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Comment by 100011_100001 | Hacker News Reader

I think the natural progression of war is going to be remote controlled systems. Drones are for flying.

Remote Controlled land and water units would also work.

There are multiple reasons why it's the future.

1. Cheap to make

2. Can be smaller since they don't have to have space for humans to sit in them, which might increase ability to carry things, longer range etc.

3. Because humans don't have to be inside of them they can also go a higher speeds, maneuver faster without human body limitations

4. If a drone goes down, the drone pilot can man another one. All that training and knowledge is retained. Human operated vehicles have a high probability of losing their occupants.

5. If 5,000 drones get destroyed, it's lost money. If 5,000 military personnel gets killed it appears much worse in terms of optics, value of life etc.

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The next issue to arise in this paradigm is that autonomous machines are most analogous to mercenaries, with no fixed allegiance to the nation they are fighting for. Thus this army of 5,000 drones could alarmingly be converted to an enemy force in a way a normal army could not.

Maybe mercenaries without the random war crimes aspect.

Now we see the actual DRM wars.

And the natural progression of war will lead to the toner wars. The drones will become so small that they become next mesothelioma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age: "Nell's older brother, who plays an important role in the beginning as her protector; he obtains the Primer for his sister by mugging John Percival Hackworth. Harv is forced to leave Nell when she is accepted by the Neo-Victorians, and is later bedridden by asthma caused by the inhalation of dead nanomachines ("toner") in his childhood."

I would expect that, at the low end, a drone's maximum velocity and its range would be proportional to its size. Really small drones would be perfect for loitering (unless it's windy), but less good for getting to a denied location (unless it's downwind). That seems to me to really limit the usefulness of really small drones.

Now they're talking semi-autonomous mobile weapons systems to accompany special operators. The drone wars will scale up from the bottom and scale down from the top to meet in the middle for a full spectrum of robot-on-robot mayhem. And thus SkyNet was born...

The era of remote control won't last too long though because of signal jamming. Autonomous systems that don't need constant control by a human operator is the next logical progression.

CDMA and other spread-spectrum radio tech was developed to counter signal jamming. If your comms is split amongst a range of frequencies and extractible with pseudo-random codes or other trunking scheme then you've raised the cost of jamming significantly.

And jammers are always going to leave parts of the spectrum untouched so the owners of the jammers can still communicate.

There are a myriad of ways to work through signal jamming.Something designed to work in a battlefield can utilize one or several methods.

Most civilian devices aren't designed to do that because it's usually more expensive. There are also nebulous arguments about hindering law enforcement (but also counter-arguments about criminals eg "if you outlaw guns then only outlaws will have guns").

The problem with jamming is that in order to be effective the transponder has to be very "loud", which means it can be destroyed by a missile which is built to target the "loudest" object in front of it. Active radar can partially avoid these systems by turning off during inactivity, but jamming has to be continuous to really be effective

I can imagine a semi-disposable drone-like device being used for fast and cheap reconnaissance. If cost of something with a camera and rough lidar can be brought to $200, then why not turn it into a 'consumable' item that can be deployed from out of a briefcase?

I feel like assuming that the device will be lost/destroyed can help optimize for short-term performance. Why not add a few grams of C4 to it, to make sure that it and its silicon are absolutely unrecoverable and in many pieces after its operational lifetime?

I feel like you just described the Switchblade drones.

https://www.avinc.com/tms/switchblade

The animated image is cracking me the hell up. It just glides out of the tube like WHOOP!

But, that's actually very close to what I was thinking about! I was imagining something with a much shorter range, however. Something like 1km, compared to that thing's 10km.

I suspect this is exactly what they are going for but at the same time, reliability is critical if you only have a handful of them you can't afford for some to not work, so by the time you use some prime components, they start costing "military" money instead!

You're almost describing the Russian Orlan-10, except you've got the cost off by an order of magnitude (they cost around $2,000 each).

