401–410 of 650 posts
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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.
FPV drones can only work at short ranges (line of sight) or in permissive EW environments. So, not as relevant to a future conflict with China.
Part of a broader pattern in military technology right now. 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.
- 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.
The US Army is cutting back in this area. The Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft, which was a small attack helicopter, has been cancelled.[1] If it flies low and slow over the enemy, it's going to be shot down. Better to send many drones and lose some of them. 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 195…
Dumb question: Why are 12ga shotguns, possibly on small auto-targeting platforms, not a thing yet? Like a CWIS/CRAM but tiny and for close-in engagements?
In the war I fought in, there was a markedly different approach to combat air ops between even just the different service branches. The Army tended to use the Apache like it was a flying tank, hovering and delivering ordinance; the Marines (which is where I fought) flew as low and as quickly as possible even while sending rounds and hellfire missiles downrange. The marines were not losing aircraft in anywhere close t…
Russia's use is more similar to the use you describe in the marines. Come in fast and low, pop up the nose and fire off the ordinance while popping flares then get out before the MANPADS can take a shot. The problem is that this limits them to very expensive portable artillery and the accuracy suffers a lot when you can't stick around. The big use for helicopters is defense. Russia showed the potential during last ye…
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> Additionally, precision weapons typically have a much smaller logistical footprint, and logistics can make or break military campaigns. 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 p…
Haha, since when is Ukraine even close to 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.
Better discussion by Perun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnoKpXvj41A (there is a saying or word for titles as questions, and the answer is always no)
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.
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.
In the war I fought in, there was a markedly different approach to combat air ops between even just the different service branches. The Army tended to use the Apache like it was a flying tank, hovering and delivering ordinance; the Marines (which is where I fought) flew as low and as quickly as possible even while sending rounds and hellfire missiles downrange. The marines were not losing aircraft in anywhere close t…
Honestly I don't want to sound like a smartass and second-guess you, but the main problem with attack helicopters imo is that they are expensive to buy and operate, going comfortably into lower-end jet fighter territory, so to justify their existence, they need to possess some indispensable qualities. 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…
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.
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Russian military doctrine favors collateral damage. I think part of the US's love of precision weapons comes from the fact that they media will go nuts if the US kills non-targets. 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.
USA doesn't kill many civilians because Obama defined that "if you die in a drone attack you weren't a civilian". 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.
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I highly doubt that such a general presumption holds. 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 opp…
Precision ICBMs are not low tech. They're 1-3M$ a pop. Not sure if that's what you were trying to say (that arrow/david sling/iron dome have been saturated to some large advantage by Iran). 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 missile…
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.