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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

it's hard not to forsee a future where entire wars are fought by sending millions of drones at each other. I can't decide if it's a dystopian nightmare or a much better thing than having humans slaughter each other. It's sort of the ultimate conversion of physical war to economic. The side that runs out of money to make more or better drones first will be the loser.

Probably optimistic though. I guess each side will always know that humans are the high value targets and that will dictate that whatever else happens they will still target them even if a proxy-war is being fought by the drones.

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While a common sentiment, I think this concept misses the entire purpose of war. The purpose of any war is to impose your will by force on another, and by extension, prevent your enemy from imposing his. A drone-on-drone war may be an opening salvo, but unless drones are the only means available to an aggressor or defender, they will never be the only means being used in warfare no matter how technologically advanced things become. As long as an enemy has the will and capacity to resist force upon him, or still has the ability to impose his will by force on another, the war will continue. Once enough of one side's drones or robots are sufficiently defeated, it will be people that are the means for imposing or resisting force, so they will eventually always be the ones fighting and dying.

I can't imagine if Ukrainians had incredibly advanced drone/robot tech, them throwing all their drones at the Russians, loosing them all, and then saying 'Well, we used up all our drones, I guess we'll give up now.' It always comes down to removing an enemy's capacity or will to resist force, and people will always be part of that equation.

>While a common sentiment, I think this concept misses the entire purpose of war. The purpose of any war is to impose your will by force on another, and by extension, prevent your enemy from imposing his.

More fundamentally, war is just another facet of diplomacy.

It's commonly said that diplomacy has failed when wars are waged, but actually wars are merely the act of last resort in diplomacy and diplomacy itself is perfectly fine.

War itself involves a great deal of diplomacy between those fighting, various allies of those fighting, neutral 3rd parties etc.

Treatment of prisoners of war is probably the most obvious example of this. If you’re known to treat people who surrender well then you get more people willing to do so compared to a reputation as a country which will simply slaughter anyone captured. Sure it forces you to devote resources to caring for potentially millions of people, but that’s preferable to fighting millions of desperate people.

If drone armies are vastly more powerful than human armies, the latter become insignificant much like unarmed civilians are irrelevant in a war today. If Ukraine loses its army, it will surrender. If an army of the future loses its drones it will be impossible to oppose the winner’s drones and would surrender as well.

Still had to atom bomb the Japanese for them to capitulate. Sometimes defenders ready to fight with stick and stones. At the end of the day, still need to slaughter a bunch of combatants and civilians to extract human cost to prime surrender. Drones may make that more expedient by making the slaughter competely lopsided. But peoples tend not to capitulate until they've suffered severe loss in material and lives. IMO what's more likely are fully automate drones that guns down wedding parties without human operators on winning side developing PTSD.

It will help non-state actors wage the asymmetric war and impose costs.

Think Houthis, they may in few years drive sea/air drones with small load munitions - operating far from the site, and statistically be lucky to make their point

It will not be limited to them either - pick a place that have people who think they are oppressed and live in the margins, and really have not a whole lot at stake to worry

> Once enough of one side's drones or robots are sufficiently defeated, it will be people that are the means for imposing or resisting force, so they will eventually always be the ones fighting and dying.

If your people are better at building drones than fighting in person, then presumably the enemy's drones will already be in your cities before it makes sense to send people to stop them.

> The purpose of any war is to impose your will by force on another… …It always comes down to removing an enemy's capacity or will to resist force, and people will always be part of that equation.

People are the quarry. That doesn't mean that the physical means to resist force will always be in the hands of people.

It might also mean an initial attritional phase where machines kill machines, followed by a very brief and very lethal series of machine-directed killings in all your metropolitan areas, as soon as one side runs out of drones and drone-producing factories.

>I can't imagine if Ukrainians had incredibly advanced drone/robot tech,

sufficiently advanced for supply disruption

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1cse...

and profit denial, something international sanctions seems to have failed to accomplish, here 1400km away from border:

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1cns...

