“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.
Disclaimer:Short AI timelines imply we won’t see this stuff much before AI makes things weird
This is all well and good in theory but mostly bottlenecked on software/implementation/manufacturing.
with the right software/hardware current military is obsolete
but no one has that hardware/software yet
EG:no one makes an airborne sharpshooter drone(edit:cross that one off the list)Black sea is not currently full of Ukrainian anti-ship drones + comms relays
no drone swarms/networking/autonomy yet
I expect current militaries to successfully adapt before/as new drones emerge
soft kill systems (Jam/Hack) will be effective against cheap off the shelf consumer crap
hard kill systems (Airburst/Laser) exist and will still be effective
laser cost/KW has been dropping rapidly
minimal viable product is enough for now
Ukraine war still involves squishy human soldiers and TRENCHES
what’s the minimum viable slaughterbot
can it be reuseable (bomber instead of kamikaze) to reduce cost per strike
Drone warfare engame concerns are:
kill/death ratio
better per $ effectiveness
conflict budget
USA can outspend opponents at much higher than 10:1 ratio
R&D budget/amortisation
Economies of scale likely overdetermine winners in drone vs drone warfare since quantity leads to cheaper more effective drones
A few quibbles
Ground drones have big advantages
better payload/efficiency/endurance compared to flying
cost can be very low (similar to car/truck/ATV)
can use cover effectively
indirect fire is much easier
launch cheap time fused shells using gun barrel
downside is 2 or 2.5d mobility.
Vulnerable to landmines/obstacles unlike flying drones
navigation is harder
line of site for good RF comms is harder
Use radio, not light for comms.
optical is immature and has downsides
RF handles occlusion better (smoke, walls, etc.)
RF is fine aside from non-jamming resistant civilian stuff like WIFI
Development pressure not there to make mobile free space optical cheap/reliable
jamming isn’t too significant
spread spectrum and frequency hopping is very effective
jamming power required to stop comms is enormous, have to cover all of spectrum with noise
directional antennas and phased arrays give some directionality and make jamming harder
phased array RF can double as radar
stealthy comms can use spread spectrum with transmit power below noise floor
need radio telescope equivalent to see if something is an RF hotspot transmitting noise like signal
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.