$200 is an incredibly ambitious target that's unlikely to be hit, but it's also not necessary to bring costs that low. Our military budget is $800B/yr and our current drones cost way more than $2000. Simply bringing the costs down a bit would get us sufficient quantity.

Nah, custom FPV drones are in that range.

It’s doable rn

Oh, that's much larger than I was thinking of. I was thinking somewhere on low-single-digit-km range, and probably sized to where carbon fiber + aluminum are still the best choices for the frame materials. Roughly, the size of 2 beer bottles?

Like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hornet_Nano

You're the one replier so far to who I must say, larger, but not by too much. 1 or 2 beer bottles of size is what I was thinking of.

I suspect the cheapest option would be cameras mounted on artillery shells.

https://www.afcea.org/content/artillery-eyes-provide-sight-g...

The U S army worked on putting cameras in howitzer shells as far back as the 70’s, so short-ish range (10 miles or so), but cheap by military standards.

Though these days a cheap plastic drone might easily be less expensive if mass produced.

6. Killing someone by clicking a button and watching the explosion on a TV is much easier than pulling a trigger in the real-world

The PTSD articles from people in Las Vegas driving drones in the Middle East seem to indicate otherwise. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/us/drones-airstrikes-ptsd...

It’s not the killing.

It’s the watching, tracking, and recording. It’s the months of getting to know every aspect of the individuals.

They become real, not just the ‘enemy’.

From what I hear, PTSD is pretty bad among stateside UAV operators. https://dronecenter.bard.edu/burdens-war-crews-drone-aircraf...

This is a false ethical concern: it's harder in person because the other guy can shoot back.

This contributes another ethical quality though: if the other person can shoot back, you have a right to go all out in order to defend yourself. The same cannot be said for unmanned warfare, where the immediate danger is asymmetric.

I don't think it's possible to reconcile the battlefield with an ethics of self defense. You can pick a side that way, yes, but the doctrines of justifiable homicide simply don't hold up in battle.

In modern wars, especially those were one party is a lot stronger than the other and wants to keep the moral high ground, ethics does come into play.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_engagement:

“Rules of engagement (ROE) are the internal rules or directives afforded military forces (including individuals) that define the circumstances, conditions, degree, and manner in which the use of force, or actions which might be construed as provocative, may be applied. They provide authorization for and/or limits on, among other things, the use of force and the employment of certain specific capabilities. In some nations, articulated ROE have the status of guidance to military forces, while in other nations, ROE constitute lawful command. Rules of engagement do not normally dictate how a result is to be achieved, but will indicate what measures may be unacceptable.”

Soldiers won’t be allowed to destroy a house on the grounds that it can be used by a sniper, for example, but must have reasonable certainty that it is being used as such.

Yes but not the ethics of self defense, such as a doctrine of clear and present danger.

Self defense doesn't have a concept of a combatant, only an immediate threat to the safety of yourself or another.

Couldn't the same be said of an artilleryman? Or a bomber pilot dropping ordnance on a position with no AA defense? Or a tanker shelling infantry with no AT gear?

Isn't the difference more about collateral damage? In the battle, you have at least an inkling of the person you are shooting being an enemy, if you are ordered to bomb a house and find out that a load of kids were killed as well as the target, it becomes much more traumatic.

I have zero military experience so just guessing!

It may or may not be easier to remotely kill someone else from across the world, but I suspect that drone warfare will evolve quickly so it’s drone vs drone. I suspect few people would feel bad about shooting down some pieces of metal and plastic.

Attended a dinner with dozens of active and retired pilots from three services. The highlight were two speakers who saw combat in the Gulf War I. Wing Commander’s SiL (F-16) pilot and son (SAR medic).

They loved the formers gun camera videos and stories. They squirmed and looked at their desserts when the latter showed up close and personal pics of the “Highway of Death”in Kuwait. Miles and miles of burned bodies in the sands.

Pilots don’t have to watch in 4k like the button clickers do.

I don't think the majority of deaths in combat have been from humans killing other humans that they can see with their eyes for a long time. Possibly well over a hundred years.

