It's a great accomplishment, but it must also be stated that the FRP isn't for Block 4 F-35s, and multiple DoD staff have gone on the record that Block 4 will be a minimum for survivability, to clarify, that's "survivability" in high-threat environments.
War thinky types divide the "battle space" into zones of danger, and stealth platforms justify their cost by being able to penetrate highest threat areas. It's an idea that hasn't really been tested yet, not really, not since 1993. Hopefully we never find out.
Some of the Block 4 mods have been moved up, particularly the necessary avionics stuff, but some of the mods need rework for heat management and other deeper requirements.
> War thinky types divide the "battle space" into zones of danger, and stealth platforms justify their cost by being able to penetrate highest threat areas. It's an idea that hasn't really been tested yet, not really, not since 1993.
Not sure entirely how you mean, as "stealth" has been utilized multiple times since then. For example, using a stealth platform to penetrate high threat areas was tested over Yugoslavia in 1999 with the F-117. Stealth failed that test and it was confirmed that more than just low observability was needed (an issue addressed by the F-22 and F-35).
Full-featured stealth aircraft haven't been employed - so far as we know - in an offensive capacity inside a peer's air defense system, which is the "high threat" regime. The 1999 F-117 shootdown was accomplished with a 1961 S-125 (NATO SA-3 Goa) missile system, attack mass, some good tactics, and good old fashioned American overconfidence. 1961 vintage - even in 1999 - is definitely not a peer air defense. Current thought today is that - with enough stealth - you can enter even very highly defended zones.
Speaking personally, I'm skeptical of stealth's utility against a peer power. Automation, very smart software, and cheap electronics will just be too dense, and the attacking platform is too expensive for the elevated level of risk. Some stealth is useful, to break locks . . but I think the ceiling of usefulness might be lower than we suspect. Whatever the real answer is, my own hope is that the powers-that-be will be capable of changing their minds in the face of accurate reports and analysis. "Being able to change your mind quickly" might be the best skill for a peacetime military to have.
On that front, I'm not filled with confidence. This all smells a little bit like the precision bombing advocates of the interwar period (1920-1943). There are many who, to this day, maintain that the pre-1943 daylight precision bombing campaigns were effective in their stated mission, in spite of all findings to the contrary. Pre-1943 (before the H2X "Micky" radar groundmap bombsight) we were extraordinarily lucky if a bomb hit a point target (not helped at all by the near-fraudulent behavior of Norden and the NBoO), and even if it did, it didn't disable it, because factories are pretty tough and enormous. If we can't talk about something after seventy years, how likely are we to see truth of something happening right in front of our faces?
Feels like celebrating someone for finishing the good draft of theirPhD dissertation after 17 years. Just glad it's kind of close to the end. The paper is pretty good, even if the field has changed dramatically and the thesis might not even be super relevant anymore.
The idea of stealth is tested every day. When missions are planned the capability of the aircraft determines what missions is can fly. A stealth aircraft can factually fly closer to an enemy's AA system without being detected.
It is, and quite well. And it is effective. But to make the really deep investment cost effective, it needs to be in the ninety percentile effective, and where we're sitting, right now, in the EW and sensor environment we're currently in, it's likely to be less than that, as low as a 40%. You can see this in the mobilizations we've seen to date. We try to keep them away from China close EW coverage, for good reason. You'll note Israel hasn't mobed the F-35I variant against anyone besides Gaza[0]. Again, for good reason.
Now, please let me be clear. If I am in the pilot seat, and I have a forty percent lower chance of being blown into flash-fried gibbets, I will be overjoyed. I will be blissful. The technologies are super cool, and, in spite of what could be called a rocky development path, they came out the other side with what looks like a usable platform, maybe even an excellent one. But, big picture, if I have a platform that costs a hundred times more[1], and it improves my rates from 5:1 to 9.2:1, taken on the whole . . that was not an optimal use of treasure and materiel. If it was flown out in 2009? Yeah, probably 20:1 exchange rates. It's not 2009 . . there's been a LOT of tech movement (hence the importance of Block 4).
