Is the attack helicopter dead?
hushkit.net
hushkit.net
It's my understanding (and from watching the videos that I can get as a civilian) that the Russians still aren't operating their helicopters in a manner that I would be comfortable with if I was inside one. I certainly wouldn't be pumped flying in the environment they are in, with so many MANPADS out there, but there is no way a machine I was in would be hit with an anti-tank missile while we hovered (as was in the article.)
Lot of preamble to say: no, I don't think the attack helicopter is dead. Attack helicopters are nimble and can hide in terrain quite well, and even when an attacking force can see them it takes a skilled operator to actually hit them. The single use drones that operate like kamikaze vehicles may throw a winkle into the mix, but a helo flying at 150knots is going to be very challenging to hit for one of those. I expect there will be quite an arms race countering and then counter countering these in the future wars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pEqyr_uT-k
When they fly, they basically turn horizontal, relying on body lift + vectored thrust. They're small enough, with high enough power/weight ratios, that that's enough. Apparently there's no need for a tilt-rotor, because the whole airplane becomes a tilt-rotor.
Similar principal as cruise missiles, which have short stubby wings to augment body lift + vectored thrust. When the airframe gets light enough, you don't need much in the way of wings.
On new approaches, I saw something about new US missile research where they get rid of the fins and point the nose to turn. My Google-fu is failing me though.
https://interestingengineering.com/videos/this-bizarre-plane...
There were a few drawbacks. It required a seat that pivoted 90° forward, so that when pilots could see when taking off and when landing.
Unpowered landings would inevitably result in damage to the airframe.
Powered landings looked like space-x rockets, and were at the time difficult to pull off, as their instrumentation and and flight systems weren't developed enough to reliably land vertically.
They noted the airframe would have a habit of spinning when hovering vertically.
It was cancelled after a failed test flight, but with modern technology I think one could be built flightworthy.
The plane does look cool, and would fulfill a critical role of a jet aircraft that can be launched without a runway.
Considering how UAVs and/or smaller drones have evolved and used in the battlefield the past few years, we need to rethink the way to conduct war.
> assuming improvements to drones and not the counter-drones
And I think we just began. The good thing about this (if there is ever a good thing in war/death-dealing) is that a drone carrying a small explosive device to release it over a vehicle will not kill 10k civilians.
I'm not trying to argue with you and I appreciate you weighing in with firsthand expertise. It's just that current USMC leadership seems to be focusing on different priorities.
Maybe Marines on the ground had a different experience, but I viewed the jets, Artillery, and AC-130s as a much more blunt instrument. We got a lot of calls for precision strikes that would have been danger close, and without us I can imagine a lot more friendly fire incidents.
That said, there is no air to air defense for an attack helicopter, it’s comical that we even practiced. Without our jets suppressing enemy jets, there would be no way helicopters could operate, we’re sitting ducks.
By 2011, when I went to war, the main thing we'd learned was to fly high up above small arms range: above 1,000 feet AGL. Only our Kiowas were generally allowed to operate below that, flying exactly the way you describe Marine helicopters operating; that was part of the Kiowa's nature as scouts relying mostly on the pilots' eyes (and sometimes their M4 rifles pointed out the door). The aircraft (Kiowas, but also Apaches and Black Hawks when in support of troops-in-contact) that got chewed up were invariably operating down below that.
By that time, Apaches were also mostly a deterrent. The point was for them to be seen. That kept the enemy in hiding under cover while we did whatever else needed to be done. Before firing a shot, they'd circle for 30+ minutes recording video and talking into the tape recorder to establish positive identification of targets and explicitly go through all the steps that the lawyers came up with to mitigate civilian casualties. It was all very unlike e.g. Iraq in 1991 or 2003, to my knowledge, or present-day Ukraine. Not at all stealthy or fast. And there has been an effort in recent years to unlearn all of this, and get back to the tactics that would be needed in a fight like Ukraine's.
The big use for helicopters is defense. Russia showed the potential during last year's failure of a counter-offensive by Ukraine. They'd pop up just over the treelines to shoot their TOW equivalent from outside of MANPADS range (can't do this on offense because you can't be sure that the front line didn't accidentally bypass a MANPADS somewhere). The helicopters would target the minesweeper and rear vehicle to stall the convoy then the chopper's remaining missiles along with artillery and whatever else would finish off the vehicles in the middle (or they'd try their luck in the minefield which always ended badly).
The software can detect when the correct pitch/direction are achieved so the barrage can be reasonably accurate. They don't have the luxury of slowly dialing in their aim, but have much better calculation systems and are firing a fraction of the distance (often over just 1-2 treelines).
As I said, I don't know that it's ideal. I think troops on the ground with a laser designator while the chopper lobs munitions up over the treeline from a farther, safer distance would be ideal.
All you're seeing is makeshift COTS drones picking targets of opportunity. If you know that MANPADS can easily take down a helicopter then you are already aware that there is decades-old technology already quite able to take down helicopters, and the only difference between the drones you're seeing today and those that can be easily produced today is the product design requirements.
I'm not sure what those are, but I think they probably have to do with the ablity to hover in place/land anywhere, a capability probably much more meaningful in transport helicopters.
And it seems the US has decided to choose the V-280 Valor, which is a tiltrotor rather than a helicopter.
I don't follow the space closely, but it seems to me there's no active program in the US that's developing a combat helicopter that's likely to enter service, so I don't think the US military considers them to be worth investing in that much.
They are absolutely devastating to columns of tanks. And they help control the "z-axis" the the united states military is dependent on.
Helicopters give you the ability to have air "presence" and keep situations in check with low-peer adversaries. When you start bringing in MANPADS or stingers the game changes.
Oddly enough things like the US Javelin anti tank system and the british NLAW are making tanks relatively obsolete as well.
I suspect attack helicopters with some sort of very small automated phalanx system (directed energy weapon? net launcher?) to destroy drones would be incredibly effective still.
The Apache is still an effective platform for delivering a shit ton of ordnance down range from out of no where and then skidaddling.
Artillery or missile strikes are too.
I think modern military doctrine dictates that you shouldn't even give a chance of an enemy to shoot at you.
I don't think they are a near peer weapon at all. Even small groups can have weapons that can hurt it, in contrast with an F-16, which, unless you have an air force of your own, or anti-aircraft batteries, you can do nothing about.
You’re talking about a tilt rotor to replace a troop carrying helicopter, it’s a different role with different requirements.
The AH-1Z is more like the A-10 warthog than a traditional jet fighter, and in the wars we’ve been in recently serves a similar role, close air support. To the Marines on the ground, they are indispensable. The airframes were “just” (in the terms that make sense for an airframe that has been in service since the late 60s) upgraded to 4 rotor with a number of other updates.
Being able to literally point at the enemy and have the pilots see you and put ordinance where you are pointing… that is way way different than trying to call in strikes from jets or freaking arty as some people were saying.
Kosovo war for example. US deployed two battalions of AH-64s in Task Force Hawk into Albania, but never send them over the border. Their task would have been just what they were designed for, but risk reward ratio was just too high. Serbs would have been able to cause them massive casualties.
For most cases combining drones for targeting with field or rocket artillery achieves the same.
The conflict in Kosovo was nothing like the ROE in Iraq, and if you’re on the ground calling for fire you damn sure would know the difference between arty and us.
All weapon systems that consist of an expensive vehicle and an expensive-to-train crew are being re-evaluated against drones right now.
If you're fighting a highly asymmetric conflict where your enemies can barely touch your expensive toys then it's less of a concern.
If you're fighting near-peer it's a different story.
A drone that can do meaningful damage to a factory 500+ miles from a front line is either an easy target or it starts to look a lot like a missile with all the associated costs from that.
[0] https://kyivindependent.com/human-safari-kherson-civilians-h...
That seems to be the explicit strategy here, and I've come to believe that they genuinely think that this is how it should be, that there can't be a different world. Perhaps some linguistic quirk that makes the difference between friendship (that's not based on a power gradient) and allegiance (unite with the strongest, even when they're monsters, in particular when they're monsters) different to express and think about, perhaps it's a long term effect of socialist ideology having co-opted all concepts of friendship based on equality for a system that never was. But the pattern seems to go all the way through society, from the infamous prison hierarchies to imbalanced spousal relationships to the KGB state to the relationship between state power and its barons (who are commonly called oligarchs, but they are the exact opposite, powerless pawns on the political floor that are allowed to hold a fief until they aren't)
For countries like the US which at least ostensibly claim to care about human life indiscriminately and to fight for "liberty and peace" and all that, there is a considerable cost to collateral damage, although of course that also depends on who the victims are and the cost can be higher for a Democrat leader than a Republican.
Putin's Russia infamously responded to a hostage crisis in Moscow by killing not only all hostage takers but also more than three times as many hostages and injuring most of the survivors. That alone should make it easy to extrapolate what the cost of collateral damage in Ukraine might be in Russia's calculations. Israel similarly seems to use a much lower cost than the US although in Palestine this is also shaped by the perception that anyone who isn't a militant or supports the militant is eventually going to turn out that way anyway (e.g. the child who died would have grown up to become a threat anyway).
20 civilians dying in Iraq to a helicopter that thought their camera was a gun was a national embarrassment. For Russia, 100 civilians dying in a mass artillery bombardment is a normal workday.
More specifically, it is a success to them. They clearly use civilian casualty and the terror it brings as a tactic to dishearten their victims.
Also during beginning of the war there were videos of russian soldiers setting up machine gun posts next to bigger roads and literally gunning every single unsuspecting civilian car that came along... not much better behavior than hamas attack last year. Bucha, civilian mass graves with people having hands tied behind their back with wire and headshot found on territories won back from them.
Shows how depraved that society is that this doesn't even cause any upheaval, instead is something to boast about back home and to whole world. Now do a simple projection for next decades.
I know China is #1 topic for US right now, but China views US rather as a competitor. Russia views whole west and US specifically as existential threat to actively fight against (and it did in asymetric subversion warfare for past 2 decades). Not whole russian population, they don't give a fuck whether whole world burns as long as they can drink vodka into desperate oblivion, but all their rulers and that's all that matters there. Now how to tackle and survive that due to all the resources required from that land I don't know but future in that regard looks bleak.
For the last twenty years in the Middle East alone, the number of civilian deaths in which the US is either directly or indirectly involved is easily in the millions
People who create studies suggesting those wars killed 5 million people include a lot of ludicrous definitions of "killed" to get numbers that big.
It's not like iraq had tanks by the USA border, ready to roll in no?
It also didn't have any of the terrible weapons that USA claimed they had.
In all cases, the US has demonstrated a level of weakness on the foreign stage, and terrible people have come to exploit that. Like it or not, those little wars in Iraq were the long arm of the Pax Americana, which is ending now, to the tune of the first land war in Europe in quite some time. And one of the bloodiest conflicts in recent history.
This is what happens when you are a world-spanning empire. An empire, by the way, that Europe, India, China, and the rest of the civilized world has benefitted massively from in the form of free security and safe transport of goods. When there is no dominant empire, the world gets messy.
I could point you to literally dozens of books on the Pax Americana and its decline (google is your friend) and America's de facto empire, as well as historical studies of the Pax Brittanica and the Pax Romana. Or Chinese histories that discuss the waves of peace and prosperity following the growth of major dynasties which end exactly the same way. I suspect you won't read any of them though, since nobody who asks for a source in an online discussion really wants a source (nobody ever asks for a source when they agree with you). They just want to claim that their counterpart is uninformed.
