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Comment by siliconc0w | Hacker News Reader

Whoever can most cost effectively put explosives on target wins.

The future will be annihilation at a distance with cheap standoff weapons followed by swarms of cheap drones loitering over battlefields to clean up.

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Due to the nature of their deployment (ad hoc, improvised, crowd-sourced) swarms of quads in Ukraine didn't have much of a counter. Nobody had thought enough about it yet. All the work had gone into developing really sophisticated, cheap drones for consumer use, and strapping a bomb on them was all it took to weaponize that consumer technology. Nobody had spent a similar amount of time developing an equally sophisticated anti-drone system as a counter to a non-existent attack. There have been some garage-level technologies to mitigate their practical effectiveness, but that's not what I mean. I think we're in this period where quads are the meta, because not enough money has been spent thinking about the defense against them, but right now DoD contractors are developing the systems that will make cheap drones less effective in the future. I don't know what that will look like, but I'm sure it's a top priority to figure it out.

There were no counters to cavalry for like 1000 years. The only generalized countermeasure to cavalry was cavalry of your own. This led to the dramatic territorial and genetic expansion of nomadic peoples, such as the Arabs and Turks.

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.

Great historical context, ty.

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.

Lasers and microwaves can be mitigated, jamming doesn't matter if they're autonomous(and can also be mitigated), bullets have a hard time with fast and stocastic movement.

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.

Drone on drone is very inefficient. There is plenty of work on going for anti drone capabilities for small caliber cannons, direct energy, and aps. I would not hand wave mitigation as defeating.

Well there is one limitation, flight time for drones is still garbage, and with more payload doubly so. You just have to wait 20 minutes and it'll run out of power.

Drones for reconnaissance and kill verification too, in combination with regular artillery.

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:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archer_artillery_system

SF to San Jose is 50 miles, 40km is about half that.

The logical endgame of this is war between a bunch of drones with very few humans in the loop, with the only viable way for either side to end it being to attack civilian targets until the opponent surrenders.

War never changes.

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.

What? In what world is hand to have combat the nature of war anymore? I don't think I understand what you're saying here.

Also, I would argue that winning battles is about numbers and advantage. Winning wars is about effectively reducing supplies and support.

Somehow, it hasn't gone away. There's a disputed border region between China and India where at least 24 soldiers were killed in Jume 2020 in hand-to-hand fighting between the Indian and Chinese militaries.

To be fair, that situation is an extreme outlier even by most pre-modern warfare standards. Exceptions don't prove rules, but they sure highlight the common case.

Drones can't occupy land (yet).

Are you sure? It seems that the obvious way for drones to "occupy" land is to embed an IFF transponder in every human that is authorized to be in the area, and then program your drone swarm to kill every living thing that is not identified as friendly. The reason this hasn't happened yet is that nobody ruthless enough has yet gained control of a drone swarm. But this is a social, not technical obstacle, and one that is disturbingly likely to fall in the next decade.

That's quite a dark thought. And I doubt we'll get there - in that case you'd be one failed chip away from death at all times. Nothing like redefining the reign of terror.

Yes, it is a dark thought. There have been many leaders in history where millions of people have been one failed harvest or missing piece of documentation away from death at all times, and the leader didn't care. (And worse, much of the population backing the leader didn't care either, as long as it wasn't them.)

Hey not sure why you're getting downvoted, you had a genuine question and I think it's a common misconception.

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.

Standoff weapons stop being cheap when countermeasures come into effect.

We've had ICBMs for some time.

ICBMs are not useful in a conventional conflict.

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.

They likely are useful now, given their costs are going down and can be used in saturation attacks like Iran just did. A single ICBM with a dozen 500lb bombs can take out an fleet of fighters.

If launched from a nuclear country, the attacked country would have to assume nuclear payload. In the case of another nuclear country, this means nuclear retaliation.

Don’t those cost 10s of millions each?

Look up what a drone costs.

Yeah. The archetypal “second amendment” weapon… the kind any regular American would need to hold his own was a musket, then a rifle, then lever or auto loader, then an M16. Now it’s a drone. A man or crew out in the country with AR15s are Don Quixote tilting at windmills with the advent of cheap drones.

The places we're seeing drone warfare proliferate still have men with AR15s out in the country. The side that can no longer field those men will have lost the war

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