The bitch of it is, I'm not even complaining against stealth all that much. I'm mostly bitching about the program management, not measuring spares, not checking if a widget worked yet before signing it off. Cheap stealth can be had, especially nowadays. And when it goes below a much lower cost threshold, it's even worth it - look at the NSM, after all, cheap stealth is incredibly deadly on a cruise missile or anything that needs to get in the enemy's face, that needs to close the range. But I'll be surprised if the cost of the 35 turns out to be worth it, as cool as it might be.
Eh, but who knows? Prominent defense talky talky type people have said that you're a fool for having opinions about the 35. So I'll just sit here being a fool, when it undoubtedly spanks the entire mainland PLAN/AF and we fly back home with geostrategic supremacy balanced on a whole squadron of fifty-foot erections. That would be grand - I would be a fool for any length of time to make that happen.
[0] Maybe Beirut, maybe maybe Iraq, although in the second instance there's a question as to who they were actually shooting at. But Gaza for sure - third parties saw that one. None of those are even in the same continent as a peer competitor air defense.
[1] Yes yes yes I know full rate production assuming 1000 units the flyaway cost per unit F35 is super duper ultra Costco cheap, 35m or whatever they're claiming now, but I'm talking "whole program" costs. Even using the Costco metaphor, buying the forty pound sack of tomatoes might be real cheap per tomato, but I'm only using two of those tomatoes - in the end I spend forty bucks for two tomatoes. I got some opinions about the whole concept of "flyaway cost", but that's another conversation.
Looking back at HN F-35 posts is interesting. Up until the Russian invasion of Ukraine, almost all press coverage and popular opinion was that this aircraft is an expensive boondoggle which can’t dogfight. I think that since Ukraine, the need for advanced fighter aircraft has been made. Additionally, the unit cost of the F-35 today is a bargain, cheaper than the Rafale, and even the Chinese J20 (allegedly).
30 years from now, I think this program will be seen as a massive success. Countries are lining up to order these, which is a massive geopolitical benefit to the US. Drone warfare will be increasingly important, but at least in this decade, I don’t think we’ll see autonomous fighters that have the sorts of capabilities 5th gen fighters have.
F35 as 5th gen is now confirmed useless as rumor that Russian had one shotdown in Syria and Chinese in Taiwan Strait. This can be back verified with "accidents" there some years back. This also explain why you dont really hear anything about F35 with Ukraine and to some extend Taiwan after 2020. Without stealth, F35 is bad. Hence why the sudden resurgence of F16 and F22 being mentioned widely in press. Heck to some extend, seems like a saving grace alternative B21 raider being introduced last year. It is a waste of money and one of the irresponsible debt contributor to fall of USA in these decades and coming years.
Right now, in peace time, it’s all about safety and proving. When the next war against a balanced adversary happens, what will matter is “what can we build that does damage” and “how fast can we churn them out”. So it’s good that a lot of the manufacturing we need is moving back to the USA. These planes aren’t the future. These planes are jobs and elections programs. These planes are battleships in a carrier world. But until the enemy fields their “carriers”, battleships are more than enough.
It’s been quite a few years since anything US-military related didn’t also bring up thoughts and questions about the Chinese military for me as well.
The gap between the two has closed so much within the last decade, people just do some hand waving to dismiss china because it gives them some sort of psychological comfort.
In this case for example it’s the cost - sure the US spends billions more on defense, but the gap in spending is way, way smaller than people think. It’s not just a matter of ppp or anything like that, which of course plays a big part, but also just the stage in maturity these organizations are in.
Not even sure what my point here, maybe I was just made uneasy by the person throwing a congratulations out there as if this were some sort of big accomplishment. The Chinese are making bigger strides day-to-day and I don’t see them celebrating.
The US has its strenths in being an omnipresense. Not only does it have the largest carrier fleet it has bases around the world. It can mobilize anywhere on earth. China can’t do the same. They don’t have much of a navy nor do they have a global network of military bases and supply caches.
This is a common response but it seems to be one of those things that is just repeated over and over that in the end doesn’t even shed light into why china is a problem. And this is what I meant as well, people like being dismissive because it makes them feel better.
Yes, the US has a global presence but it’s because it has to have one, china does not.
