[HN Gopher] Fiber optic drone control beats any RF jammer
___________________________________________________________________
Fiber optic drone control beats any RF jammer
Author : walterbell
Score : 256 points
Date : 2024-08-02 22:48 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.forbes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.forbes.com)
| fsagx wrote:
| The anti tank guided missile designers of 50+ years ago would
| find this rather obvious.
| Zamiel_Snawley wrote:
| I was just about to say the same thing, TOW missiles are still
| in service.
| lupusreal wrote:
| I think all the fiber/wire controlled TOWs are retired from
| US service though? The new ones are all wireless AFAIK.
| romwell wrote:
| The more relevant part is that _Ukraine_ is using them
| right now, and that has been specifically mentioned in the
| article.
| rock_artist wrote:
| From my understanding this technology is still actively
| used by Spike [1] based missiles and their counterfeit ones
| by Iran used by its allies.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_(missile)
| Muromec wrote:
| That's because US military doesn't optimize for cost and
| can have those things costing in the area of 250 per shot.
| Ukrainian military does optimize for cost and gets 10 of
| fly by wire Stugna's for this money.
| romwell wrote:
| _> The anti tank guided missile designers of 50+ years ago
| would find this rather obvious._
|
| TOW missiles are specifically mentioned in the article as an
| example of this technology being in active use for decades (and
| particularly, right now in Ukraine)
| Muromec wrote:
| Ukrainian Stugna-P is fly by wire and was actively used in
| 2022.
| morkalork wrote:
| Stugna is laser guided, no?
| H8crilA wrote:
| Yeah, a beam-rider, doesn't have a fiber optic cable like
| the TOW.
|
| There was some cool footage early on in the war where a
| skilled Ukrainian Stugna-P operator pointed the beam just
| off of an enemy helicopter (or maybe some armored
| vehicle, but I think it was a helicopter), then corrected
| to the target at the last moment. This gave as little
| warning as possible to the crew of the helicopter via
| their illumination sensors. Very skilful.
| AmVess wrote:
| TOW missiles are a LOT faster than a drone and fired a LOT
| father away.
| tacticus wrote:
| given the reports indicate drones being used 15 + kms from
| controllers already courtesy radio relay style systems
| that's a bit more than the 4kms of a TOW
| mndgs wrote:
| 20-25 kms already...
| GartzenDeHaes wrote:
| I think older TOW, AT-2, and other such missiles used wires
| rather than fiber optics. Fiber optics is thinner, which would
| give it a much longer range presumably.
| tamimio wrote:
| Yeah, these are called tethered drones. They've been around for
| decades and have their own use cases, especially on moving
| vehicles or boats. There's nothing new about them.
| Cacti wrote:
| These have explosives and a ten mile fiber optic cable. Little
| different.
| tamimio wrote:
| Explosives are just a payload (like any other payload you can
| attach to a drone), either independent from the whole system
| or activated through a simple relay. You can see ArduPilot is
| the ground station, where you can easily customize such
| switches. The distance is only about the wire/fiber;
| obviously, fiber is lighter, hence the longer distance for
| the drone to carry.
| Zamiel_Snawley wrote:
| Ten miles is pretty impressive, but TOW missiles are from the
| 70s.
| mandevil wrote:
| The Ruhrstall X-4 [1] had five and a half kilometers of wire
| 80 years ago, along with a 20kg warhead and an acoustic
| proximity fuse.
|
| 1: Never deployed operationally Luftwaffe wunderwaffen, first
| tested in August 1944, wire-guided air-to-air missile.
| nikolay wrote:
| The tethered are differnet and long in use in America for mass
| surveillance in cities [0].
|
| [0]: https://www.unmannedsas.com/
| jwsteigerwalt wrote:
| I found it interesting there was no mention of submarine torpedo
| control by wire in the article.
