Comment by tomalaci
21 hours ago
Exact stats are hard to come by but depletion of vehicles has certainly been noticed in battlefield footage: they started with proper military grade vehicles, went down to WW2 era vehicles, then down to light vehicles, civilian vehicles, motorcycles, scooters... donkeys.
That doesn't mean they are completely out of modern stuff but you just dont see it being used on frontlines anymore.
What is happening, however, is the rapidly developing drone warfare which is becoming terrifyingly efficient to conduct warfare in. I dont think we are far off from fully autonomous kamikaze drones at mass produced scale, at dirt cheap price.
It pretty much makes a lot of previously developed modern missiles or even defense systems (e.g. patriots) useless due to how cheaply and effectively you can launch kamikaze drone swarms.
It will require a modern Geneva convention or the extinction of humans eventually. Drones are the modern equivalent of chemical and biological weapons.
> Drones are the modern equivalent of chemical and biological weapons
We didn’t ban these because they’re an extinction threat. (They’re not.)
We banned them because they’re only useful asymmetrically. Drones, on the other hand, are useful for everyone. So no bans. (I’m putting aside that we’re moving away from global arms control agreements.)
>We didn’t ban these because they’re an extinction threat. (They’re not.)
Sorry what? Biological weapons are absolutely an extinction level threat. If you haven't watched the spread of the flu and covid every year and quickly realized that in the modern day a properly engineered bio-weapon would functionally end the human race, I'd like some of what you're having.
>We banned them because they’re only useful asymmetrically.
That's simply not true and shows either a lack of understanding of history, or an intentional perversion. The Taliban don't care about the Geneva convention, but is functionally incapable of utilizing chemical warfare to any significant degree despite the fact I'm sure they'd have loved to use it to wipe out the US military in Afghanistan for the last 20 years and the Russians before that. On the flip side, their deployment in WWI wasn't asymmetrical, both sides used the weapons and both sides agreed after watching the end result that nobody should be using them.
*If anything, drones are far, far more useful for asymmetric warfare. They can be easily acquired for cheap, there are no export controls, there's very little expertise required, and you can attach something as basic as a pipe bomb to them to do significant damage.
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