You are thinking from a technical perspective. You will always need a guy in the cockpit that can refuse an order. Not the same thing if it's a room of drone pilots, a drone pilot will just get fired and replaced on the spot. Imagine being given an order to kill a terrorist, but you notice the place he is at is actually a wedding. A fighter pilot has final authority on the strike, he can make decisions about collater…
Except we already make most of our air-based strikes from drones currently, so that can't be the reason we have SOME piloted planes.
Side question -- do submarines really have the ability to ping, like in Hunt for Red October, do they ever use it, and does it actually use the frequency range of human hearing like that? Do torpedoes? Or are they ultrasonic (given that depth gauges I know are ultrasonic). I assume that subs once did use such pings historically given how common that sound effect is associated with them. Maybe not any more I guess?
Take EVERYTHING in that article with a giant tub of salt. The specifics of torpedo combat are some of the most closely guarded military secrets. Take the following: "These high-torque, permanent magnet electric motor torpedoes ramp up to speed in under a second. They go from sitting in a torpedo tube to 50 knots in a near-instant because they don’t have the mechanical lag and inertia thermal torpedoes must overcome d…
"Aaron Amick is a retired U.S. Navy submarine sonarman. He served in both Atlantic and Pacific Oceans on 688 Los Angles Class Fast Attack and Ohio class ballistic missile submarines. He has published two audiobooks on Cold War-era submarines, Akula SSN Project 971 Sub Brief and USS Nautilus SSN-571 Sub Brief."
I dunno, the author's bio suggests that he knows that he's talking about.
Somewhat related, my uncle was a “Phantom driver” (F4 Phantom II) in Vietnam. Flew a bunch of missions of varying types. So Top Gun comes out, and my mom points out he had graduated Fighter Weapons School - my uncle is a real Top Gun! So I asked him for tales of dogfights, war stories. He had exactly one: “they’d send us out to fight some MiGs, and as soon as we got in range and turned our radar on to start shooting,…
Well. The Vietnamese pilots were using Soviet tactics, mainly Ground Control vectors. Most Vietnamese pilots were rookies, but they did have some aces who would dogfight, like Colonel Toon, who was shot down by Randy Cunningham: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Cunningham But largely the tactics were to surprise the Americans with first MiG-17's, then have a MiG-21 at high speed do an ambush pass from the clouds th…
The no gun thing is over hyped. The Navy never did install guns in their fighters in Vietnam, and still ended up reversing the kill ratio.
You are thinking from a technical perspective. You will always need a guy in the cockpit that can refuse an order. Not the same thing if it's a room of drone pilots, a drone pilot will just get fired and replaced on the spot. Imagine being given an order to kill a terrorist, but you notice the place he is at is actually a wedding. A fighter pilot has final authority on the strike, he can make decisions about collater…
You're making an interesting argument, but one that was rendered obsolete a long time ago. We've used beyond line of sight weapon systems on massive scale for at least 40 years, and weapons like the Tomahawk and JSOW have taken things completely out of the realm where such an argument can be taken seriously. The decisions you talk about are probably valid doing close air support in something like a helicopter where t…
Good point,and drone strikes are being used as well. Some is vastly different than all. There hasn't been a major war where most or majority of kills happened remotely yet. I think either wars will be very short or exremely long if it was mostly done by unmanned operators and it will mean more civilians and less soldiers will die.
From linked reference: Silver oxide-aluminium (AgO-Al) Silver oxide-zinc (AgO-Zn) Lithium-Ion (Li-Ion) Lithium-polymer Lithium-iron phosphate (LiFePO4) 1,040 Wh/kg 490 Wh/kg 600 Wh/kg 600 Wh/kg 520 Wh/kg The F21 is powered by a new generation of silver oxide-aluminium (AgO-Al) sea-water primary battery using dissolved sodium dioxide powder as electrolyte and incorporating a new electronic closed loop electrolyte circ…
And here we are on Hacker News with other threads on how battery density is peaking with Lithium and there is nothing better in sight. Turns out there are silver based battery that can do almost double. So what's the catch as to why it's not being adopted by phones?
They're primary batteries. Which is to say: not rechargable.
Somewhat related, my uncle was a “Phantom driver” (F4 Phantom II) in Vietnam. Flew a bunch of missions of varying types. So Top Gun comes out, and my mom points out he had graduated Fighter Weapons School - my uncle is a real Top Gun! So I asked him for tales of dogfights, war stories. He had exactly one: “they’d send us out to fight some MiGs, and as soon as we got in range and turned our radar on to start shooting,…
The article's description of submarine warfare is surprisingly similar to how modern air combat is supposed to play out, and parallels modern artillery's shoot and scoot philosophy as well. Hide, find, hit, and hide again.
Long gone are the days of the British soldiers taking a knee in formations to shoot their muskets. Essentially expecting to take turns with the enemy trading shots. Never did understand that mentality at all.
Take EVERYTHING in that article with a giant tub of salt. The specifics of torpedo combat are some of the most closely guarded military secrets. Take the following: "These high-torque, permanent magnet electric motor torpedoes ramp up to speed in under a second. They go from sitting in a torpedo tube to 50 knots in a near-instant because they don’t have the mechanical lag and inertia thermal torpedoes must overcome d…
Apparently, there are things called "swim out" torpedoes?
The article's description of submarine warfare is surprisingly similar to how modern air combat is supposed to play out, and parallels modern artillery's shoot and scoot philosophy as well. Hide, find, hit, and hide again.
Long gone are the days of the British soldiers taking a knee in formations to shoot their muskets. Essentially expecting to take turns with the enemy trading shots. Never did understand that mentality at all.
Well, that was when individual muskets were inaccurate and the coordination issues with commanding thousands of men using drums and flags meant a large mass of soldiers firing in sync could scare the opposing side into fleeing and allow calvary to mop up. And before that, you had knights with plate armor that could could shrug off most bladed weapons on a battlefield that would have destroyed peasant conscript without armor. Warfare's evolved from elite units that could tank almost anything you can throw at them, to using masses of men to soak up more damage than the opposing side, to using cover and squad tactics to evade machine gun fire, to trying to be so stealthy that the enemy can't even fire on you at all. This progression has resulted from modern technology making offense superior to defense in every way. Makes you wonder if there will be a technological progression in the future that begins to give defense an edge over offense.
The article's description of submarine warfare is surprisingly similar to how modern air combat is supposed to play out, and parallels modern artillery's shoot and scoot philosophy as well. Hide, find, hit, and hide again.
Long gone are the days of the British soldiers taking a knee in formations to shoot their muskets. Essentially expecting to take turns with the enemy trading shots. Never did understand that mentality at all.
In the days before accurate rapid fire weapons, the key to victory was pumping out more lead per second than the other squad. The only way to do that was discipline, training, and keeping cool under fire.