> them throwing all their drones at the Russians, loosing them all

'losing' by blowing stuff up

>and then saying 'Well, we used up all our drones, I guess we'll give up now.'

is that what you see here (NSFW):

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1cuq...

are 20 burned russian bodies Ukrainian way of saying 'I guess we'll give up now'? Drones enabled $500-1000 kills, the cheapest way to erase enemy manpower ever achieved.

This is typical ru trench run

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1cth...

and mopping up leftovers

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1cum...

> I guess each side will always know that humans are the high value targets and that will dictate that whatever else happens they will still target them even if a proxy-war is being fought by the drones.

Humans are more of an emotional target. Some humans are a high value target, but most are not. It's more valuable to target an oil refinery, an airport or a strategic bridge.

The next war will boil down to math. AI powered drones where intelligence and strategy will determine the fate of the war. That is until the other party decide to blow the whole thing with nuclear weapons.

> Humans are more of an emotional target. Some humans are a high value target, but most are not.

Tell that to Nagasaki or Hiroshima. Also, tell that to Ukraine.

Humans will always be targets at least somewhat; If for nothing else, they are near the controls to some drone. Warfare is psychological at least as much as it is physical.

Nuclear weapons are on a different category. They are not targeting a lot of humans but pretty much all humans; and infrastructure too (strategic or not).

Carpet shelling or carpet bombing with kilotons of TNT beg to differ.

Carpet bombing has strictly limited utility vs. humans and infrastructure, as shown by allied bombing campaigns in WWII. Strategic targets were bombed for years and the Germans kept building tanks and aircraft. Japanese cities were burned without breaking the will of the Japanese people to fight.

With nuclear weapons, the potential for total destruction of human civilization is extremely high. The "tons of TNT" measure doesn't take into account flash, radiation and environmental effects of nuclear warfare.

The next war will boil down to math. AI powered drones where intelligence and strategy will determine the fate of the war.

AI powered drones are useless without the logistics and manufacturing base which they came from. They also cannot take land, because they're drones, not infantry killbots. They also lack the attribute and strength of tube artillery, rockets, fighter planes, etc.

It's also missing the dimensions of counter such as direct energy weapons, SHORADs, electronic warfare, etc. Drones are prominent now because counters hadn't been sufficiently developed or widely deployed.

Also, we don't know when the next war will erupt. 1 year? 5 year? 10 year? It's quite bold to make such prediction.

>Humans are more of an emotional target. Some humans are a high value target, but most are not

Only using western $military spending$ numbers, like $10K switchblade-300 or those ridiculous $90K Rogue https://www.twz.com/air/rogue-1-is-one-of-the-marine-corps-n... https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/1colzqq...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2023/12/04/some-o...

Ukraine calculated that at $500-1000 per fpv kill they can deplete all russian able bodies without breaking $10 Billion, something inconceivable to NATO armies.

You are misunderstanding the nature of war. Drones, much like aircraft can't take ground. Infantry can, other ground units such as tanks and AFV helps assists in that.

For sure, drones will be a new element in warfare, but as like units in strategy video games, they have weakness and strength. Although unlike strategy games, reality doesn't care about balance.

When we say “drone” we often think of aircraft, but there are done ships and drone vehicles too.

The Ukrainian drone boats have been very successfully waging an asymmetric war in the Black Sea.

Drone ground vehicle development is mostly around demining, logistics and casualty evacuation. But there have been some old tanks laden with explosives used as breaches.

You also need men to actually hold any land. The best you can do with drones is turning enemy territory into grey zone.

> You also need men to actually hold any land

*and women

You do not need women in uniform to hold any land so that's a nice to have.

I'm not talking about settling that land. I imagine that in Golan Heights Israel only basically has military personnel.

You need ground troops to hold land. They come in two genders.

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