[marcus_holmes]

This feels like the same thing that happened with tanks. The end of WW1 saw tanks deployed effectively. WW2 was then fought using entirely new tactics and strategies enabled by tanks (not least "blitzkrieg").

Britain and France, notably, hadn't really worked out how to use them effectively and so were left fighting the last war, horribly disadvantaged until they worked out how to catch up (though air power being developed at the same time also had an influence).

So now we have drones, and all those incredibly expensive fighter planes are useless. Aircraft carriers will be replaced with cheap drone swarm carriers, so naval strategy will need to change. Anti-tank drone swarms will make conventional armour more or less ineffective. And so on.

The good news is that there will be anti-drone swarms too. And so we'll end up fighting battles mostly by destroying drones instead of people. Once you've knocked out all the enemy drones, they'll surrender because humans can't fight drones.

Interesting times.

[epicureanideal]

> Once you've knocked out all the enemy drones, they'll surrender because humans can't fight drones.

Or will lead to blending in with civilians, more advanced camouflage, or “hugging the enemy” tactics (staying close enough that they risk harming their own people). Or more terrorism rather than open warfare.

It might be that with these killer drones, we will look back on WW2 style armies in the field as equivalent to 18th century musketeers lining up and firing volleys at each other in bright colored shirts.

[dragontamer]

> It might be that with these killer drones, we will look back on WW2 style armies in the field as equivalent to 18th century musketeers lining up and firing volleys at each other in bright colored shirts.

When the guns were so inaccurate that getting more shots was more important than actually aiming, that's the natural tactic to employ.

Lining up was hugely important for other members of the army to know what you're doing. If you're 1st in line, you shoot. Back of the line you're loading gunpowder (with everyone else). Middle of the line, you're dropping the bullet into the musket. Etc. etc.

Like a choir performance: its more about having tons of other people doing the same thing you're supposed to be doing. So no one in the army ever "misses" a step in the ~1-minute reload process.

Even if you're not that good at singing, you get "better" in a choir because you just follow the crowd. Similarly, even if you've forgotten a few steps in the long reload process, you just mimic the actions of your neighbors.

-----------

Note that the Redcoat beat the US rifles at pretty much every engagement. It was guerilla warfare that allowed George Washington to survive and last through the war.

Rifles took longer to load. Without precision machining, the bullets needed to be wadded up with paper to stick with the rifling, adding a laborious step in the shooting process. Muskets could fire more shots per minute due to the smooth (though inaccurate) barrels. In army vs army battles, aim doesn't matter, your bullet will hit somebody over there, so there's no advantage to the superior aim that rifles have. You've added 20-seconds to your reload process for almost no tactical advantage at all.

USA experimented with rifles / guerilla warfare, but it really wasn't that successful in the 1700s. (It got the job done but... George Washington lost far more battles than he won). Even in the mid 1800s, the British Square formations were doing decently.

[cercatrova]

I don't think the parent was saying that firing lines were ineffective - indeed, like you say, if they were actually ineffective, people back then would've stopped using them. Rather, the parent was comparing the changing nature of warfare, such that we see field armies today as being eternal in warfare, but just like firing lines, they too will be replaced by new tactics. It doesn't mean that field armies don't work currently, just that they won't work in the future.

[dragontamer]

I guess my overall point is that the specific, nitty-gritty reasons militaries do one thing over the other is more interesting and enlightening when put into context.

If drones are the weapon of the future, then they will have some kind of advantage over their predecessor. A lot of people in this page are talking as if drones will replace fighters (lol no), cruise missiles (lol no), and other weaponry.

Lets really think about things: What does a Predator Drone really do? How is the military using drones TODAY, and how does that change in the future?

We can see that the #1 advantage of a drone is its __loitering__ capabilities. Missiles can't loiter, and sending a pilot in there to loiter is higher-risk than sending in a drone.

Can __loitering__ help in a fight vs a tank? Yes: if the loitering drone is faster than air support (which it will be, because its at the time/place to support the infantry), then it is reasonable to expect infantry to use a drone rather than call on air-support.

--------------

This is how combat changes. One step at a time, as people incrementally think about the distinct advantages a weapon has over its predecessor. Musket-warfare was such because shooting a bullet-per-minute was better than shooting a bullet-per-1.5 minutes.