| scintill76 wrote:
| I'm amused picturing soldiers following the fiber back to the
| drone operator. But I suppose either their location is no real
| secret, it's easy to defend and/or the other end has a radio
| transceiver far enough away from jamming and giving them a few
| more km of buffer.
| rasz wrote:
| Good luck finding end of the strand after explosion :)
| CMCDragonkai wrote:
| Why not lasers?
| Arrath wrote:
| Like using line of sight laser comms to send commands and
| return video?
|
| Exactly that, line of sight. The horizon strictly limits your
| operational range, and for fpv suicide drones there goes your
| terminal guidance (or the "buzzing around inside a
| maintenance warehouse to blow up vehicles inside")
| capabilities.
|
| Could be useful for high flying surveillance drones, but not
| much beyond that.
| jlmorton wrote:
| Fly the drones in pairs? Relay drone goes to a
| significantly higher altitude in the middle?
| * / \ / \
| _0ffh wrote:
| Yes, or just have a relay drone with radio comm
| relatively close, so jamming's not a problem and have
| that communicate via laser with the disposable drone.
|
| One problem might be smoke, though, which happens both
| naturally on a battlefield and is also often used for
| concealment.
| morkalork wrote:
| The problem with following the fiber back is they don't have
| just one explosive drone and they will happily target anyone
| meandering into the grey zone.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Inside The 'Magic Radio' Protecting Russian Drones from Jamming
| (2023)_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38735138
| walterbell wrote:
| What's the cost of a 10 mile fiber optic cable, relative to the
| RF drone jammer it defeats, or the $5K drone it defends?
| rasz wrote:
| Hundreds of dollars aka insignificant.
| walterbell wrote:
| That's a good price. Web search found Corning SMF-28e+ single
| mode optical fiber [1], retail price ~$1500 USD [2] for 10
| miles.
|
| [1] https://www.corning.com/optical-
| communications/worldwide/en/...
|
| [2] https://www.fiberinthebox.com/p/21683/corning-
| smf-28e-100kps...
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Multi mode is cheaper and perfectly fine for these low data
| rates
| jandrese wrote:
| Multi-mode would be heavier and bulkier. For the drone
| every gram saved on the spool is another gram you can add
| to the explosive. The article does talk about these
| drones having relatively small payloads due to the weight
| of the spool.
|
| I briefly thought about having the drones spool out a
| pair of thin copper wires instead and having very high
| voltage running through the wires so the drone didn't
| have to carry a battery, but realized this would be
| wildly impractical as the resistance of the wire would
| kill the voltage and they would constantly be touching
| each other in the wind or sagging down to the ground and
| shorting out.
| mey wrote:
| Perun (unsurprisingly) did a video on the drone's evolution in
| Ukraine, including countermeasures and counter counter
| measures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJnuTtUFiWM Drones
| are highly variable.
| lupusreal wrote:
| That's the wrong way of looking at it. At least, you need to
| consider the value of the targets this new system can destroy
| that the old ones wouldn't be able to.
| romwell wrote:
| _> What's the cost of a 10 mile fiber optic cable, relative to
| the RF drone jammer it defeats, or the $5K drone it defends?_
|
| Far less than the cost of the target it destroys, or the life
| of a trained soldier it kills.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| Rf jammers don't work, too hard to chase an evasive signal
| zh3 wrote:
| About $1k off the shelf (depending on volume).It likely needs a
| jacket though.
|
| https://www.i-fiberoptics.com/asahi-optical-fiber-detail.php...
