red 100
Well, at least the strawberries will be safe…
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Probably depends on how wide the river is and how fast it is moving? I could see the drag on cable messing with the drone as it is pulled across the water. I suppose the water could also mess with the optical properties of the cable somehow but IANOP.
Wouldn’t fully automated drones be unjammable?
If they’re fully automated how well can they coordinate with each other into a cohesive threat?
Putin did Xi a solid and waited to invade until after the winter olympics were done, which meant that vast swaths of materiel got stuck in the mud.
I’ve played around with fiber, a little. It might be risky but avoid fast moving water and they’re probably fine, imo. Optically, they should be unaffected. By design, the electric and magnetic field components of light don’t extend beyond the fiber (total internal reflection), so there’s no way for them to be affected by anything outside the fiber, unless it is physically damaged. Fibers might degrade in the water over long enough time, but these missions are short.
I wouldn’t want to have to clean up all that glass after the war. They should make Putin do it. Like Kirk made Cyrano Jones pick up all the tribbles on the space station.
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I think the importance of the recon drones is far greater than the kamikaze or even the bomber drones, and Ukraine had the recon drones early on which gave them the upper hand against a much stronger military.
Near the very beginning of the war, after the event where the hobby dronist called the military to share his live feed so they could hit the column, all of the drone hobbyists in Kyiv formed a Whatsapp group and would relay info to the military. This enabled Ukraine to destroy a far better equipped military.
The kamikaze and bomber drones started off as jailbreaking commercial tech and then strapping a munition on it. They’ve gotten more sophisticated, but still are pretty basic. Even today, regular drones hit their target around 40% of the time, and fiberoptics around 70%. The lethality of these is very low compared to something that a modern army would field at the start of a war. A modern army that dominates the recon battle and also has access to the stuff from that video, airstrikes from an F35, tomahawks, etc. would be able to inflict far more damage than Ukraine can by calling in a kamikaze drone with a mortar attached to it.
The reason the drones we see on the battlefield in Ukraine are so effective is largely due to Putin’s complete disregard for life, and the extremely large front line. In future fights I think it’s going to come down to who can have more recon drones in the air, and then they will unleash absolutely devastating attacks which the drones we see now really can’t even compare (unless the war drags on and devolves in a Mad Max setting like we see now in Ukraine).
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Russia has a land based army, largely because they thought any war they got involved in would be against NATO and Russia would never stand a chance of gaining air superiority.
I think they had a chance at gaining air superiority against Ukraine even despite that. Russia literally had a map of all of Ukraine’s air defenses and command. One documentary I watched on Kharkiv said that Russia opened by hitting their AD command center with two missiles (they knew the bunker was designed to withstand a nuclear blast, so they would need two) which rendered over 90% of the AD in that area useless.
Putin was convinced that he would take Ukraine quickly though, and wanted the air defenses captured not destroyed. Because of this, Ukraine was then able to move around their AD to new positions. For several days though most of Ukraine’s AD was suppressed, and if Russia instead tried to destroy it then it’s possible that they would have managed air superiority.
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It might not have to drag on very long for this to happen. Anders Nielsen did a video on this a couple of months ago. The thing is that NATO cannot sustain a very intense effort for very long. Maybe weeks.
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If only there was some kind of similar example in a similar area that could have highlighted this risk for him.
Good question.
I think it’s solvable. For example any/all of the above.
- Communication via light
- Communication by movement patterns
- Randomised flight paths or attack zones
- Divide the air craft carrier up and have each from attack a different square foot
The spooky/cool thing about machine learning is that it often finds unusual ways to communicate.
Recon drones have been around forever though. Like the AAI RQ-2 Pioneer was used to great effect in the Iraq War… the first one. I think we might be overstating how much things have changed because of:
- Both sides have drones
- Both sides love uploading their shit online
- The Russians have no qualms about sending wave after wave of soon to be dead people for no effect and seemingly no imagination for any other tactics
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I think the difference is volume and price.
Sure. The US could have 30 drones (number completely made up) over iraq. Technically that covers a lot of ground, but some one has to make sense of the footage
Vs today.
Every platoon has multiple drones that cost 100s of dollars and can watch every dugout and building in their area
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As you say, they were used to great effect in those wars.
The difference now is the scale and integration. DoD was describing Ukraine’s battlefield as “transparent”, which I dont think accurately describes Iraq, where there were only a handful (but still an enormous advantage). If the battle field is transparent for one military but not the other then it’s going to be an extremely one sided conflict.
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Also altitude and resolution. A drone at 10000’ with a 1998 camera is not going to be showing as much as 20 drones at 1000’ with 2025 cameras.
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It would also be transmitting to someone very high up, who would then need to relay the information down. Since there are so many now the information goes directly to the people fighting.
I posted this in the Euro thread, but figured I’d post here as well since there was a lot of talk about how inevitable this type of situation is:
https://x.com/LucasADWebber/status/1976342941263429887
Whenever the Ukraine war finishes I think there will be a lot of drone team mercenaries doing this type of thing in a far more professional manner. Probably in South America and Africa, but it’s possible anywhere.
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Yeah, no game of telephone before getting the intel matters a lot, too.
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Russia has begun this year’s coordinated attack on energy infrastructure.
Russians are inflicting a massive blow on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, - Ministry of Energy.
Yes, guys, I came straight to you as soon as I was free.
In Kyiv, the main target of the ballistic missiles and mopeds was the Kyiv Thermal Power Plant.
If it weren’t for the Patriot, the consequences would have been catastrophic.
But there’s still hope.
So far, the main strikes have been aimed exclusively at energy infrastructure in various regions.
It was just a matter of time.
As far as I know, those at the top are considering whether to target their electricity and water systems as aggressively as they do ours, while not forgetting about the oil refineries.
The decision-makers, gentlemen, have suggested the right decision today, and how correct it would be to make a positive decision.
If there wasn’t anything to do in 2022, there is now.
We need to work.
Earlier today there was a large attack towards Zaporizhzhia instead of towards Pokrovsk which is what russia has been attempting to capture the last year.
https://x.com/clement_molin/status/1976057123189686414
There were around to 40 APCs and 10 tanks hit, which isn’t an absurd amount compared to past years, but very high for the style of fighting that is happening now.
Ukrainian officer:
After yesterday’s enemy activity on the left flank of the Dobropillia direction, in the Shakhovoye and Volodymyrivka areas, the bastards began probing the right flank today and broke through in the direction of Novoekonomichne with 5 armoured vehicles and paratroopers, but without success.
Observing the events of these two days, we can safely say that the enemy has launched an offensive in Donetsk Oblast with the use of a large number of armoured vehicles, the very offensive that all the media were trumpeting a month ago.
This was not a one-off incident, and I am sure that we will see similar mass assaults in bad weather conditions in the future.We are waiting. After all, armoured vehicles are rolling out of factories en masse, but are being used minimally on the front lines, which suggests two possibilities: they are being stockpiled either for us or for our allies.
Global security has been a recent focus for the JP Morgan boss, with his letter to shareholders earlier this year warning the US would run out of missiles in seven days of a South China Sea war.