Rifle warfare (thanks to the Minié ball) allowed accurate rifles to shoot faster than once-per-minute AND do so accurately. And as such, tactics changed. It was no longer a question of "bullet throughput vs bullet accuracy", an invention happened that allowed both simultaneously.

---------

What advantages do drones have in combat? That's really the big question that needs to be discussed. Today's modern theory of combat is "Combined Arms". We want to invent devices where "Device X" requires special weaponry, while "Device Y" requires OPPOSITE weaponry.

RPGs kill tanks, but are terrible vs infantry. Machine guns kill infantry, but are terrible vs tanks. SAM kill airplanes, but are terrible vs tanks and infantry.

Each "leg" of your combined arms forces the opponent to make a difficult choice. What gun do I pack in my bags today? Where do drones fit in this puzzle?

As far as I'm concerned, drones are looking increasingly like "infantry replacement", more than anything. Their ability to "loiter" in an area, and probably have specialized weaponry (through with a small payload) means you can carry a wide variety of weapons on a wide variety of different drones, in support of a greater overall mission. At least, if future drones are as cheap as everyone seems to be making them sound...

[the_sleaze]

I agree with much of what you say, but I think you're limiting your imagination in drones' current and imminent capabilities are.

Drones can, and are, replacing fighters and cruise missiles, if not make those ideas of weapons platforms entirely obsolete. Autonomous jets exist already, you may have not heard of missiles composed of thousands of small single-use bombs with onboard auto guidance, which also exist already.

While yes, loitering is a strength, it is far and away not the only thing a robot can be engineered to do.

The bigger idea here is the problems being solved when diplomacy breaks down into violence. You seem to not be aware that modern warfare consists of Shock and Awe. Not like the movies. If there could be a combatant in an office building in the next village, you call in an AC130 and you blow up the building. The idea is that warfare isn't a battle of contrition, but a battle of financial resolution.

So, looking at it from this angle, yes; the natural evolution of warfare will be robot on robot until one side runs out of the ability to make more robots.

Everything else resulting from this has been stated already.

But I think you're just underestimating human engineering and imagination.

[dragontamer]

I think you're underestimating the capabilities of traditional fighter jets (or even modern stealth ones) and cruise missiles.

And you're probably underestimating the costs associated with stealth paints / stealth capabilities. Its not easy to avoid modern radar systems. You've pretty much got two choices:

1. Go cheap and swarm -- Ignore stealth entirely, but you pop up on radar like a sore thumb. Which opens up your drones to a variety of automated weaponry. CIWS defense are basically radar-based aimbots that can shoot down supersonic threats like cruise missiles. I find it unlikely that a modern drone would go faster (or cheaper) than a typical rocket lobbed at Israel's Iron Dome, but think of that for a typical defense system you're trying to break these days.

2. Go expensive and stealth -- Stealth capabilities are clearly the future, but their extraordinary costs (F35 project) are well known. Furthermore, stealth capabilities make communication (radio) extremely difficult. If you emit a noise, you can be detected, so a human in the loop (ex: F35) just seems innately more reliable, since they can be "cut off" and enter radio silence for extended periods of time.

--------

Swarming the Israeli Iron Dome with many, many rockets is a strategy that seems to work on occasion. Its not a perfect air defense, so with enough rockets, it begins to miss.

But each of these dumb rockets are launched extremely cheaply: without much computer smarts at all, just flying as fast as possible to make it harder to get shot down. Once we start talking about computer systems (especially in 2021, a year where we've run out of computer chips), your costs escalate severely.

The cheap-and-swarm methodology, especially if you're not really concerned about where you hit exactly (Hamas is mostly doing this as a political / terrorism ploy), is kind of well optimized already. And I'm not entirely sure if an organization like Hamas would switch their rockets to drones in an attempt to beat Israel's Iron Dome. In fact, I'd argue that such a move would be worse than what they're already doing.

[sangnoir]

> Or more terrorism rather than open warfare.

Some autonomous weapons blur the line, like the 'sniperbot' recently used to kill an Iranian nuclear scientist as he drove by. The weapon itself was mounted to the back of a truck, and could have lay waiting for days/weeks/months. There is no need for the fighters to blend in, when the weapons can - I imagine in the future where some high ranking military or political figure is sniped by a traffic light (by way of facial recognition or a humble license plate reader)

[koheripbal]

Given the highly accurate nature of drone fire seen in the Armenian-Azeri war recently, I do not think "hugging the enemy" works any longer.

