Comment by trhway
1 year ago
>drones smart enough to dodge bullets
well, there will be similarly smart "predator"/defense drones. The humans will have no chances on such a battlefield populated by thousands drones per square kilometer fighting each other.
>The tech industry is working hard to bring about the Terminator future.
And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
>or at least dodge out of where guns are pointing
just a bit of arithmetic comparing new weapons - drones vs. classic guns. Say a radar guided gun takes 1 sec. to train onto a drone and shoot several bullets. The range is max 3 km (an expensive 20mm-30mm autocannon like Pantsir) - 35 seconds for a 200 miles/hour drone. Thus all it takes is maximum 36 such drones coming simultaneously from all the directions to take out that gun. At less than $1000/drone it is many times cheaper than that radar guided gun. (and that without accounting for the drones coming in very low and hiding behind trees, hills, etc and without the first drones interfering with the radar say by dropping a foil chaff clouds, etc.) It is basically a very typical paradigm shift from vertical scaling to horizontal scaling by way of software orchestrated cheap components.
> And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
Drones don't remove people from the battlefield, they further the trend of there being no boundary to "the battlefield", putting everyone on it.
They can, depending on how they are employed, reduce the casualties (total and particularly civilian) on both sides of a conflict for any degree of military impact (Ukraine's recent strike against Russian bombers is an example), or they can increase the civilian death toll for marginal military impact (the accounts of Israeli gun- and missile-armed drones directly targeting civilians in Gaza being an example of what that could look like.)
Note for example, that Ukraine attack, although it caused no civilian casualties... it relied heavily on civilian infrastructure. Ukraine rented warehouses, common trucks, and hid the drones in normal shipping containers.
Thus indeed, this made the battlefield larger instead, now common trucks, warehouses and shipping containers are legitimate targets.
What Ukraine destroyed doesn't help either, for example they destroyed early warning airplanes intended to warn Russia if incoming missiles are nuclear or not. How Russia have to assume incoming missiles are nuclear, specially if they are flying in the regions where their land nuke detectors were destroyed too (I think 1 or 2 years ago Ukraine did that).
Thus Ukraine proved, that civilian equipment can destroy nuclear deterrence. Now common trucks and containers are a threat as big as many advanced military hardware out there. A truck with a bunch of drones can open a hole in your nuclear defense as much as stealth planes were needed for this before.
>Thus Ukraine proved, that civilian equipment can destroy nuclear deterrence.
yes, that is the point i've been making for a while - those cheap automated systems, the drones being the first examples of it, is the new MAD/equalizer weapons now available to all countries, not only to the large nuclear ones (and that becomes very important for avoiding future wars giving for example growing doubt that NATO, and USA in particular, would come to the defense of Baltic countries, whereis several millions of drones (including larger long range ones) which Baltic countries can get relatively easy for several billions of dollars may pose an unacceptable high cost to Russia of any potential aggression against those countries).
In this particular case a much smaller Ukraine can use that MAD/equalizer potential to win the war, or at least to get a great negotiating position by systematically severely degrading Russia's strategic capabilities toward making Russia potentially defenseless against US or China, or even say Turkey.
That is how i think they can degrade strategic air/missile defense systems https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42529638
And imagine if similarly to the plane attack Ukraine would attack Russian nuclear submarines parked openly at the bases (say using ships for drone launching instead of trucks) - there is no risk of destruction of those submarines, yet 10-50kg drone can damage the skin and outer hull forcing the submarine out of service for prolonged time.
>And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
It is very dangerous, since it will mean that an organization with enough drones can dominate society on its own. Much better if humans were battlefield-relevant.
It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant.
And if you look at Russia your logic does fail on that example - no amount of human losses affect Russia's behavior in the current war as they are sure that Ukraine will run out of soldiers before Russia does. So, from Russia's POV the faster the grinder the sooner their victory.
