7 ms·

Defending the city: An overview of defensive tactics

78 points by jdmark 2y ago

davidw 2y ago
We're seeing massive use of drones in the UA/RU war. I wonder how those change these points?
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  I'd argue it's still the same, there's just a tech accessibility difference between defense and offense. When they are equal, defense still tends to win out but it'll take a bit for the access to catch up. The counter for drones will be the proliferation of CRAM/CIWS and APS. Currently there exists cheap, publicly available (and commonly heavily open sourced) tech stacks for drones but the same is not the case for CRAM/CIWS and APS. But fundamentally the systems that can effectively kill artillery shells, mortars shells, rockets, and missiles in flight will be able to kill drones as well. There are some differences (such as that drones tend to fly lower/slower) but fundamentally the tech applies the same. And to be entirely honest this proliferation is almost entirely a software problem. Of course the existence of public hardware designs is important as well but getting effective sensor integration, detection, targeting, tracking, and response at a low enough latency will be bottlenecked by access to high quality domain specific software.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    I don't think we've even seen the real potential of drone warfare on the battlefield, yet. Right now their guidance is very crude, little more than the adaptation of consumer FPV technology. Once US/RU/CN have had time to develop the technology, build up the manufacturing and logistics, and give them AI automated target selection, it's going to completely change the nature of warfare IMO. Instead of dropping tons of expensive guided bombs and shells, attackers will drop tens of thousands of cheaper small anti-personnel hunter-seeker drones that can not only seek out human targets but wait in low power mode for a target to appear if it can't identify one at first. It'll make most kinds of static installations and defenses untenable. Units will have to constantly be on the move and camouflaged, and avoid giving up all kinds of life signs like sound/gunshots, thermal, RF comms, etc. The smaller drones will be able to help larger drones with targeting any armor they can't handle themselves while acting like free flying land mines. I agree that it's a software problem. The Slaughterbots video [1] is already six years old and all of the pieces to make killer drone swarms were already there (just not as miniaturized as the video). Now there's data in Ukraine about how well individual drones work; AI is getting better and better; the compute is getting cheap enough to just slap on a drone; SOTA single use aluminum air batteries can already enable drones with much longer flight times than consumer batteries. All the pieces are there to make a nightmarish weapon that changes warfare as much as the machine gun, land mine, or air support. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecClODh4zYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecClODh4zYk
    - flawsofar 2y ago
      And thus begins the serious electromagnetic weapons age
    - unethical_ban 2y ago
      I think/hope civilian organizations get access to this technology or the defensive counterparts before it is banned. Having guns and food and ammo is good, but if civilians want to have a chance against NYPD or (insert dystopian boot) then night vision, drones for surveillance and offense, as well as drone defense are needed. Having offensive drone tech in the hands of domestic law enforcement scares the shit out of me. I think we are one human generation away from the Matrix "Sentinels" being a reality. Swarms of autonomous disposable killer drones.
      - oceanplexian 2y ago
        I agree and am a huge advocate for the idea that self defense is a human right. Civilians should have a right to access to the exact same technology that a government employs with its infantry. I'm not talking Nuclear Weapons or Stealth Bombers, if a 17-year-old recruit can be trusted to operate a drone to kill human beings in a far off foreign country, law-abiding citizens should have access to the same technology. Or, alternatively, we can ban the technology, as long as the police are restricted from using it the same as civilians.