The US doesn’t care about Taiwan just out of principle, it cares about Taiwan because in a way it’s fighting to keep all of Asia from falling under Chinese influence.
China doesn’t have to worry about parking aircraft carriers off the coast of California at a moments notice because it doesn’t have to, what’s at stake is in their backyard where they are more than well prepared for combat.
Also, the US has to spend resources projecting power in Europe for many reasons, which only makes it more vulnerable to a conflict with China. Can you imagine what would happen if russia decided to go to war in Europe with full aid from China while the US was also trying to fight an all out war in Asia?
These aren’t some doomsday scenarios I’m coming up with here, just stating that dismissing China the way Americans do is reminiscent of the same hubris that has come to bite other nations in the ass sooner or later.
It was! But it's left a lot of nations with huge debt for projects that often haven't really helped their economies.
Even when things are working mind of ok, rather than build alliances and friends (build soft power), China too often acts entitled after coming in to a place & blows the political gains they should have been making. Even when coming with a carrot to the world, China's demands-of-ego get in their own way.
China does have an incredibly fast growing navy. Their military is cranking out enormous amounts of everything, at a dizzying unimaginable pace. And perhaps the Belt & Road will help that nation project power some, will serve as ports and bases. But I'm not sure. I'm not sure why they are so aggressively building their military.
PLA spending is ~2% of GDP, what US wants NATO to spend. It's just 2% of 20T economy with huge industrial capacity and relatively efficient procurement buys a lot. And since most of the hardware is new and not replacing deprecated equipment, the number naturally increase until level will production and replacement demands balances out. Ultimately PRC is ~25% larger than US by PPP, domestic MIC is largely indigenous on operate on domestic pricing, it would be weird if they don't have comparable or larger sized fleet. Much of it is also reorganization/rebalancing away from army to navy/airforce, net personel is down, but capital equipement up. It's easier for satellites/media to report 100s of more ships and planes, but not 250,000 less soldiers.
Well yeah the project is in its infancy. America doesn't just plop down military bases in places either. They build influence first. Then maybe down the line it's "we'll forgive your debt if you let us build this port for our navy" or "we'll build you a nice airport and allow you access to it if you let us use it for military purposes"
US military also paid for the political hit of stationing these warheads decades ago. It would be hard to imagine another country doing the same without triggering something like the cuban missile crisis.
> How Much Does It Cost? The F-35's price per unit, including ancillary costs like depot maintenance, ground support equipment, and spare parts is $110.3 million per F-35A, $135.8 million per F-35B, and $117.3 million per F-35C.
The F-16 isn't cheap at $63 per.
EDIT: the above is not from the article, where "cost" appears once in a link to another article.
This is the same company that added developers (and had them work in shifts 24x7) to an already late project and expected that to result in a quality product.
Concentrating on the process of developing airplanes from concept to production quickly rather than just concentrating on just one airplane. When you have the former, the latter becomes easier.
F16 is peak fighter jet aesthetics, tho I have a soft spot for the Tomcats and Eagles. Both look the part of powerful birds of prey.
Su-27 has a nice sleek look to it but I respected it more when it had all this theoretical capabilities that never materialized in an active theater...
Soon we will have 30,000 autonomous drones delivered via a rocket anywhere on earth in 30 minutes or less. Starlink satellites will monitor the drones as they pick off soldiers one by one.
These craft are capable of controlling a local swarm of drones themselves. Its hardly obsolete to bake in redundancy in control especially one capable of running independently at the edge.
>delivered via a rocket anywhere on earth in 30 minutes or less
Which rocket are you imagining as the delivery platform? I hope it is not any of SpaceX's rockets, which probably need 30 min just to fuel them up -- and once they're fueled, they have to be launched in a few days or undergo an expensive disassembly process to prevent corrosion caused by fuel residue.
The US Air Force used liquid-fueled ICBMs for about 10 years, then in the 1960s switched to solid fueled because of the disadvantages described above.
OK. But then you have to unload whatever payload was scheduled to launch next and load the drones, which again probably takes more than 30 min all by itself even after we modify the system to make unloading and loading payloads as fast as possible. (For one thing, I bet the way they do it now, SpaceX loads the payload and only then fuels the rocket, and if they were to reverse the order, They would need to make modifications that are expensive in engineering time to prevent the jostling of loading the payload from causing leaks or explosions of the fuel.)
