[jpt4]

"Hopping drones", with movement akin to the hunting method of robins [0], will be used as a kind of living minefield in military operations. When anti-air is absent/suppressed, they will engage in high energy aerial maneuvers to cover as much ground, with as little contest, as possible. Once emplaced, they will lower their signature and engage in low energy defensive fire/ambush behaviors, to hold territory.

The critical consideration is that movement is dangerous, under conditions of pervasive battlefield surveillance, so when it is possible at all it must be exploited to its full potential, and thus can be conducted via an expensive process such as flight. In turn, to make movement dangerous to the enemy, one must make terrain frictionful to cross, through high lethality, low detectability assets, of which mines are the paradigmatic example.

[0] Brief bursts of flight interwoven between slow stalking of different ground locations for worms.

[eszed]

I hadn't thought of that, but it's terrifying. Like, far more nightmare-inducing than a conventional minefield.

How would you counter? Up-armoured bipedal robots with roughly human-shaped heat-signatures is the only thing that would defeat easily-implemented automatic counter-measures. But if the "minefield" is under surveillance + command and control, then that goes right out the window. Besides, the cost-benefit (let alone logistics) is firmly in favor of the defender's "robins". I suspect attackers will try jamming signals and then send in the meatshields.

Ugh.

[nine_k]

Why, a "vacuum bomb", that is, a large-volume detonation of combustible spray, could give a serious kick to anything and everything within the area.

(If not that, a small nuke can generate enough heat and gamma rays to burn everything near the point of the blast, but the military escalation hasn't reached this point just yet.)

[eszed]

Not a bad thought. (Your first one: if we're throwing nukes around I suspect minefields will be the last of our worries.) The complicating factor would be how widely they can be dispersed, and how quickly they can converge. It might take more vacuum bombs than is feasible to clear even a small area.

I had another thought. There's a tried and tested method for knocking down bird-sized moving objects. So, what about shotguns? (Yes, I know they're currently banned for combat use. I think something like this would override that, at least de facto.)

[marcosdumay]

> How would you counter?

With something cheaper that you spread around. Drone grenades?