[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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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

[marcus_holmes]

I think there's a big difference between a large, hot, predictable missile and a tiny, cold, evasive drone.

Area-effect weapons would have more impact, sure. But that's a lot of area to cover. A bit like flak vs airplanes - you've got to shoot a lot of metal into the air hoping for a bit of shrapnel to hit something vital.

It's the "big and expensive" vs "tiny and very cheap" decision - you don't mind losing 90% of your swarm to take out one tank, because the entire swarm costs less than the tank (added bonus: there's no humans in the swarm).

[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.