Watching the vids from the Ukraine-Russia war with small drones successfully dropping munitions on unsuspecting troops, tanks and other vehicles (sometimes right thru the open hatch of a tank) leads me to think war nowadays is pretty much unwinnable
Neither the Russians nor the West seem to be able to come up with any kinda effective countermeasures and considering the low cost of drones compared to the loss of troops and expensive vehicles, it looks like it's become a stalemate?
Hamas isn't doing much with drones. I don't believe they aren't trying, since drone warfare got big during the Syrian civil war, so I can only assume that the IDF have enough working EW to negate whatever drone capability Hamas has
>Russians vs the West
lol let me know how that goes
The thing with drones that they are disproportionately effective against forces that do not have robust ECM and AA assets, so while a dirt poor army and a degraded army can easily employ drones against each other, they simply don't have the means to defend against them efficiently.
>ECM and AA
Granted, but it seems that improving drones is cheeper and easier then countering them?
>but it seems that improving drones is cheeper and easier then countering them?
>shortsighted overconfidence in something that's only seen very specific efficacy among two very specific types of belligerents
No offense but this and the entirety of the dronegay mentality reeks of neo-McNamara-ism. I fully don't understand how you guys just ignore/handwave away very real issues with the idea of drones somehow taking over all of modern warfare.
>I saw all the videos Russia/Ukraine decided to release because they hit something
>i never saw any of the videos where they missed/didnt kill the target/Fell out of the sky after the battery dies in 6 minutes/Get shot down
>Drones must be the unstoppable future of warfare!
Thanks captain midwit you've really figured it all out
>disposable bomb that costs nothing to make and field that eventually kills highly valued equipment and personnel with enough tries and no risk to operators does not change anything
moron. When the gun was invented some idiot like you probably said "what about all the bullets that missed".
>Drones are free
It gets worse
An OTS quadcopter capable of dropping a hand grenade on an enemy position costs less than a rifle, and factories in china are producing untold amounts of them for day. In terms of military budgets it's probably the cheapest weapon system you'll ever buy
>Goodmen, now that the handgonne has been devised all other weapons are of no worth. There is no possibility that the spear will remain the most common armament upon the field of battle for another three centuries.
>no risk to operators
It was revealed to you in a dream? Drone operators are the priority target for both sides
>disposable plane that costs nothing to make and field that eventually kills highly valued equipment and personnel
Thank you Pierre Spray you have truly revolutionized warfare
>no risk to operators
I guess you never saw all the drone videos of operators getting counter-droned
>the same thread
>again
>and again
>and again
>and again
>and again
>and again
>and again
Look, Ivan, the solution is to employ a kind of warfare wherein MANEUVER is the key element.
But that requires you to be able to move.
Drones dropping grenades are a minor issue in the grand scheme of things. The real problem is that 24/7 battlefield surveillance means that neither side can concentrate enough forces for a breakthrough because any mass troop movements will be spotted and shelled. Gone are the days of "we think the enemy is over there somewhere".
>Drones dropping grenades are a minor issue in the grand scheme of things. The real problem is that 24/7 battlefield surveillance means that neither side can concentrate enough forces for a breakthrough because any mass troop movements will be spotted and shelled. Gone are the days of "we think the enemy is over there somewhere".
And with functioning laser AA such as DragonFire, it seems like the era of the Ogre is soon upon us.
And I wonder when battleships with proper gun batteries returns.
Naval ships passed through this stage in WW2 and decided on never fighting again
>The real problem is that 24/7 battlefield surveillance
But satellites already provide that?
A geostationary orbit is too far for making detailed scans and you can't monitor the whole theater with satellites from lower orbits in a realtime because of the big relative speed.
Also the clouds obstruct view from the satellites and drones can fly below the clouds.
ukraine when it had artillery shells
miss those times
>But what if you spend more money than several nations' GDP on Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance assets alone?
You now understand why the US spends a frickload of money on not only the NRO, but also on keeping U-2s in service, and building utterly ridiculous, hilariously capable shit like Global Hawk, and literally spending inordinate amounts of time on making sure there are extremely capable assets covering the gaps between those major ones.
Recon is like sex.
When it's good it's great, and when it's bad it's better than nothing.
>when it's bad it's better than nothing.
That is not true at all about sex, and especially not about reconnaissance.
TRUE
just give everyone shotguns
That's one weird dildo.
EMP weapons, as anyone with two brain cells saw coming, are already beginning to counter drones. Hell, film studios had already been using drone killers for years.
They have their uses, but anyone who insisted that drones are le future of warfare are braindead.
Drones are mostly just the civilian commercial market catching up then passing the military smart weapon systems.
The reply to cheap drones is cheap computer controlled AAA blasting them out of the sky. The problem is as always FOF identification. Automatically shooting down your own drones or large more expensive vehicles is a problem and any system you build to exempt your drones and aircraft from getting attacked by hyper aggressive automatic AAA systems is going to be what the enemy targets to copy to try and slip their own drones by with.
The overwhelming majority of drone attacks fail, we only get to see the tiny curated minority of successes. Think of them more of a supplemental artillery but with ISR capability — most shots don’t hit anything, but the ones that do makes the effort worth it. Artillery is still the mainstay killer of this war.
drones scare people more than artillery though, artillery is always raining down, but the sound of a drone means you know someone is watching you at that very moment and is now going to be very accurate with artillery. it's kind of funny that the term drone has become synonymous with the quadcopter variety though, even though modern uavs have been a thing for decades
>realtime decryption of AES 256
>apparently
unless that's re-using keys from a captured radio that's some serious Doubt (X) right there
Yeah, unless they have more specific evidence, that looks like all it is.
Drones become a decisive factor only with mutual air denial.
i don't think they made war unwinnable, just that global civilization is in a slow grinding self-destruct phase and everyone is warring because they're pissy that quality of life is declining.
everything is just getting more expensive and tedious and moronic.
Drones are only scary if your military wants to use electronic communications gear. Broad-spectrum jamming and EMPs combined with a low-tech army is the future. North Korea will dominate the world.
How many of these could do you think a conventional quadcopter bomb drop could carry?
they can supposedly be fired out of m320 40mm grenade launchers
I'm just waiting until the terries end up using one for terroristic purposes.
No, drones only mean we have to conduct war a different way. It has also made war more slower for the meantime.
If only we had some sort of handheld tool that was able to hit small and fast objects in the air.
moron
Will we see more people wanting to avoid combat now that warfare has become so gay
I remember back in the 2014-22 phase of the war ukraine and the west complained that russia was using drones to drop mines into ukrainian trenches, calling it a war crime and outlining the cruelty of it.
Was this a back and forth thing all along, or did ukraine just throw the gloves off and eventually beat russia at their own game after the 2022 invasion?
Either way its interesting how dronedropping is now described as innovative and clever, when a few years ago it was just considered cruel.
Same story as with landmines and cluster munitions.
The countermeasure is killing the operators. If you aren't a shit tier military then you probably aren't stuck in a perpetual trench warfare stalemate.
You're merely living through a "will the machinegun render war unwinnable" phase.
This. An effective countermeasure will be discovered at some point, which will in turn be countered.
Wars are won through strategic long-range nuclear ballistic/cruise missiles.
The question is how have drones affected BATTLES on the micro-scale.