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I wonder if you could make a combo with power delivery and signal
| via a wire+fibre spool -- eliminating the battery. Then have
| intermediate drones holding up the strand to extend the range...
| manvillej wrote:
| each extra drone is more power needed to keep the drones and
| wire in the air. More power requirements means bigger wires,
| bigger wires mean more resistance, which means more power
|
| In addition, every drone has dependency on all of the drones
| previously. Failure at any point in the chain will cause
| failure in the entire system.
|
| So in essence, there is a limit to how far you can chain drones
| together and they will be very vulnerable to catastrophic
| failure.
|
| You also have more and more drones to control and send signal
| to.
|
| could it be done? yes. viable/useful? doubtful
| etrautmann wrote:
| cool idea but that seems very hard. Resistance goes up with
| distance, and tiny wires (100 um or so for fiber) would have
| high resistance and low current capacity).
| amelius wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38865518
| anfractuosity wrote:
| Could that be done with a high powered laser, rather than wire,
| I wonder.
| jrexilius wrote:
| Yes, SPE could get you ~1km. https://electricui.com/blog/spe-
| sensor-node
| jharohit wrote:
| probably better done with lasercomms
| outworlder wrote:
| What about tracking and constant line of sight requirements?
| 23B1 wrote:
| Could do a 'local' relay drone with LOS on the 'forward'
| drone?
| etrautmann wrote:
| that requires good weather and precision alignment on a moving
| platform. line of sight is possible with a relay drone, but now
| you have to align multiple lines of sight precisely while
| moving, and still can't fly with any smoke, fog, etc.
|
| fiber optic seems like a pretty robust solution here.
| crygin wrote:
| You could even power it, too:
| https://powerlighttech.com/autonomous-vehicles/
| anfractuosity wrote:
| Would an 'explosively pumped flux compression generator' disrupt
| electronics within a drone?
|
| Also do many drones use GPS / dead-reckoning and follow pre-
| guided paths, to avoid need for comms.
|
| Came across - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fgcxDRti5s
| recently which uses an array of IMUs and filtering, to they claim
| get accuracy similar to a fibre optic gyro.
| jerf wrote:
| If someone says they're immune to RF jamming, I naturally
| interpret that from the perspective of blocking communication.
| I don't necessarily expect that they're claiming to be immune
| to EMP blasts straight-up destroying the electronics.
| kaibee wrote:
| > Came across - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fgcxDRti5s
| recently which uses an array of IMUs and filtering, to they
| claim get accuracy similar to a fibre optic gyro.
|
| I had this idea a few years ago when I was learning about VR
| position tracking issues stuff. Kinda surprised this wasn't a
| thing immediately after the first MEMS gyro honestly?
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| The data link for the drones is critical for many of the drones
| functionality.
|
| a) Many drones still are being used for ISR (intelligence
| gathering). Live feed is valuable. Solving the
| navigation/guidance problem with dead reckoning doesn't let you
| solve the intelligence issue.
|
| b) Turning FPV drones back into fire and forget munitions kinda
| robs them of their value proposition. We -already had- smart
| munitions that could be fired more or less unobserved into an
| area, and which could then more or less autonomously select and
| attack its own targets. FPV drones (in some applications) let
| you have part of that functionality (you can launch an attack
| into a general area without knowing precisely what you're
| aiming at, while still getting pretty precise terminal
| guidance) at substantially less cost (though granted the cost
| savings are coming from a variety of factors, not just the
| sensor portion).
| anfractuosity wrote:
| Yeah, they're very good points regarding the live feed.
| slobiwan wrote:
| Using GPS doesn't mean you can't be jammed. GPS is quite low
| power and easy to jam, and feasible to spoof[1].
|
| [1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2415318-ukraine-will-
| sp...
| anfractuosity wrote:
| No, that's true, I was under the impression there is an
| encrypted version though. Was thinking that could be combined
| with dead reckoning.
| iamleppert wrote:
| Forbes rediscovers the 1950's Park Flyer. Film at 11.
| zh3 wrote:
| Knowing a little bit about this, a 12km spool of 0.125mm plastic
| fibre costs about $1k [0]. Limits the range still (especially if
| the fibre is jacketed/supported in anyway).
|
| They'll be back to barrage balloons next [1].