If killing someone through a camera is action-at-a-distance, so is blowing up an opaque metal box that you know probably has four humans in it, or firing your artillery piece at a grid square that probably has some humans in it, or dropping a bomb on a glowing blob on a thermal sensor that's probably a human. Even in daytime infantry-on-infantry combat, at a lot of ranges you're not shooting at people, you're shooting at piece of cover you saw gunfire emanate from. All of these partially-removed actions are also mainly what we're seeing drones do well at.

While one could design a killer robot to go inside buildings and shoot people while looking them in the eye, the complexities and timeframes of close-range combat make it seems like the very last place for robots to replace infantry.

This is also a way to think about the UFOs. If they are uncrewed, then it's quite possible it took them tens or hundreds of years to get here, and once here, to seek out US Navy maneuvers (cos that's where the most interesting electromagnetic spectrum is), and then toy with them to check our capabilities. And then report back. If the "UFO attack" on Washington DC in the early 50s was one series of contacts, then there's been decades for them pesky aliens to work up another wave of drones to come say hi and mess with naval aviators' heads.

Remote controlled drones only work reliably at short range. At longer ranges they stop working once the enemy knocks out your communications relays. Communications satellites are no longer survivable. In the future AI technology might solve the problem but outside of simple loitering munitions, AI can't do much today. In some scenarios we may see drones controlled by manned aircraft that are just a few miles behind and still within communications line of sight.

Maneuverability doesn't count for a whole lot in the real world. For manned aircraft the trend is to de-emphasize maneuverability in favor of signature reduction, ECM, and decoys. While it's theoretically possible to design a UCAV that could pull >9Gs, in practice it's totally pointless. That would make the airframe too heavy and expensive, and would adversely impact other more important qualities like endurance and magazine depth.

Drones are vulnerable because they have to transmit a video feed over many miles for a remote operator to be able to control them. And the enemy can easily detect that, and then launch a missile that homes in on that signal. That's why there aren't any stealth drones. Drones shouldn't work against a first rate 21st century military, but Russia has proven in this war that they are not in that group.

One way to make a stealth drone is to make it operate autonomously, without sending back a video feed. But nobody is comfortable with that for obvious reasons.

The approach the French have proposed for their next gen fighter jet is to have a stealth jet surrounded by a swarm of stealth drones. The pilot commands all the drones, and so any radio links would be short range and therefore hard for an adversary to detect.

> and then launch a missile that homes in on that signal

Can signal relay swarm mitigate this threat?

> 2. Can be smaller since they don't have to have space for humans to sit in them, which might increase ability to carry things, longer range etc.

To an extent, but the large the drone is (so it's more capable of range and payload capacity), the less the relative manned penalty is.

> 3. Because humans don't have to be inside of them they can also go a higher speeds, maneuver faster without human body limitations

Similar to above: the bigger the drone, the more they get constrained by other factors than the human body. A drone the size of a F-15 isn't going to be significantly more manueverable or faster than a F-15, simply because the G limit is in part due to the fact that plane can only be so strong, and the engines can only supply so much thrust.

If a drone goes down, the drone pilot can man another one. All that training and knowledge is retained.

We have only to look to WWII to see the strategic value of sapping the enemy of their experienced pilots. Which, in turn, could mean that shooting down enemy drones is no longer a goal. Perhaps it becomes more like a carrier formation, with a drone formation defending the operators, and the aggressor looking to destroy the operators instead of the drones. Much like how a carrier is a far larger prize than a carrier fighter.

Volunteer armies have much lower death rates, because the commanders cannot afford to squander their lives.

Conscript armies get treated as cannon fodder.

> Conscript armies get treated as cannon fodder.

Counter example is the conscripted Allied armies at the end of WW2. In the last few months, the allies would much rather expend a mass of munitions rather than lose troops, especially front-line infantry, who were very hard to replace.

The marines, air force, and navy were all volunteers in WW2. The marines were front line. The army had a lot of volunteers, too, like the paratroopers.

The US military is all volunteer today, and is very parsimonious with the lives of servicemen.

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