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You don't need a direct hit. Here is an example of an APS hitting "drone sized" targets with a much smaller explosive payload than an anti air missile: https://youtube.com/watch?v=I0ymxZruvvI
And then ATGMs get ablative nosecones.
Also if direct energy weapons could neutralize the threat of missiles, then planes would also benefit from this. Planes would be better at tankbusting if MANPADS could be neutralized.
Delivering force and logistics to the desired location, in a way you can support, is the end goal.
In most of the industrialized world, there are better options. But there's a fair bit of the planet where animal transport is still optimal: hard to beat the fuel requirements.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/10/18/...
But the cavalry regiments (who use tanks but ride horses ceremonially) would get very upset if the state of their horses was so parlous. They must be one of the few modern organisations that actually has a career path for farriers and other horse-related trades.
[Edit] Not saying that engineering difficulty was the only factor behind these cancellations, but it clearly was a significant cost driver.
We seem to be heading toward a plane with 1-2 people plus an AI that will cost $300M paired with 5-10 drones each costing around $30M. A real pilot nearby also reduces the efficiency of jamming to a large degree.
The idea is that smaller drones are harder to see on radar, they cost less, and they require many more missiles to fully intercept than one large drone.
Today though, missiles have their own radar that works at close ranges but, if I’m right, still need guidance at long ranges. At close range, good luck out turning the much smaller faster missile. At long ranges you can’t really out turn anything.
Not to mention that with modern jets like the F-35, I heard the pilots can track you with their helmets, with the aircraft having sensors all over the airframe effectively allowing the pilot to “see-through” the aircraft, and transmit your location via data link to an in-flight missile.
The main advantage of a drone is expendability - sending a pilot to certain death is not something the military wants to do. However there are missions where risking a 300 MM drone on a 30% chance of destruction makes sense. A missile truck drone with an AESA radar could likely maintain a 4:1 kill ratio by simply flying further into enemy air defenses than a human pilot would. It doesn't matter if you lose the drone if it kills 4 other air defense targets worth 300MM.
Maneuverability improvements such as super-maneuverability were rejected due to being counter-productive in Beyond Visual Range combat. You have to give up to much energy for fancy acrobatics to be worthwhile.
The key financial advantage of drones is that they don't need money to live after work, health insurance, or a pension plan. It's expensive to ask people to risk their lives for work.
And specifically for forward deployment scenarios: they don't require human support infrastructure pushed forward, at great cost.
Even in austere military terms, it's logistically expensive to keep a human alive on a random atoll in the Pacific.
The aircraft:supportHumans ratio is a tyranny in that each of those supportHumans requires their own support.
Unless you're in the Russian army.
Being able to put a pilot inside a weapon and then have them fly, react, deploy and return is a lot better than building stacks of drones and then just hitting a wall of RF jamming, which will soon be everywhere on the battlefield, even more so than was in Iraq for counter IED work.
When using AI controlled I think the poster meant local AI controlled, no RF. We probably will also see laser communication from satellite to drones, which will be much more difficult to jam.
Laser comms are neat, but they suffer from things like clouds or smokescreens. And once you figure out the wavelength, a hostile laser comms sat can trivially jam it.
Air defense systems already have to operate autonomously for instance, since not every threat will be detected early enough to allow for human review.
Plus, friendly fire incidents also happen with humans, we don't punish those unless they're obviously negligent, just work on ways to not repeat that mistake, so how is AI any different?
The determination of negligence would just fall upon whoever was responsible for configuring the drone for that mission.
So, for example, if the drone was used to target a certain kind of tank which is in use on both sides and it was known ahead of time that the drone can't differentiate between them, it'd be negligent use, while a mission programmed with full understanding of the drone's capabilities results in friendly fire due to a previously unknown error, it'd be no different from any other current smart weapon messing up.
I'm not aware of any controversy that stopped weapon progress. We have biological weapon research, atomic weapons and the US used chemical agents in Vietnam.
The US stopped tactical nuclear weapons because it thought they were not useful, not because of the protests in Europe.
SDI was cancelled because laser weapons were not feasable in the 80s, not because of the controversy.
There are more mines used in Ukraine than ever before - despite "bans". There is cluster ammunition delivered despite a huge controversy.
"clouds or smokescreens."
Sure smokescreens can only jam low flying drones? If you smoke a target the drone waits for you running out of smoke rounds.
They're even trying to get rid of certain cluster munitions.
We'll see if Russia uses a tactical nuke when Ukraine enters Crimea.
Biological weapons have been killed because they are hard to be used operationally. You don't want to kill civilians, this creates more resistance (shown in WW2 and Iraq for example), also if you conquer a country you need people to run it. Biological weapons are not that useful.
Humanity yes, mankind I'm not so sure. Earth is huge. There are a lot of humans. Some will survive winter. Some will survive mutations. Some will continue to reproduce.
Bioweapons are useless unless your goal is to kill off everyone.
This didn't happen... most of America's tactical nuclear weapons were withdrawn when the Cold War ended, but America still has several hundred of them and has continued to upgrade them with new guidance systems.
See the B61, specifically the Mod 3, 4, 10 and 12 varients. These are tactical nuclear weapons with 'dial-a-yield' down to 0.3 kilotons. The mod 12 was developed during the 2010s and is in production now.
Whether or not that constitutes "AI" (pointless discussion since nobody can decide what "AI" truly means even in conversations about state-of-the-art LLMs), it's a weapon autonomously monitoring its environment, classifying targets and killing them without a human in the loop.
But if we talk about killing, we'll get thousands of micro satellites, good luck shooting them down.
One drone with a cpu, toroidal props for increased range, speed and silence, and a range of onboard sensors are far better at attacking target objects than SAS soldiers dug into a ditch for several days trying to remain down wind of a dog.
In other words, lithium ion batteries mean drones can be dug in for longer observing or waiting to assassinate than biological robots aka the military.
That changes the window of opportunity despite all the current surveillance methods in place today, like our computers, mobile phones, bank accounts, payment cards and loyalty cards, whilst also pleasing some of the animal rights group, who havent bought the so called free press lies through omission.
Bruh, the German Ghepard wasn't some fancy drone cannon but an obsolete anti aircraft cannon designed in the 50's which they scrapped because present day jets fly much faster and higher than those from the '50's but it's perfect for Iranian drones.
[1] https://twitter.com/colonelcassad/status/1677615793956171776