|
| [0] https://www.i-fiberoptics.com/fiber-
| detail.php?id=3630&sum=1...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon
| Modified3019 wrote:
| I've seen references to balloons are already being used by both
| sides a camera platforms, decoys, and high altitude mortar
| dropping weapons.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| .014 g/m or .014 kg/km or 0.14kg for 10km or 0.31 lbs
| samstave wrote:
| Wow. Imagine just having a tether like this [whatever
| altitude] above your property - if you had multiple of these
| fibers, one could use them as guy-wires - to hold a balloon
| with solar powered cam and redundant fiber connections...
| These should be placed over mountains - remote cabins, ski
| resorts.
|
| Whats the tensile strength? So if you do use them as a guy -
| and hit some heavy winds... Put high powered air-plane-
| warning LEDS... a cam, and a HAM-to-fiber transceiver...
|
| EDIT - Also, several strands of these as guys holding a solar
| cambloon in place would pose no substantial threat to Big
| Bird.
| BJones12 wrote:
| > Whats the tensile strength?
|
| About 600 Kpsi. That works out to somewhere around 0.1 lb
| per strand.
| samstave wrote:
| Oh I was thinking that the thing was jacketed like... I
| just assumed wrong - youd still need to wrap it in
| superconductive carbon nanotubes to make it work. :-)
| petsfed wrote:
| For context, the total mass of a standard M67 fragmentation
| grenade is ~400g, including a 180g of actual explosive. So
| this is like a third of the standard payload of the e.g. DJI
| drones dropping grenades onto foxholes.
|
| My initial expectation was that the cable would upset their
| mass budget, but honestly, that's pretty minor as these
| things go. Certainly, bigger boom > smaller boom, but smaller
| boom >> incomplete boom mission.
| Qwertious wrote:
| >.014 kg/km
|
| Just post it in grams, ugh.
|
| (14g/km)
|
| >or 0.14kg for 10km
|
| (or 140g for 10km)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If the target costs a lot more than $1k than this might be a
| good deal.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| There's no target worth less than $1k on a battlefield.
| whatisthiseven wrote:
| Ironically, the drones themselves are targets worth about
| $1k or less. Just fairly difficult to spot/shoot down.
| stavros wrote:
| How do you figure they're worth less than $1k? They
| _cost_ $1k, they 're worth as much as the thing they're
| about to take out.
| sqeaky wrote:
| This!!
|
| People keep trying to look at war economics as each side
| spending a dollar to cost the other a dollar.
|
| Really it is a countless series of wildly inequitable
| exchanges. Sometimes you waste a cruise missile on a
| single dude because that guy was a sniper and could cause
| tens of millions of dollars of damage. Sometimes you
| spend $1,000 on a single drone and take out a billion
| dollar parked strategic bomber.
|
| Trying to look at each Exchange in an economic context is
| ridiculous, not that someone doesn't need to look at
| economics. But looking at it at the scale of individual
| targets and price tags isn't the right way.
| willcipriano wrote:
| If you have to rebuild everything you blow up like in the
| middle east, every target has a negative value (unless you
| are a Haliburton stockholder).
| rasz wrote:
| russian Chinese bikes and EV scooters are pretty close.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Why would you target them without a man on it?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Russia seems to treat soldiers as if they were worth 0
| [?].
| littlestymaar wrote:
| The fact that Russia's valuation of their own soldiers
| life is off doesn't mean killing one soldier isn't worth
| a thousand bucks.
|
| Even if you discount the tactical effect of losing
| soldiers in battle, just the gear of the soldier is worth
| more than a thousand dollars already (just ballistic vest
| + riffle is enough to pass this very low bar)
| agapon wrote:
| How much would you value a soldier riding one of those?
| sqeaky wrote:
| I'm not sure why people keep considering the cost of the
| target like this. In the grand strategic scope it sort of
| matters. If you want to win a war economically you need to
| inflict more damage on them than they can afford, but a lot
| of people seem to think that means that if I spend a dollar
| on a munition it should cause a dollar in damage to my enemy.
