A lot of important technology do not exists yet for the above.
You assume independent movement and coordination of said movement in a hostile area, while we barely arrived at self-driving cars in well governed, 1st world areas (available only very few places afaik due to not being able to demonstrate high enough reliability to be convincing to lawmakers).
Point-to-point laser communication would be a great solution indeed, but that would also be a great solution for a bunch of other military applications. Yet it is not used, as we do not have reliable solution for working with it in case of moving objects (apart from satelites), too much coordination is needed to find the end points.
There is no software system currently that is even close to completing the requirements.
Let me offer a different point of view on the whole question:
A suicide drone is just a missile. Until recently there was just no way to propel and guide an explosive charge accurately, reliably and cheaply other than using a rocket engine.
A recon drone is just a helicopter. Until recently there was just no way to propel and guide a good enough observer and transmit the information reliably and cheaply other than a human carrying object using gas turbines.
What happened is now we have better battery and material technology, and way better (smaller) electronic devices (and optimized global supply chains). The cost advantage against missiles is mostly due to inertia in the military-industrial complex: most missiles in inventory were designed against targets with different size and performance parameters. You need a a million dollar AMRAAM missile to intercept an Su-30 flying 80 kms away, maybe flying at 2 mach or at 40 000 feet or pulling 9g maneuvers while dispensing chaff, flares and using EW. (and the missile carrying aircraft may have already pulled the same speed and maneuvers, and may have took off from the desert with 45 degrees Celsius and arrived to − 30 degrees Celsius flight attitude in the next couple of minutes, yet the missile must stay safe and reliable).
The infantryman did not get replaced. They just got missiles available in large numbers, and their own miniature recon helicopters in every bush. It is harder to hide and there are more precision fires to throw at you after getting spotted.
Self driving cars have to be (almost)perfectly reliable and never have an at fault accident.
Meanwhile cluster munitions are being banned because submunitions can have 2-30% failure rates leaving unexploded ordinance everywhere.
In some cases avoiding civvy casualties may be a similar barrier since distinguishing civvy from enemy reliably is hard but militaries are pretty tolerant to collateral damage. Significant failure rates are tolerable as long as there’s no exploitable weaknesses.
Distributed positioning systems
Time of flight distance determination is in some newer Wifi chips/standards for indoor positioning.
Time of flight across a swarm of drones gives drone-drone distances which is enough to build a very robust distributed positioning system. Absolute positioning can depend on other sensors like cameras or phased array GPS receivers, ground drones or whatever else is convenient.
Firstly that we both agree that much such tech does not exist. The major goal of the article is to think about what could exist within physical limits and foreseeable etc.
For independent movement—I am not convinced that self driving cars tell you that much. Mostly airborne drones that are expendable seem like quite a different problem. Radio mesh networks for many fixed points is a very mature tech now—smart meters all coordinate, making the mesh automatically as desired. I expect adapting it to moving units is either not hard or already solved by the military. Sure there is still a long way to go to anything like military hardened optimization but a military would be foolish to assume their adversary was not close to achieving it.
For light vs radio, see this comment—rather than expecting p2p immediately my more important claim is the EW and Jamming will lose out in the “endgame” situation. I may look at the physics/cost of laser diodes with beam spread, intensity if I have time.
I am not sure entirely how your different point of view changes things, or if it is even different to mine. To be specific I claim that front line infantryman carrying rifles will soon be obsolete, then infantry driving vehicles. The front line (or zone as it may be much more spread out) if there are soldiers there at all will be spending almost all their time stationary in well protected areas such as well underground, or in heavily armored units coordinating the battlefield.
A lot of important technology do not exists yet for the above.
You assume independent movement and coordination of said movement in a hostile area, while we barely arrived at self-driving cars in well governed, 1st world areas (available only very few places afaik due to not being able to demonstrate high enough reliability to be convincing to lawmakers).
Point-to-point laser communication would be a great solution indeed, but that would also be a great solution for a bunch of other military applications. Yet it is not used, as we do not have reliable solution for working with it in case of moving objects (apart from satelites), too much coordination is needed to find the end points.
There is no software system currently that is even close to completing the requirements.
Let me offer a different point of view on the whole question:
A suicide drone is just a missile. Until recently there was just no way to propel and guide an explosive charge accurately, reliably and cheaply other than using a rocket engine.
A recon drone is just a helicopter. Until recently there was just no way to propel and guide a good enough observer and transmit the information reliably and cheaply other than a human carrying object using gas turbines.
What happened is now we have better battery and material technology, and way better (smaller) electronic devices (and optimized global supply chains). The cost advantage against missiles is mostly due to inertia in the military-industrial complex: most missiles in inventory were designed against targets with different size and performance parameters. You need a a million dollar AMRAAM missile to intercept an Su-30 flying 80 kms away, maybe flying at 2 mach or at 40 000 feet or pulling 9g maneuvers while dispensing chaff, flares and using EW. (and the missile carrying aircraft may have already pulled the same speed and maneuvers, and may have took off from the desert with 45 degrees Celsius and arrived to − 30 degrees Celsius flight attitude in the next couple of minutes, yet the missile must stay safe and reliable).
The infantryman did not get replaced. They just got missiles available in large numbers, and their own miniature recon helicopters in every bush. It is harder to hide and there are more precision fires to throw at you after getting spotted.
Self driving cars have to be (almost)perfectly reliable and never have an at fault accident.
Meanwhile cluster munitions are being banned because submunitions can have 2-30% failure rates leaving unexploded ordinance everywhere.
In some cases avoiding civvy casualties may be a similar barrier since distinguishing civvy from enemy reliably is hard but militaries are pretty tolerant to collateral damage. Significant failure rates are tolerable as long as there’s no exploitable weaknesses.
Distributed positioning systems
Time of flight distance determination is in some newer Wifi chips/standards for indoor positioning.
Time of flight across a swarm of drones gives drone-drone distances which is enough to build a very robust distributed positioning system. Absolute positioning can depend on other sensors like cameras or phased array GPS receivers, ground drones or whatever else is convenient.
Thanks for the thoughts.
Firstly that we both agree that much such tech does not exist. The major goal of the article is to think about what could exist within physical limits and foreseeable etc.
For independent movement—I am not convinced that self driving cars tell you that much. Mostly airborne drones that are expendable seem like quite a different problem. Radio mesh networks for many fixed points is a very mature tech now—smart meters all coordinate, making the mesh automatically as desired. I expect adapting it to moving units is either not hard or already solved by the military. Sure there is still a long way to go to anything like military hardened optimization but a military would be foolish to assume their adversary was not close to achieving it.
For light vs radio, see this comment—rather than expecting p2p immediately my more important claim is the EW and Jamming will lose out in the “endgame” situation. I may look at the physics/cost of laser diodes with beam spread, intensity if I have time.
I am not sure entirely how your different point of view changes things, or if it is even different to mine. To be specific I claim that front line infantryman carrying rifles will soon be obsolete, then infantry driving vehicles. The front line (or zone as it may be much more spread out) if there are soldiers there at all will be spending almost all their time stationary in well protected areas such as well underground, or in heavily armored units coordinating the battlefield.