        lm28469 2y ago
        So rocket launchers, grenades, and all kind of explosives, anti air weapons that can destroy any flying machine from 10+km away Yeah sure that sounds absolutely sane....
        unethical_ban 2y ago
        Citizens should be no less armed than domestic law enforcement. I'm not aware of cops having rocket launchers, but maybe they shouldn't.
        2y ago
  - denton-scratch 2y ago
    CRAM and CIWS are for point-defence; it would be very expensive to cover e.g. 100 miles of international border using those systems. Because drones are steerable, they can fly between the gatling guns and on to their target. Of course, if the target has point-defence, that won't work! In Ukraine, it seems that a lot of the defender's drones are hybrid surveillance and attack, so they don't know what their target is at launch. You can't point-defend a trenchline. I think the Russians are relying on jammers. Broadband jamming must require a lot of power (and presumably impairs their own comms); narrowband jamming requires knowledge of the attacker's frequency. CRAM/CIWS generally consists of several weapons systems, and a command centre with the radar, communicating by radio. So those defensive systems are also exposed to jamming, which could be achieved by a high-altitude drone; these systems aren't designed to shoot things at 20,000 ft., although many of them can have a SAM system strapped on. Anyway, I suspect that drone-antidrone warfare is going to come down to a radio arms-race; i.e. jammer vs. anti-jammer. And you can defeat a jammer using beamforming.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
      > 100 miles of international border using those systems Yeah that's not really the point. You use CRAM or CIWS at installations, cities, and maybe even towns. But then you use APS for military vehicles. You don't need to stop every attack along a border, you just need to protect important installations and population centers. > You can't point-defend a trenchline Sure you can't but you can point defend mobile artillery, tanks, and other mechanized infantry. This greatly reduces the actual value you get out of a drone strike. You won't be hitting high value targets without spending a lot of resources in a saturation attack. > I think the Russians are relying on jammers They try to and it's not particularly effective. > So those defensive systems are also exposed to jamming This is only the case if you communicate by radio. In an active combat environment, if you are setting up installations that may be the best you can do at the time but for regions that are currently at peace, you can absolutely run fiber-optics between the weapons systems, sensor systems, and command center(s), leaving radio comms as a fallback. It's definitely more expensive but if you are installing equipment in a city or permanent military installation, you probably already have access to fiber runs that could be procured as dedicated/dark fiber. > Anyway, I suspect that drone-antidrone warfare is going to come down to a radio arms-race That'll definitely be a heavy component of it but the defense side should be able to insulate themselves from the arms race as long as they invest in the infrastructure ahead of time rather than waiting until a hot war starts to protect soft targets.
myth_drannon 2y ago
[flagged]
- petsfed 2y ago
  Those have been part of the common language of city defense since at least Operation: Desert Storm in 1991, and in regular use for as long as sieges (and therefore cities) have been a thing. One of the ways to win a war without winning a battle is to make winning so morally costly to your enemy that their own troops balk at the doing. Its not a super effective method, and usually fails (propaganda tends to win in that particular game of rock-paper-scissors), but it can certainly be effective as a delaying tactic, or as a method to damage your enemy's morale. There have always been statespeople and military leaders who argue that human shields are unsporting, but the main pressures on military strategy are evolutionary, rather than ethical. Thus, if its horrific but it works, it must not be that horrific. More broadly, arms races typically amount to "we believe the other side has the technology to commit X atrocity. We therefore need the same ability to commit that atrocity, else we appear weak"
