[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.

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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.

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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.

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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.