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Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

Yes, because it can scale massively and it removes even the chance of a moral reconsideration on the part of the killer. With a human soldier there's at least a chance they'll decide to disobey an order to murder innocent people.

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How could smart drones scale massively more than firearms and trucks?

If anything, we see from the conflict in Ukraine that keeping smart weapons supplied in a modern conflict it a huge effort that needs a lot of interconnected players.

This isn't the same problem at all. The weapons we have trouble supplying are huge (howitzer with smart rounds, &c.) and require good roads and rails

You could drop hundreds of autonomous drone by air, make them land somewhere and wait in standby until they get activated or detect a threat.

They scale massively because 1 guy with 100 rifles won't do much more than 1 guy with 1 rifle, 1 guy with 100 trucks won't move faster than 1 guy with 1 truck. 0 guy with 100 drones would potentially kill 100 guys simultaneously for cheap since switchblade style drones are glorified DJIs with a grenade straped at the front

I admit that control has the _possibility_ to scale well. Supply, on the contrary, it would be much harder to maintain.

That's another point in favor of drones: you can skip field maintenance and do it a the home base and deploy/recover them at time of mission, en masse. Human soldiers has to maintain their equipment in the field/forward base - which is a different set of logistical problems

>How could smart drones scale massively more than firearms and trucks?

I suspect we will start seeing the first true drone swarm deployments in Ukraine over the next couple years. The world is simply not ready for how horrifying it will be. These things can be manufactured for a few hundred bucks a piece. Sony can pump out 10 million PlayStations in a few months. What happens when that kind of logistics and manufacturing is applied to kamikaze drones? You get swarms of tens of thousands of them. The entire future of land warfare from this point on will be an arms race between drone swarms. And the swarms will take on combined arms aspects; there will be AA, AT, AP, incendiary, electronic warfare, observation, and hunter-killer variants. Winning wars in the future will consist of choosing the correct size and makeup of your swarm to counter the enemy's capability.

One person can control, at most, about two guns and one truck at a time.

> One person can control, at most, about two guns and one truck at a time.

A really big gun, or missile (battery)…

Isn't it the case that only 1 in X soldiers actually fires their weapon ? I think vaguely remember something to that effect.

If you refer to the WW1 claim floating around, then it is most likely false. If you are talking about the fact modern military has many nore support ropes than combat roles, then... yeah, but that tells nothing about the willingness to fire a gun.

There's a book on this called On Killing by David Grossman.[1]

"In World War II, only 15 to 20 percent of combat infantry were willing to fire their rifles. In Korea, about 50 percent. In Vietnam, the figure rose to more than 90 percent."

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Killing-Psychological-Cost-Learning-S...

Yeah about 8:1 in 2005 for the US

https://acoup.blog/2022/04/22/fireside-friday-april-22-2022/

I wonder what they start doing after enduring a single artillery barrage in a city. That must be horribly traumatising to see.

I recently came back home from travels and realised that our neighbour’s car burned down(I live in London), and it just struck me how horrible it looks like. That’s after seeing many videos of total destruction in Ukraine. It just never popped into my mind how unusual it is to see something like that.

That wasn’t even people dying, just practical realisation how not far we are from total civilisation collapse, if the majority of citizens wanted that.

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