| But even in this Grand view it doesn't work that way because
| each side has a different amount of dollars.
|
| What a military really needs to look at is how much damage
| can that target do if they don't break it first. If a target
| only cost $1,000 but can somehow do a million dollars in
| damage to me and me spending $900,000 to service that target
| is $100,000 savings. This is why during some wars the US was
| using cruise missiles on teams of dudes in Toyotas with
| discarded anti-aircraft guns strapped to the back. It's not
| those 'shitty technicals' were worth the millions of dollars
| like a tomahawk, it's that those things could drive around
| and do millions of dollars worth of damage if unopposed. If
| all you're cheaper assets are already working on something
| you might assign a multi-million dollar munition unless the
| target can't do as much damage as firing the munition.
|
| Because an unserviced enemy target can generally cause an
| unlimited amount of damage in wartime it generally becomes
| cost effective to take any opportunity to disable an enemy
| asset.
| datameta wrote:
| Fiber is problematic as far as LOS and obstacles are concerned.
| Most launch points are concealed, usually at the edge of a
| treeline. As far as I understand, fiber creates unnecessary
| risk for operators.
| upsuper wrote:
| Not sure whether they are already doing this, but the fiber
| could simply connect to a relay rather than the operator
| themselves, that way the operator can still hide far from the
| connected system and use wireless outside jamming to control
| if that still makes sense.
| arkh wrote:
| Radio controlled drones carrier drones to which the
| kamikaze drones are linked by fiber. Move the carrier in
| low EW area then control the kamikazes in high EW areas
| using the carrier as a relay.
| datameta wrote:
| This would be the way. Essentially the system would be an
| air-to-ground TOW missile. I wonder how difficult it is
| to source fiber at the scale needed.
|
| However, a drone can take hits in non-critical areas
| whereas the fiber is even harder to hit but vulnerable to
| any caliber or shrapnel sent up. May not be a huge issue,
| though.
| wongarsu wrote:
| That's pretty cheap. An unguided artillery shell is about $3000
| each, plus the logistics of getting it there. Guided munition
| is in the 6 figure range.
|
| In these drone attacks Ukraine seems to now routinely sacrifice
| multiple drones to take out one target. If it's just about
| cost, $1k per drone to make it more likely to succeed is a
| great deal.
| dmix wrote:
| I remember reading that Ukraine loses about 3-4 drones for
| every successful hit. Higher in EW heavy regions. Beyond EW
| the losses are because they can't find targets within battery
| time (these are always 1 way drones regardless), they miss,
| they get shot down, etc.
|
| Eliminating EW loses of the other drones per target could
| make it worth it by itself.
| anovikov wrote:
| If that was true, Russia would have been utterly defeated a
| long time ago. Ukraine uses about 4000 drones per day, even
| if a successful hit meant just 1 infantryman killed or
| incapacitated, Russians will be at the negotiation table,
| at least, because no way they can sustain 1000 people per
| day in irrecoverable losses.
| theblobawakens wrote:
| Russia's professional army plus reservists was about 2.1M
| before the war.
|
| Add 2-300K volunteers who signed up since to replace
| professional soldiers departing, out of patriotism or
| because pay was increased 3-4x. Even with all that,
| Russia still won't have drafted anybody in the pool of
| about 20M ex-conscripts who went through basic military
| service in their youth.
|
| They can absolutely sustain that and much more from a
| purely military point of view. Of course, if you involve
| public opinion in these matters, 1'000 a day is indeed a
| bit much for what is not a defensive war.
| racional wrote:
| _10000 a day is indeed a bit much for what is not a
| defensive war._
|
| As is 10 percent of annual GDP.
| some_random wrote:
| Over the ~10 years of US involvement in Vietnam, the US
| had 58k dead and 150k hospitalized. In less than two and
| a half years of SMO, Russia has had probably around 315k
| casualties? 61k have been confirmed dead for sure.
