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Drones have upended the unit economics of combat and made older doctrines less relevant. Drones seem to combine the benefits of missiles level payloads, aircraf

Drones have upended the unit economics of combat and made older doctrines less relevant. Drones seem to combine the benefits of missiles level payloads, aircraft level control and ability to project force over a distance. I don’t see any technical way we can stop them - but it’s not like we stopped guns. The drone and LLM era are the end of many things we older folk are used to. The information commons are sunk with LLMs - we simply do not have the capacity (resources, manpower, bandwidth, desire) to verify the content being churned out every second.

dboreham 7mo ago
I'm skeptical about the "cheap drones: who knew?" narrative. Such drones have existed since 1944.
- dontlikeyoueith 7mo ago
  There's been a massive step change in their capability per unit cost. What used to cost millions per unit now costs tens of thousands. That's significant. It's like saying artillery isn't that big a deal in 1914. After all, it's been around since 1452.
luxuryballs 7mo ago
it’s basically smart grenades that “throw” themselves, high tech shit, there’s def going to be some kind of automatic helmet-mounted counter devices coming
pianopatrick 7mo ago
I dunno, seems to me that they're slow enough and fly low enough you could shoot them down with 50 cal ammo. The hard part is aiming and hitting them. But seems to me that someone could make a radar assisted point defense system that automatically aimed and fired a 50 cal gun, like automatic skeet shooting. Such a system would have limited range and could not hit very fast moving or high altitude targets, but would be cheap enough to deal with the cheap slow drones.
- verdverm 7mo ago
  Look into what Ukraine is doing, they are at the forefront of all this. They already have the system you describe. The German one's with radars are expensive compared to the technicals aimed by soldiers. Neither has very large effective range and the drones do not fly straight paths. You'd need millions of them. They are mass producing interceptor drones for a reason.

dboreham 7mo ago

I'm skeptical about the "cheap drones: who knew?" narrative. Such drones have existed since 1944.

dontlikeyoueith 7mo ago
There's been a massive step change in their capability per unit cost. What used to cost millions per unit now costs tens of thousands. That's significant. It's like saying artillery isn't that big a deal in 1914. After all, it's been around since 1452.

luxuryballs 7mo ago

it’s basically smart grenades that “throw” themselves, high tech shit, there’s def going to be some kind of automatic helmet-mounted counter devices coming

pianopatrick 7mo ago

I dunno, seems to me that they're slow enough and fly low enough you could shoot them down with 50 cal ammo. The hard part is aiming and hitting them. But seems to me that someone could make a radar assisted point defense system that automatically aimed and fired a 50 cal gun, like automatic skeet shooting. Such a system would have limited range and could not hit very fast moving or high altitude targets, but would be cheap enough to deal with the cheap slow drones.

verdverm 7mo ago
Look into what Ukraine is doing, they are at the forefront of all this. They already have the system you describe. The German one's with radars are expensive compared to the technicals aimed by soldiers. Neither has very large effective range and the drones do not fly straight paths. You'd need millions of them. They are mass producing interceptor drones for a reason.