A senior figure in the Ukrainian defence industry told New Scientist that a test took place two years ago involving fully autonomous drones set to destroy anything in a given area, with confirmed casualties
It seems like “summer child” implies you yourself have experienced any of these possibilities. At the end of the day we’re both making educated guesses about the future.
You need a big, pricey, vulnerable piece of machinery to target your shells.
Are we talking about a dispersed group of guerillas, or a Le Mis street uprising kind of thing? If conflict ever happens the latter way is very debatable, but usually when someone talks about the people against the rich/elites/whatever, that’s what’s in mind.
In the guerillas case, shelling is very situational, you’re right. So is a motion-tracking drone. It’s cheap and portable, but there’s also a lot more countermeasures to it, and they’re both ultimately for area denial (or similar). In the end, a whole lot is riding on some human-level intelligence deciding who to target, particularly if you’re doing COIN, and that brings you back to piloted drones or small arms.
In the Le Mis case, the gun itself isn’t vulnerable, and you can assume every shell kills at least one person. This exact thing has happened, and I’ve never heard it described as a major expense for the government side. It goes at least as far back as Napoleon; being the one general willing to take grapeshot to protesters was his big break.
Now, your revolutionary drone operator saves you the trouble of tracking by broadcasting his location, assuming he hasn’t already been sighted on your universal surveillance cameras or been swept up by irregular purchasing habits.
The safe-er way would involve fibre or wires, either to an attritable antenna or to the drone itself. Maybe just getting TFO before a counterattack can arrive would work. It sounds like that’s frequently the situation in Ukraine, even though it seems really risky.
The surveillance networks could be bad, if the many gaps fill in. That’s not about drones though.
So when you stack up any belligerents [state vs state/non-state], the key math is who can deploy more drones from better positions with better range/targeting, better tactical intelligence and keep pressure over a longer period. A state actor will always have the advantage there.
That can be the logic of a fight with guns or muskets as well. Clearly, sometimes the ability to blend with the population beats better positioning.
There’s officers who think drones are entirely overblown, and Ukraine is the way it is because of the kind of battlefield and the exact asymmetry between the sides. Maybe they’re wrong, but the next big thing in warfare has turned out to be vapourware before.
This isn’t speculation about the future, this stuff has been going on for decades. This is the culmination of armed UAV strikes in 2002; this is the Patriot Act and the war on terror. We have been experiencing this. What we’re just witnessing now is the tipping point taking us past the point of no return.
Drones cheap enough to swarm; bioidentification advanced enough to ID crowds of dissidents; computer imaging refined over decades; drones being deployed as “public safety first responders”; live fire conflicts brought to a standstill by even the most rudimentary combat drones; advertising and big tech perfecting digital fingerprinting over decades; legislation being pushed to require OS-level user ID; mandated surveillance in new cars & ALPRs; restrictions on 3D printers…
Despite the show of ignorance, every state actor has known where the wind is blowing for a long time. They know that the pendulum for disruptive tech is swinging in the direction of accessibility for the public, and they’ve gotten out faaar ahead of that.
We’re not talking about wiretaps and secret police acting on human intel. We’re into automated surveillance tech feeding directly into pre-crime hueristics agencies where an instant and proportional response can be dispatched. Despite how comforting it feels to be one of a hundred million in a crowd, your life and actions are trivial to quantify and track.
The only thing that caught people off guard was how effective hybrid warfare is, specifically at sowing discord. “Wait and see” is a sentiment 30+ years too late. Geopolitics & domestic surveillance are going into a deep existential gridlock, probably until climate collapse makes drone production unsustainable.
It seems like “summer child” implies you yourself have experienced any of these possibilities. At the end of the day we’re both making educated guesses about the future.
Are we talking about a dispersed group of guerillas, or a Le Mis street uprising kind of thing? If conflict ever happens the latter way is very debatable, but usually when someone talks about the people against the rich/elites/whatever, that’s what’s in mind.
In the guerillas case, shelling is very situational, you’re right. So is a motion-tracking drone. It’s cheap and portable, but there’s also a lot more countermeasures to it, and they’re both ultimately for area denial (or similar). In the end, a whole lot is riding on some human-level intelligence deciding who to target, particularly if you’re doing COIN, and that brings you back to piloted drones or small arms.
In the Le Mis case, the gun itself isn’t vulnerable, and you can assume every shell kills at least one person. This exact thing has happened, and I’ve never heard it described as a major expense for the government side. It goes at least as far back as Napoleon; being the one general willing to take grapeshot to protesters was his big break.
The safe-er way would involve fibre or wires, either to an attritable antenna or to the drone itself. Maybe just getting TFO before a counterattack can arrive would work. It sounds like that’s frequently the situation in Ukraine, even though it seems really risky.
The surveillance networks could be bad, if the many gaps fill in. That’s not about drones though.
That can be the logic of a fight with guns or muskets as well. Clearly, sometimes the ability to blend with the population beats better positioning.
There’s officers who think drones are entirely overblown, and Ukraine is the way it is because of the kind of battlefield and the exact asymmetry between the sides. Maybe they’re wrong, but the next big thing in warfare has turned out to be vapourware before.
This isn’t speculation about the future, this stuff has been going on for decades. This is the culmination of armed UAV strikes in 2002; this is the Patriot Act and the war on terror. We have been experiencing this. What we’re just witnessing now is the tipping point taking us past the point of no return.
Drones cheap enough to swarm; bioidentification advanced enough to ID crowds of dissidents; computer imaging refined over decades; drones being deployed as “public safety first responders”; live fire conflicts brought to a standstill by even the most rudimentary combat drones; advertising and big tech perfecting digital fingerprinting over decades; legislation being pushed to require OS-level user ID; mandated surveillance in new cars & ALPRs; restrictions on 3D printers…
Despite the show of ignorance, every state actor has known where the wind is blowing for a long time. They know that the pendulum for disruptive tech is swinging in the direction of accessibility for the public, and they’ve gotten out faaar ahead of that.
We’re not talking about wiretaps and secret police acting on human intel. We’re into automated surveillance tech feeding directly into pre-crime hueristics agencies where an instant and proportional response can be dispatched. Despite how comforting it feels to be one of a hundred million in a crowd, your life and actions are trivial to quantify and track.
The only thing that caught people off guard was how effective hybrid warfare is, specifically at sowing discord. “Wait and see” is a sentiment 30+ years too late. Geopolitics & domestic surveillance are going into a deep existential gridlock, probably until climate collapse makes drone production unsustainable.