|
| The other thing to consider is that sure Russia had 2.1M
| professional soldiers and reservists, but how many knew
| how to fly a Ka-50? How many were well trained tank
| gunners? How many were competent, experienced members of
| the NCO corps, or well trained and equipped paratroopers,
| or artillery officers? How many are left, and how many
| have to have their positions go empty or be filled by
| someone new without adequate experience?
| fpoling wrote:
| It appeared Russia cannot sustain the losses long term.
| The sign-up bonus for volunteers during the last year
| increased by factor of 10 from 2k USD to over 20K. Plus
| Russia has severe deficit of working force for anything
| that required non-trivial amount of training. They cannot
| afford a new mobilization wave for this reason.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _Ukraine uses about 4000 drones per day_
|
| Use, or expend?
| JoachimS wrote:
| Mainly expend. Most of them, after release lives for
| minutes up to half an hour or so. Often they aren't even
| charged to full capacity.
| anovikov wrote:
| I think most electric drones can't stay in the air for
| half an hour. Why not charged to full capacity?
| anovikov wrote:
| Also... if it is true that drones live for less than 2
| sorties on average, that makes their returnable use
| pointless because launching them one-off doubles the
| range as they don't need to store charge for return trip,
| don't you think? Also i assume, primary cells that are
| not rechargeable, can have higher capacity than
| rechargeable batteries.
| pbmonster wrote:
| > Also i assume, primary cells that are not rechargeable,
| can have higher capacity than rechargeable batteries.
|
| Interesting, do you have more information on state of the
| art non-rechargeable batteries? I would assume they just
| use normal LiPo cells anyway and just charge them once,
| ideally at the factory. Cheap, light (compared to the
| warhead at least), can deliver enough current.
| mgc_mgc wrote:
| Zinc-Air primary cells have about twice the energy
| density of Li-ion cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co
| mparison_of_commercial_batte...
| lupusreal wrote:
| I expect them to have hundreds if not thousands of drones
| in surveillance/recon roles, in which they'd mostly be
| reusable. If that "4k used per day" figure actually means
| the ones expended per day I'd be pretty surprised.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| Even the recon drones have a fairly short lifespan due to
| EW.
| some_random wrote:
| I find that extremely hard to believe, unless you're
| exclusively talking about sending drones to attack a
| specific location with a time crunch, I don't see any
| reason why a drone wouldn't be charged to full.
| Especially since that figure probably includes unarmed
| drones used for ISR
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| The documentaries I have seen on YT suggest Ukraine is
| building >1M drones annually, which would be enough to
| cover going through 4K daily, ballpark. Lots of those FPV
| videos do show various "low charge" warnings, maybe it
| just doesn't make sense to fully charge something that's
| basically a guided bullet on a one-way trip?
| creaturemachine wrote:
| FPVs fly a few KM before getting to a target, so the
| battery will be low by the time they get to the part
| worth recording. There's no need for a return trip since
| it either finds a target or is intentionally ditched.
|
| Also they use li-ion cells which can be run to a lower
| voltage than a lipo, which is normally what the flight
| controllers are configured for out of the box.
| JoachimS wrote:
| Russia is in fact loosing more than 1000 people per day.
| It has for many months.
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/russia-highest-monthly-losses-
| ukrai...
|
| They also loose equipment at a staggering rate. From the
| start of the invasion 2022 until end of July, they have
| lost more than 570 000 soldiers, 8000 tanks and 16000
| artillery systems.
|
| Oh and also 38 war ships and one submarine - against a
| country that didn't have a navy at the start of the
| invasion. Drones is ammunition and is used in air, land
| and sea.
