Color me skeptical. It feels like what we're seeing now is a local optimum: new systems (drones) designed to asymmetrically win ($) against legacy systems (mechanized vehicles) designed for very different goals.
We'll see what things look like once the post-drone evolution cycle has turned on the armored side.
That said, I do think the Marines are right, in that distributed agility/logistics from temporary and frequently relocated basing is going to be the new normal.
Russia doesn't have particularly advanced long range fires and Ukrainian inventory is limited.
But conflict against China or the US would be dominated by cruise or ballistic missile strikes against any concentrated, persistent target.
I'm not convinced this is feasible in the short term; drone warfare is predicated on launching not just cheap drones but many of them. The new armor isn't steel or iron to survive the blast, but to shoot down attacking drones before they can explode. Most current defenses are ground-based missile batteries that can't really be directly protected by armor. Long-term, the most promising options are laser-based batteries, which today have insufficient power sources to stuff into mobile armored platforms.
Ukraine hunted that tank down and destroyed it by drone, btw.
I could see microwave-based APS (probably powered by a high energy consumable?) proliferating.
The harder part I see is friend/foe identification, rather than just attacking anything else that's small and flying slowly.
If these small drones provide capabilities that are, as your comment implies, not new but they do it with a cost effectiveness that blows away anything that came before, that's a pretty big deal.
As for the drone you linked - we don't know how much it cost Russian to produce Geran-2, but definitely less than you imagine.
the economist: https://www.economist.com/interactive/science-and-technology... https://archive.is/nJYJ0
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2024/02/07/375000the...
This is very different to artillery which is too expensive to lose to return fire and even more expensive if you try and make it operable remotely.
Which is why it is very unlikely, that we can avoid fully autonomous killer drones.
(if they are not already deployed in experimental settings)
Where in Civil War times you would need to clothe, feed, camp 100 people, now you have that firepower in a single soldier's weapon.
And when you remove the need for even a single human, you also remove their logistics footprint.
Which doesn't reduce the number of troops you need against a given foe with peer equipment, it just increases the durable equipment and consumables per soldier
Do you think it's 1, 2, or 3 drones to get 1 kill?
Jamming and dying batteries make the odds much worse than that.
Look up how many drones have been expended in Ukraine. Then look up how many casualties there have been. Finally, understand that not all casualties ate caused by drones, and do the math.
As we have seen, the russians have been very good at electronic warfare and have increased their capabilities in fighting and jamming drones from sensible distance.
This doesn't change what a mess "modern" war is when both sides have relatively good equipment and none can claim air superiority: symmetrical war of attrition.
Recently they have been using them to drop spikes to slow vehicles which are then hit by a second set of drones.
At some point soon these drones will have specialised capabilities and will go out in swarms to autonomously figure out how to take down objects.
Drones evolve under this pressure. Dynamic frequency changes, computer vision, maneuvering (like "go up when lost signal") and many more counter measures are adopted on both sides.
Cities are hugely hostile to low power transmission, especially in the 2.4 and 5ghz frequencies.
The effective range of cheap DJI "mini" drones in cities is measured in kilometres. If you get away from the city, you can double and triple your effective range.
Flying your drone around in a city is not the same as flying it against an opponent skilled in electronic warfare.
You can jam the signal, but you can work around signal jamming in software by having it back off or gain altitude.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/unmanned-flying-te...
Take FPV drones. In [1] Michael Kofman estimates (based on talking to a number of frontline units) that on average <10% of FPV drone strikes on armour are successful. The success being a mission kill, not a spectacular turret toss we see on twitter/reddit/telegram. Every strike requires a large support team, strikes can't be massed (because of radio interference and EW), the efficiency is dropping over time because of cheap adaptations (EW, nets/cages, smoke), and the drones aren't that cheap and much less suppressive than 155mm shells. A layperson relying on stuff on social networks would have no way of knowing this, and think of FPV drones as this incredibly effective weapon making tanks (and helicopters) obsolete.
Or TB2s. Remember how they were the future of warfare after their success in Nagorno-Karabakh and the first few weeks in Ukraine? Few months later TB2s completely disappeared from the media, and I don't think many people are aware of how useless they became.
