I live in the US. A near-peer conflict involves a nuclear exchange. The world will change in ways forever that none of us can ever foresee at that point.
Worth noting that Russia has nuclear weapons, yet elects not to use them against their near peer Ukraine.
Ukraine was not considered to be a near peer to Russia before the war. It seems likely that they thought they’d have a quick win. Possibly, whatever it is they are after, it isn’t worth the pariah status using nuclear weapons would produce. (Or maybe they still think they can get it done conventionally).
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.
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.
Worth noting that Russia has nuclear weapons, yet elects not to use them against their near peer Ukraine.
Worth noting that Ukraine had nuclear weapons and negotiated them away in exchange for a promise that Russia would not use nuclear weapons against them.
The Bucharest memorandum contained the promises that:
- 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.
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.
>All weapon systems that consist of an expensive vehicle and an expensive-to-train crew are being re-evaluated against drones right now. 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 frac…
I spent tons of hours as a kid playing Comanche on our old 486!
> I think most manned war vehicles are dead now. IMO, submarines - especially nuclear subs probably have decades of life left at a minimum. But yeah - everything else is starting to look very vulnerable.
What’s to stop development of unmanned drone SSNs? Including ones that act as motherships for underwater drone swarms to boot.
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.
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…
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.
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…
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.
>Part of a broader pattern in military technology right now. 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…
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...
People in this discussion are concentrating on the drones (which are a big factor) but the massively effective HIMARS and ATACMS is worth noting too. Precision guided artillery has been a game-changer in Ukraine.
Precision guided artillery looked like it could be a game changer for about a month or two, then Russia figured out how to spoof and jam it, making guided artillery worse than useless. Ukraine is back to using good old dumb artillery, which isn't too accurate but at least cannot be jammed.
I hope our military is thinking about drones, because when WW3 starts our enemies are going to have millions of tiny software-controlled drones and if we're still fighting like we're in WW2 it's all over for us.