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Is the attack helicopter dead?

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Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#381

Post by matusp »

ikrenji wrote: post #158
matusp wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attack helis were never that important compared to tanks of mechanized infantry. On top of that, it really seems that a significant part of their role can be fulfilled by drones.

when UAF was ramping up the counter offensive wherever they made any gains into the minefields a couple of ka-52s showed up and shut that down. UAF had no answer to them as their ATGMs simply outrange any SHORAD that UAF has...

True, but I can easily see that the same role - short range airstrikes - could be played by drone teams in the future. They also have the capability to observe and strike targets over the treelines. And in top of that, they are cheaper, easier to scale and maintain, and do not require vulnerable airfields to operate.

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.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#382

Post by CoastalCoder »

vFunct wrote: post #205
navbaker wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent tons of hours as a kid playing Comanche on our old 486!

My game of choice was Gunship on the Commodore 64, the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter simulator from Microprose. Spent YEARS playing that. 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.

Me too! And in retrospect, it's amazing what they managed to pull off with the C64's limited hardware.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#383

Post by pclmulqdq »

guappa wrote: post #370
pclmulqdq wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you are the world police and you stop "doing wars everywhere," everywhere starts doing wars with you (usually through your weaker/looser allies). Hence Ukraine, Hong Kong, the Mexican cartels, Iran's proxy wars, and let's not forget 9/11. 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 th…

This needs a very large "citation needed" banner.

Ah yes, the "source?" argument. The classic cry of people who want to disagree but have nothing productive to add to the discussion.

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.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#384

Post by hollerith »

tomjen3 wrote: post #335
epolanski wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I don't think it is. 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.

russia is completely corrupt. Nuke upkeep is expensive and is an obvious area for corruption (you will only know at the end of the world). There is zero reason that more than a handful has actually been maintained. 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.

I've never heard any expert in nuclear weapons suggest that Russian nukes don't work, especially the ones that have been modernized since the fall of the SU, which is all the ones attached to ICBMs and SLBMs. Until a few years ago, US nuke experts regularly inspected Russian nukes and Russian nuke delivery systems. If Russian nukes don't work, it seems likely that the inspectors would have been able to tell, e.g., through gamma-ray spectrography.

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.)

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#385

Post by torginus »

onepointsixC wrote: post #144
torginus wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more complex than that. The US made Switchblade drones which cost tens of thousands of dollars were outperformed with lightly modified FPVs with grenades, which came in under a thousand.

Switchblade 600’s have the same warhead as the Javelin. With 8.5kg of explosives, it’s an entirely different category of weapon than the drones you’re thinking of which had closer to 200g of explosives.

There are drones with shaped charges.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#386

Post by torginus »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #62
torginus wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more complex than that. The US made Switchblade drones which cost tens of thousands of dollars were outperformed with lightly modified FPVs with grenades, which came in under a thousand.

We don't know if they underperfomed so much as weren't cost effective. If the switchblade costing $10k results in a kill 80% of the time, while the $1k drone is 30% of the time, you just get 3 times as many $1k drones, average about the same kill rate, and save 70% to boot. Or spend the same amount and get about 3x the kill rate.

I just wonder how much does professional image comes into play. I can't imagine US troops using drones which are basically a bunch of PCBs screwed together and mounted to a sheet of laser cut carbon fiber, even if those things are technically the most cost effective way to build a drone.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#387

Post by worldsayshi »

ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #298
throwup238 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? A helicopter is on the order of 75-80 decibels at 1000 feet. That’s the equivalent of a giant flying stadium speaker consuming kilowatts of power, that has to catch a much smaller 200mph drone while being just as cheap. The attack drone can just move and triangulate the sound, eliminating anything that’s trying to mimic a helicopter without outputting enough decibels.

Use your imagination. The counter-drone doesn't have to output the exact same energy profile as an attack helicopter, just close enough to trigger the anti-helo-drone's activation. 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…

That's a lot of specific engineering just to protect the helicopter. Or you can just spend that engineering effort and money on replacing the helicopters with more advanced drones.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#388

Post by MindSpunk »

Teever wrote: post #294
rgmerk wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because small, cheap drones can’t fly at supersonic speeds at long enough range to matter. Drones that can do that are called “anti-aircraft missiles”.

What are the speeds and the distances required to take down a jet like an F-35? 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.

Well your drone would need to fly faster than an f35 to catch up, maneuver more effectively than an f35 to hit a defending f35 and have a sufficiently complex sensor array to track and defeat the f35 autonomously.

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.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#389

Post by Turskarama »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #378
throwup238 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? A helicopter is on the order of 75-80 decibels at 1000 feet. That’s the equivalent of a giant flying stadium speaker consuming kilowatts of power, that has to catch a much smaller 200mph drone while being just as cheap. The attack drone can just move and triangulate the sound, eliminating anything that’s trying to mimic a helicopter without outputting enough decibels.

How much would it cost to slap some plywood on an old/scrapped heli engine and make a remote-controlled decoy that just looks and sounds a bit like an attack chopper? Drones don't need to be small, and big doesn't always mean expensive.

More than the drone for sure, and you'd run out of old heli engines pretty fast.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#390

Post by dgoldstein0 »

ericmay wrote: post #296
anonylizard wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soldiers exist, but expensive western soldiers are basically a different species compared to the cheap militia of the third world. 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 con…

I’d say western militaries will avoid extreme casualties if they can, but read a bit about the Second Battle of Faluja - the U.S. for example has no problem sending troops into hardcore combat. 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 keepin…

Russia has the added, common problem for autocracies that they are heavily disincentivized from telling Putin the truth - it was far better to hide the problems, and be rewarded for doing a good job. At least until the war started.
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