What matters for a weapon is the delay between the decision to use the weapon and when the weapon arrives at the target; it would be a mistake to look just at flight time. For an ICBM or a sub-launched ballistic missile, the delay really is about 40 min all in.
Liquid-fueled rocket engines are not used by the US military and haven't been used since about 1970 and that is unlikely to change in my estimation because of this new capability that SpaceX has developed of rockets that can land gently enough that a payload of drones survives the landing. I don't want to guess as to the feasibility of developing a solid-fuel rocket that can land gently.
(Also I think 30 min is unrealistic: a SpaceX rocket would need about an hour IMO to travel to some destination on the other side of Earth from where it launched: an ICBM can do it in about 40 min only because it is still going at about 8 times the speed of sound when it hits.)
If anyone actually in the industry contradicts anything I wrote here, they are probably right and I'm probably wrong.
Tiny drones are having a moment right now, but anti-drone tech will probably catch up in short order, both electronic warfare and systems to actually shoot them down.
>anti-drone tech will probably catch up in short order, both electronic warfare and systems to actually shoot them down.
It's not a popular fact but Russia is excelling at this area right now.
Having a live war to test in and a tight feedback loop between the front lines and the industrial backbone has sped up their weapons development quite a lot.
nope. i've been trying to figure out what's going on by piecing together western-leaning and russian-leaning sources together like a jigsaw. my assumption is that both sides generally tell truths that suit them while ignoring truths that don't suit them, and both will admit that something has gone wrong once it becomes difficult to hide.
here's an example of a western admission that Russia is currently ahead in electronic warfare:
The F-35 does seem like a colossal waste of money, but it's also one a government jobs program and a cash cow for MIC investors with a budget of $1.7 trillion, which is how the government makes these decisions:
Lockheed Martin is moving towards drone fighter jets under "Project Carrera" although their ideal is to have a F-35 controlling a swarm of fighter drones that travel with it, which seems like a convenient excuse to keep producing and selling the F-35. Eventually the human fighter pilot will be removed from the system and it'll all be run by an AI called SkyNet.
Maybe against asymmetric opponents who can't hit back in space domain.
Peer powers with ASAT capability will just launch a "cheap" kill vehicle to blowup starship + payload worth 100s of million because US put eggs in one platform basket like aircraft carriers where ROI depends on reusability which is ultimately predicated on survivability. Meanwhile resulting kessler syndrome degrades space enviroment for everyone, but US the most because they have the most hardware in space.
It's surprising that weapons manufacturers seem to be quite slow at adopting this trend. I guess they don't want to speed up the obsolescence of their own supply chains.
Cheap drones aren’t that cheap and conventional weapons aren’t always that expensive. A JDAM is like 20k which is cheaper than a Shahed, but way more powerful. There aren’t many ways to beat a modern air force other than having your own expensive modern airforce and AA systems. So you initially spent a lot of resources to beat those systems, and the moment you have beaten those, you can carpet bomb the battle field with bombs that are more powerful and cheaper than “cheap” drones.
Well, for one, slowness of adoption usually translates to "let's milk the crap out of the government's dollars for as long as we can without putting too much of our own money into it". LHM's stock (as well as other major contractors) seems to be a good indicator of that.
I have a relative who recently (2 years ago) called it a career after roughly 40 years at Lockheed-Martin, and a good chunk of that time was within the Skunk Works division. What I was able to gleam from him is that LHM sees the future of aerial warfare as a hybrid of manned and unmanned vehicles. The idea is that a 6th or 7th gen fighter might be a "mothership" of sorts with much more powerful weapons such as bombs or heavier artillery , but also in control of a number of unmanned drones capable of significantly faster attack abilities but with lighter armaments or laser weapons, all to replace current dogfighting scenarios.
Defense contractors make heaps of money on big, drawn out projects like the F35. They probably stand to make much less if they pivot to compete with COTS drones carrying IEDs. So it's not surprising to me that the military industrial complex is more interested in milking the government for cash than actually innovating towards superior combat efficiency and effectiveness.