More generally, I think we're seeing a repeat of the century old debate over torpedo boats. People saw how torpedo boats were much cheaper than battleships and thought "hey we can have many of those boats, it'll be cheaper and more lethal". Turns out that range, coordination, sensing, targeting, and logistics are so difficult a smaller number of more capable platforms in well trained hands is both more effective and efficient.
In that analogy, those CCA drones are [torpedo boat] destroyers, not torpedo boats. A small number of somewhat cheaper, but still expensive platforms dependent on the exquisite core of the fleet (battleships, carriers, F-35s, or AH-64s) that doesn't go anywhere.
[1]: https://warontherocks.com/2024/04/mike-kofman-and-rob-lee-on...
The 10% estimate is not mine, it's from a legitimate expert who regularly goes to the frontline in Ukraine.
[1]: An amusing anecdote from that podcast: Tesla battery packs are a big source of batteries for FPV drones. The packs can be sourced for next to nothing from totaled Teslas, and individual cells are very reliable.
[2]: https://www.twz.com/ukrainians-are-cutting-open-u-s-cluster-...
[3]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/17/ukraine-frontline-ammo-...
AI is not the limiting factor as much as sensors, energy, datalinks, logistics, and costs are. Yes we can miniaturise TERCOM now, but then where would the vehicle get maps from (battlefields change!), how would it see the terrain (at night? on a foggy, rainy day? deliberately dazzled/blinded with a cheap laser?), how far can it travel, how much payload can it take, where does it launch from, and how does it get to the launch point? Working through those questions and anticipating cycles of adaptation, I think it's easy to end up with a $1m JASSM-ER or a $3k 155mm shell (neither of which Ukrainians have in sufficient numbers).
For example, if you know there's an enemy platoon in that forest, why would you fly a swarm of autonomous tree-avoiding hunter drones there if you can drop some 155mm instead? The enemy can't blind a 155mm shell, EW wouldn't work, shells don't care about fog or darkness, payload-to-weight ratio is ~100%, and they're cheap. Of course if you don't have shells you have to be creative, but that doesn't mean the creative solutions are better.
On the other hand, according to the episode I linked, humble unarmed non-AI DJI Mavics have a very persistent and systemic impact. They provide 24/7 eyes in the sky over the entire front line, which makes tactical surprise impossible. This is very much not "AI swarming slaughterbots" many seem to imagine and invisible to folks on the sidelines like us, but that's why I'd be cautious of making inferences from the media we get to see.
And that was mostly right; that's why fast attack craft, the modern evolution of torpedo boats, are still a thing, while battleships have been relegated to the graveyard of history.
The top end of course got much bigger, CVNs displace almost twice as much as Yamato.
HMS Dreadnought: Length: 160m / Beam: 25m / Displacement: 18410t
Acorn-class destroyer (contemporary with Dreadnought): Length: 75m / Beam: 8m / Displacement: 780t
Burke Flight III: Length: 155m / Beam: 20m / Displacement: 9900t
Less than 10% is not good when you consider how much does it cost in practice. Drone teams are often 2 pilots + technician + explosives technician (an incredibly risky job btw, those bastardised RPG warheads are live and sensitive) + infantry cover. At least double that if you want to strike beyond line of sight and need a retransmitter drone. Those teams can only move at night and on foot because they are actively hunted by the other side. They can only have one or two drones simultaneously in the air at best, and the drones need to get to their targets first without giving away the launch point. All of that for less than 10% success rate is not "incredibly effective".
Now compare to fire-and-forget Javelins that are way more lethal and are just something added to a normal infantry platoon.
Of course they did, arguing anything else is complete lunacy, especially since you later advocate for the usage of Javelins, which, if effective and available, obviously reduce the value of tank. They also have the imense drawback of exposing the soldier to enemy fire.
I don't even get your other points. Why would drone operators be hunted more than Javelin operators? Why would Javelin operators not have to worry about giving away their position? Why don't Javelin operators need infantry cover?