[stickfigure]

> those incredibly expensive fighter planes are useless. Aircraft carriers will be replaced

I'm not fully convinced. The advantage of drones is that they are relatively cheap. That automatically comes with significant range and speed limitations; after all, as someone else mentioned, we already have long-range semi-autonomous drones called missiles. They aren't cheap.

Naval engagements, not to mention aircraft engagements, happen at distances that are just not in the reach of cheap drones. Someone might get a surprise shot at an aircraft carrier in peacetime, but probably not while alert on the open sea. And I'm sure ships will be upgraded with defenses (if they haven't already).

Tanks and infantry, that's a more interesting problem.

[sandworm101]

>> And I'm sure ships will be upgraded with defenses (if they haven't already).

They already have CIWS (and a bunch of other stuff) to shoot down incoming supersonic and maneuvering anti-ship missiles. Any drone slower or less difficult to hit than those missiles stands little chance. Drones can extend the eye and ears of a ship but they are not going to be killing ships themselves anytime soon.

[baybal2]

No air defence system is considered efficient against supersonic, sea skimming missiles, let alone manoeuvering ones.

[marcus_holmes]

Aircraft carriers engage at range because they're high-value targets themselves and they need to stay at range.

If you produce 100 small boats (I'm thinking torpedo-boat size), each of which carry a few thousand cheap drones with a 5km range, then you can do 90% of the job of an aircraft carrier for 10% (or less) of the cost.

[koonsolo]

I agree. Plus, the payload of a drone is way too small to do any proper damage. That's like a 100 mosquitos stinging an elephant.

[the_sleaze]

This is an entirely inaccurate metaphor, and a frightening lack of insight.

[falcolas]

Nah. Humans can't fight cruise missiles either, yet it hasn't changed to where one side gives up when the other has cruise missiles.

Humans aren't that logical.

[rajin444]

> Humans aren't that logical.

I think they're perfectly logical. Superior force (in the context being discussed) makes you better at war, but not ruling.

Advances in military tech will probably reduce the overall bodycount of wars, but they don't solve the insurgency problem.

[marcus_holmes]

I thought Patriot and all those Isreali firework shows were anti-missile defences?

[AlexandrB]

The Venn diagram of people who have cruise missiles and people who have anti-missile defences is a circle. I think parent was talking about various guerrilla fighters/terrorists who have neither technology but still engage in conflicts with those that do.

[epicureanideal]

Cruise missiles are expensive. In theory a million person guerrilla army that stays somewhat spread out can be too expensive to use cruise missiles against effectively. But small, cheap drones…

[baybal2]

You can't shoot down modern cruise missiles with any kind of reliability.

Qassam missiles are straight, dumb ballistic missiles with no guidance.

[ska]

I thought all of that works pretty ok against relatively slow and dumb missiles only though, no?

[petermcneeley]

This analysis is slightly off because WWI and WWII were great powers fighting each other. If the great powers were ever to directly fight this would still be nuclear war. Nothing about "swarming bots" has significantly changed this domain.

Where bots and swarm bots would be used is likely in asymmetric warfare.

"Aircraft carriers will be replaced with cheap drone swarm carriers" I would argue that Aircraft carriers are the size and cost due to large munitions and maintenance constraints.

[marcus_holmes]

> I would argue that Aircraft carriers are the size and cost due to large munitions and maintenance constraints.

Pretty sure runways are the reason. VTOL aircraft are too expensive to operate. Helicopters aren't good at attacking ships. Conventional aircraft need a runway: aircraft carriers have to be that big.

[epicureanideal]

Swarm bots would also be useless against tanks or carriers. Too small to carry enough explosives to do much. As the drone becomes big enough to do more it approaches the size of a missile, which we already have.

[nostrademons]

A TOW anti-tank missile's warhead is about 10 lbs, and it penetrates tanks just fine. That's well within the carrying capacities of commodity carrying drones, which can carry about 20-100 lbs.