You want to engage in a debate involving cited sources? What's good for the goose is good for the gander - write a response with a citation or two that rebuts a key point. Otherwise, asking for sources in online arguments is borderline trolling.
In the case of Pax Americana the framing is also dubious as it wasn't American dominance that kept the peace in Europe (on this side of the iron curtain) but arguably more the shared market and the necessity of cooperation to recover from the wounds of two world wars while facing the threat of annihilation in the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union.
Even in Europe this period was heavily defined by oppressive policing in both East and West Germany (culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall in the East and the student protests and RAF terrorist attacks in the West), civil war in Northern Ireland (with terrorist attacks reaching deep into England at times), separatist movements in the Basque region, the excruciatingly slow death of fascism in Spain and Portugal, the violent suppression of striking miners in the UK, and the birth pains of neoliberalism and austerity.
The "pax" in these titles always only applies in a very narrow sense to the affluent in its imperial core, i.e. the American upper middle class of the 1950s or the British bourgeoisie of the colonial era. Even the Pax Romana is not a coherent description of life in the Roman Empire for the time frame it is often applied to and was defined by expansion (i.e. military conquest) not an absence of war.
If anything, the "prosperity" these terms often imply always only existed because of a hierarchical system of exploitation and the "peace" refers to the absence of serious challengers to disrupt this exploitation. The prosperity in Britain during the Pax Britannica specifically only existed due to the violent oppression of British colonies and the absence of powerful challengers to claim those colonies instead. Following the war economies of WW2, the 20th century saw a massive redistribution of wealth and public infrastructure to the financial elites, especially under Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK, while colonialism largely evolved from the crude brutal oppression of e.g. the British Raj to loans and privatization, aka "soft power" (promoting the production of worthless cash crops for international trade at low margins instead of vital food crops, making the economy dependent on imports to keep the local population fed, or exporting raw resources rather than building up local infrastructure to refine those resources into goods that can be sold at a higher price and thus having to import the finished goods at exorbitant prices).
So, yes, for you or I living in the imperial core - whether literally in the US or by extension in Europe - the "decline" and the rise of challengers is worrisome and can only be negative. But ultimately, especially to those living outside that core, the challengers are no worse or better than the status quo.
Much of Europe's economic policy benefits from the huge subisdy that the US covers them with its guns - a drain of 6-10% of GDP may otherwise apply to NATO countries that find themselves up against Putin (and in a hypothetical world - maybe against each other). The Marshall Plan is also a relatively visible indication of how intertwined Europe's post-WWII growth was done with America's involvement, and when you look at US foreign aid ("imperial economic stimulus"), a lot of it today goes to poorer European nations. I agree with you that the EU (post-iron-curtain project) has been, as you suggest, a solely European initiative driven more by European solidarity than US guns. However, it exists in the world of the petrodollar (not any more) and with the quiet reassurance that many of the leading nations in the EU are NATO members. As we have seen with Ukraine, sometimes that NATO membership matters.
Empires are always a lot looser than we think - the Roman empire was a great example of this, where the nation-state of Rome (in the modern idea) didn't extend beyond the Alps until the Caracalla years, where Roman citizenship was truly extended to the provinces (note: after the end of the pax Romana). Egypt and the levant were basically completely autonomous, much like the EU is today.
This happened in europe, south america, and middle east.
> I suspect you won't read any of them though
That's very unacademic of you to suspect I won't read "the books", which you didn't even bother to list.
I have read this book in the summer. Perhaps you want to give it a read and step out of your bubble? https://www.amazon.it/del-marcio-Occidente-Piergiorgio-Odifr...
> Pax Brittanica
That's now how you spell it.
But also, on an online forum, a post is written once, but read many times. When you say "look it up yourself", that doesn't tell one person to look it up, it tells 10 or 100. That's inefficient - the looking up is done multiple times rather than once.
And, I can google for why the earth is flat and find plenty of resources. The fact that I can find stuff on google that supports your position doesn't say much.
So, yeah. Maybe you could supply some resources that you think are solid, and why you think they are?
Wait is that a good thing or a bad thing?
The US goes out of its way to minimize collateral damage because it gets accused of causing all collateral damage in the first place.
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/opinion/2012-05-29/ana...
This does somehow still result in a lower ratio of dead civilians than when applying the same definitions to Russia or Israel. This shouldn't be seen as a way to excuse the behavior of the US but rather as a way to recontextualize the actions of the latter two, whether you support or oppose their military operations.
Related reading. https://chomsky.info/20210512/
What makes you think that? And which “the USA”, since Netanyahu has been in discussions with both Biden’s administration, and Trump.
WW2 was a classic example. Every nation except the US still had bolt-action rifles as the standard infantry weapon, on the belief that giving every infantryman semi-auto was a waste of ammo/too expensive/too heavy on logistics. Also motorization was not appreciated until late in the war, even in the German army - which despite all the attention devoted to the panzer/panzergrenadier divisions, was maybe 20% motorized at its peak. Mostly their soldiers marched from place to place, or used rail.
There is kinda a reason for this, that there are counter examples were new tech wasn't all it was hyped to be. And until something is battle tested, its hard to say how it would perform. Like early in the Vietnam war, US infantrymen may have been better off with the old M1 garand, because early models of the M16 tended to jam in combat conditions.
> anyone who was ever made to look foolish saying[...]
These are common throwaway sayings people with no concept of resources and an overly active aversion to risk often use.
The reality of the situation is that nobody cares to invest in some insanely expensive and vulnerable platform to hijack drones, because 1. it will probably get taken out by a drone 2. it would cost orders of magnitude more than all of the drones and personnel it would take out.
Furthermore, nobody would care to truly protect against such a counter, because the drones cost absolutely nothing.
Saying "it's improbable but let's prepare anyway" isn't how the real world works. Look around you - the world is absolutely filled to the brim with problems, even ones quite probable, even ones inevitable, that nobody can or is willing to spare the resources to deal with. As a general rule, preparing for the improbable is a poor path to success, and worse still is preparing for the improbable, where the improbable event doesn't even impact you in any serious way.
Also, ofc you don't hear about those people. Nobody is reporting on the non-event or the people who prepared for the non-event. Pure selection bias.
[1] https://williamaarkin.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/arkins-con...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...
Where did I claim nobody's ever taken out a drone with ewar? Plus this action presumably took an entire squadron with extremely powerful ewar apparatus - a complete waste of time on an 800e drone that will be replaced before the one you've dropped even hits the ground.
Much of the US focus on precision terminal guidance is derived from this calculus in a straightforward way. It may be more expensive in a unit cost sense but significantly cheaper in terms of net expected effect on the battlefield. This "precision versus quantity" argument played out to greatly favor precision in Ukraine.
You lose range, but urbanized warfare of the 21st century seems to be a very different battlefield calculus from the strategic bombing campaigns of WW2. The vast majority of engagements these days seem to be within easy drone range, probably because they can be produced in quantities that negate the "just destroy everything within 200 miles" strategy of WW2 carrier battle groups.
There are multiple reasons to believe that drones' advantages over piloted aircraft are even greater than drones' advantages over tanks. Take the pilot away and the G-forces you can pull increase many-fold. Take the pilot away and you have no compunctions against sacrificing a drone for tactical advantage. Take the pilot away and you can field 10x or 100x as many aircraft, since pilot training is often the limiting factor in the growth of your airforce (see eg. Japanese WW2 experience from 1943 onwards, or the need for Top Gun in Vietnam). More aircraft can play airspace denial, since the presence of a bogey creates a kill zone in the area where they can bring their weapons to bear. Computer algorithms can play physics and geometry games where no matter where a piloted aircraft turns, there is always something waiting to shoot them down. Computers can run these simulations instantly, overwhelming the pilot's ability to react. The human becomes the weak link in the weapon system.
The equilibrium I see is drone designs with a range made to just out-range cheap weaponry like glide bombs and common anti-ship missiles, maybe 50-80 miles. For anything fancy (like the supersonic cruise missiles that the Russians have with 200-300 mile range), you want directed energy CIWS instead, but you need those anyway to defend against enemy drones. Then you pack these drones into shipping containers, and launch and retrieve them directly. A single container ship carries its own air force of roughly 10,000 drones, and makes the airspace around it out to ~100 miles completely inhospitable for foes. The convoy becomes its own aircraft carrier, just like the escort carriers of WW2, but the air wing follows the shipping containers and can be packed onto trucks or rail at its destination. Then you bring the convoy to where it needs to be, creating a no-go bubble around it at all times.
Yes, but the defining attribute of the Ukraine war seems to be CHEAP precision - the ability of drones to respond and attack car-sized targets in real time is what has turned this war into a slog.
The American-made stuff is great, but I've seen multiple examples of Ukrainian missile crews reacting contemptuously to the idea that they could use a Javelin/NLAW to take out an older Soviet piece of equipment; that kind of task seems to be reserved for Soviet-era weapons or (preferably) drones.
FPV drones are precise because they're remotely piloted by experienced pilots. This allows them to inflict large damage with small payloads applied at a critical point, Luke Skywalker-style.
Then you deploy the drone from some carrying vehicle, land and loiter, listening for a trigger. Trigger comes, the drone flies only gets a connection for a lineup if any and flies through the "line up" trajectory.
Pilot involvement can be optional.
Things progress at a ridiculous pace in a high-stakes environment like a war for existence.
With artillery that's certainly true. On the other hand, Ukraine moved from expensive Bayraktar drones in 2021 to primarily drones in the 1k-10k price range today. Cheaper weapon systems allow them to be deployed in more places. Getting 5000 drones for the price of 5 drones might be worse for logistics, but it also means some will always be where you need them, doing wonders for the latency between target detection and target destruction.
Only if you exclude manufacturing.
> This "precision versus quantity" argument played out to greatly favor precision in Ukraine.
Until the allies of Ukraine fell behind on artillery manufacturing — allowing Russia to gain dominance and grind down the Ukrainian military.
That mass produced artillery out sustained precision munitions is a major lesson in Ukraine’s defeat.
What event do you believe could change the outcome at this point?
And since Ukraine was defeated, we can discuss why: their inability to match artillery exchanges for most of the war.
But that you responded with rhetoric rather than pointing out where I’m wrong suggests you don’t have an answer to what would change the outcome.
Not even his allies believe in the “Victory Plan” — and several started talking about calling Putin after reading it.
If you think I’m wrong, stop engaging in empty rhetoric and explain what you think will allow Ukraine to win… because nobody seems to know, not even Zelensky.
So okay, fine: HN is a big place, and there's plenty of other people you can debate on this particular point if you want. I don't think we'll convince each other of anything anyway, which is also perfectly fine.
> caused by NATOs defeat
Defeated enemies aren’t making regular incursions into the ‘victors’ land which the ‘victor’ can’t stop, or launching attacks agains the ‘victors’ capital.
This just reads like Russian delusion/cope.
Kursk was stopped after small gains and prior to any major captures — with Ukraine losing their best units. That loss has led to cities along the line of battle being captured, including the fortress city of Vuhledar.
There’s now increased talk of Ukraine giving up territory — which is their defeat.
Edit due to rate limit:
You’re citing areas Russia withdrew from during the Istanbul talks as “lost” while ignoring that Russia posses 18% of Ukraine and is advancing.
Russia isn’t losing “more and more control” on any front, they’re forcing Ukraine back — including driving Ukraine from places like Vuhledar they’ve held for the entire war until now.
To use your Canadian analogy:
It would be like if the US seized the 20% of Canada closest to the continental US and then proceeded to shell Canadian army to dysfunction from there — which would be seen as a sane and effective strategy.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian-occupied_territories....]