What you’re suggesting sounds like an ICBM effectively. Launching one, even if it’s a falcon 9 launch vehicle, anyway close to a nuclear power is not reasonable.
I was just thinking that all these FPV drones we saw dominate in Ukraine would've been possible to make 2 decades ago with similarly rudimentary tools of the day - no advanced tech required.
No they weren't as effective due to reduced lithium ion battery capacity as well as less efficient small electric motors. Otherwise the 70's and 80's would have had quadcopters too in every house.
Well, it was a bit more than that, but it is still hilarious, how they changed everything after the initial desaster, so that the US side would still win:
"After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory."
The alternative would have been uncomfortable after all.
Large scale exercises like that are only ever half wargames. You can do wargames all day long in Newport, but it's a little harder to get a few dozen boats and a few thousand sailors together to practice their normal operations. If you do have an exercise and the OPFOR manages to win, then it switches from half wargame half training exercise to full training exercise, or switches to a different scenario. "Ok, we lost that scenario, we'll go home and come up with a different strategy later. While everyone's here, how about let's try this different scenario instead? no, we don't want to deal with chemical weapons right now, we need work on dealing with air defenses and adding in WMDs would complicate things too much right now"
"no, we don't want to deal with chemical weapons right now, we need work on dealing with air defenses and adding in WMDs would complicate things too much right now"
Sure, but then why add them in the first place?
And no, when everyone is already there, it does not make sense to send them home, after the initial failure. But what they then did, was not a "wargame" anymore.
But they still called it like that and still had a US "victory" in the end. That sounds fake to boost moral (while ignoring serious flaws).
That was so sad. The whole point of the exercise was have been to validate whether Networked Warfare doctrine "worked". But, aside from refloating the navy, some of the restrictions like the Red OPFOR wasn't allowed to shoot down V-22s or C-130s while they were invading, also,
"The white cell also directed the chief of staff that the red team had to position its air defense assets out in the open so the blue forces could easily destroy them. Even after some were not destroyed, the red team was forbidden to fire upon blue forces as they conducted a live airborne drop. Van Riper asked the white cell if his forces could at least deploy the chemical weapons that he possessed, but he was again denied."[0]
Well, no, a few armed powerboats couldn't take out a US carrier group, unless they had advantages such as the carrier group being constrained to an anchorage out of the way of shipping lanes and unable to maneuver, being able to carry missiles heavier than the entire rest of the boat, having un-interdictable motorcycle couriers that could transit at the speed of light, or a few other minor techological innovations that the OPFOR commander implemented in the Millennium Challenge
That's old hat. A modern strike package uses decoys to overwhelm radar and only needs to deploy a fraction of them as live missiles. The TALD/MALD is a recent example of this, used as a JSOW decoy when attacking high-capability SEAD targets.
> And you know who has 5000+ air defense rockets ready to engage?
Probably most modern militaries with advanced ballistic point defense like the Phalanx CIWS. Mass-produced drones are slow, large, and usually don't carry an effective enough payload to disable your target. A swarm could prove effective, but usually a single supersonic cruise missile is enough to put any modern target in the "it's a gamble" territory of interception. The materiel advantage of multiple drones is vastly outweighed by the capabilities of a well-placed munition.
You are right that cheap drones are slow. But they can destroy aircrafts or fuel storage for them or SAM missile launcher.
Cheap (~50k USD) are disabling oil refineries in Russia right now causing losses of a more than a hundred million USD.
Phalanx could cover 3km range meaning you need at least 6 for a single air field. And it has ammo for 30 seconds only. How many drones it can kill? 10? 30? And drone #50 will hit target.
And for some reason navy is not waiting for Phalanx to engage in the last second before impact, they use expensive rockets.
Modern army has no real answer to the attack of 100+ drones at a time.
They really cannot. Both SAM sites and CIWs are built for this job, and drones simply aren't. A drone isn't as fast as a cruise missile or as maneuverable as a jet. Most of them boast a radio signature bigger than an F-35 and struggle to outrun a hatchback while delivering a payload smaller than an AIM-9. They cannot be effectively delivered at standoff range, and fail to damage anything but the most vulnerable assets.