JohnMakin 2y ago
> Military theorists have long described the defense as the strongest form of war, and current doctrine agrees. Indeed - one of the first wars fought with modern rifling, the American Civil War, had General Lee learn this lesson in a very hard way on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg, in a failed infantry assault known as "Pickett's Charge."[0] Lee mistakenly attacked a position that was very easily defensible by Union artillery on faulty theory that it would be weakened due to a (failed) artillery barrage that happened previously. The Union correctly predicted Lee would attack there, and he sent over 12,000 men in a futile assault that resulted in 50% casualties in less than 1 hour, one of the bloodiest hours of the entire war. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickett%27s_Charge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickett%27s_Charge
- runamuck 2y ago
  Good point. For a counter point, the German Blitzkrieg helped them get France in WW2.
  - georgeecollins 2y ago
    Even more modern example: The little green men who seized Ukraine.
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      Eh, seized a small sliver and failed with extremely high casualties to seize a much larger chunk. The botched invasion was nothing like the German Blitzkrieg.
  - asdasdsddd 2y ago
    Only worked because armor was so dominant and anti armor wasn't there yet.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - 2y ago
ninininino 2y ago
I want a tool that I can use to feed it a block of text or a URL to a website and it will give me an LLM and a text prompt that would yield said text/website. I decided to ask ChatGPT 3.5 about what a Westpoint Academy instructor would have to say about defending a city and defensive tactics beyond those commonly known and the answer was not nearly as interesting.
- flawsofar 2y ago
  be the language model you want to see in the world
- itronitron 2y ago
  or you could just visit the page
m3kw9 2y ago
Not updated to include drone tactics
rossant 2y ago
(2022)
wolverine876 2y ago
(2022) The date is important because it was written before the Ukraine-Russia war's use of drones ramped up. The article doesn't mention drones (UAVs) afaict - how to use them in attack and defense, how to protect yourself - which is today a major omission.
lambdato 2y ago
[flagged]
- Facemelters 2y ago
  but it's a wall built and patrolled by the opponent that is preventing the population from leaving the combat zone
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- webdoodle 2y ago
  PSYOP's are the most powerful and most used weapon in the U.S. arsenal.
- petsfed 2y ago
  I said as much in response to another (rightly) dead post: Human shield tactics are basically as old as permanent settlements, because forcing your enemy past their own ethical limits has always been a tactic of occasional effectiveness. Its basically how insurgencies work against technologically and numerically superior opponents, and this has been true for millennia. And for just as long, there have been military and political leaders describing it as cowardly or unsporting. But again, the state of the art of military tactics is a catalog of what works, not what's ethical. The practice of war itself is, by and large, unethical. If it didn't work, they wouldn't keep doing it. Speaking entirely for myself, I don't ever want to be in the mental state to say "its ok for the SWAT team to shoot through the hostages; its their fault for going to a bank that could be robbed in the first place". Absolutely, the party that provoked the war in the first place is in the wrong for the attack that provoked it. But that doesn't give the side prosecuting the war carte blanche to respond as brutally as they please.
  - immibis 2y ago
    It's weird that you are trying to say without saying that Hamas provoked the war he's talk about. Israel has been at war with Palestine continuously since it was founded.

