The concept of troops going to the battlefield in armored vehicles may well be a thing of the past, if this YouTube video is any indication. In the Ukraine today, supplies going to the front have to be transported not by vehicle but by drone. It’s simply impossible to get supplies there by any other means, given the nearly impossible task of running a gauntlet of drone swarms. This ought to serve as a lesson to those in charge of determining defense spending priorities.
well.
so much for your F35s.
so much for your T90s and Abrams.
give me 80,000 drones for the same price and lets conduct a real world experiment.
and give Vlad a call.
You’re still watching CBC? I’m glad someone is standing against the Clintons, Bidens and Nulands of this world.
see below referencing the C-17
and l dont watch anything currently known as television
How will the Elites slaughter as many poor boys as they can if they use machines to fight the Future Wars?
You fly a C-17 at 40K feet, far above the battle field and far out of range from enemy AA. You dump a sea-container out the back. It soft-lands on a parachute and a thousand fire-and-forget drones fly away looking for sh1t to blow up. If you’re feeling squeamish, tell them to only blow up stuff painted OD green.
If you’re a Communist, you tell them to blow up anything that moves. Cows, deer, humans, cars, everything.
Rinse and repeat. For months, if necessary.
-Then- you send in artillery, tanks, APCs and guys with rifles.
This is what’s going to happen to the Chicoms, because they are led by morons who can’t see what’s in front of their faces. Is a Chicom destroyer going to survive attacks by swarms of cheap robot torpedoes that fall out of cheap robot aircraft launched from Taiwan, the biggest aircraft carrier in the world? Doubt it.
But if you want a real eye-opener, just try telling a Canadian Forces officer that. They are all set to re-fight the Korean war. They don’t understand that if an F-35 can hit 20 targets at once, you just send 100 drones. Because an F-35 costs a hundred million bucks, and a drone (if it was made by honest men) might cost at most $100,000. Probably more like $10,000 with economy of scale.
I know this because there are -hobbyists- out there approaching Mach-1 with home made radio control aircraft, powered by commercial hobby jet engines. Guys are going 300 to 400 mph on YouTube. Haven’t seen supersonic yet but it is only a matter of time.
Tell that to a Canadian Forces guy? Like talking to a dog.
l like your way of thinking.
try this: Taiwan is some areas of defence are at par with the rest of the world.
they just keep it under wraps. and mebbe let tidbits slip out via double agents to give the rational mainland higher ups justified pause. as in oopsie. the entire armada headed to the island is sunk and 100,000 soldiers sent to occupy are fish food.
l really think this is why when beijing starts ‘hinting’ its just to satisfy their hawks and has been like that since before it was even possibly a legit threat during prob. Mao’s time.
Let the commons start rioting and #WinnieThePooh will try it.
I’ve heard that those destroyers are not much better than fishing boats with missiles on them. But they have lots of them, and they’re making more every week, so I hope Taiwan has been busy.
also if Xi decides the key is to hold power is to start a war, then lm gonna see a somewhat reenactment of the Battle of Midway.
japs played by the mainlanders invading and islanders play Halsey, Spruance et al
(ps JUST fini a YT about the admiral’s early career and many successes).
a lifetime to hone the instincts to know just when to make his move.
l once told a computer class how McCluskey lucked in and adios 3 carriers in 10 minutes.
hopefully the islanders get to write insults on the missiles and bombs before deployment and add that to the propaganda news stories.
Awesome post, Phantom!
Thank you sir.
You want to see something interesting, a guy made a defense turret to keep the squirrels out of his bird feeder. It’s on YouTube somewhere. When the vision system sees a squirrel, the turret tacks it and a squirt gun blasts the squirrel with water. The whole thing cost him a couple hundred bucks, camera, servos and all, and it runs on a Raspberry Pi 4. Maybe even a 3, it’s been a while since I saw it.
Trivial, right? Just a $40-$80 computer system made by some dude in his garage, that can tell the difference between a squirrel and a bird at 100 feet. Took him a couple months of fiddling about.
I saw another YouTube about a couple of guys who used an AI algo and Google Maps to make a self-contained guidance system for a drone. ~$5k cost.
