Sea drones have proved very effective for Ukraine against Russia's navy — and now the Houthis are threatening US warships in the Red Sea.
  • Houthi rebels are threatening US warships and shipping using naval drones, a new report said.
  • The commander of a US Navy carrier strike group says these weapons are among the more frightening.
  • The use of cheap sea drones has been pioneered, to considerable success, by Ukraine.
  • @[email protected]English
    2•9 months ago

    I think war will change somewhat with drones, and military hacking will become much more important to disable or even recruit drones over to another side. But unfortunately, I don’t think drones will ever capture cities without infantry, and the advent and proliferation of DE (laser) weapons could largely make open areas into simple hitscan battles, grounding cheap and expensive drones alike. Similar story for sea drones once we figure out DE aerial weapons.

    Anyways, I expect automated direct energy weapons to largely change the calculus of war again, sooner rather than later. I pray we figure it out for nuclear shield technologies soon, since firing rockets at high-speed ICBMs or hypersonic rockets doesn’t seem too practical, dollar for dollar, or for 100% reliability from nukes.

    • @TropicalDingdongEnglish
      7•9 months ago

      The exact things you are citing here are what I am claiming are the precise kinds of misthinking that I think the military industrial research and consulting complex has built their carreers and brands on, and exactly what I’m saying have shown themselves to be largely ineffective in the face of a distributed low cost/ low risk/ high turnover/ high capacity force.

      DE is a great example of this kind of tautology of high technology in action. This link goes to a very recent congressional report on DE. Lets just suggest that they make the 500 kW targets claimed, or that those targets have already been achieved, for the sake of illustration. The Tesla Megapack 2 has a capacity of 3.854 MWh and can support a load of 1.927 MW (1927 Kilowatt). It weighs 67,200 lb (30,500 kg). So hypothetically a Tesla Megapack 2 could support up to four beams simultaneously, and for a duration up to two hours. So we’ll call that 8 beam hours. Lets say it takes 30 beam seconds to engage an unarmored target (the beam needs to be sustained long enough to cause damage, it has to happen at range, so there are stabilization requirements). A system like this is going to several million per unit. They are going to be very big, heavy and slow moving. They’ll need to be basically almost perfectly stable while the laser is firing.

      Here is an recent video on the destructiveness of DE. . Here is a link to the unit in the video. The optics probably cost another 1k. You can drive it on 2 phase.

      Your points reflect that exact thinking, so thank you for allowing the justopostion. In this context, unless you can scale down DE weaponry to something that can be 3d printed, drone mounted, is basically disposable, and costs less than 3k to make including labor, its probably a waste of time in the context of modern warfare. Its the thinking that high-technology is a panacea, when actually, cheap, easily produced, modular tools are orders of magnitude more effective per dollar.

      The broader point I’m making is that the military industrial complex has misunderstood the future of where warfare will go because it is and has been more profitable to do so.