Looks like Russia has lost everything but a tiny portion they gained, at immense cost - including the near total collapse of their economy.
And are going to be locked in trench warfare on land they don’t control, with uncertain supply lines, with no air superiority - going into winter.
And is losing more and more control of the little they have left.
This is Russia’s Afghanistan writ large, and will lead to the total collapse of the Russian gov’t (and society) soon.
It’s already nearly destroyed an entire generation of Russian men - in the middle of an already epic demographic collapse.
Don’t get me wrong, this has wrought terrible damage to Ukraine too. But with Russia’s economy (previously) and population being 10x larger, this whole debacle is a huge embarrassment to Russia. Even bigger than the collapse of the USSR.
It would be like if the US went to invade Canada, and couldn’t even hold Ottawa.
Edit to answer your edit: maybe if the 18% was the land near Alaska. And they’re at almost the same amount of land they had control of when this whole mess started. All the major economically productive areas of Ukraine are still under Ukraine’s control.
> including the near total collapse of their economy.
Regardless, even if 2, 3, or 4%, none of those is "near total collapse of their economy".
Agreed that comment above yours was out to lunch, of course.
As for AI features when the comms are jammed, Russian lancet drones, which have some autonomous capability, seem to be running on Nvidia Jetson boards, and those things cost like $200.
Precision in terms of "circular error probability" isn't the biggest issue now. Its the EW environment.
My point was if system A gets through defenses 30% of the time, but is 10x cheaper than system B which gets through 80% of the time. System A is generally the better choice, except for some very specific circumstances, very high value targets with limited strike opportunity.
Sanity check: 80% success is an 80% success rate; 3 shots at 30% success is a 66% rate, which is much, much worse.
You need 5 cheap 30% drones to beat an 80% success rate, still a major savings at the prices you give, but 70% more than 3 drones.
Point is just that it seems a little silly to try to reductively do these calculations - seems meaningless to try to compare without more information…
Yes! That definitely came up while I was thinking about the problem.
I concluded that, in cases where you desire to eliminate (1) a particular target (2) under time constraints, only simultaneous attempts make sense. (And that this combination of needs is common.)
If instead your goal is to cause random deaths, you can ignore the simultaneous/sequential distinction, treat every drone as having a different target, and just say that 3 30% drones will get 0.9 kills for every 0.8 kills from 1 80% drone.
[1] https://kyivindependent.com/us-company-aerovironment-plans-t...
Odds are there will be local adjustments made - different, more robust radio link and such to replace the fucking shit one that originally came with the switchblade.
Trying to defend against 3x-10x as many enemies brings its own challenges, even if each one is less lethal.
No Western military is prepared for a ground war with hundreds of thousands of drone attacks per day, which is what near peer would mean now.
Ref: https://kyivindependent.com/deputy-minister-ukraine-can-prod...
I do think this war must be making any sufficiently advanced military rethink their ground game to include a lot of cheap FPV drones with attached explosives.
https://thedefensepost.com/2024/10/03/ukraine-produce-millio...
Switchblade 600 is a bit better but still overpriced what civilian market can deliver at a fraction of a cost, in vast numbers, not blocked by various political negotiations etc.
Switchblade was designed for a different war entirely.
Leave the realm of mass production and you can build drones that would be, but they quickly start looking like existing systems because militaries have been working with drones since WWII.
You may be thinking of AP grenades, but broadly speaking this isn't true. UA has been dropping RKG-3 anti-tank grenades since early in the invasion. Any drone with a 3 pound lift capacity can knock out armor.
https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-cheap-grenades-expensive-tan...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-attack
The KF51 Panther revealed 2022 should represent the current state of the art. comprising a hard-kill element of extending the coverage of the ADS to the roof of the vehicle for protection against ATGMs and unguided anti-tank rockets launched from higher elevations, as well as a soft-kill element for protection against threats such as loitering munitions.[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_KF51
Obviously getting 100% accurate information on current tank armor isn’t realistic but at minimum these drones aren’t breaking new ground.
Also there is a trend recently to see more and more AA FPVs taking down Russian recon drones, some flying up to 3 km high! This already had an interesting side effects of many such drones being covered by expletives or even fake Ukrainian markings - did not really help.
Of course everyone sees this happening in Russia right now and is adapting their next generation, if they weren't already doing so. But that will only shift the sweet-spot for saturation attacks, not eliminating them
Tanks / APCs / IMVs / other armored devices that go close to the front line seem like having much more of an existential crisis.
Something that gets lost in these discussions is that the US does continuous “Ship of Theseus” upgrades to their systems and they mostly don’t export the state-of-the-art. Abrams armor in US systems is regularly completely replaced with new tech but the details are classified and not exported.
Ukraine tried NATO tactics in last year's offensive and got slaughtered. If they'd tried to bunch up even closer (as some NATO generals were pushing for), the losses would have been far worse inside of those kill boxes. It's not training. Tanks are trivial for spotter drones to find at which point they can die to stuff like drones dropping RPG shells onto the weak upper armor (even the most modern Abrams tanks can be penetrated easily) or even just calling in an artillery strike. The best case for either of these attacks is very often a mission kill and the worst case is a complete loss.
Tanks made to fight other tanks are a dead end. The future is pure infantry support. You want something with more armor than a Bradley so it can't be taken out without specialized weapons and with enough firepower to be a must-answer threat, so a bigger cannon than the one on the Bradley is needed. Rifled barrels should probably make an appearance again because they offer better accuracy and HESH rounds are great for infantry support and fortification busting. It also needs to haul troops because you can't afford an extra vehicle that can't hold troops. Merkava shows a path in that direction.
NATO tactics have never been used as those start with air power which ukraine doesn't have. NATO hasn't always given good advice but this isn't the way they would fight.
ukrane is using tanks as they are made to fight. That isn't fight other tanks if there is any other option. tanks in previous world wars were fighting tanks but not today. Russia is sometimes using tanks like that and there they do well.
To buy training time, they hired Wagner. Wagner needed bodies, so they recruited untrained guys from prison to die for them (though some small percentage survived and are presumably still working for Wagner). After 6 months of this, the Russian training pipeline started pushing out troops at a steady pace and has been ever since.
This is in stark contrast to Ukraine where you get several videos every week from someone who was kidnapped off the streets and sent to die in the trenches 24-48 hours later. A couple guys on my dev team haven't left their homes in months (female family getting them stuff) because they are so afraid of getting shanghaied.
As to "used wrong for the training", everyone is training/preparing for the last war. Nobody is sure how to train for this war as the only part that has a historical analog is trench storming, but that was over 100 years ago and the tactics have changed.
Did ANYONE expect calvary to reappear? I don't think so, but Russian troops are dumping money into buying small motorcycles and dirt bikes so they can mount up and charge the enemy trenches.
The real issue for me is that Russia is working out how to fight the new style of war while we in the US are not. Russia is going to walk away from this war with a massive 1M+ army of seasoned veterans while we can barely muster around 70k of active infantry most of whom aren't veterans and NONE with combat experience in the new way of war.
You mean "sent to training". It definitely seems strange to suggest that Russia has a smooth, efficient "training pipeline", while Ukrainians are brutally sent "to die in the trenches". As if their onboarding process is in any way different, or newly trained Russian soldiers aren't also being sent to die in trenches.
We all know what war entails, so there's no need for weird, emotionally manipulative language like this.
I prefer the Culture term “equiv-tech”
We have the whole other range of combat capabilities, and the distribution of those capabilities in our arsenal/armed forces seems guaranteed to change.
Nukes are not magic. Of course we can foresee many of the changes a nuclear exchange would bring. Especially on the “planning for war” level.
There are many steps on the escalation ladder before a nuclear exchange.
Using nuclear weapons against an opponent who has enough nuclear weapons to retaliate is a "flip over the chess board and stomp on the pieces" move. Presently the US isn't even playing against Russia, at best it's sitting behind Russia's opponent and whispering chess moves into their ear.
> gradations of nuclear exchange
Controversially, I don't think generals from either the US, nor Russia, would be willing to "pull the trigger" and launch a nuclear attack. Yes, I really think there would be a constitutional crisis where senior ministers and military leaders might stage an "instant" coup to prevent a nuclear attack.
- None of the countries (US, UK, and Russia) would threaten Ukraine’s territory
- If nuclear weapons were used against them, or they were threatened by nuclear weapons, the other signatories would “Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance”
Among other promises. So it seems like they’ve already had their promises violated.
https://warontherocks.com/2015/06/the-budapest-memorandum-an...
We also saw with DVD encryption that physical access to the device makes it tough to fully protect. Nuclear codes are protected significantly by “no one gets to tinker with the device without rapid lead poisoning”.
Physical access to a nuke does not let you disable the PAL. They are constructed so that they are embedded within the device, and cannot be disabled or altered without deconstructing significant parts of the warhead. (I suspect that the PAL is not actually a separate device that can be separated from the warhead, but a series of design choices for how the warhead is constructed that make it unable to fire without the input of a cryptographic code. But then, details on this are very highly classified for obvious reasons, so we'll never know for sure.)
The real reason they didn't and don't do this is because they don't want to end up an international pariah state like Iran and North Korea. It's very clear that the U.S. has a vested interest in nuclear non-proliferation; they were the ones who gave the PALs to all our adversaries in the first place, because in the game-theoretic calculus of MAD, a small number of enemies that you can bargain and reason with is better than a large number of nuclear states even if many of those states are on your side. We would not have supported Ukraine if they attempted to retain the nukes in the 1990s, and we wouldn't support them developing nukes now.
Sure. But standing up a program makes you an international pariah. “We’re keeping this” would have had a bit less uproar.
> Physical access to a nuke does not let you disable the PAL. They are constructed so that they are embedded within the device, and cannot be disabled or altered without deconstructing significant parts of the warhead.
People say this sort of thing, but it comes out that the US arsenal was set to 00000000 in fear that they couldn’t be used. I have… severe doubts on the uncrackable nature of Soviet nuclear cryptography.
https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/P...
Nothing in it says anything like "if broken, Ukraine can have a nuclear program".
Загроза силою чи її використання проти територіальної цілісності та недоторканності кордонів чи політичної незалежності України з боку будь-якої ядерної держави, так само, як і застосування економічного тиску, спрямованого на те, щоб підкорити своїм власним інтересам здійснення Україною прав, притаманних її суверенітету, розглядатимуться Україною як виняткові обставини, що поставили під загрозу її найвищі інтереси.
Цей Закон набирає чинності після надання Україні ядерними державами гарантій безпеки, оформлених шляхом підписання відповідного міжнародно-правового документа.
Machine translation (Gemma2):
Each Participant of this Treaty, in the exercise of its state sovereignty, has the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it determines that exceptional circumstances related to the content of this Treaty have threatened the supreme interests of its country. Such withdrawal shall be notified to all Participants of the Treaty and the Security Council of the United Nations three months in advance. The notification shall contain a statement on the exceptional circumstances which it considers to threaten its supreme interests.
Threat of force or its use against the territorial integrity and inviolability of borders or political independence of Ukraine by any nuclear state, as well as the application of economic pressure aimed at subjugating the exercise by Ukraine of rights inherent in its sovereignty to its own interests, shall be considered by Ukraine as exceptional circumstances that threaten its supreme interests.
This Act shall enter into force after Ukraine has received security assurances from nuclear states, formalized through the signing of a relevant international legal document.
It cannot be withdrawn mid-conflict:
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/tpnw-2017/art...
