The future of warfare: A $400 drone killing a $2M tank
politico.eu
politico.eu
At any point, a drone that you often can't hear or see can drop a grenade or mortar shell that might kill all your squad but leave you unhurt. Or kill one person next to you in the trench. Or your vehicle may just explode with no warning.
Sure, it could be argued that is not "worse" than other wars, but how will these veterans react to drones in the sky back in civilian life?
I'm not aware of them being used to summon the fire department and don't think that's very common outside maybe extremely rural areas. AFAIK volunteer fire departments use mobile phones.
I wonder what the defining moment of drone combat will be? The equivalent of the Battle of Agincourt where English longbows devastated the opposing French force.
French tactics were so bad that it is said that the English were looking in amazement how we were basically fighting with ourselves (cavalry vs retreating infantry)
Today you can get killed even far away from the front in a place that was considered mostly safe in previous wars.
The psychological effect today is much worse than anytime in history.
> The psychological effect of the V-2 was considerable, as the V-2, traveling faster than the speed of sound, gave no warning before impact (unlike bombing planes or the V-1 flying bomb, which made a characteristic buzzing sound). There was no effective defence and no risk of pilot or crew casualties.
That’s quite some food for thought, especially in a non-war context.
Reminds me about the short film “Slaughterbots” [1] and that one Black Mirror episode with the weaponized robotic bees.
If the drone is above the net it'll have to stop mortar rounds (it won't)
If the drone is under the net you're fucked
At best you give them a free airburst, at worst the net does nothing.
Again, I don't hope that's our future, I just cannot understand why it's not our present already.
The US at least wants a human pressing the button and is not willing to let AI make a lethal order.
I'm old enough to remember exactly how crazy the US went after 9/11. It's going to take exactly one surprise attack on the US before it puts out the first weapons contracts for automated killbots.
In the case of US/Russia, I assume it's the prospect of mutually assured destruction that keeps our respective leaders from assassinating each other.
5G already uses beam forming to establish link between the base station and end user. Maybe such a beam can be used to “blind” drones.
Granted: what ISW says is probably based on what Ukraine says.
And granted: if you dont shoot down every kamikazi drone in a swarm, then the swarm succeeded (or could have succeeded).
It's in Russian but should be readable with translation
So many aggreived parties in the world with the need to explode from a distance, but on a limited budget. What's the alternative? A bomber plane? A howitzer? A suicidal dude? Nobody's got time for that. Cheap Kamikaze FPVs are the next big tech market and it's blowing up, like right now!
The alternative is peace. I know, i know, human life is cheap and we need more profits.
We could, for example, release a lot of carbon dioxide and then capture it again.
- Off the shelf Drones are dirt cheap. Plus you could build much more capable drones from consumer parts. See some of the long range drone people on youtube.
- Communication. It used to be a billion dollar operation to put up a satellite. now closer to $20-30k.
Maybe it's vacillating. From the it's easier to destroy than to create perspective, this feels like the natural trend of warfare.
We already had inexpensive explosives. The difference here is a worthwhile delivery system is getting cheap.
It can be argued that drones themselves have been making big changes across all kinds of industries and this is part of that wave.
Drones may turn to be as pivotal as locomotion, air-conditioning and the internet.
Even guns had done the same to armor.
Sometimes it vacillates with general tech advancements. Tech driven by large bureaucratic structures will still occasionally fall behind what's available on an open market driven by competition and the public's bias toward cheaper goods. In other words, as a country's general economy goes, so goes its war chest... unless it manages a quite large war chest, in which case it can attempt to conquer another country and pillage the economic spoils of that country.
Given we had the SR71 blackbird in ‘64, a mere 20 years post WW2 which could honestly look to be something from the last couple decades, I’m convinced the global military powers have some eye watering tech that we can’t even comprehend.
For example, it’s in the US’ best interest for people to think (re: Govs) “US has no defense against hypersonic missiles”. I would bet an arm and a leg that given the amount of money the US pours into military tech, that we have a counter measure available.
Although I wouldn't be surprised if cargo ships start getting approved to use nuclear propulsion in the near future.
I mean, I think nuclear fuel is highly valuable, no?
I would be. The cost, the controls over nuclear technology, and probably other reasons all make it a complete non-starter.
This is the crux of the matter. The USA was fine letting people think the patriot system was still suffering from the early teething problems and that it was an overpriced system that couldn't take down ballistic missiles as promised (and it did perform lacklustrely during the first gulf war). Queue the donations to Ukraine successfully shooting down Russia's "unstoppable" hypersonic missiles with quickly trained troops.
