone-war-us-military-was-waiting-for-2023-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-ukraine-fighting-dron... The truth is that there is no “drone warfare” only a new class of military tools that resemble drones and are built on drone-esque platforms. They come on the sea, they come by land and they come by air, and they can be millions of dollars or 3500-5000 bucks (which is utterly nothing for US military spending) and built of cardboard like this one: https://www.defensenews.com/air/2023/09/13/cardboard-drone-vendor-retools-software-based-on-ukraine-war-hacks/ https://www.defensenews.com/air/2023/09/13/cardboard-drone-v... They are using Ukraine as a providing ground for anti-drone technology for sure as there have been many reports of directed energy weapons in Ukraine and Israel as of late. There are also sea-based systems: https://www.newsweek.com/taiwan-drone-sea-china-attack-laser-war-1840662 https://www.newsweek.com/taiwan-drone-sea-china-attack-laser... So definitely we are in the drone warfare period and those lessons are getting learned. Have been since 2013 to 2016 when we had initial reports of drones on the battlefield and reactions in military planning discussions. With regards to the idea, that experience is the sole predictor of Battlefield success, I would urge the original poster of that comment to read a few history books.
- petre 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
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- ProjectArcturis 3y agoThere may be a problem with this outlook: bio-robots are able to self-replicate.
- petre 3y agoIt takes years. They're not mice to replenish in 20 days. And not exactly cheap to build, train and service.