Maybe you want to take pictures of something in Lake Ontario, let’s say an island inhabited only by birds 30 miles offshore. You get yourself a nice chain saw motor, build a little drone out of foam board and fiberglass, and you can fly out there to take pictures as long as your fuel holds out. Modern computer engine management and a super efficient airframe, you can make it last a loooong time. You can have your drone upload pictures to Starlink. Launch it off a slingshot. Program it to return to a location convenient to you, at a time convenient to you. Total cost, some time and maybe a thousand bucks worth of tools/materials/hardware.
Some geezer who knows a little bit about building things, like he can fix a chainsaw motor and solder up a doorbell circuit, maybe knows his way around a tablesaw, he can do it.
How do I know all this? I watch other people do it on YouTube.
Drone dispensers have already been tested for fighters. But how will you conduct NORAD missions with drones? Intercept, identify and communicate with unidentified aircraft. There are no drones that can do this job now. I’m also curious about that C-17 flight profile. It is both clear of enemy air defense and still able to parachute a container on the enemy? Maybe that’s problem with your plan. Air defences are layered and reach many hundreds of miles. And radars just love those big fat transports with a 5 story vertical slab for a tail.
The world record for the greatest distance covered by parachute is 46.2km.
“There are no drones that can do this job now.”
There are no -cheap- drones that can do it. That we know of, anyway. Maybe look up “Rapid Dragon” for dumping drones out of a C-17. Now in deployment with the USA.
Radar reaches hundreds of miles. Actual anti-aircraft fire, not so much. You saturate their launchers with targets, and they can’t cope. If they have a hundred AA missiles, you send 300 drones. You send fighters to cover your transports and shoot down AA missiles. You arm your transports with anti-missile defenses. You blow up their launchers and keep moving forward. Peel the onion.
Also, recall that the Ukrainians just did this exact thing to the Russians a few weeks ago and took out a fair bit of their strategic bomber fleet. Containers full of drones, driven in trucks to within 10 or so miles of air bases, and then deployed. Blew up a whole bunch of expensive planes.
No reason the container has to be on a truck, no reason it has to only be 10 miles. Drop it out of a plane outside air defenses, or put the containers on a ship, in a submarine, whatever. Drop them off and let the drones fly in. They’re already doing it. They’ll be doing it a lot more in the future.
Two watchwords. Cheap and Numerous.
Canada will of course lag FAR behind because of so many guys defaulting to paperwork instead of having a go and getting it done.
B-2 will be here momentarily to remind us how Russia is so militarily backward that they are using WWII era tanks in the Ukraine War. And other Reddit tales.
hi kenji.
l sent a letter to the white house identifying myself and thanking POTUS Trump for dispatching the best of the best of the flyboys and pop those radioactive blackheads in the ground in lran, and thus ‘if it is destined to happen’ thus pushed the aarmagedon clock back to about 1/4 to for the next 20-30 years. suffice for my remaining life expectancy.
Another thing you are about to see concerning militarized drones and it will come from the UN. What is the dud rate and are the explosives they carry still dangerous? (of course it is). This is how cluster bombs were taken out of CF inventory: unexploded bomblets were injuring people (and kids, of course) when used abroad (by the US). The usual suspects mounted a campaign so they were reclassified as analogous to land mines. So we trashed our cluster bombs.
The Convention on Cluster Munitions is an international treaty that prohibits all use, transfer, production, and stockpiling of cluster munitions, a type of explosive weapon which scatters submunitions over an area.
Swarms of drones may sound sexy but I predict the kibosh will be put on them.
“The Convention on Cluster Munitions is an international treaty that prohibits all use, transfer, production, and stockpiling of cluster munitions, a type of explosive weapon which scatters submunitions over an area.”
But the Russians still use them. And they still use landmines with wild abandon, another treaty. Oh, and flechettes. Another treaty.
Drone swarms are already a thing. Genie will not be getting put back into the bottle, because crappy third world countries will be able to build these systems on their own.
You’re right. Officially (from 2022): “Cluster munitions were deployed in seven nations that have not signed the global disarmament treaty prohibiting them between August 2010 and July 2020: Cambodia, Libya, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen.” I have do doubt the Russians are still using them. And the US was in hot water for about a microsecond for shipping them to Ukraine. “Ukraine provided “written assurances that it is going to use these in a very careful way,” Sullivan said in announcing the transfer.”(there is kind of a loophole in the treaty).
Anyways the point is that countries that follow the rules, like Canada, will follow the rules even as others won’t. Canada will deliberately ignore a military capability as it has in the past.