I really do wonder how the F-35 actually will perform in combat one day (which in a way I hope we never need to know).
IDK if that isn't still true about the US military. The most high-tech equipment sent to Ukraine is still decades old. Israel receives more up-to-date equipment but we haven't seen them deal with $400 drones yet -- it's likely they'd fare much better.
We actually don't know how far US military tech is ahead because we haven't seen that tech being actively used in the battlefield. I think the greater issue is that if the US were to enter a conflict where that tech would be necessary, it would likely face an opponent that also has access to nuclear weapons and then that tech is unlikely to remain relevant for long unless it can prevent every single nuclear weapon from launching and arming.
The thing to always bear in mind is scale: slightly less-advanced tech, but 100x as much of it, is probably still better.
Part of me wonders if the (relatively) small scale of current military engagements is skewing the discussion. Bret Deveraux[1] mentions that WW2 saw millions of tons of explosives being dropped on London and Berlin. Even last winter, Russia didn't come close to matching the destruction of the Blitz.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...
and they definitely arent supplying PLA https://asiatimes.com/2022/10/us-blacklists-chinas-dji-drone...
“Hurdling trenches, crawling over shell craters, and walking through forests unhalted by intense gunfire, the tanks cannot be stopped by anything less than a direct hit from shells of considerable caliber,” reports The Ogden Standard of October 21, 1916, 4 p.m. City Edition https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-wwi-tanks
https://mwi.westpoint.edu/an-unerring-sense-of-locality-ukra... >the Russian tank crews fell victim to roving bands of hidden Ukrainian light infantry armed with Javelin and NLAW ATGMs, as well as armed drones. Like the destruction waged by Egyptian and Syrian Sagger teams, these ambushes resulted in the widespread destruction of Russian tanks and contributed to Russia’s operational abandonment of its northern axis of advance. As a result, between February 2022 and March 2023, Russia lost 1,917 of what the International Institute for Strategic Estimate estimated to be a prewar total of 3,417 tanks in active service
Soldiers can be equipped with safety goggles. Injured civilians are reclassified as casualties of the hostile force.
Don't think it'll take too much to update them to also shoot down drones.
If you can build a frag grenade you can probably make an effective mortar. It’s more difficult to make something that can hit large targets at 2+ miles, but not extremely so.
In then end someone who can make high explosives can trivially kill people, but that’s a non trivial task.
I think the main difference is precision and anonymity - mortars are noisy and would attract attention, but a drone fits in a backpack and there’s no obvious connection between the launch site and the targets, so things like ballistics analysis and “shot spotter” systems are less effective. If there’s, say, a hotel or apartment building you’re going from needing to check the roof to needing to worry about every window even on the non-facing sides.
Drones are hardly even a daily occurence let alone frequent enough not to catch anyone's attention. Cars on the other hand are everywhere.
(They would often be accompanied with a telephone warning allowing people to evacuate - but hoax warnings and deliberately vague warnings were also sometimes made)
The good news is it would appear very few people are inclined to carry out anonymous bombings, in spite of the ease with which it can be done.
> "The good news is it would appear very few people are inclined to carry out anonymous bombings, in spite of the ease with which it can be done."
A lot of so-called anonymous attacks also leave traces that can be used to pin the attack on someone if there is sufficient political will to lead a thorough investigation. And of course the victim can still decide to interpret them differently even if you didn't want to remain anonymous. Consider for example how Turkey would attribute acts of terrorism in Turkey to the PKK despite ISIS claiming them, because it was politically useful to justify a focus on attacking PKK-aligned Rojava in Syria even when it meant aligning with ISIS.
I guess what's saving us from anonymous bombings being commonplace is that few people are willing to carry them out, foolhardy to do so despite the risk of being caught, competent enough to carry them out successfully and sufficiently motivated to cause the death and injury of their victims. And of course the people most likely to be targeted tend to also be much harder to target.
And on an individual grievance level: while it's almost trivially possible to kill someone without being found out, it's much harder to kill a specific someone you want to kill without being found out.
Well, coffeebeqn did speak of terrorism with a "terrifying degree of anonymity"
In the IRA case they would generally make an anonymous phone call where the organisation claimed responsibility, but the actual individuals have long since fled the scene.
A better question here is, what kind of a shitty tank this is, with all the "active armor" and other sales buzzwords, that can't even survive something dropped from a cheap drone (so, relatively light and weak compared to conventional munitions used in the stationary/ground battlefield), while at the meantime the same people are making fun of russian "cope cages".