> Such withdrawal shall only take effect 12 months after the date of the receipt of the notification of withdrawal by the Depositary. If, however, on the expiry of that 12-month period, the withdrawing State Party is a party to an armed conflict, the State Party shall continue to be bound by the obligations of this Treaty and of any additional protocols until it is no longer party to an armed conflict.
Ukraine also isn't a signatory to it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Treaty_...
Which specific agreement are you trying to quote from, because it's not the Budapest Memorandom?
https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/995_098#Text
Ukrainian law about joining the treaty:
https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/248/94-%D0%B2%D1%80#Text
As with any treaty, it can be broken/withdrawn from.
The treaty does not establish a right/recourse to a nuclear weapons program to NPT members in Ukraine's scenario. Ukraine just, when agreeing to it, said they'd leave if they had to. They would be non-compliant with the treaty, as North Korea was/is. They would be similarly sanctioned for it.
The Budapest Memorandom was a separate agreement, predicated on acceptance of the NPT. Similarly, nothing in it says "you can have a nuclear weapons program in scenario x".
Moreover, Ukraine is post-nuclear country. We had nuclear weapons and we know how to produce more.
Sanctions and loss of Western support would be virtually guaranteed.
Talk about biting the hand that feeds.
Seriously, this whole nuclear idea you're onto, while no doubt well-intentioned, is infinitely untenable for a whole bunch of plainly obvious reasons.
> Sanctions and loss of Western support would be virtually guaranteed.
This will be a good case to support the claims. Moreover, this support will be unnecessary for a nuclear country, because war will be ended very fast.
But the simple fact is, it doesn't have unlimited control over its destiny in this particular regard, and pretending otherwise won't change that fact. It is entirely dependent on Western help at this point -- its benefactors are 1000 percent against any further nuclear proliferation, and are infinitely more concerned about that issue than they are about the borders of Ukraine, or Ukraine's survival in any other sense. They have no interest in the inevitable and far wider confrontation with Russia that would ensue from such recklessness -- and they just aren't going to allow it.
Exiting it would lead to consequences from their allies, which they can’t afford.
Ukraine does not automatically leave the NPT just because Russia violated the Budapest Memorandum; such a mechanism linking the two does not exist. Ukraine would have to explicitly leave the NPT, which they will not do.
Having nukes actually in-hand changes the calculus, a lot.
They'd have been sanctioned like crazy, but invaded? No one's taking the risk that they managed to arm a bomb.
To me a near peer implies that either side has a good chance of losing the war. It’s my opinion that Russia has not yet been at a real risk of losing this war and thus has not yet had a need to use nuclear weapons. I’m aware that the NAFO line is that Ukraine still has this in the bag - but I still don’t see a Ukrainian victory as a likely.
I assume this is why the gp post suggested ‘near peer’ implies nukes.
The reality is that nuclear weapons are a deterrent against existential threats, and all else is a bluff. So it's not a risk of losing this war that will push Russia to commit such murder-suicide, but an existential threat to its own survival as a nation.
Note that there have been numerous documented cases of near nuclear launches, especially in the 60s and 70s, it is by no means a bluff or an idle risk.
The bluff does, however, work very well in slowing down and dissuading Western help to Ukraine by cultivating the "don't do X else nukes tomorrow" memes and propaganda talking points. Very effective foreign policy tool for a nuclear-armed fascist dictatorship, other will certainly take note for future invasions.
Also, if you're not sure what they're after: Russia has been systematically driving Ukraine forces out of the Donbas because the Donbas has been shelled indiscriminately by Ukrainian forces since 2014. You can argue there's more to it than that, but that's their perspective.
I was responding to somebody who said Ukraine was Russian’s near-peer. I didn’t say they should be considered peers now, just that they certainly weren’t when the choice was made to go to war.
The Vietnam War was like 50 years ago. Who cares, sure, I don’t have any investment in whether or not the US and Vietnam were peers decades before I was born. Vietnam certainly has an impressive record.
> Also, if you're not sure what they're after: Russia has been systematically driving Ukraine forces out of the Donbas because the Donbas has been shelled indiscriminately by Ukrainian forces since 2014. You can argue there's more to it than that, but that's their perspective.
They also seem to be trying to get entrenched in Crimea, and IIRC brought up the idea of some promise that Ukraine wouldn’t ever going NATO, although don’t remember if that was a serious proposal or what.
You implied it.
> The Vietnam War was like 50 years ago. Who cares, sure, I don’t have any investment in whether or not the US and Vietnam were peers decades before I was born. Vietnam certainly has an impressive record.
America clearly wasn't using anywhere near all of the power it had. Neither is Russia now.
It wasn't sending every last teenager and pensioner to the front, like in the final defense of Berlin. But the simple fact is, it was throwing everything it reasonably could have at its optional colonial project, short of causing major instability for itself on the domestic front, or endangering its real (as opposed to imagined) security needs.
Until it was defeated in the way all the Western colonial powers were -- by simply being outlasted by the people that it had a delusional "need" to perpetually occupy.
Neither is Russia now.
An equally unsupported belief.
> You implied it.
No I didn’t. I left that unaddressed because I don’t care to argue it either way, or consider it relevant to my overall point.
NATO explicitly added plans to offer membership to Ukraine and Georgia at the Bucharest summit, and has been conducting joint military excercises with Ukraine ever since, the last one happening ~1 year before the Russian war of aggression started. The current huge NATO support for Ukraine also proves the military closeness - to the point that many of the major victories NATO weaponry firing NATO rockets with NATO targeting details to targets identified by NATO intelligence, only with Ukrainian soldiers pushing the trigger.
Not to justify Russia's clear war of aggression in any way, just explaining that Ukraine absolutely was, and likely still is, moving towards NATO membership.
That's the complete opposite of what happened. The key outcome of the Bucharest summit is that Ukraine and Georgia were explicitly denied Membership Action Plans, which would have been the crucial step needed to move their application forward. Instead they got kicked downstairs to "aspirational" status, which they both complained loudly and bitterly about. This was very, very big news at the time.
So no, Ukraine was not "absolutely moving toward membership" as of that date. They might be moving in a different direction now, but if so that's a result of the invasion, not the 2008 summit.
In any case: No, that's not why they went into the Donbas, or why they're trying to hold onto it.
Right now, Kursk is supposedly considered a major success by the Ukrainians. Let's see how that pans out.
They have detonated more than 800 nukes in their history, ballistic ones from subs since 60 years ago, and have almost 2k warheads deployed.
Don't confuse the fact that they tend to start and conduct wars poorly, until cornered, with complete ineptitude.
Nuclear missiles have a lot of stuff that degrades over time. The plutonium. The conventional chemical explosives. The electronics. Were their nukes even designed to be serviced 25, 50 years in the future?
Russia went through quite a bit of economic difficulty in the waning years of communism and in the years after communism. The state of their other big expensive military toys (their navy, etc) and even their ability to equip their infantry on a personal level seems to be pretty far from ideal.
I'm not telling you that Russia doesn't have functional nukes, and it's certainly not a bluff that other nations can afford to call, but I think it's a very legitimate question.
Not to mention that their recent launch was a bit - eh.
The Soviet Union was evil, but it was somewhat competent. The russian regime is not.
As for nukes, nuclear saber rattling seems to be one of the few remaining reasons the rest of the world gives a f*ck about whatever Putin and his cronies are saying. Without nukes, the West would have massively stepped up support for Ukraine, and the Russian army would be nothing but a breadcrumb of smoldering wrecks all the way to Siberia. So I'd think that Putin has a huge incentive to keep his nuclear deterrent functional, no matter how corrupt and inept the rest of his armed forces are.
The ICBMs and SLBMs to "deliver" the nukes are more expensive and harder to develop them the nukes themselves, and Russia routinely tests those.
"harder to develop": London, not having had as much money to spend on nukes as the US and USSR had, gets its SLBMs (along with the launch tubes) from the US (whereas they make their own nukes and SLBM-carrying subs) and a few minutes of searching finds no signs of them ever developing an ICBM. (In fact, they might never have had ICBMs: they certainly don't now.)
The one you describe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_(missile) - is being actively phased out.
> Despite the Russian claims that the missile is on 'combat alert', since its 2022 flight test, it has experienced four failed tests, the most recent on 21 September 2024
We have the short opportunity window, when Satana stopped to work and Sarmat is not working yet.
Even if 1% are operational, they could devastate the US.
Russia has 2000. What percentage of them are you willing to gamble are working? Are 10% of them working? That's 200 US cities.
So, no. We are absolutely not going to follow your logic. There is too much chance that they have enough nukes working to make us infinitely regret a nuclear exchange.
A near-peer conflict involves a nuclear exchange
It does not mean that the two sides are necessarily using the most destructive possible weapons in their arsenals. A hypothetical US/China armed conflict over Taiwan (god forbid) would be "near-peer" even if neither side goes nuclear.
"Near-peer" is meant to distinguish that sort of conflict from, let's say, US vs. Taliban in Afghanistan where the two sides had vastly different levels of technology and capability.
Or maybe you're making the point that two nuclear states would be hard-pressed to fight an open war that did not devolve into a nuclear exchange. Which is a very valid concern. If that's your point, I apologize.
It's a valid point to argue, but it does need to be argued, not assumed.
We could be entering a world where there is always a military alternative to nuclear weapons, leaving nukes in a state where their only utility is as a deterrent against another nuclear power using them.
It's not a new discussion, this comes up every decade or so when some new technology takes expensive kit out but just as with the tank nothing is going anywhere.
Paraphrasing I can't remember who, "if you're getting out of the tank, what are you getting into?" Helicopters, tanks, mechanized and combined arms warfare and metal are still pretty much the only way you take territory, there's no alternative, even if drones start taking helicopters or expensive vehicles out it's the only thing that is mobile and packs a punch and protects your infantry.
> Justin Bronk, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think-tank, said Russian helicopters fitted with anti-tank guided missiles “were always going to be a much greater threat to Ukrainian forces during a counteroffensive than during periods when Ukraine was defending against Russian attacks”.
> “They can hover, spot for targets and fire anti-tank guided missiles from beyond the range of shoulder-fired Manpads or anti-aircraft fire,” Bronk said.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/d8fe8941-3703-433d-ac7a-dab9ba500...
Of course Russians will use their helis, they already built them, but nobody will probably seriously think about developing and building new helis in the future.
Manned systems still have advantages though: no matter how much EW there is, you still have a man in the loop.
But I expect the role of the human to be less and less mechanical, and more and more about bearing the responsibility. As such I expect manned systems to evolve into more like on mini command post supported by a squad of automated weapons. (Ideally you'd want the manned version to look exactly the same as the automated ones to prevent enemies from targeting it, like the IDF did with its fake tanks[1] a while ago).
[1]: https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-disguises-missile-launc...
I remain skeptical that the F-35 will prove to be a prudent expenditure of resources both financial and in terms of R&D.
Instead, the retrospective will likely be: "I guess we should now build drones in addition to our jet fighter." Double the effort, half the efficiency, half the result.
If we use the Ukraine war as a template for the next major war that the US faces (possibly against China) -- does the United States have the industrial capability to produce the tens to hundreds of millions of drones necessary to win?
Like can it produce the propellers, the frames, the motors, the batteries, the ICs to make a FPV drone that blows up in an enemy soldiers face?
Can that supply chain be made in the US and how long can will it take to make?
Is this a priority for the United States? Why or why not?
Yes
> Can that supply chain be made in the US and how long can will it take to make?
In a limited capacity yes but also in like 5 or so years the answer will be an unequivocal yes.
How independent would TSMC's American foundries be if cut off and forced to operate autonomously if US/China war breaks out?