Swarm warfare isn't irrelevant, but propeller-driven subsonic aircraft usually end up as cannon fodder no matter how many you throw into controlled airspace.
Currently cannot. At end of the day interceptors and CIWS are still constrained by magazine depth.
Ghetto 10-50k propellor drones with 2000km+ theatre range are (basically stand off capabilities) now are just (very) poverty mans subsonic TLAMs, which themselves are weaponeered in strike packages to account for interception, ecm, duds etc. But they're still sent in numbers designed to overwhelm finite local defense.
Ground reality right now is most US bases can get away with CIWS and interceptors because current garbage cheap propellor drones (Iran) are limited to dumb bulk drone attacks. But once you add some autonomous intelligence and coordinated swarm ability, a swarm of cheap propellor drone that can do basic evasion can make counter drone warfare unsustainably inefficient. A CIWS with 1500 rounds has 25-30 burst, a remotely reactive propellor drone that bleeds 3 bursts instead of 1, or a longer burst because it's no longer on a predictable trajectory and all of sudden base defense scaled to engage 200 targets goes dry engaging 50. Maybe INS and software enables limitted onboard compute to hug terrain lower, navigate in low covered approachces etc. Now an adversary who can't coordinate a 300 drone attack, can manage to pierce defense with 100. Optmize even more when software improves onboard target recognition and that tiny payload goes strait for vunerable assets. Or if base defense destroyed, it could loiter (because propeller) and lock down base for hours while defenders hide in hardened shelters. Or just glide itself into structures and sit around as unexploded ordnance that goes boom if cheap webcam recognizes motion / battery runs out. IMO there's a lot of capabilities that can be milked from a cheap platform.
The next thing you know the entire economics of said base defense stops being viable. The potential danger with intelligent autonomous swarms is it's feasible that eventually they'll make the cannon fodder to successful attack exchange unfavourable / unsustainable to defenders.
Air defense rockets came about because they were an improvement on crew controlled flak cannons. Now adays though it would be pretty trivial to create a flak autocannon that uses machine learning to absolutely mow down clouds of drones in a few moments.
Only if flak cannon is there. How far can it engage? 3km? How many you need to cover one airfield? Fuel storage? Ammo depot? How many airfield there are?
Multiply and you need a hundred billion USD of investment. And a lot of ammo which is not cheap either. Phalanx auto cannon fire rate is 3000+ USD per second.
Theres investment on either side, one to put up the defenses another to field the drones. US spending figures are misleading because they also serve as domestic job and training programs, a different story compared to a military that has to go to the global market for their kit.
Good luck defending your air defenses if your opposition can throw hundreds or thousands of drones at you, all of which can travel faster than Mach 10.
> Good luck defending your air defenses if your opposition can throw hundreds or thousands of drones at you, all of which can travel faster than Mach 10.
We used to just call those cruise missiles. I guess everything needs to just be called a drone now.
Depends what capabilities the drones have. And having a glimpse is already a confirmed sighting, then you can start a focused search with traditional groundbased radar - the stealth planes are not invisible, if you know something is there, you have a way better chance of tracking it. And when you have some other drones in the flightpath, you might get more than a glimpse and finally a lock. Or your own fighter jets. The idea of a stealth plane is, that you don't spot them at all, once spotted, their survival rate drops a lot.
>if you know something is there, you have a way better chance of tracking it.
Fighter jets can maneuver. For a successful missile launch you need a good enough lock to track the plane precisely as it moves. Just knowing roughly where the plane was a few minutes ago doesn't help all that much when it comes to killing it.
But your fighter jets can know where to look. Supported by all your drones you can send in the flight path. One drone close enough with a heat seeking missile and that was it.
And advanced radar probably also can get a lock, if the operators know something is there.
To keep eyes (or IRSTs) on a maneuvering stealth jet you're either going to need insane numbers of drones or drones that have similar performance to the jet you're tracking. The sky is a big place. Either way, if this kind of thing works at all, it's not going to work out any cheaper than the existing options.
Also, launch parameters for missiles are important. A missile fired from a drone flying at low subsonic speeds has far less energy, and is thus far less of a threat.
"A missile fired from a drone flying at low subsonic speeds has far less energy, and is thus far less of a threat."