78 points by jdmark 2y ago

davidw 2y ago

We're seeing massive use of drones in the UA/RU war. I wonder how those change these points?

CuriousCosmic 2y ago
I'd argue it's still the same, there's just a tech accessibility difference between defense and offense. When they are equal, defense still tends to win out but it'll take a bit for the access to catch up. The counter for drones will be the proliferation of CRAM/CIWS and APS. Currently there exists cheap, publicly available (and commonly heavily open sourced) tech stacks for drones but the same is not the case for CRAM/CIWS and APS. But fundamentally the systems that can effectively kill artillery shells, mortars shells, rockets, and missiles in flight will be able to kill drones as well. There are some differences (such as that drones tend to fly lower/slower) but fundamentally the tech applies the same. And to be entirely honest this proliferation is almost entirely a software problem. Of course the existence of public hardware designs is important as well but getting effective sensor integration, detection, targeting, tracking, and response at a low enough latency will be bottlenecked by access to high quality domain specific software.
- throwup238 2y ago
  I don't think we've even seen the real potential of drone warfare on the battlefield, yet. Right now their guidance is very crude, little more than the adaptation of consumer FPV technology. Once US/RU/CN have had time to develop the technology, build up the manufacturing and logistics, and give them AI automated target selection, it's going to completely change the nature of warfare IMO. Instead of dropping tons of expensive guided bombs and shells, attackers will drop tens of thousands of cheaper small anti-personnel hunter-seeker drones that can not only seek out human targets but wait in low power mode for a target to appear if it can't identify one at first. It'll make most kinds of static installations and defenses untenable. Units will have to constantly be on the move and camouflaged, and avoid giving up all kinds of life signs like sound/gunshots, thermal, RF comms, etc. The smaller drones will be able to help larger drones with targeting any armor they can't handle themselves while acting like free flying land mines. I agree that it's a software problem. The Slaughterbots video [1] is already six years old and all of the pieces to make killer drone swarms were already there (just not as miniaturized as the video). Now there's data in Ukraine about how well individual drones work; AI is getting better and better; the compute is getting cheap enough to just slap on a drone; SOTA single use aluminum air batteries can already enable drones with much longer flight times than consumer batteries. All the pieces are there to make a nightmarish weapon that changes warfare as much as the machine gun, land mine, or air support. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecClODh4zYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecClODh4zYk
  - flawsofar 2y ago
    And thus begins the serious electromagnetic weapons age
  - unethical_ban 2y ago
    I think/hope civilian organizations get access to this technology or the defensive counterparts before it is banned. Having guns and food and ammo is good, but if civilians want to have a chance against NYPD or (insert dystopian boot) then night vision, drones for surveillance and offense, as well as drone defense are needed. Having offensive drone tech in the hands of domestic law enforcement scares the shit out of me. I think we are one human generation away from the Matrix "Sentinels" being a reality. Swarms of autonomous disposable killer drones.
    - oceanplexian 2y ago
      I agree and am a huge advocate for the idea that self defense is a human right. Civilians should have a right to access to the exact same technology that a government employs with its infantry. I'm not talking Nuclear Weapons or Stealth Bombers, if a 17-year-old recruit can be trusted to operate a drone to kill human beings in a far off foreign country, law-abiding citizens should have access to the same technology. Or, alternatively, we can ban the technology, as long as the police are restricted from using it the same as civilians.
      - lm28469 2y ago
        So rocket launchers, grenades, and all kind of explosives, anti air weapons that can destroy any flying machine from 10+km away Yeah sure that sounds absolutely sane....
        unethical_ban 2y ago
        Citizens should be no less armed than domestic law enforcement. I'm not aware of cops having rocket launchers, but maybe they shouldn't.
        2y ago
- denton-scratch 2y ago
  CRAM and CIWS are for point-defence; it would be very expensive to cover e.g. 100 miles of international border using those systems. Because drones are steerable, they can fly between the gatling guns and on to their target. Of course, if the target has point-defence, that won't work! In Ukraine, it seems that a lot of the defender's drones are hybrid surveillance and attack, so they don't know what their target is at launch. You can't point-defend a trenchline. I think the Russians are relying on jammers. Broadband jamming must require a lot of power (and presumably impairs their own comms); narrowband jamming requires knowledge of the attacker's frequency. CRAM/CIWS generally consists of several weapons systems, and a command centre with the radar, communicating by radio. So those defensive systems are also exposed to jamming, which could be achieved by a high-altitude drone; these systems aren't designed to shoot things at 20,000 ft., although many of them can have a SAM system strapped on. Anyway, I suspect that drone-antidrone warfare is going to come down to a radio arms-race; i.e. jammer vs. anti-jammer. And you can defeat a jammer using beamforming.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
    > 100 miles of international border using those systems Yeah that's not really the point. You use CRAM or CIWS at installations, cities, and maybe even towns. But then you use APS for military vehicles. You don't need to stop every attack along a border, you just need to protect important installations and population centers. > You can't point-defend a trenchline Sure you can't but you can point defend mobile artillery, tanks, and other mechanized infantry. This greatly reduces the actual value you get out of a drone strike. You won't be hitting high value targets without spending a lot of resources in a saturation attack. > I think the Russians are relying on jammers They try to and it's not particularly effective. > So those defensive systems are also exposed to jamming This is only the case if you communicate by radio. In an active combat environment, if you are setting up installations that may be the best you can do at the time but for regions that are currently at peace, you can absolutely run fiber-optics between the weapons systems, sensor systems, and command center(s), leaving radio comms as a fallback. It's definitely more expensive but if you are installing equipment in a city or permanent military installation, you probably already have access to fiber runs that could be procured as dedicated/dark fiber. > Anyway, I suspect that drone-antidrone warfare is going to come down to a radio arms-race That'll definitely be a heavy component of it but the defense side should be able to insulate themselves from the arms race as long as they invest in the infrastructure ahead of time rather than waiting until a hot war starts to protect soft targets.