I am sure that the goal is full independence but I have no idea what the current state of that is, what the state of it will be in 5-10 years etc.
Most are much smaller and more specialised/less automated so they don't have the same kind of production but there are a lot of fabs in the US and a lot of fab knowledge. Of all the countries, the US is one of the few that could probably survive a semiconductor industry collapse outside.
And many of those semiconductors in cheap FPV drones likely are actually fabbed in the US or could easily be fabbed in the US by Intel, Infineon, Texas Instruments, pSemi, NXP, Bosch, Renesas, Micron, onsemi, Analog Devices, Honeywell, Polar, GlobalFoundaries, Microchip, or Samsung, just to name a few non-military facing companies with significant fab operations in the US.
However it’s interesting to compare the F35 program to the alternative of producing several hundred F22s, or some other stealth solution.
And importantly, the US wants to export the F-35 but keep the F-22 close to chest so that should push come to shove, the US can always maintain air superiority.
However, it's unrealistic for them to establish anything like air superiority over the Taiwan Straits. Each carrier has fewer than 100 aircraft, and only a couple can be deployed to the region at a time. The opposing PLAAF has over 2000 combat aircraft including hundreds of stealth planes.
For the US to be competitive such a contest they need planes that are qualitatively better than the Chinese ones by a huge margin. American advantages in stealth, missile range and avionics are essential just to stay in the game.
They are in effect the specced-down mass production version of the F-22 and are comparable in terms of cost relative to similar fifth generation fighters (and even comparable to many fourth generation fights) but go toe to toe with or outperform the competition.
This stacks the deck such that the F-35 will be a peer to or superior to any "opposition" aircraft or anti-air weapon system while the US keeps the F-22 around to serve as a dogfighter that is reserved for fighting the rare circumstance of something that's legitimately a threat to an F-35.
Drones that can do that are called “anti-aircraft missiles”.
Are you absolutely certain that there's no other way to take down modern fighter aircraft?
Like isn't that the lesson from the Ukraine war w.r.t. tanks? That there are cheaper, more effective tools out there to take out state of the art equipment.
We have many drones much cheaper than an f35 that can do this already. They're called AIM-9, AIM-120, Meteor. Or if you're Russian they're called R77, or R73.
These are, of course, anti-aircraft missiles.
Why or why not?
For another, R&D: we've been working on fast autonomous flying vehicles to take down aircraft for decades: as the poster above keeps explaining, they're called AA missiles, and are extremely expensive, and even still have a hard time actually hitting a plain. Drones are an innovation in fighting tanks because they are much more maneuverable than traditional AT weapons and thus can more easily find chinks in the tank's armor. You could have always used the extreme maneuverability of AA rockets to hit those same chinks in the armor, but the cost was too high; drones were cheaper. AA rockets are extremely cost effective against plains though, as those jets are monumentally more expensive than a tank.
So essentially you can't see an F-35 until it is already lined up to kill you. That tends to make it pretty difficult to hit it.
An air-to-air missile is essentially a single-use drone
And barring some big advance, an air-to-air missile can't be any smaller than it is currently. It needs to carry enough explosive to damage the target aircraft, and it needs enough fuel to travel at supersonic speeds for a long enough distance to actually intercept the target.
That's the lesson from drones vs tanks.
Not sure what this has to do with my claims about not being able to use cheap drones for taking down fighter jets. Military ships, like tanks, are also somewhat slower and somewhat less maneuverable than fighter jets, I believe.
They will absolutely replace modern fighters to a degree and already have to an extent, like we've seen in Ukraine with drones serving as close infantry support etc. instead of manned aircraft.
There are still some things "cheap" drones won't be able to do.
Specifically, if you want to carry big bombs and missiles, you need a large aircraft even if it's unmanned. The drone is also presumably going to need to be able to survive enemy air defenses to some extent. So you wind up with a big expensive drone like the MQ-9 Reaper ($30mil plus, lol) that is approaching the size and complexity of a manned fighter.
Also, and I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but "small, cheap drones" are not likely to be shooting down modern fighters in the way that small cheap drones are currently killing tanks directly.
If you want an aircraft that can fly at mach 1.6+ and shoot missiles at other things (some of them stealthy) traveling at mach 1.6+, you are going to wind up with something fairly close to the size/cost/complexity of an F-35 even if you don't have a human being sitting inside.
A starship already costs around 90 million USD at cost (estimated based on parts cost currently) and is intended to cost around 10 million USD per launch commercially if it's able to be reused regularly.
And a single launch could carry a lot of bombs (like 50-400 based on the size). So on the high end after factoring in the cost of the bombs, amortising the cost of the initial orbital platform, and assuming a higher cost of like 120 million USD for a single launch, that would still almost certainly come out cheaper than sacrificing an MQ-9 or a much more expensive missile. And of course if you can get that cost down to 10 million USD per launch then other than artillery, that's going to be the cheapest way to deliver ordinance to any location in the world by far (after factoring in the cost of flight time for jets, etc).
Worth mentioning that this already happened to an attack helicopter 20 years ago! The Comanche[0] was a revolutionary recon/attack helicopter with some mental stealth engineering behind it - everything from limiting sound profile via blade design & fenestron, a radar presence a fraction of an Apache, they even directed the exhaust down the tail boom so that the heat generated could easily be dissipated by the tail rotor!
Unfortunately for helicopter nerds, UAVs were a fraction of the price, suitable for recon and attack, and pilots could survive it being shot down.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing%E2%80%93Sikorsky_RAH-66...
Best part was the instruction manual that came with it that was basically a guide of all the military equipment of the Soviet Union that you could target in the game.
I loved that it had a dynamic campaign where the frontline moved according to how well you did.
Before that, I also enjoyed LHX.
> Best part was the instruction manual that came with it that was basically a guide of all the military equipment of the Soviet Union that you could target in the game.
Do you remember what the copy protection was for MicroProse's F-19 Stealth Fighter? It was the silhouettes of US and Soviet fighters and bombers from the Cold War era: "identify this aircraft". Somehow they thought my teenage self, obsessed as I was with Cold War military tech, wouldn't learn the shapes. It's how I learned the shapes of most fighter jets.
Yes, I had a pirated copy. We all did back then, legal games were unheard of.
Still EA for now, but it looks promising.
Thanks for the link.
-- edit: I don't like half assed comments so I went and dig him up https://x.com/HiddenAsbestos
I don't recall having played Comanche in order to compare the two. The other game I spent innumerable hours in was F117A [1] - partially because -- again, my recollection -- one had to damn near real-time fly from the base to the target and then back, all the while in stealth mode, which usually meant going slow and terrain hugging
1: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/f-117a-nighthawk-stealth-...
Around the time of F-117A I discovered Jetfighter II which felt a lot smoother handling wise, it was great to just fly around doing stunts to be honest. I spent a lot of time just doing carrier take-offs with an immediate 360 and back into landing.
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/jetfighter-ii-advanced-ta...
There were a few games like Comanche, X-Wing, Magic Carpet and Descent that felt like they really pushed the technology while trying to show how we could utilize 3d in a different way from the other titles of the time (which were usually all FPS games).
You can swap a carrier air wing to 2 years newer planes.
You can't swap a battleship to 2 years newer tech.
Battleships aren’t useful for that.
Missile cruisers/destroyers are the battleship replacements.
But airplanes can also carry and launch missiles even better, with some warning and planning.
Battleships are useful for the naval equivalent of a bar brawl or a street gang fight. Aka up close, nasty, ‘punch them in the face until they can’t get up again’. They’re the equivalent of Mike Tyson in his prime for that.
Which even now would have some PR value, and no matter the time period will always be a spectacle.
But tactics have evolved more since then, and we just don’t have those type of fights that much anymore. And when we do, we just bring a ‘gun’ instead of relying on our ‘fists’.
Of course, anything is possible and maybe we’ll turn New Jersey into a spaceship to fight our space naval battles in a hundred years. Odds are low though.
The main reason really is range. A battleship can obliterate a target within about 25 km (yes, I know the guns can shoot longer than that, but practical accuracy against a moving target such as another ship..) whereas an aircraft carrier can launch strikes from hundreds of km away. Further, the carrier can launch reconnaissance aircraft (nowadays with radar obviously, but thinking of the WWII era when battleships were obsoleted) so it's aware of what's happening around it. So it can, say, stay away out of range of enemy battleships, as well as detect enemy targets at long range to launch strikes against. Yes, mistakes can still happen, see the battle of Samar. And yes, the battleship likely has floatplanes, but compared to a carrier, few of them, shorter range, and needs relatively calm seas to recover them.
All this being said, yes it took a lot of planes launched from a lot of carriers to sink the Yamato. But due to the range issue explained in the previous paragraph, the carriers could safely do this well out of range of the massive guns of the Yamato, whereas the Yamato could do nothing more than sit there impotently taking hit after hit until it finally succumbed.
> When doing a shore assult a battleship is more useful than airplanes but that is not enough to be worth the cost of running them.
In principle, yes. But to do that the battleship needs to get awfully close to whatever it's going to shoot at, running the risk of hitting mines, or being targeted by shore-based anti-ship missiles etc. And if you already have the overwhelming superiority to get rid of all such enemy systems before bringing the battleship in, why not use those same assets to hit the same targets the battleship would hit in the first place?
He should tell the F-117 pilot who got shot down with a few decades old anti-air system that, while keeping in mind that the F-117 flew higher and faster and quieter (relatively).
You have to account for the possibility that for your enemy losing a couple of regiments for a town of 10,000 is acceptable losses.
And of course it wouldn't work if the commanders didn't have informal authority to put their soldiers into pits or summarily execute them - also well documented.
The Aztecs and other ancient people like the Vikings didn't make excuses, they made war for it's own sake to please the entities they were worshipping with the blood of men.
- Even conflicts where tanks were obviously useful, like WWII, there were high rates of loss.
- Russian armored groups were poorly trained and not well supported by dismounted infantry early in the war, leading to high losses against fairly mobile Ukrainians armed with ATGMs. Now that the front has solidified, there's less room for maneuver where tanks are more crucial.
- Russia is employing a lot of old equipment and Ukraine doesn't have enough western armored vehicles for it to matter.
Cheap and prolific drones make tanks more vulnerable than before by making them easier to spot and delivering munitions directly, but there's still a need for armored direct fire, especially between two heavily fortified lines. You can't really break a trench line with waves of infantry anymore.
I suspect there's still a niche for helicopters too.
Being in a T-72 with an armor configuration from the 80s and a carousel auto loader in the middle of the crew compartment in a war where your enemies have top attack atgms with tandem warheads would suck a lot though.
I don’t think that drones are necessarily the only answer to the “expensive weapons with expensive to train crews” problem.
Expensive weapons lead to cost boondoggles and economic asymmetry, eg $10k in modified COTS drones can defeat $MM in conventional armored vehicles.
We should be re-evaluating our weapons systems economically as well as doctrinally.
For example, would our Navy be more effective with thousands of relatively inexpensive small platforms that could do commerce raiding, interdiction, air defense and so forth (destroyer type jobs) than with our expensive and rare large surface combatants?
adding more things to control will cause more problems .... especially in peace time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeune_%C3%89cole was all about this... In the 19th century, when a couple of innovations (torpedoes, explosive shells) made it look like smaller ships could do enough damage that big ships were just a waste of money. In their case, they were wrong and their ideas were surpassed by further technological advancements (aircraft carriers).
Small ships with missiles and drones and unmanned submarines could be a decently powerful combination. You can't project power with those though, and around half the idea behind the US' carrier fleet is power projection.