Evidence suggests all modern tanks without "cope cages" are vulnerable. There are videos from this month of FPV drones destroying a bunch of Leopard 2's and even a Merkava.
What kind of grenade would have done that?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2023/10/04/ukrain...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/xc687p/quadcopter_...
Tanks have comparatively weak turret and upper armour. Plus you don't need to destroy a tank to reduce its combat ability, you can just make it throw a track, or destroy its external sensors. A grenade will sometimes do that, but even better is a cheap rocket propelled grenade warhead that you drop onto the turret of the tank, as those are designed to penetrate armour.
In addition, russian tanks would be driven with their hatches open for fresh air, providing an easy entry point for a skilled Ukrainian drone pilot.
This tank defense system is also designed to stop drones.
We're talking about a terrorist group operating on hand-me-downs from foreign sponsor states in a very small and densely populated mostly-urban territory that has no control over its borders or foreign trade. They likely have impressive caches for an organization of its size but that doesn't make the conflict any less one-sided given Israel is one of the best equipped militaries in the world subsidized directly by the US. Let's not confuse Hamas and Hezbollah, which is actually better equipped than the official military of its host nation Lebanon and also receives massive funding from Iran - but still pales in comparison to the tech available to Israel.
> that doesn't make the conflict any less one-sided given Israel is one of the best equipped militaries in the world subsidized directly by the US.
That's one sided in terms of modern warfare. Sure. But they have plenty of anti-tank missiles and are still firing many rockets into cities in Israel on a daily basis. Israel is also required to hold back on many of its capabilities both due to international law (which the Hamas ignores) and due to the fear of hurting the kidnapped hostages.
The Hamas is no Hezbollah but who are also taking a part in the fight albeit to a minimal extent at the moment. But they have a home court advantage and urban warfare is difficult even for the most advanced armies. It reduces a lot of the advantages. E.g. in the past the IDF used to rely on night vision goggles and take advantage of the night. The Hamas has those now and many of their soldiers received training in Iran.
> Israel is one of the best equipped militaries in the world subsidized directly by the US.
Notice that a lot of the tech Israel has is home grown. One of the reasons the USA funds Israel (besides the alignment on many issues) is to keep Israeli arm manufacturing in its niche. Israeli weapons such as its jets and guns (famously the Uzi) were hot items in the late 60's and 70's. The USA's funding effectively made it uneconomical for Israel to make some of its weapons. Most specifically the fighter jets.
Israel is also an amazing "demo stage" for US weapon superiority.
Call back when Putin is dead.
(I mean no disrespect to those fighting on the front lines by trivializing their experience with a video game metaphor; I pray for safety for both sides and for eventual peace).
Fighting for land via physical violence? Really?? That's as old as cavemen.
Physical attacks are for revenge. And are based on the past more than a view to the future.
* Similar happened in Ukraine. The media doesn't highlight such things because their reporting what keeps you engaged in the short term, not what ultimately matters further out.
The NSA appears to have been a little more successful with things like Stuxnet but even there it’s hard to say that had much lasting impact compared to, say, the Mossad’s more direct targeting of scientists.
This makes me think that we’re prone to dramatically overweight the importance of the types of systems we work on, and forget how most physical systems have a fair amount of robustness stemming from human operators being able to notice problems and halt things before too much damage happens.
What's also sadly funny is that everyone here is already assuming warfare is a given in the future.
You realize how ridiculous that sounds? The types of attack you mention are perhaps an additional dimension of war in the future, but you sound a lot like all the experts back in WWII who thought strategic bombing would make ground forces obsolete.
And your last line is weird. We do lots of things today that are as old as cavemen, physically and socially.
Start with C4I and go from there.
p.s. Just because we can doesn't mean qe should. Precedent is no excuse for stupidity.
Words like ridiculous in this context are...ridiculous.
Tanks and ships, etc. are *very* expensive. A team of hackers, much less so.
As another HNer has already commented, control of physical space trumps any hacker doing anything. Particularly true when you can't simply H-Bomb an enemy, or the entire world would rise against you.
Ransomware victims would beg to differ.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/illinois-hospital-link...
As we computerize more and more, it also makes our networks more and more sensitive to computer/network attacks.
Also keep in mind, the media loves to show carnage and destruction. A _______ crippled and disabled due to a cyber attack isn't sexy. Sure, they mention it but their level of attention is not an indication of importance for a given objective.