| CapricornNoble wrote:
| >>against a country that didn't have a navy at the start
| of the invasion
|
| They have one, it's just small. It lost its only
| principal surface combatant, a frigate, early in 2022 and
| has taken other losses in patrol craft since. It's also
| not a surprise to any warfighting professional that one
| of the world's most notoriously underfunded navies has
| been getting smashed by air attacks and sea drones which
| are supported by experienced and untouchable third-party
| intelligence assets flying in international airspace with
| impunity.
|
| >>Russia is in fact loosing more than 1000 people per
| day.
|
| Don't take everything you read on the internet at face
| value. That "1000 Russian casualties per day" talking
| point is a deliberate part of the US-UK information
| campaign supporting NATO objectives for Ukraine.[0]
|
| I've seen the SITREPs that get pushed from the AFU to the
| SAG-U almost daily.[1] The issues with their reporting
| are glaringly obvious: they are simply BDA (Battle Damage
| Assessment) rollups. If a Territorial Defense Brigade
| repulses a Russian attack, do you think these Ukrainian
| conscripts are going out into the grey zone to count
| exactly how many bodies that destroyed BMP has inside? Of
| course not. They send up a guess to headquarters, and its
| as maximalist as the enemy KIA numbers US troops were
| sending up during Vietnam. Those daily AFU reports NEVER
| list an estimate of Ukrainian losses, either. They
| include Russian air strikes, and sometimes include "heavy
| artillery strikes" if they annihilate an AFU position.
| But those positions don't have Ukrainian casualties
| associated with them at all.
|
| Here's an exercise I leave to the readers: take any well-
| established quantitative combat model, such as RCPA
| (Relative Combat Power Analysis) or QJM (Quantified
| Judgement Model).[2][3] Plug in the 1000 Russian
| casualties per day, a rough balance of frontline troops
| (Ukraine says Russia outnumbers them, and estimates for
| Russian manpower in Ukraine are around 500,000+), rates
| of Russian advance (0.5km in many locations lately,
| sometimes as much as 1.5km), the approximate ratios of
| supporting fires (10:1 or even 20:1 Russian advantage in
| air support, ~80 airstrikes daily, and a 5:1 or 10:1
| advantage in Russia artillery) and modifiers for
| Ukrainian intel advantage (24/7 NATO-provided airborne
| ELINT, satellite imagery, and satellite thermal). Solve
| for Ukrainian casualties.
|
| The Russians already did the math. They are accepting the
| butcher's bill because the trendline is obviously heading
| towards a Russian victory. The men, tanks, and artillery
| are consumable items to the siloviki. They are going to
| get what they want. It was clear they weren't going to
| take "No" for an answer when they mobilized 300,000 men
| in late 2022. Every event after that is just refining the
| details of "how many people will die before Ukraine
| capitulates/ceases to exist?"
|
| [0] https://mwi.westpoint.edu/data-as-a-weapon-
| psychological-ope...
|
| [1] https://www.europeafrica.army.mil/ArticleViewPressRel
| ease/Ar...
|
| [2] https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/moc-
| warfighter/vol1/iss10/...
|
| [3] https://dupuyinstitute.org/2017/10/26/validating-
| trevor-dupu...
| genman wrote:
| How much spreading Russian talking points pays these
| days?
| lawlessone wrote:
| That's not all he's spreading..
|
| edit: though largely it is.
| MC995 wrote:
| Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing,
| shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It
| degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| lawlessone wrote:
| It's going on this website whether people would like to
| admit it or not.
| genman wrote:
| Why should I waste my valuable time to answer anything
| meaningful to an obvious propaganda comment? Such
| comments are what are degrading HN discussion.
| sqeaky wrote:
| Isn't the real problem astroturfing, shilling, brigading,
| being a government agent, and the like?
|
| The person who posted the big wall of text that seems
| plausible superficially said a bunch of really dumb or
| dishonest things. At best they're disingenuous, they're
| doing things like averaging advancements per day, in some
| places lines literally aren't moving and others people
| are advancing unopposed, averaging some things is
| fundamentally dishonest or a fundamental
| misunderstanding. There are other issues with their
| comment, but these are all the kinds of mistakes and an
| informed person participating in honest discourse doesn't
| make.