In principle, wars between armies are proxy wars between nations/governments/etc.
A long time ago (Sumeria maybe), soldiers started to fight soldiers, and civilians could get on with civilian life while fighting continued (farming, production, etc.). Now obviously that doesn't mean that no war has ever had civilian casualties, or that armies have never targeted civilian populations, but it made warfare a fairly symmetric endeavour. Rather than having your farmers hacking at each other with hoes until there are no farmers left, you can pit some of your strongest and best trained men against your enemy's strongest and best trained men, and accept the results of that to avoid total annihilation of your whole populace.
But that only works because both sides have skin in the game, and people are dying on both sides.
If we move to a model where a stronger power can fight a war remotely with no risk to real people, then the only way to take the war to the enemy will be to target civilians. Terrorism, asymmetrical warfare, etc. will be the only way to respond to drone strikes and the like.
I don't know what the answer is, but it worries me.
This is hardly new, it's been the reason for the prevalence of suicide bombings in the Israel/Hamas war for decades.
Combine that with the tech behind the Redbull F1 camera drone [1] that can fly at 200mph and drones become much deadlier to attack helicopters. Slap a rocket motor on it for final approach, even a sub-M civilian model rocket motor, and it’s over. Imagine the drone just sitting there listening for a helicopter to get close enough - humans wouldn’t even need to be involved except to place it strategically.
Imagine a drone which outputs the signature of an attack helicopter to draw out that loitering drone and then destroy it, leaving the space open for an actual attack helicopter to swoop in and do its business.
The attack drone can just move and triangulate the sound, eliminating anything that’s trying to mimic a helicopter without outputting enough decibels.
Examples: the counter-drone outputs only a specific frequency (the anti-helo drone isn't running a whole sound analysis, just a narrow range). It outputs that at much lower decibels (the anti-helo-drone just thinks the helo is farther away). It outputs that sound in bursts and directionally (the anti-helo-drone is only listening in a specific place).
Once found, the counter-drone dispatches a kill drone which can match the anti-helo drone's speed.
Sure all of these "hacks" will be countered by future versions of the anti-helo-drones, but that's kinda my whole point.
It doesn't matter if the decoy can match frequency if it can't match amplitude because it's trivial to triangulate the position and eliminate anything that's too quiet. Any helicopter that sounds "farther away" than its actual position is obviously a decoy. Measuring the time of flight on reflections eliminates directional speakers.
These aren't even hacks, this is something an Alexa smart home speaker is equipped to do today. Add a rudimentary radar and the decoy now has to have the same radar cross section as a big metal helicopter. Chaff isn't going to work when sensor fusion includes computer vision.
> Once found, the counter-drone dispatches a kill drone which can match the anti-helo drone's speed.
Once it's dispatched, how is it going to target and intercept a small drone with a tiny radar cross section that has thrust vectoring? That's a job for static CIWS/AA, not a cheap counter drone dispatched from a decoy.
My point is that attackers have the technological and cost advantage here, possibly forever. Civilian quadcopters can't easily take down a 150 knot helicopter now but the technology to make 200+ mph military drones is already here, it just hasn't been combined into a weapon yet. No imagination needed, it's practically inevitable.
Knights in armor didn't necessarily die out because of their vulnerability to guns; rather, professional pikemen and musketeers started making more economic sense.
Why? Sure you might be limited to that if you're using an Arduino but with an FPGA or even a cheap "edge AI" NPU you could do a very thorough analysis (even credit card sized image recognition modules with camera are <$50 now). Heck even a seeedstudio respeaker can do live voice identification and isolation, noise cancellation, and 16 direction source location/indication using 4 microphones!
A megaphone is pretty loud and doesn’t require kilowatts. Sure it’s directional, but it would be good enough in a sweep pattern to trigger sleeper drones. That would necessitate triangulation and counter-countermeasures.
Welcome to the arms race! Lockheed Martin is hiring!
Drones don't need to be small, and big doesn't always mean expensive.
on edit: ah, I understand a later comment better now, but I mean, detecting the waiting drone is probably going to involve that waiting drone doing lots of movement - not turning its camera to look at noise source.
Maybe helicopter moving should just have an increasing number of little anti-drones flying with it, increasing further the cost and complexity of helicopters.
I'm not sure that follows.
Military drones like the Predator have been around for 30 years - at a cost of $30 million a drone. US military contractors are many things, but they're never cheap. And at that price, you don't have many and so they're never where they need to be.
The battlefield impact in Ukraine has been because for $500 you can strap a grenade to a DJI Mavic and you've got 60,000 times as many of them. And sure it's got much less range and inferior sensors and less jamming resistance and so on - but the price lets it be it's in the right place at the right time.
Defence contractors aren't famous for their cost-effective practices, so I'm not sure they can improve on the most important aspect of these drones.
If there's good R&D and first-order thinking in the mix, one order of magnitude does not seem insane to me. It's a cliche, but look at what Elon Musk has achieved, everyone said it couldn't be done, but it happened.
Ultimately other things can help, like designing new innovative form factors and cathering to a changing reality (it's doesn't make sense to shoot down 50k$ drones with 1M$ missiles).
Also, the US has shown it can stomach its pride and buy foreign off the shelf designs which are better (okay, not always, cf. the KC-45 vs KC-46, but still). And of course there's the whole rest of the world.
NATO has been flying large, expensive drones equipped with long-range radar at the edges of Ukrainian and Russian airspace. You don't hear much about it but this has been tremendously helpful for feeding Ukraine targeting data and warning about attacks. Can't do that with a cheap drone.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sypaq_Corvo_Precision_Payload_...
The concept of tactical air superiority is now questionable. The USAF used to boast that American troops have not had to fight under a hostile sky since 1952. That era seems to be over. There are so many portable systems now that can take out an aircraft.
Jam-resistant drones are already a thing. Drones are going to have to be shot down one at a time. This is quite possible but the missiles to do it can cost more than the drones.
[1] https://www.defensenews.com/air/2024/02/08/us-army-spent-bil...
shotgun slugs aren't usable in any serious, consistent way outside of maybe 20 meters (~60 ft). nasty stuff if you're in range, through.
Shotgun slugs can be useful well beyond 20 meters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_slug#:~:text=A%20slug%....
As a Canadian, I am normally not the one correcting others on the basics of firearms.
But I think an open question is if it could be made portable enough to tote around on the battlefield.
If attack drones can move like racing drones, that’s going to be a hard shot to pull off though
The loitering "drop grenades on cars" kind are probably much easier to knock down.
There are issues though. Skeet guns are 28-34" barrels which is super-long. These guns are also heavy. Once you have ammo loaded up, you're talking 11+ pounds. These guns size and weight make them almost unusable for anything outside of drones. Carrying around an extra gun and heavy ammo is a big commitment both physically and logistically.
9mm rounds go 1500 ft per second, so probably within 300 meters a drone wouldn't have the reaction time to dodge a bullet with precise aim.
It could also be mounted on a dog, real or robotic.
Actually building this thing though might be a science fiction dream.
About a decade ago, DARPA developed a .50 caliber gun round that has onboard guidance.[1] They were thinking snipers, not anti-drone, but maybe the concept can be adapted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnoKpXvj41A
(there is a saying or word for titles as questions, and the answer is always no)
like, nearly all commentators, everywhere, are talking about OSINT releases from RUSI or CNA or whoever. and those are based on scraps from official UKR, NATO, RUS, etc. releases.
1. There are no wonder weapons, nor are weapons obsoleted so easily. You cannot look at one in isolation of the larger context. The incidents in one war do not inform the use in all wars or operations.
2. Militaries view these types of things as part of a larger system, the parts of which are combined to create a desired effect. It is situational and Russia C&C is not the same as other countries C&C.
3. War has pro/con evolutions, as the drones progress, so does the anti-drone tech. These same helicopters were allegedly instrumental in preventing Ukraine's counter offensive in Zaporizhzhia, with their standoff anti-tank missiles, popping up above the trees, outside the range of manpads
I agree with your three points, but they are very high level, a bit like quoting Sun Tzu. The question is whether the attack heli is becoming rapidly obsolete (or at least, relegated to less relevant roles), and I think it might. Other weapon systems have, after all.
--
Edit: I love that I got downvoted for asking this even though, sure enough, Perun indeed uploaded a recent video reviewing his opinions of the attack helicopter! Oh, well... that's HN for you.
In this specific respect, not really. Neither Ukraine or Russia really gained air superiority and MANPADS are common. In that context, attack helicopters are not a great weapon. It does not mean that it would be the case in all future wars. Some countries are more capable than Russia. Sure, better anti-drone weapons would help, but it’s a bit early to call helicopters obsolete. Pretty much in the same way as it was premature to call the main battle tank dead as a concept last year.
Why do you think the days of the heli might be over?
I think if you ask the military of US, Israel, Russia, and China, you will find them saying the attack heli has unique and useful capabilities not available on other platforms.
To my knowledge the US has abandoned the development of their advanced attack helicopters, and it's not because the current ones are flawless. Their Apaches are very vulnerable in a modern threat environment.
The Russians seem to have lots of inventory, who knows what they are thinking. Even Perun states a lot of Russian tactics and doctrine seem very old fashioned, using helicopters in a way that doesn't seem particularly cost effective (e.g. in roles better served by artillery).
As for China, I haven't the faintest idea. What's their use of attack helicopters?
My first comment which reached -2 said:
> That video by Perun is 2 years old, while TFA is from today. Surely there have been additional lessons learned in two years?
What was wrong about the delivery, so that I can learn and avoid it in the future?
Using italics was unnecessary
It's also hilarious I got downvoted for saying Perun's video was 2 years old and surely there would be new considerations, and sure enough, Perun posted a newer video with new considerations!
> Using italics was unnecessary
So a single word in italics in a different comment triggered downvotes on my first comment that didn't use italics? Seems like retaliatory downvoting of unrelated comments then. In any case, italics is used for emphasis and it's used commonly enough here on HN that its very limited markup supports it.
you are being argumentative... which earns downvotes. you can word things differently to not be this way. Also, talking about being downvoted is against the posting guidelines, which will earn more downvotes. (See the links at the bottom)
> Punished for disagreement
see it as a signal from community moderation, this is not a free speech platform, content and conversation moderation is necessary online, unpopular opinions are often downvoted to avoid back and forth argumentation, so you may view it beyond moderation as feedback on your views, context dependent
> Sorry, mate, but I really think you missed the point of the attack helicopter concept, at least in the modern Western concept. I can't speak as to either how the Russians think they should be using their helicopters in doctrine, or how they actually are using their helicopters in doctrine, but you seem to have completely ignored where the attack helicopter fits in as far as we in the West are concerned. The days of using attack helicopters in a troop support role to aid ground forces are long gone, except in cases of extreme emergency or very permissive environments. Instead, they are used as the division and corps commander's maneuver asset. MG Isenhower last week publicly described an evolution during an NTC rotation for a corps-level mission, the 1AD CAB sending both battalions from Fort Irwin to a target area over 250km away, (Conducted with incorporation into a Red Flag exercise to replicate the air and SEAD problem) and this sort of operation pretty much matches what I've seen helicopters be used for over the past four years' worth of division and corps level exercises. You can imagine the level of havoc which can be wreaked by one battalion, let alone two in the division and corps deep areas, by a unit capable of identifying and engaging its own targets in real-time from (relatively speaking) close range, whilst itself emitting a rather limited EM signature, and, of course, being entirely unjammable unlike long-range loitering munitions.