Shaped charges are remarkably effective at penetrating armor, penetrating up to 7x their diameter. A 4-inch wide charge will penetrate up to 28 inches of solid steel armor, more than a WW2 battleship's armor.

I don't know how much armor a modern aircraft carrier has, but they're designed for the era of not-very-maneuverable warheads. Send it through the aircraft lifts and blow up the hangar filled with munitions and jet fuel, or punch through the bridge windows and kill the command staff.

Same goes for common tank countermeasures against HEAT rounds, like composite or reactive armor. These are both designed on the assumption that the same exact spot is not going to be hit twice, but you can program a drone to invalidate that assumption pretty easily.

[1e-9]

Armored vehicles have thin armor on top, which allows effective top-attack by smaller munitions such as SADARM.[1]

SADARM is smaller than a typical toaster and weighs 12 kg.

An even smaller micro-drone could just attack a tank's gun by setting a small charge or providing blockage that would be devastating when the tank fired.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_and_Destroy_ARMor

[marcus_holmes]

how much of a missile's weight is payload, and how much is "missile"? I don't know enough about either to be able to say for certainty, but it's probable that the ratio of payload:delivery is different for drones, and possibly better.

also, drones can do stupid things like fly underneath tanks, or land on them and then place a charge right up against the armour (or a vision slit, etc). Or even place a charge, back off, detonate it, then place a second charge on the same spot and detonate that. And of course a swarm can see multiple drones attack exactly the same spot on a tank's armour.

also, they don't need to destroy the tank. They just need to mess with it enough that it needs repair.

[dragontamer]

> also, drones can do stupid things like fly underneath tanks

I'm not sure how this is superior to just shooting a tank with a missile.

> Or even place a charge, back off, detonate it, then place a second charge on the same spot and detonate that

Now you've halved the payload. If your drone can carry 10kg, you now have 2x 5kg bombs instead of 1x 10kg bomb. If you have a single payload, you have just a shitty, slow moving cruise missile.

> And of course a swarm can see multiple drones attack exactly the same spot on a tank's armour.

We have *guns* that attack the same spot on a Tank's armor. Let alone missiles or drones. Al Qaeda was chaining RPGs in the last war together (__literally__ a chain) that accomplishes that goal.

--------------

The __ONLY__ advantage I can see drones having is sustaining a position for hours at a time. Missiles always fly at top speed, so you can't just "wait around" an area with a missile.

A drone with a gun can sit in a location for 4 hours waiting for the tank to come, then fire the RPG when the tank comes into position. That is, the drone plays a role similar to a modern infantry, except the drone is cheaper to make.

But as soon as you're talking "hit the same spot twice", then we're back to guns / RPGs with a chain on it. Maybe a drone can fire that gun, but... don't have the drone do the job directly.

---------

EDIT: The theory of "Combined Arms" means that in practice, you'll never face a lone tank. In practice, infantry move to protect tanks, and tanks move to protect infantry.

If you are a soldier who is facing an enemy army: you only have enough strength to carry one weapon. So what do you pick? An anti-tank RPG? Or an anti-infantry machine gun?

Drones seem to fit the same conundrum on both sides. I'd expect drones to be weak against small arms (a machine gun would quickly disable a drone, even if it moves at 100 mph). While RPGs are useless vs drones. Similarly, a drone has a very small payload, so it only can have a certain number of weapons.

[marcus_holmes]

> I'm not sure how this is superior to just shooting a tank with a missile.

armour underneath a tank is usually much lighter, because it's difficult to hit. Missiles have to do fancy armour-penetration stuff to get through the main armour on a tank. If you can get a shaped charge stuck to the underside of a tank, you don't need to do the fancy stuff.

> If you have a single payload, you have just a shitty, slow moving cruise missile.

yes. exactly. Except that for the cost of a single conventional cruise missile, you now have 10,000 shitty slow-moving, intelligent, able-to-do-evasive-maneuvres missiles.

> Al Qaeda was chaining RPGs in the last war together

so it works then? Imagine 10,000 RPG grenades flying by themselves, able to chain-hit a target, with no human operator in sight.

> A drone with a gun can sit in a location for 4 hours waiting for the tank to come, then fire the RPG when the tank comes into position.

The drone is the grenade. It doesn't fire the grenade. It flies to the target, attaches itself, goes bang. Next one flies to the same point, attaches, goes bang. There's thousands of them.