The F35 only has a top speed of Mach 1,6 (F16 had Mach 2). And a ground to surface missile also starts at V0 = 0 so less of a threat maybe, but still a great threat. The defense of a stealth jet is not speed, but stealth. When a missile is fired at it, it might survive, but the idea is that there never will be a missile fired in the first place. Drones could negate that.
SAMs are much bigger than anything a drone or fighter jet can launch. Here's one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-400_missile_system This missile weighs about 10x as much as an AMRAAM, for example. That's how it has enough propellant to launch from the ground and still have enough energy to pose a significant threat.
That's right, I wasn't reading carefully. I did not mean a drone should fire a SAM. My point with the SAM was just, they are dangerous, even though they start at V0=0. But yes, they were designed for it. But air to air missiles are also dangerous when fired from a slow helicopter as far as I know ..
Any real kill bot army is fully autonomous requiring no disrupt-able RF, and wars aren’t fought against soldiers. When your armies are drones the fight moves to who you’re really fighting - the citizens whom you’re trying to break to surrender. Welcome to the future!
Combat has been about controlling resources. When labor or attention is now considered a resource, how does combat change how it looks? You can’t necessarily conduct the same tactics to secure a rubber plantation like you might to secure a mindshare of a population. Maybe you lean more on propaganda instead of actions that might diminish the quality of the labor/attention pool from loss of life. You could gradually shift their labor pools to enrich your own companies, shift their public discourse to discuss products created by your own companies, and you’ve effectively captured the population without a shot fired or them realizing what has even happened.
This isn't hard to achieve - I think a Starlink-guided drone army is pretty much unjammable - unless you have space based jammers, but once they get laser datalinks it will be 100% unjammable.
Highly directional antennas mean that the radiation source needs to be up in the sky to be even picked up by the drone.
Ground based jammers are physically not capable of doing this. And I'm pretty sure they use frequency bands that do not reflect off the ionosphere otherwise they couldn't talk to satellites.
Earth to satellite connection is as jammable as other wireless connection. And don't forget that gps sygnals are also jammed and replaced with fake location.
I have no idea how any of this actually works in practice, but I imagine a series of MEMS mirrors could split a single physical laser beam into many-many recievers in a time-multiplexed manner.
Probably you could control a good amount of drones with a single satellite transciever, and your typical drone would have LOS to many satellites.
There could be multiplexer drones whose purpose would be to mediate between cheap disposable small drones and the satellites themselves.
This is already a thing (not with lasers and sats) - the Russians have the Orlan drones with sophisticated(ish) surveillance equipment that act as spotters and guide the Lancet suicide drones and artillery
Watching closely Ukrainian - Russia war I can see @lettergram has a point. Cheap commercial drone with granade showing just astonishing funds/effectiveness ratio. Think about firing $150 000 rocket (javelin) or $1 000 drone. Plus drone does not require any special military training and you can manuver during the fly and choose angle of attack.
Edit: forgot to add GPS denied areas. Dead reckoning is really fucking hard when you’re blown about like a leaf in the wind.
What about the datalink? Max distance? Is there a video feed? Does each drone have an operator? If not, how do you know who is being targeted? War is ugly and messy, everything looks like the same shit on the battlefield.
Have you considered weather? Temperature can play a nasty role in drone mobility, not to mention wind. Oh, and they’re not quiet, at all.
Drones are as much of a pain as they can be effective. Everyone just assumes they “just work” and they really don’t.
yes, yes, we only need to use a few more GPUs to turn automated plagiarism machines into full blown AGI, am I right?
I thought at least Apple getting off the horse because they realized it's just a carnival carousel was a hint. But apparently people are so high on the LLM supply they can't think straight any more.
All a drone needs to do in what I just described is target something that looks like a target (ie person with gun). We have that tech today, and it’s not hard.
War thinky types divide the "battle space" into zones of danger, and stealth platforms justify their cost by being able to penetrate highest threat areas. It's an idea that hasn't really been tested yet, not really, not since 1993. Hopefully we never find out.
Some of the Block 4 mods have been moved up, particularly the necessary avionics stuff, but some of the mods need rework for heat management and other deeper requirements.