In a war of attrition (actually any war or even battle for that matter) the war is generally won by the enemy's morale breaking, not by literally running out of soldiers. When one side is losing and they know they're losing (or they see the conflict as not worth dying for), most people would prefer to save their own lives rather than die for nothing.
So you get desertion, refusal to enlist, rapid surrender, and so on. This results in the losing state having to resort to ever more brutal means of conscription such as literally dragging people in off the street, making it illegal to film such actions, making it illegal to leave the country, expanding the age range for conscription, and so on.
That all results in even worse morale which makes your fundamental problems even worse. That, in turn, can motivate the losing nation to expend soldiers/resources on missions which may have some propaganda benefit, but ultimately serve no military purpose whatsoever. And at some point it all just collapses like a house of cards.
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And I think this fundamental issue of morale will be a perpetual in war. The winner will not be decided by who has the most drones, but by which side's morale breaks first. This is why Afghanistan, in terms of outcomes, is essentially the strongest military nation in the world. They've defeated both the US and the USSR in spite of being orders of magnitude behind in every single measure of military strength - except for morale. Those guys' spirit is simply unbreakable and they will fight you for decades, and to the last man, with absolutely no relenting.
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> It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant.
Battlefields have the inconvenient property of sometimes coming to where you are. Even if you would rather not participate in any way.
Currently in democratic countries one of the brakes on war is that you need "boots" on the ground, and "boots" on the ground results in caskets draped in flags on TV. Which result in people not voting for you come next election. If you don't need humans to fight on the ground anymore (or you can get away with drastically fewer humans on the battlefield) then you will get a lot more war, and a lot more battlefields in a lot more places.
That's the problem. First order effect is of course good for the humans who don't need to die on the battlefield to achieve some goals. Second order effect is what I'm worried about. The lot more suffering caused by a lot more wars and battlefields in a less stable world.
And that is assuming you need the resources of a state to fight these autonomous wars. If the tech is cheap enough, and hard to "control" enough that it is available for organised crime you might see it used in assassinations, gang warfare, and protection rackets. And then we all will live on battlefields. Third order effects are the people hurt by the anti-drone weapons missing their target or activating the wrong time. Fourth order effects are all the constraints and weird technology restrictions they will put on tech trying to stop the proliferation of autonomous drones.
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No.
Here in Sweden we instituted mandatory military service we did so because we wanted to ensure that there was no military class that if they decide to can take over. We knew the cost, and the cost is worth it.
In normal times the cost is simply to do ones mandatory military service.
This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over.
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Don't we already have this in the form of the state?
> And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
I agree with your other points, but this only helps with (physically) extending the battlefield, at least going by the current war in Ukraine. It's not only the line of contact that is now part of the battlefield, there's also a band of 10-15 kilometres (if not more) on each side which is now part of the active battlefield because of the use of drones.
Even though I have to admit that it looks like the very big power asymmetry in favour of cheap drones over almost everything that moves down bellow (from mere soldiers on foot to armoured vehicles) has helped with actually decreasing the number of total casualties (just one of the many paradoxes of war), as it is now way too risky to get out in the open so soldiers do it way less compared with the pre-drone era.
"And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing."
You're mistaking the removal of certain soldiers for "removing people". There will absolutely be people in future battle fields, mainly civilians, or as we call them now, terrorists.
About your last paragraph: High level, I generally agree, but when you dive deeper to look at the numbers, I doubt that you can have 1000 USD drones that can fly at 200 mph/320 km/h. One quarter of that speed, I could believe.
https://youtu.be/oG2GaSMlfdo
Off the shelf parts are available for 200mph quads (that’s without payload though)
quad - no. Plane type - very doable.
I agree, but I'm a bit disappointed it will probably come to this, instead of having a mano a mano like in the movie "Robot Jox".
+1 for mentioning that movie; I watched it a month ago and it's hilarious. Nearest I've seen to live action with giant robot anime sensibilities.
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