[dragontamer]

> armour underneath a tank is usually much lighter, because it's difficult to hit. Missiles have to do fancy armour-penetration stuff to get through the main armour on a tank. If you can get a shaped charge stuck to the underside of a tank, you don't need to do the fancy stuff.

I'm not even sure if the air-pressures under a tank would allow a drone to fly under there. Let alone the myriad of anti-air defenses a modern tank has.

The M1A1 Abrams tank has not only the main cannon, but also a .50 Caliber M2 Browning and two M240 machine guns. In addition, there's a general expectation that a tank would be surrounded by supporting troops and equipment (and vice versa: the tank supports the troops, as per the theory of Combined Arms)

So a tank, facing a swarm of drones, probably can just fire its two machine guns and take them out. Its not like drones have any armor of any kind. Similarly, anti-personnel rifles from the supporting infantry would probably be effective against those drones.

Once we start considering weapons like air-burst grenades, I'm finding it less-and-less likely that a "10,000 Swarm" makes any sense what-so-ever. The __reason__ we mix tanks-with-infantry is because a singular weapon (ex: air-burst grenade) works only on infantry (tank armor is too thick), while a Tandem-shaped charge RPG only really works on tanks (Personnel are relatively cheap and move in groups. If you kill one, the rest of their buddies gang up and kill you).

------------

Any scenario where you're just lobbing uniformly made drones into the same area just opens them up to air-burst or machine gun fire.

-----------

EDIT: I had a lot of unnecessary words. Lets just point this out... I'm not sure if you understand how good machine guns are today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS

We have machine guns that can autonomously aim and shoot-down a group of missiles that travel at 1500 mph (Mach 2). And you think a swarm of 10,000 drones flying at lol 100 mph has a chance?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB8d3OaFEco

Depending on the armament: you could have up to 9000 "pellets" per shot that airburst at the expected distance to maximize the chance of hitting the target.

If a missile flying at 1500mph has no chance, why do you think a drone at 100 chance or 200 mph has a chance?

Israel's "Iron Dome" machine guns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGaqBWXM8Ko

These platforms are "portable", for a definition of portable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAw82h-IhdQ

[ign0ramus]

A tomahawk with a 1000 lbs warhead weighs 2900 lbs (or 3500 lbs with a booster)[1]. It's a long range missile so, it is probably possible to achieve a better ratio for something shorter range but I have doubts regarding quadcopters like the ones discussed in the article being able to do so by virtue of how fixed wing craft (which the tomahawk is IMHO).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomahawk_(missile)

[marcus_holmes]

yeah, but for the cost of 1 tomahawk you could launch 100,000 ish kamikaze drones. Maybe 10,000 if we made them more sophisticated and a bit larger. And if the maths work out that a tomahawk is cheaper than a tank, then there's room to increase those numbers. The maths really favour drones on this.

And the infrastructure is so much easier - the tomahawk needs a specialist launch vehicle, that is in turn vulnerable to being spotted and attacked. Drones need a backpack and a bluetooth connection (for each 100 drones or so).

[throwaway316943]

They could also target specific systems on the tank. The main gun, the engine, the tracks. They’re essentially anti tank hand grenades that don’t require someone to get close to the tank.

[ufmace]

> "Aircraft carriers will be replaced with cheap drone swarm carriers" I would argue that Aircraft carriers are the size and cost due to large munitions and maintenance constraints.

Mostly the need to carry big heavy bombs and missiles to attack big targets, and big heavy radars to find those targets, and big fuel tanks to stay up long enough to get to them, which then requires catapults to get them airborne and arrestor wire landing strips to recover them.

[GuB-42]

> So now we have drones, and all those incredibly expensive fighter planes are useless.

Not useless. The idea seem to be that fighter planes will become something like a command center for the drone swarm. There is value in having a human on site, to take quick decisions for instance, and links to drones can be jammed.

And if you look at the F-35 program, you'll see hints that it is the way we are going. It is a stealth fighter with a heavy emphasis on communication systems. Perfect for managing a fleet of drones. Ok, the execution is far from perfect, but that's another debate.

In the end, it is not entirely unlike the current situation. The difference is that these drones blow themselves up on arrival and are called missiles.