Wow, now I can't unsee it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_Atta...
[2] https://archive.ph/20200101232918/http://clarkesworldmagazin...
Everything in a war will involve losses that appear asymmetric if you consider losses in isolation. War is a horrible affair.
Helicopters won't disappear because they can be shot down, but if UAV, communications, plus artillery can replace them. Communication is the most likely weak link due to countermeasures.
All IMO of course.
All the strategic decisions of western militaries is based on the sheer expensiveness of their foot soldiers, which means reluctance to fight ground wars, extreme aversion to casualties etc.
It also meant advanced militaries generally shrunk massively in terms of soldier count, ending conscription, making the existing forces more elite and more equipped (Since the meat solider is so expensive anyways).
So helicopters, given their decreasing cost effectiveness, is likely to entirely disappear as a tactical weapon. They will be transport only going forward, or some sort of a big drone carrier.
In fact, I would argue that the U.S., U.K., Israel, and now Ukraine and Russia are the only countries today that have demonstrated the capability to engage in extremely fierce fighting.
We’ve also become a lot better at keeping troops alive, which I wouldn’t mistake for a reluctance to engage in heavy fighting.
It’s important to remember, and Russia in particular has learned this lesson again most recently, that you need to exercise your military to work out cobwebs and operational problems, and while you can conduct training exercises, nothing resembles the experience from fighting a war. The number of countries with this institutional knowledge and experience continues to dwindle.
I took part in Op Phantom Fury in a support role -- that was 20 years ago next month. And while that was real, intense combat, and several units got mauled, the total casualties on the US side were ~700. That's big for Iraq, and at the time, staggering. I donated a pint and a half of O-, more than I probably should have, because there were a lot of wounded coming in.
At the time we estimated as high as 5000 enemy combatants, and there were ~3000 killed or captured.
But compared to modern peer-vs-peer fights, that's rookie numbers. The Russians were taking ~1500 casualties a day during hard frights in Bakhmut; the Ukranians less, but probably on par with Fallujah coalition casualties.
> In fact, I would argue that the U.S., U.K., Israel, and now Ukraine and Russia are the only countries today that have demonstrated the capability to engage in extremely fierce fighting.
The US (and to some degree NATO) has the capacity, but 20 years of middle east fighting that produced nothing of value have removed the tolerance for more unneeded military adventures. Plus Iraq/AFG didn't send home 10000+ casualties a month. Serious, hardcore combat with commensurate casualties would not sell with the US public, and a large part of Russian / Iranian / Israeli / Chinese, et al politics are based around that perception.
To your point, I don't disagree that serious, hardcore combat with huge casualties wouldn't set well with the American public, but I would suggest that you're basing that hypothesis on how we reacted to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and as such it's not really comparable because a war with, let's say China, is going to elicit a different response altogether.
Even so, we spent how long in Afghanistan? How long in Iraq? We were kicking in doors still even with a population that thought "what's the point of this?" for a decade +. Imagine if a real war kicks off - I'm not so sure we would be hesitant to fight if there were serious issues at stake.
Thanks for your service too. I was also in a support role during OIF. Thankfully it was rather uneventful for me personally.
A lot of US systems are designed to be functional with bandwidth that is significantly less than an old dial-up modem. In the average case that doesn’t happen but it is an explicit design target to enable operation in severely compromised environments.
The future will be annihilation at a distance with cheap standoff weapons followed by swarms of cheap drones loitering over battlefields to clean up.
BTW Russia and the US at least, saw this coming decades ago. Which was the reason behind the intermediate range missile treaty, which was sadly ripped up in the early 2000s.
Archer has a 40km range (SF to San Jose) and can fire off three rounds in 20 seconds before hitting the road at 40mph. “Sniper” artillery apparently:
The future will be boots on the ground, men engaging in hand-to-hand combat, one dies/one lives.
That might occur in the context of standoff weapons or cheap drones or AI or whatever, but all of those things will be to facilitate a scenario where your side brings more men to that fight, that your men have an advantage in that fight, and that the fight actually reduces the other side's ability to do the same to you.
Also, I would argue that winning battles is about numbers and advantage. Winning wars is about effectively reducing supplies and support.
If you play out the drones, standoff weapons, ICBMs, whatever...at the end of the day war is about taking something from someone or stopping someone from taking from you. All the tech nets out and it's you face to face with another human.
All of the tech is context of the face to face.
And your comment about battles vs wars isn't wrong, but reducing "supplies and support" just sets you up to have a an easier battle. Maybe you reduce the other side's capacity to do battle so effectively that the next "battle" is just you walking into the other side's capitol/village/home, but you still actually need the boots on the ground to go do that thing.
There are specific 'counters' like pikes, fortifications etc, but they only trade effectively against head on charges. Cavalry still held the advantage of tactical mobility, which meant they dominated reconnaissance, can pursue and annihilate defeated enemies, can retreat gracefully etc.
There may be no counters to drones except for more drones. Or the counter may have to be highly strategical, such as devastating hack-based attacks that may involve use of advanced and dangerous AIs (Cyberpunk Blackwall...).
Artilleries also had no counter for like 50 years. And completely reshaped military doctrine and strategy, made WW1 into a slog etc. WWII found a way to 'beat' artillery by armored thrusts to get behind them, but that is not easily achievable.
You're right that you may only find a counter to the latest tech once you've lost the war, or you may never find it and you'll only see the victors over you displaced by someone who does find a counter and now rules over you instead of your first enemy.
It's gonna be done on drone. And they can lie in wait in low power mode and navigate buildings so, yeah better hope you get all of them.
The US Army has not had a evolution of its attack helicopter since the 1970s.
I remember because one of my favorite childhood games was Comanche 3. [1] Control a helicopter, not crash, not get shot down, neutralize enemies, and achieve mission objectives -- it was cutting-edge for 1997.
The Comanche program was scrapped after more than a decade of development. And the Defiant program was just cancelled last year as well.
Sure, it's beta and continuously in development (and likely won't be finished, ever), but still, you can take off in a Harrier and blow up stuff. The graphics are charmingly retro.
--
[1] published by MicroProse, but actually a one-man effort.
I know we have Hellfire toting drones, but their payload seems very limited versus existing attack helicopter platforms or the A-10.
I’m actually surprised we don’t have a drone attack helicopter - basically an unmanned Apache.
Or has that entire concept basically become obsolete in favor of just sending over swarms of loitering suicide drones?
The drones I would see as maybe being effective is some kind of anti radar drone that can loiter in an area without comms and strike when the radar lights up.
That said the CAS role requires radio comms to the helicopter / airplane, so I mean maybe a drone with an LLM that can use human comms to figure out friend from foe.
Obviously the drone has to send back a TV signal to the controller, I think the US would figure out some kind of HARM missile that would just lock onto the drone transmitter. Or a CIWS system with a radar that locks on to the transmitter.
I think solid fuel rocket motors are cheaper than electric motors and batteries.
Maybe drones are the future, but I sort of see it as 2 broke countries duking it out. There's probably a reason why Ukraine wants US weapons like ATACMS and not a container ship full of drones. If you look at the $120 billion in aid to ukraine, that would buy you 100 million drones at $1200 per drone. Or 10 million at $12,000 per.
I guess what I'm saying is if NATO fought Russia it would be over in a few weeks and no one would care about drones. I think drones, except for Ukraine's sea drones, are highly useful in this conflict but probably not many others.
Sea drones could be a game changer, its a super long range torpedo and for anyone fighting the US, its probably safe to assume vessels beyond the vessel that launches them, are those of the US military / the enemy.
The problem then is all the OPFOR has to defend against is cheap shitty drones.
The Apache has been incrementally upgrade over the years, so yeah, it is much different.
We are definitely entering into the era of drone-vs-human warfare.
Drones are cheap and deadly and can be remotely operated, and soon probably operated by AI.
Another way of saying this is "may well not be".
That theoretical highly maneuverable drone with a highly advanced sensor suite isn't going to be cheap either. At which point, what's the advantage? You wouldn't be bound by the number of pilots, but if the drones are too expensive it doesn't matter.
You gave part of the answer right there. Not only would you not be limited by the number of - hard to replace and time-consuming and expensive to train - pilots but you don't run the risk of losing them either.
> but if the drones are too expensive it doesn't matter.
The large expense for fighter aircraft tends not to lie in the actual production costs but in the development costs which are spread over a limited production run. Build more drones and they get less expensive per item. Build enough of them to overwhelm the enemy and you win drone superiority.
Modern fourth generation fighters would be more than sufficient up close. Except that fifth generation fighters hunt in packs and none of them need to be pointed at their target to hit them.
If you're communicating, you are broadcasting your position to the enemy. That means you can be shot down.
If you're in passive stealth mode, you can't detect the enemy and they can't detect you until both sides are extremely close and that means a dogfight.
All of this also ignores the massive advancements in IRST and AI which can likely pick out subtle patterns in radar and other data that normal hard-coded algorithms cannot.
Your side can have another plane paint the enemy plane, so now you can see him without your emitting anything.
If the illuminating plane is a stealth plane, then you've just traded on stealth plane for another. Even worse, there's a decent chance that your broadcasting plane gets shot down, the illumination fails, and the enemy stealth plane still gets away leaving you one plane less for no gains at all.
As seen in the case of Russia’s super drone being downed by their own this week after presumably loosing control, only relying on unmanned vehicles en mass leads to a single point of failure.
Disrupt or corrupt signals, disrupt the entire force.
The US is the force it is because it can do combined arms like nobody else.
Unique capabilities don’t matter if your opponent saturates them with low tech or combined arms.
Look at last weeks Iran ICBM barrage vs. iron dome and David’s sling.
Sure, unmanned vehicles bring unique capabilities to any field of battle, but combined arms is as much the future as it was the past.
I believe the issue was not overwhelming the defences but rather the defences (Iron Dome and David's sling) were designed for short range and slow rockets from Lebanon or Gaza and not long range fast/high rockets from Iran.
It may be that the cost per Arrow missile (for long range intercepts) is $3M as well, so they didn't fire that many of them? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_(missile_family)
https://x.com/catebrown12/status/1842167731547721788
If there was 180 missiles were fired and 24 got through to targets, that is a penetration rate of 13%.
We don't know if they were let through because their predicted targets or because there weren't enough interceptors or some other reason.
Air bases are pretty hardened targets. Most important stuff is kept in bunkers. They're also huge. The design assumption of an air base is that it's the prime target for rocket/missile/air raid attacks (and Israel airbases have been attacked by rockets in past wars, e.g. in the Yom Kippur war).
I've seen someone review satellite photos from Nevatim that seemed to indicate one or two hits to some structure. As far as we know nothing of value was hit and no one was hurt.
All that said, I wouldn't want to be around when these volleys of ICBMs are fired at you. Definitely not fun. But not a war winner either as long as they're conventional warheads.
This. Israel knew the 3 targets in advance, according to reporting. Any jets or other valuable equipment from the two airfields would have been removed before the attack. It would have been a waste to use Arrow interceptors to protect empty hangars. Also, according to a satellite image of impact craters, many of the missiles hit dirt around the airbase, so wouldn't have been intercepted even if they needed to protect jets.
Defense against ICBMs attack definitely matters, even if they can be saturated it's not that easy, you need launchers and you need to keep them capable of launching. The ICBM defense isn't just about knocking some of those missiles (and you can selectively do that by priority) it's also about early warning. The combination of these capabilities makes a huge difference.
Germany launched 1400 V2 1-ton warhead ICBMs on London and that didn't stop the British fighting.
