| > In a true future war scenario it wouldn't be one hobbyist drone with a jury rigged mortar round against a CRAM installation either, I would expect there to be drones flying around blasting out wide-band EM hash, dropping lines of chaff, and using other measures to clutter the battlespace and confuse and overload defending sensors to allow offensive devices to get through and damage or destroy their targets. Or maybe, the current state of the art of missiles, is superior to that strategy? Consider 1 hypersonic missile, 1 supersonic missile, and maybe 10 subsonic missiles, all cruise missiles flying no higher than 100m off the ground. Since they're so low, they can only be physically detected at a range of 10km (they're literally "behind the horizon" and cannot be detected beforehand). With proper timing: all 12 targets pop up on the horizon simultaneously. The 10 subsonic missiles will hit the ship in 30-seconds, the supersonic missile will hit the ship in 15-seconds, and the hypersonic missile will hit the ship in 5-seconds. They are all flying at a randomized flight pattern at ~2G lateral movements. Its not like missiles fly straight at their targets these days, they fly monte-carlo randomly to throw off defense systems. ------------ Now consider the drone swarm flying at 100mph that crossed over the horizon with the 12 cruise missiles. The Drone Swarm will arrive in 2+ minutes. Do your defense systems even care? Do the drones have any significant amount of lateral G's that they can pull? Can they fly at 2G random flight patterns to throw off air defenses? |
In your naval combat scenario, I think you're absolutely correct and the proliferation of autonomous drones will not cause a seismic shift in the battlefield. Unless we go mad scientist and throw in autonomous mobile mines that with a nuclear warhead that lurk around until they home in on the acoustic signature of a CVN's screws from the SCS to Guam. But we already have attack submarines.
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I've always imagined autonomous drones as having the most impact in urban combat, or 'traditional' divisional level fights. We've seen the early impact of this technology in Crimea and most lately in the Armenia and Azerbaijan conflict.