Oh, and swarms of drones won't be cheap, that's the army we are talking about. "Predator" style drones are multi-million dollar machines. A small missile like the Hellfire costs around $100k apiece. Forget your idea of a swarm of hobby quadcopters.

[spywaregorilla]

> The good news is that there will be anti-drone swarms too. And so we'll end up fighting battles mostly by destroying drones instead of people. Once you've knocked out all the enemy drones, they'll surrender because humans can't fight drones.

They can still fight the guerilla war among citizens. That's been an incredibly effective strategy because it's so expensive to fight. One might wonder if drones are the key to fighting these wars cheaply. If all you need is a small local base and then a thousand drones to surveil a populace... Well that sounds pretty nightmarish for the citizens, but it would certainly change the nature of war.

[nickthemagicman]

> And so we'll end up fighting battles mostly by destroying drones instead of people.

This is one piece of possibly good news that it seems like everyone is overlooking.

Automation/Remote control applies not just to drones, but tanks, boats, other aerial vehicles, and maybe troops(after seeing that Boston Dynamics dog robot) etc. Seems like it will be a small squad of highly advanced human troops to move in after the Remotes to secure and maintain control of the area.

So many lives will be spared during wars.

However, this may be unbeatable tech by humans, so any future revolutions will be easily quelled by a gov't with a few drone pilots piloting a drone swarm in a room a thousand miles away.

[throwaway316943]

More likely it will cause a greater loss of life while invalidating previous military tactics. These weapons are more similar to land mines than guided missiles. They’ll be used primarily against troops and armour but also stationary targets like radar, command posts, barracks, depots, and in a bigger war probably against civilian targets. You could drop hundreds of these from a bomber or dozens from a large truck that an insurgent can park close to the target but outside the secured area or a single terrorist could deploy a single drone at a high value target. I’m hoping anti drone technology turns out to be easier and cheaper otherwise we’re seriously screwed.

[marcus_holmes]

I agree. This isn't all bad :) Like the move from conscript peasant armies to volunteer professional armies, leave the rest of us out of it.

It'll come down to "how many drones, and of what quality, can your manufacturing base produce?". But this is not that dissimilar from WW2's "how many tanks, and of what quality, can you manufacture?" equation.

Insurgencies will be about getting a small swarm in exactly the right place at the right time.

[keiferski]

On that note, it is interesting how a British military theorist more-or-less invented these tank tactics used by the Germans. (Although it is debated as to how much influence he actually had.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._H._Liddell_Hart

[caseysoftware]

This is a rough explanation of the "generations of warfare" where our tactics are defined by the tools and weapons we have available. Unfortunately, we (humans, not just the US) tend to then treat those as the "right" tactics even as the underlying tools and weapons change so we're always fighting the last war.

Cheap, autonomous, easily-deployed tools - weapons drones, sensors, etc - are a huge change that some are adapting to leverage but few have adapted to respond to.

Which is scary considering the "generations of warfare" model where in fourth generation warfare, the boundary between civilian and combatant is blurred..

[marcus_holmes]

Exactly. Machine guns invalidated cavalry charges, but we ended up in a trench war just trying to create a break in the trenches long enough to get the cavalry through. Tanks invalidated trench warfare, but the French built an impregnable defensive line along the border that would make them invincible in the next trench war.

And it's fascinating seeing the comments here saying "nah, this won't change anything" when it already is changing things.

And yes, the blurring of the lines is a problem. As others have pointed out, hiding drones in civilian populations is easy.

[caseysoftware]

I was at an SMS aggregator before joining Twilio back in the day.

At the SMS aggregator, it took $10k to get started, $1k/month for a short code, and $0.1/message.

When I discovered Twilio and found it took $0 to get started, $1/month for a long code, and $0.01/message, the world changed.

It became easy enough to build yourself, fast enough to experiment with, and cheap enough to fail. I see the same thing happening here but with lives on the line.

[grey-area]

> And so we'll end up fighting battles mostly by destroying drones instead of people. Once you've knocked out all the enemy drones, they'll surrender because humans can't fight drones.

A war like no other?

[marcus_holmes]

"war never changes" right? ;)

[ReptileMan]

And I will spend the weekend developing autoaiming gun battery that shoots the .22LR that needs to ground one of those birds and we are at stage 1.