Tanks' value doesn't come from their invulnerability. They weren't invulnerable since WW1, if ever. Their value comes from being better than alternatives.
As for Javelins, Javelins don't need operators that have to sit still and blind, guiding their slow drones to targets. Javelins don't need dedicated operator teams, US army more or less hands them to infantry platoons as needed. Javelins don't need "infantry cover", their operators are infantry. Javelins are fire and forget, so you can shoot and immediately leave, unlike drone teams. Javelins don't require extensive training and fine skill.
The only thing Javelins don't do is first person videos. See my original point about drawing wrong conclusions from footage we get to see.
ATGMs did lower the value of tanks, but not to 0. Anything that can knock out a weapons system decreases the value of that weapons system.
It's an unavoidable dilemma: commodity stuff is cheap, but easily countered; stuff that isn't easy to counter isn't commodity and isn't cheap. You probably heard "yes but you can JUST add a jamming-resistant radio, and a thermal camera, and autonomous recognition/coordination, and larger payload, and…", but that's just motte-and-bailey.
Plus the drones still need the payload. If they are used against armour, they need shaped charges, which aren't free. In practice they often get random RPG-7 HEAT warheads from Soviet stockpiles, but we can't compare that with newly manufactured western 155mm HE.
A Howitzer itself ranges from $2m - 3.7m USD each.
There are limits to autonomy as well. Presumably they mean these things can find targets and maneuver in real time without continual human intervention, but they still have human operators and someone has to give them a target. My brother-in-law works for Anduril, as a forward-deployed trainer of the drone operators. There are very much plenty of humans involved here. They can't just ship you a pallet of machines that you turn on and then they go fight a war for you.
Also remember that exactly what you're describing (all the grunts are pinned down by artillery and can't move) is exactly what happened in WWI. That didn't mean it was the future of war. Offensive forces adapted. Heavy armor, airborne troop insertion, long-range counter-battery. Having the upper hand in an arms race is never enduring. The other side always adapts.
On the contrary-- I think that capability would be enthusiastically adopted by a state like Ukraine, which is fighting an asymmetric defensive war against a larger aggressor with logistical advantages. Keep in mind that a "permanent wasteland" as a buffer was in fact the status quo in parts of the east prior to the Russian invasion in 2022, except the wasteland was maintained by human beings at a high political and economic cost. Today, both Russia and Ukraine create permanent wastelands in the form of extensive minefields, passing those costs on to posterity.
The autonomous No Man's Land--a relatively low-cost deployment of a buffer zone along a state border, in which nothing human may move and live--is likely to be the future of warfare in a world increasingly defined by ethnic conflicts, unchecked inter-state rivalries, and migratory pressures.
But that's always been the pain of nukes "let me do what I want or I'll nuke you" has become a catch phrase.
If China invaded Taiwan tomorrow and said "if you stop us we will use nuclear weapons"...like what can you say to that? It's very easy to bet against mutually assured destruction because that takes two parties and both have to accept said destruction...I don't think many Western countries would go "Okay fine, you do what you gotta do and we'll send some right back to you"...I think we'd probably just let China take Taiwan.
The only thing that would trigger a western nuclear response would be if we couldn't evacuate semi technology and assets out before invasion, I think US for sure would definitely lay hands on the big red button if that was in play.
If that were true, foot soldiers would have been done once the enemy had anything to kill them. And the enemy had the ability to kill foot soldiers from the earliest days of warfare.
Everything in the battlefield in vulnerable. Everything.
Being vulnerable does not make something obsolete.
What makes something obsolete is when that thing is no longer the best way to accomplish any mission.
Their "Fury", which they acquired from Blue Force, is "a single engine business jet with no cabin." It was originally intended as a target drone, something for fighter pilots to practice against. Anduril repurposed it as an autonomous weapons system.
They do mean autonomous. Their slogan is "Autonomy for Every Mission".
We're seeing the future of warfare in Ukraine. The grunts are pinned down by drones and artillery, while the mobile forces are unmanned. Zipping around in helicopters is over, once the opposition has anything that can shoot them down. The expensive fighters are more agile and survivable, but they are few.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2022/03/30/a-drone-w...