Both in Israel and in Ukraine those missiles and UAVs are not really a huge factor.
Definitely combined arms is where it's at today, and today attack helicopters have a huge role to play within that scenario, what the future looks like with more sophisticated autonomous machines is hard to predict. Maybe an autonomous bi-pedal robot combined with a UAV combined with an autonomous tank combined with an autonomous jet...
They're launched, they fly, but at some point close to reaching terminal phase, all they do is fall along a pre-calculated trajectory.
Case in point with regards to Iran, a combination of factors played a role in Israel's response:
They knew the launch locations, times and most likely targets.
Hence were able to move out any valuable assets of targeted bases well ahead of time and, had they wanted to, could have even pre-emptively striked the launchers.
The latter again, requiring combined arms and from what I've seen about military ops, there are so many factors to pay attention to with sometimes such little time windows calculated by mission planners, that I don't see all that going full on autonomously for still some time to come.
Check out this video on the 2017/18 US/ coalition response to the Syrian regime perpetrating gas attacks against civilians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vnbkmi3Iieo
The nominal number of assets involved, the number of types of naval and aerial assets involved, the highly detailed operation plan with a short window for payload launch resulting in a 2 minute window of said payloads reaching their targets simultaneously: That is such a dynamic and complex situation that the reliability required by each component in such a calculation is high.
That's why all of the humans operating these assets receive years of training.
Autonomous vehicles will have support roles or be optimized for high risk or standard, low-complexity scenarios, but I don't see them making huge strides to replace people in a big way in high-complexity, high-impact ops.
For the sake of humanity, I wish that was the case, but it won't be. Defensive drones will exist for sure, but generally the targets will be human or infrastructure, not other drones.
IMO, submarines - especially nuclear subs probably have decades of life left at a minimum.
But yeah - everything else is starting to look very vulnerable.
Torpedoes are forced to use physical wires for remote guidance because nothing else works.
It would be pretty easy for someone to develop a quiet, long-range torpedo that can be launched undetected outside active sonar range. (Assuming this capability doesn’t already exist.)
Also, SSNs already carry long-range drones called cruise missiles.
Manned subs will take a long time to become obsolete.
To be fair, I’m (partly) playing devil’s advocate, but I don’t think the tech to create a fully or nearly fully autonomous attack sub is that far out. Key point is that you would have to be willing to give it more autonomy than the current crop of UAVs.
As such, only nuclear AI subs may be viable, since that gives the strategic advantage of a submarine that doesn't need to resurface for like years. But putting nuclear reactors in an autonomous AI system sounds like a terrible idea.
Human societies have spent millenia developing the infrastructure to produce reliable/trustworthy soldiers. AI is not nearly at that level in terms of trustworthiness/fault tolerance, even if they will quickly be as smart as soliders.
There are a lot of problems.
Technically, you need the resources of a nation-state to make stealthy ones that can operate at depth. There are no off the shelf systems you can strap together. Salt water and pressure destroys things very quickly. It wouldn’t take long for non-moving propellers to get fouled with debris. If you want a mine that launches a torpedo, I think that already exists. If you don’t need to operate at depth, a surface drone would be sufficient. If you’re attacking ships, aerial drones or missiles are better.
If you’re not a nation-state, diesel-electric submarines have been around for more than a century. They are easier to build and will be for a long time.
Even once you have drones, what are they attacking? The US has less than a hundred submarines.
In my opinion, this is an advanced technology weapon as part of a combined arms strategy. Basically a more sophisticated torpedo.
Not much radio range under 500m of water.
But drones are changing warfare. Drone hunting other drones, drone with self guidance - they are being used in battle right now.
500$ or even less is the cost of FPV drone with night camera capable to carry 2kg bomb. Russia is buying soldiers for up to $25000 to be killed by such cheap drone later.
And one regular 155mm shell is 5x more expensive than FPV drone.
Combined arms maneuvering is what they _should_ be doing. In fact Russia reorganized to theoretically be setup for this sort of maneuvering; they organized into BTGs (battalion tactical groups) which contain basically everything: air defense (area denial and SHORAD), logistics (refuel, resupply, rearm, repair), infantry, armor, air attack, engineering, artillery, and I’m probably leaving a few out.
To this end they’ve been completely ineffective.
They started as the second best army in the world, then went to the second best army in Ukraine, and now they are the second best army in Russia.
Ukraine tried NATO tactics summer of last year and suffered a catastrophic defeat. Going across minefields requires convoys. Russian helicopters outside of MANPADS range (and too low to be visible to SAM site radar) take out the minesweeper and rear vehicles. Now you've got a bunch of sitting ducks. If it looks like escape is possible, artillery remote-mines the path the minesweeper cleared.
Try your luck in the minefield and you get destroyed. Get out to fight and the anti-personnel mines take everyone out. Stay in place and the regular artillery takes out all the troops. At night, you get grenade and RPG-dropping drones with IR cameras so you can't even hide.
I ask again, what is your combined arms solution to this mess?
But it is like asking what is the healthy thing to do when you are 300 pounds and can run because you have heart issues: the answer is to never be in that position in the first place.
Anyway I assume the US has some sort of remote detonation mine plan for if shit gets hot with NK.
The results have been the elimination of Ukraine's best troops AND losing the ability to reinforce faltering lines which is why Russian advances have increased.
Maneuver warfare relies on secrecy to a large degree. You can hide strategic troop buildups from the Taliban because they don't have satellites, but not from a near peer. With current spotter drones and IR cameras, you can't really even rely on tactical secrecy.
The BTGs were mostly Infantry and Artillery, supplemented with Tanks and specialty assets. Heavy losses in one of the main three segment made the rest of the BTG mostly or entirely combat-ineffective. And that's basically what happened -- the infantry and tanks died, and artillery was relatively untouched, which led to Russia sending convicts (Storm-Z) to find targets for the (still remaining, quite numerous) artillery.
They did not have real, integrated logistics and heavy engineering units on the BTG level (though they do have combat engineers / sappers). What supply units they do have are limited, and they are dependent on higher level replenishment organizations for operations lasting longer than 6 days. Those replenishment orgs inevitably got bombed by the AFU, so the BTGs rapidly ran out of gas and ammo, even when rocking a full TO&E.
They did have integrated EW and HUMINT capabilities, with the EW being particularly potent; Russian EW is still very good, even on the BTG level. The downside of these, though, is that they are a swiss army knife; small enough to be useful, but not big enough to be ideal (and withstand casualties), and it forces a busy commander to divide their attention in ways that a larger org may not.
Precision guided artillery has been a game-changer in Ukraine.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/24/russia-jammi...
That's not to say they are useless as you need extensive coverage over a large front, but it's largely worthless right now.
This is by the way why most NATO countries don't love the idea of sharing the latest weapons with Ukraine, they give opposition intelligence on how to counter them.
https://thedefensepost.com/2024/05/27/us-himars-ineffective-...
This isn't unique to Ukraine, most US weapon exports are selectively degraded or have capabilities removed. Despite this, most export versions of US weapon systems are still very competent.
It's speculation, at best, to assume the opposite.
Of course we know that there are export versions, but those are given in general different labels, and we don't have any intel on the specific system version used in Ukraine.
Assuming that even non-export versions could not be jammed is thus just speculation.
That said, anyone familiar with the tech knows that it doesn’t work the way it would have to work for it to be jammable in the way assumed, as a matter of public record. A classic example is the amount of people and media that asserts the US has GPS-guided weapons. The US has never had GPS-guided anything, it was defeatable by design.
Meanwhile, in the very same WaPo article whence that quote derives, just an inch or two down, we have the statement "Kyiv still considers HIMARS to be effective". And in Wikipedia we have attestations of its continued use and effect, post-dating the popular "HIMARS is ineffective" quote:
HIMARS has also been used to strike Russian troop concentrations in hard cover, with a HIMARS strike on a Russian base in Makiivka killing 89 Russian soldiers on the admission of the Russian government, although BBC News Russian could confirm at least 139 dead Russian soldiers [July 2024]
On 9 August 2024, HIMARS destroyed a convoy of Russian troops in the Kursk Oblast of Russia in what Russian milbloggers described as one of the bloodiest attacks of the entire war.
Are 310 helicopter losses in Ukraine that high? I don't think so. Russia has lost =~ 3K tanks. That's a 10:1 ratio for tank:helicopter, is that high?
Helicopters' role may change. They would be ideal drone operator platforms - they already have a weapons operator in a back seat. The right cannon / loadout could take out small drones. Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) style wingmen would work with quadcopters for helicopters. They could expand the sensory capability to avoid surface to air threats.
The co-pilot/gunner actually sits in the front seat of the Apache, by the way.
That figure doesn't go back as far as WWII, of course. Even the Korea and Vietnam-era Army would be dwarfed by the WWII Army: 8 million troops in 1945.
Note that we do also have the Army Reserve and Army National Guard, which effectively doubles the total Army end-strength to about 1 million today.
As a career Army officer, I could go on about this, and what it means, and what worries me, all day.
Western militaries don't seem to have much capability for tactical/mobile medium range air defense. The Russian Air Force has been extremely unimpressive, but has cobbled together an effective tactic now of launching glide bombs at front line targets from relatively safe territory. I am surprised no one has figured out how to put one or two long-range air-air missiles on a loitering high altitude drone.
This is why in 2024 Ukraine is now shooting down helicopters (they have shot down three now) with FPV drones.
> Moreover, the threat is not the organic air defences of battlegroups or a Soviet Motor-Rifle Regiment or Brigade, but dispersed and well-hidden infantry and special forces units equipped with modern MANPADS missile systems. Furthermore, because the enemy forces are operating over the defenders’ own ground, the defence can be cued and alerted to approaching helicopters, given good data connectivity.
which is exactly what did NOT happen when the Ukrainians counter-attacked on their own territory, in Southern-Ukraine, when the Russian Ka-52s had a field day (actual, several field days) against incoming Ukrainian heavy armour. These Anglo guys still live in the 1980s, they should ask the Ukrainians what they feel about the "demise" of the attack helicopter, that way maybe non-sense like this won't get published anymore.
Which is to say that these delusions won’t help the Ukrainians one bit, nor any other Eastern European army that will possibly fight the same Russians in the near future.
There are no viable ways to EW counter man-operated drone capable of locking the target with autopilot.
The biggest issue in such approach is opportunity cost: you can quickly fire another manpad, but not a drone.
What even is an "Anglo" guy? I don't think there's a culture left on the planet that identifies as that.
> Given the right network integration and the right weapons, you could inflict a deal of pain in a fairly basic helicopter while staying well out of the way of any air defence. You still have to protect yourself against chance encounters – partisans or special forces with shoulder-launched weapons, for example. This appears easier said than done.
Also, the drones being used in Ukraine by both sides would not survive in a more sophisticated electronic warfare environment.
Yes, US were the first movers and invested a lot - but into expensive high-end systems (and not really tested in challenging EW environment), not ubiquitous low-end. Presumably they are catching-up. Maybe. They are not catching-up in building warships.
More weight, more vulnerability, more ethical issues, less ability to take high g force, more expensive, more focus and endurance issues, more constraints on taking risks.
When bombing runs are guided bombs anyway and air to air is all about over the horizon missiles anyway then there really questions around why you need a human in it at all.
But yeah, drones will probably take most of the missions away.
I do. The helicopter isn’t dead, neither is the tank.
But their tactics might change, and they might become optionally manned, because why not?
But if you need quick reaction, massive firepower, or troop transport either quickly or in difficult to reach places, good luck doing it with drones or wheeled vehicles.