[nomoreplease]

This isn’t realistic

1. This won’t be your average <$1000 quad copter with a two kilometer range

2. Even if it was it could be hundreds of them

3. The military are developing large aircraft that function as essentially fighter aircraft that can destroy your tiny gun battery from 50-100 km away

[stickfigure]

This makes no sense. If we're talking about an opponent that can field fighter aircraft and missiles that can destroy anti-drone defenses at 50-100km away, they could just use those missiles instead of drones to destroy the "real" target.

Seems to me the likely scenario is some sort of cheap projectile automatic weapon mounted on a vehicle. It doesn't take much to take down a drone and they move incredibly slowly compared to "real" missiles. Sure, 22LR, why not.

[marcus_holmes]

iirc the "slaughterbot" concept is about tiny kamikaze drones. Enough explosive to crack open a skull in a drone about the size of a coin, and not much more expensive than that coin. Release hundreds of thousands of them for less than the cost of a single missile, and each of them will independently target and execute a single human.

I don't think any kind of conventional gun is going to do anything against this.

[stickfigure]

That's still very much science fiction though. What kind of battery power density would you need to make it viable?

Also: Soldiers already wear armor designed to stop bullets. Not sure this is an obvious gamechanger.

[klyrs]

Bullets are a truly silly approach. Grapeshot is already banned in war, and seems like it could be significantly more effective (but still they'll only tear a cone out of a cloud). As far as I can tell, the best defense is an EMP pulse to fry their electronics. If they aren't fully autonomous, jamming the radio might work.

[klyrs]

> Sure, 22LR, why not.

Because they're subsonic soon after they leave the barrel. A swarm could have fairly precise directional hearing, so dodging such a slow bullet isn't out of the question.

[eindiran]

I mean, you can drop in 5.56 or even magnum rimfire rounds like 17HMR (anything that is supersonic past eg 200m) and that issue is mitigated. The swarms could hypothetically still detect muzzle flashes, so that could allow them to respond.

But the real issue is that the threat is a swarm, why are you taking potshots at it. Whatever weapon you use should be able to consume as many of them as possible at once.

[stickfigure]

Birdshot? Plus less risk of collateral damage when the misses fall back to earth.

[jayd16]

I kind of doubt drone vs drone will be all that effective. Have anti-missile systems ever been all that effective?

[Grimm665]

Simulation of course, but I'll submit this video for your consideration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K8LGTwy6Zw

To sum up the conclusion of the several-hour video series: the Aegis Combat System is essentially impenetrable to all but the most overwhelming of forces.

[rightbyte]

The resurgence of battle ships? It can't counter cannons right?

[Grimm665]

Perhaps not, but missile cruisers can :) They try that in a different series, a fully armed WWII battleship group against a modern US carrier group. Guns just don't have the range compared to surface launched missiles and they can't get close enough.

I won't pretend to be some expert on military hardware, I'm a guy interested in flight sims, and that video series just happened to catch my attention. They make a compelling argument though, cruise missiles are one of the methods they try (unsure if supersonic), and they are attacking the carrier group in the absolute worst defensive position it could be in: a narrow gulf surrounded by unfriendly territory on most sides.

Still, not much gets through. If it's not the missile defense system that gets you, it's the F/A-18 patrols. If not them, it's the F-14s that can scramble in minutes. Scary stuff.

[Gunax]

I didnt watch it, but what about a supersonic cruise missile?

[sabhiram]

Directional EMP development, here we go!

[hermitcrab]

>Once you've knocked out all the enemy drones, they'll surrender because humans can't fight drones.

And what happens if these autonomous drones aren't programmed to accept surrounder (as seems likely)?

[l33t2328]

Why does that seem likely?

[onion2k]

Once you've knocked out all the enemy drones...

Then the enemy will build, or buy, more drones. Well-funded armies or terrorist groups don't lose because they run out of weapons.

[koonsolo]

I see you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

A drone cannot effectively damage a tank or any other major equipment.

The payload a swarm-drone is just way too small. Why have 100 needles when you can have 1 sword.

We have rockets, which are way more effective than any number drones.

A "drone" that can do proper damage is already the size of a plane. Anything less is only useful for recon.