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 -
Your estimate of engagement area is off by three orders of magnitude. Existing systems are designed to bring down drones from several kilometers away. This is actually really easy to do, and gets easier the closer you get.
Collateral damage is a problem, so we usually deploy these kind of systems in remote military installations with established secure perimeters. It's difficult to imagine a scenario where drones could be deployed close enough to these installations that they couldn't be intercepted in time. But again, it's not really feasible to place a secure perimeter around every substation, dock, or bridge in the country, and there are actual collateral damage risks for doing so even in limited capacity. Hence the fun EW toys.
Then they got into a war where EW matters, and the truth became more complex. There are effective EW systems on both sides of the conflict, which can and do suppress drone activity, this is not some hypothetical annoyance when effectively deployed. The challenges are not the capabilities of the technology, but the logistics of supplying advanced technologies to the combatants, particularly across several hundred km of active conflict zone. Ukraine has effectively no domestic EW manufacturing capability, and its benefactors provide extremely limited quantities of systems, in many cases for prototyping assessments before high-volume manufacturing can take place. Russia is so systemically corrupt that they can assemble heaps of money for EW manufacturing, pocket 90% of it, and distribute chinesium equivalents that basically don't work instead.
Compare with growing domestic stockpiles of anti-drone EW equipment near military bases, and active deployments around high-value political targets. These have a different logistics problem - how to deploy them effectively and immediately against a threat - but if it ever came down to street-level warfare with a threat of prolonged drone attacks, a response does exist.
I suspect they could not afford the war it would start... Even if they could, they nevertheless choose not to.
Ukraine's drone boat campaign took Russia quite by surprise, and the cost-to-hazard ratios has been quite impressive. But there's a lot more going on here:
In principle, an autonomous submarine drone carrier unloading a swarm on Manhattan sounds like it could work, evading existing oceanic tracking systems and putting a swarm near critical infrastructure with minimal risk of interception. I don't think "autonomous stealth submarine drone carrier" is something straightforward to develop and deploy - this takes a lot of research and resources to get right. Some smaller-scale swarms using very small surface vessels also seem possible, but low-yield.
The reality is: if any significant number of drones are in the air and angling to explode on your infrastructure, and your country is not a postage stamp investing heavily in modern missile defense systems to repel an endless stream of homemade rockets from the doghouse next door, you and whoever is attacking you are already in deep shit. The time to prevent drone attacks is before the first drone ever takes flight. If your argument is that preemptive deterrence doesn't sell expensive drone defense systems, I agree.
But on account of all the collateral damage concerns outlined above, deploying sockpuppet drone warfare against your own civilian population is a terrible idea that invites chaos. It's not impossible that encouraging spending on expensive drone defense systems could invite such reckless behavior, so I'm not going to dismiss the possibility outright... But it's not in my top three explanations, which currently look like:
I think we still may be thinking of different types of drones - there are the long-range plane-type ones like Russia's Shaheds/Lancets/Orlans and Ukraine's jury-rigged single-engine aircraft and some dedicated designs the names of which I don't remember, and then there are the low-flying helicopter types ranging from Ukraine's Baba Yaga to modded off-the-shelf FPV ones. The latter can easily fly between trees, buildings or stacks of containers; I don't see how you can engage them in a much larger area from a single point because in a busy industrial area there is simply no point near ground level that has line of sight of that much space. (You could of course place it in an elevated area and aim down, but then you are aiming towards the ground and I'm not sure what you would have to pay people to work in an industrial area covered by such a contraption.)
I see an abundance of FPV drone video streams from both sides where the drone actually flies into a vehicle with EW equipment. This usually plays out as some noise in the video stream that gets worse as the drone gets closer, but the target is hit all the same. I'm sure there are cases where the interference results in failure, but cases where it does not are not one-offs.
Since the whole "Russian economy collapse in a month" fiasco, I'd take Western predictions about the financial capabilities of its adversaries with a lot of salt...
That's a fair point, but what do we know about Chinese satellite capabilities? Russia's legacy kit is one thing, but I'd imagine China to actually be quite good at something of type "get a lot of good cameras and radios into orbit fast".
Interesting if true (but again, is that really the bottleneck for an adversary like China or even Iran?).
That's only really relevant for the scenario where naval drones attack ships, no? In the autonomous drone carrier scenario, they would not even get close to capital US surface ships.
Would the "submarine" element really be necessary? Do you think the naval tech gap between Russia and the US is so big that Russia can't track surface craft of the size of Ukraine's drone boats in the open sea but the US reliably can?
You lost me with the metaphors in this passage.
They've evidently failed with that in the case of Iran + proxies (and yet they are still not in an official state of war against either). What do you think would happen if, say, China did a drone-swarm warning shot against the US, say in the context of US saber-rattling against a blockade of Taiwan intended to break its resistance? It's hard to predict, but I could see a drone attack that manages to largely avoid human casualties failing to elicit the Pearl Harbor response and instead making public opinion lean towards "yeah, we don't need this war".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link