If anything, we see from the conflict in Ukraine that keeping smart weapons supplied in a modern conflict it a huge effort that needs a lot of interconnected players.
You could drop hundreds of autonomous drone by air, make them land somewhere and wait in standby until they get activated or detect a threat.
They scale massively because 1 guy with 100 rifles won't do much more than 1 guy with 1 rifle, 1 guy with 100 trucks won't move faster than 1 guy with 1 truck. 0 guy with 100 drones would potentially kill 100 guys simultaneously for cheap since switchblade style drones are glorified DJIs with a grenade straped at the front
I suspect we will start seeing the first true drone swarm deployments in Ukraine over the next couple years. The world is simply not ready for how horrifying it will be. These things can be manufactured for a few hundred bucks a piece. Sony can pump out 10 million PlayStations in a few months. What happens when that kind of logistics and manufacturing is applied to kamikaze drones? You get swarms of tens of thousands of them. The entire future of land warfare from this point on will be an arms race between drone swarms. And the swarms will take on combined arms aspects; there will be AA, AT, AP, incendiary, electronic warfare, observation, and hunter-killer variants. Winning wars in the future will consist of choosing the correct size and makeup of your swarm to counter the enemy's capability.
A really big gun, or missile (battery)…
"In World War II, only 15 to 20 percent of combat infantry were willing to fire their rifles. In Korea, about 50 percent. In Vietnam, the figure rose to more than 90 percent."
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Killing-Psychological-Cost-Learning-S...
https://acoup.blog/2022/04/22/fireside-friday-april-22-2022/
I recently came back home from travels and realised that our neighbour’s car burned down(I live in London), and it just struck me how horrible it looks like. That’s after seeing many videos of total destruction in Ukraine. It just never popped into my mind how unusual it is to see something like that.
That wasn’t even people dying, just practical realisation how not far we are from total civilisation collapse, if the majority of citizens wanted that.
That a person with a gun is coming to kill you
Or there are tiny machines floating outside your windows, in your vents, on your ceiling, ready to stab you with an undetectable poison the instant someone far away pushes a button..
Which do you think you have a better chance of spotting and defending against?
Also this:
I am honestly more scared of chemical weapons and barrel bombs. You know, things that have actually been confirmed to have devastating impact in Syria.
Somehow the typical hacker news commenter is worried about very precise robotic hit men operating in large groups to be used for indiscriminate killing when WW2 weapons were already enough to wipe out entire cities. You're more likely to have died from the atomic bombs deployed in Nagasaki or Hiroshima than from some tiny plastic drone with a 5 minute flight time.
I mean think about a hypothetical nuclear weapon that kills everyone recognized via facial recognition in a 10 kilometer radius. Most bystanders aren't important enough to have their face on that database.
If you have a drivers’ license or a passport, you’re in it.
> WW2 weapons were already enough to wipe out entire cities
Indiscriminately. Which gives you a big PR issue. Being able to kill only, say, every military-aged male in a city without touching anyone else is a bit different.
But seriously though, there's a lot of heuristics that can be used for "is a target and not a dummy". Will they be perfect? No. But they don't need to be.
You couple the fast drones with slower surveillance ones at higher altitude to identify possible targets. Or pair them with local security cameras, or the victim’s cell phone pings.
search: >'bird of prey trained to take-down drones'< @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='bird of prey trained to...>
But, here's the thing. Current tech-level drones are already extremely lethal to civilians. Given the state of modern AI, including the poor abilities for facial recognition in real-world situations, sending "autonomous" weapons to take out targets in civilian areas will only increase the number of civilian victims.
Not to mention, assassinations, in the first place.
Edit: I get the gist of your comment- that it's already possible to kill (civilians or not) in horrible ways. Yes, but why do we need yet another way to do that, then? The more ways there are to commit wanton murder and destruction, the worse, surely?
"Once it exists, a weapon will never be unmade, and it will be used."
Example from REGA, a swiss SAR provider. https://www.rega.ch/en/our-missions/cutting-edge-technology/...
There's something about the swarming nature of these things that makes them even more unsettling.
Expect urban defence to feature a lot of nets in the near future.
Lots of options. If against personel they just kamikaze in... if against armoured targets a small explosive charge on a hundred or so drones could easily destroy a target.
They don’t really need armament to maim and kill.
It would be a far more dangerous place for a slender 18-year-old girl.
So it's like using a laptop to hammer a nail. There are way more deadliest, simplest and reliable solutions, unfortunately.
And ballistic missiles are not for the task -- too funky and expensive, they are used to strike fuel/amunition storages. For urban warfare they use howitzers, mortars and 500/1000/2000kg air bombs.
> So it's like using a laptop to hammer a nail.
No. It's like using a nail gun rather than a hammer.
> There are way more deadliest, simplest and reliable solutions, unfortunately.
But none with the potential of drones and swarms. Cheap, easy to replace units that could fly, provide recoissance along with offensive/defensive capabilities. And it's just the beginning.
I suspect most armies, law enforcement, private mercenaries, mall cops, etc will be using drones in the future.
I'm going to copy an analogy I saw elsewhere: what we're seeing now is the equivalent of how planes were used in WWI; slow, not very effective, with limited range and roles. By the time WWII came around, there was technological and strategic improvements leading to to high-alt bombers, fighter escorts, dive bombers and jet engines. Nothing a WWI pilot would recognize. Drones will likely evolve in ways that would make their current use seem quaint.