This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The field is moving quickly. Sound is just a stop-gap for this year.
Medium-term, we'll put at least one small-caliber point defense cannon on every single vehicle and aircraft. Small, mass-produced phase array antenna for a millimeter-wave radar, a couple of current-gen cellphone cameras, maybe IR if you feel fancy, network between locally adjacent guns, the rest is software.
Those 70GHz+ radar modules exist today, autonomous vehicles need several of those. Automotive pricing policies ensure they cost single-digit dollar amounts. They go out to 1000' and have amazing resolution. Picking out small things going faster than 30 mph is trivial, even if they are hugging the treeline or the ground. Slewing the gun with two high power servos motors is trivial, getting below 100ms to line up on target is not unrealistic. Standardize the ammo (probably some type of buck-shot effective at 500') and prepare to produce it in absurd quantities.
Unfortunately, wrapping your drone in aluminum foil mitigates most of that. You might lose your GPS antenna and the radio link to base (unless that one is highly directional, looking away from the E-field gun), but most autonomous targeting functionality is pretty easy to preserve.
Very interesting, thank you for the explanation!
Since it sounds like you’re more educated on this than me, where does this leave us with humans? I can accept that it isn’t inherently impossible to handle drones (though I note that a single PDC would still be overwhelmed by a swarm)… But humans don’t have PDCs, radar, or the electrical generation for any of that.
Regarding EM warfare vs drones, sure, you can be fully autonomous and protected. But it’s a trade off, isn’t it? Full autonomy seems to me to favor larger drones, rather than disposable and cheap swarms. It’s also more expensive, I’d think.
How do you see the future of drone warfare, or warfare in general?
Attach motors and a tiny shaped-charge explosive to an iPhone - voila, the hardware is done, way below $1000 at scale. For military hardware, that's a cheap drone, and they'll deploy swarms of those for the right objective. This hardware would be capable of flying for many miles, radio extensive intel back home, ignore its burned antennas the moment an EW attack starts and then kamikaze towards the next human the vision model behind its cameras identify. The hardware would be easily fast enough to identify infrastructure and vehicles, or uniforms and weapons, or sex, age, race, ect.
My view is pretty dystopian the moment there will be a hot conflict between near-peers. We'll dump heavy duty cargo pallets worth of drones out the backs of cargo planes (airborne or not), and everybody not under the multi-layered umbrella of a concentrated military presence will have to huddle in their building's basement. But unlike during the air raids of WWII, this time bombed cities/front lines will become mine-fields, since an unexploded kamikaze drone can just turn dormant and wait for something to steer it awake again days later.
The only hint of optimism I have is that this might bring back an age of mutually assured destruction, making near-peer conflicts more rare again. "You can violently disarm Taiwan, you can even land troops, but your people can't ever leave base once they get here." An interesting difference is that iPhone-drones are much, much easier to proliferate than nukes. All the processors, sensors and motors are heavily dual-use items that everybody can buy. In that sense, the number of opponents that are effectively "near-peers" to the west will dramatically increase - unless current smartphone tech (mainly processors and sensors) gets retroactively heavily regulated in the future.
This is fascinating food for thought. I have some minor disagreements—namely, I don’t think a literal iPhone drone would be able to power extended flight (“many miles”), nor that sleep mode with passive sensors would massively increase operational life… (“you can’t ever leave base”).
But, big picture, you paint a convincing view of the future. If we look at the set of “drones under $1000” rather than literal converted iPhones, I think it’s a rather larger space of possibilities. Scary to imagine.
Yeah, that was hyperbole. I was thinking more in terms of the exact processors, cameras, microphones and other sensors, but of course re-arranged for aerodynamics, duplicated (you'd probably want a second/third camera module with significant optical zoom) and hardened against electronic warfare. Extended flight certainly would need more than one pouch cell - but you could use the exact cell from the phone, just duplicate it several times.
Landing and waiting would certainly increase operational life when compared to loitering in the air, or even when compared to traditional cluster munitions (which often had some sub-munitions on delayed timers in order to hit rescue/cleanup operations after the strike). You can even shut down most of the processing power, just wake everything when the microphones pick up voices/steps or the accelerometer picks up the vibrations of a vehicle.
More options
Context Copy link
I can say with a high degree of confidence that the above is significantly underestimating the scope of the problem.
Okay, I’ll bite: I’m obviously less clued in here than you or pbmonster. Where do you disagree with them? What sort of problems are being ignored or minimized?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link