“I expect current militaries to successfully adapt before/as new drones emerge”—I hope so as I think that would make a safer world. However I am not so confident—institutional inertia makes me think it all too likely that they would not anticipate and adapt leading to an unstable situation and more war. Also without actual fights how would one side know the relative strength of their drone system? They or their opponent could have an unknown critical weakness. We have no experience in predicting real world effectiveness from a paper system. I am told war is more likely when sides do not know their relative strength.
“Economies of scale likely overdetermine winners”—yes especially important for e.g. China vs USA if we want an example of one side with better tech/access to chips but worse at manufacturing.
Ground vs Air
All good points—I am agnostic/quite uncertain as to where the sweet spot is. I would expect any drone of medium to large size would be optimized to make as much use of the ground as possible.
Radio vs Light
Yes, I do not know what the “endgame” is for radio comms vs jammers, if it turns out that radio can evade jammers then light will not be used. My broader point I think I will make more specific now is that EW and jammers will not be effective in late stage highly optimized drone warfare. If that is because radio/stealth wins then yes, otherwise light comms will be developed (and may take some time to reach optimal cheapness/weight etc) because it would give such an advantage.
Not so worried about country vs. country conflicts. Terrorism/asymmetric is bigger problem since cheap slaughterbots will proliferate. Hopefully intelligence agencies can deal with that more cheaply than putting in physical defenses and hard kill systems everywhere.
Still don’t expect much impact before we get STEM AI and everything goes off the rails.
Also without actual fights how would one side know the relative strength of their drone system
Relative strength is hard to gauge but getting reasonable perf/$ is likely easy. Then just compare budgets adjusted for corruption/Purchasing power parity/R&D amortisation.
Building an effective drone army is about tactical rock paper scissors and performance / $. Perf / $ emphasis makes live fire tests cheap. Live fire test data as baseline makes simulations accurate. RF/comms performance will be straightforward to model and military is actually putting work into cybersecurity because they’re not complete morons.
Add to that the usual espionage stuff and I expect govts to know what will work and what their enemies are doing.
Ukraine war was allegedly failure to predict the human element (will to fight) with big intelligence agencies having bad models. Drone armies don’t suffer from morale problems and match theoretical models better.
Thanks for the thoughts.
“I expect current militaries to successfully adapt before/as new drones emerge”—I hope so as I think that would make a safer world. However I am not so confident—institutional inertia makes me think it all too likely that they would not anticipate and adapt leading to an unstable situation and more war. Also without actual fights how would one side know the relative strength of their drone system? They or their opponent could have an unknown critical weakness. We have no experience in predicting real world effectiveness from a paper system. I am told war is more likely when sides do not know their relative strength.
“Economies of scale likely overdetermine winners”—yes especially important for e.g. China vs USA if we want an example of one side with better tech/access to chips but worse at manufacturing.
Ground vs Air
All good points—I am agnostic/quite uncertain as to where the sweet spot is. I would expect any drone of medium to large size would be optimized to make as much use of the ground as possible.
Radio vs Light
Yes, I do not know what the “endgame” is for radio comms vs jammers, if it turns out that radio can evade jammers then light will not be used. My broader point I think I will make more specific now is that EW and jammers will not be effective in late stage highly optimized drone warfare. If that is because radio/stealth wins then yes, otherwise light comms will be developed (and may take some time to reach optimal cheapness/weight etc) because it would give such an advantage.
Not so worried about country vs. country conflicts. Terrorism/asymmetric is bigger problem since cheap slaughterbots will proliferate. Hopefully intelligence agencies can deal with that more cheaply than putting in physical defenses and hard kill systems everywhere.
Still don’t expect much impact before we get STEM AI and everything goes off the rails.
Relative strength is hard to gauge but getting reasonable perf/$ is likely easy. Then just compare budgets adjusted for corruption/Purchasing power parity/R&D amortisation.
Building an effective drone army is about tactical rock paper scissors and performance / $. Perf / $ emphasis makes live fire tests cheap. Live fire test data as baseline makes simulations accurate. RF/comms performance will be straightforward to model and military is actually putting work into cybersecurity because they’re not complete morons.
Add to that the usual espionage stuff and I expect govts to know what will work and what their enemies are doing.
Ukraine war was allegedly failure to predict the human element (will to fight) with big intelligence agencies having bad models. Drone armies don’t suffer from morale problems and match theoretical models better.