myth_drannon 2y ago

[flagged]

petsfed 2y ago
Those have been part of the common language of city defense since at least Operation: Desert Storm in 1991, and in regular use for as long as sieges (and therefore cities) have been a thing. One of the ways to win a war without winning a battle is to make winning so morally costly to your enemy that their own troops balk at the doing. Its not a super effective method, and usually fails (propaganda tends to win in that particular game of rock-paper-scissors), but it can certainly be effective as a delaying tactic, or as a method to damage your enemy's morale. There have always been statespeople and military leaders who argue that human shields are unsporting, but the main pressures on military strategy are evolutionary, rather than ethical. Thus, if its horrific but it works, it must not be that horrific. More broadly, arms races typically amount to "we believe the other side has the technology to commit X atrocity. We therefore need the same ability to commit that atrocity, else we appear weak"

JohnMakin 2y ago

> Military theorists have long described the defense as the strongest form of war, and current doctrine agrees. Indeed - one of the first wars fought with modern rifling, the American Civil War, had General Lee learn this lesson in a very hard way on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg, in a failed infantry assault known as "Pickett's Charge."[0] Lee mistakenly attacked a position that was very easily defensible by Union artillery on faulty theory that it would be weakened due to a (failed) artillery barrage that happened previously. The Union correctly predicted Lee would attack there, and he sent over 12,000 men in a futile assault that resulted in 50% casualties in less than 1 hour, one of the bloodiest hours of the entire war. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickett%27s_Charge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickett%27s_Charge

runamuck 2y ago
Good point. For a counter point, the German Blitzkrieg helped them get France in WW2.
- georgeecollins 2y ago
  Even more modern example: The little green men who seized Ukraine.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Eh, seized a small sliver and failed with extremely high casualties to seize a much larger chunk. The botched invasion was nothing like the German Blitzkrieg.
- asdasdsddd 2y ago
  Only worked because armor was so dominant and anti armor wasn't there yet.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - 2y ago

ninininino 2y ago

I want a tool that I can use to feed it a block of text or a URL to a website and it will give me an LLM and a text prompt that would yield said text/website. I decided to ask ChatGPT 3.5 about what a Westpoint Academy instructor would have to say about defending a city and defensive tactics beyond those commonly known and the answer was not nearly as interesting.

flawsofar 2y ago
be the language model you want to see in the world
itronitron 2y ago
or you could just visit the page

m3kw9 2y ago

Not updated to include drone tactics

rossant 2y ago

(2022)

wolverine876 2y ago

(2022) The date is important because it was written before the Ukraine-Russia war's use of drones ramped up. The article doesn't mention drones (UAVs) afaict - how to use them in attack and defense, how to protect yourself - which is today a major omission.

lambdato 2y ago

[flagged]

Facemelters 2y ago
but it's a wall built and patrolled by the opponent that is preventing the population from leaving the combat zone
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
webdoodle 2y ago
PSYOP's are the most powerful and most used weapon in the U.S. arsenal.
petsfed 2y ago
I said as much in response to another (rightly) dead post: Human shield tactics are basically as old as permanent settlements, because forcing your enemy past their own ethical limits has always been a tactic of occasional effectiveness. Its basically how insurgencies work against technologically and numerically superior opponents, and this has been true for millennia. And for just as long, there have been military and political leaders describing it as cowardly or unsporting. But again, the state of the art of military tactics is a catalog of what works, not what's ethical. The practice of war itself is, by and large, unethical. If it didn't work, they wouldn't keep doing it. Speaking entirely for myself, I don't ever want to be in the mental state to say "its ok for the SWAT team to shoot through the hostages; its their fault for going to a bank that could be robbed in the first place". Absolutely, the party that provoked the war in the first place is in the wrong for the attack that provoked it. But that doesn't give the side prosecuting the war carte blanche to respond as brutally as they please.
- immibis 2y ago
  It's weird that you are trying to say without saying that Hamas provoked the war he's talk about. Israel has been at war with Palestine continuously since it was founded.