|
| People arguing in bad faith need to be called out not
| tolerated.
| CapricornNoble wrote:
| Despite saying that I'm arguing in bad faith, you
| actually have the only substantive response to my post.
| My interpretation of your comments is that either:
|
| 1. I am incorrectly interpreting the models because I am
| assuming aggregate/averaged rates of advance across a
| very large (~1000km) frontage. Or:
|
| 2. The models are incorrect if they expect rates of
| advance averaged across such a large front to produce
| reliably realistic results.
|
| The task, then, is for me to dig back through the
| specifics of the models (I've got Dupuy's books and a
| couple of publications and related DoD-internal wargaming
| rulesets based on Relative Combat Power Analysis) to see
| if they articulate the scale at which they break down. I
| do recall reading that QJM was used to estimate the
| outcome of Desert Storm and produced surprisingly
| accurate results for that campaign. Given that, I don't
| think it's unreasonable to apply the model to the current
| stage of the Ukrainian conflict.
|
| In particular you seem critical of the values I suggested
| for the "rate of advance" variable. I _suspect_ that even
| if you dropped that value to 0.1km /day or even 0.....the
| models would still suggest a highly skewed rate of
| Ukrainian losses due to the lopsided-balance of fires
| assets in Russia's favor. The point is to get people to
| do the math themselves, and to get them thinking about
| the second and third order effects of a country with 1/3
| of its attackers manpower pool losing men at a greater-
| than-equal rate.
|
| As an aside, it's weird to me that a few paragraphs is
| derided as a "Wall of Text" but I guess it is to a
| generation who's baseline of social media engagement is
| mobile phones and Twitter. I developed my habits of
| internet discourse on places like bbs.stardestroyer.net
| in the late 90s: everyone was on a desktop, and everyone
| was expected to write long-form explanations for their
| positions, preferably with references.
|
| This is how I write many of my posts on HN, twenty years
| later.
| racional wrote:
| And yet sometimes that's exactly what's happening -- and
| it needs to be called out.
|
| Not the "foreign agents" part; that's _your_ insinuation
| of what the parent commenter said. But there 's an
| unusual degree commonality to the talking points and
| flat-out factually wrong narratives that people
| continually post about this conflict -- such that some of
| them (like "Ukraine wanted to negotiate, but...") we
| literally hear several times a day.
|
| It doesn't matter what sources they are uncritically
| adopting these garbage narratives from. It's just
| propaganda, straight up, and quite obviously so.
| cassepipe wrote:
| The thing is that it's both. It _does_ put in perspective
| the western narrative that 's being pushed because in
| order to make the necessary support for Ukraine appear as
| a better deal that it is but also jumps to conclusion
| when it says Russia will win, this is delusional. The
| best Russia will achieve is to get Donbass and Luhansk
| and it's hard to see if that's worth all the lives and
| money wasted into this stupid war.
| fpoling wrote:
| Russia gains more population from occupying the remaining
| parts of Donbas than they lost from the whole war. As for
| the resources they now confirmed that the world would
| continue to buy the oil from them for the next 10 years
| no matter what. That will provide them with enough profit
| to rebuild.
|
| So until the West starts helping Ukraine for real instead
| of giving barely enough for Ukraine not ti collapse, I do
| not see how what Russia is doing is stupid.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| They are gaining ground, that's an indisputable fact.
|
| Current western position is that they don't want Russia
| to win, but also don't want to provide the level of
| support that would stop Russia - for example take 1,000
| Abram's tanks out of storage and give them to Ukraine.
| Obviously this is hypocrisy.
|
| We are on the road to failure, and yet here you are,
| accusing anyone that point out the obvious of working for
| the enemy. Deaf to feedback and in denial of reality.
|
| That's how you get giant failures like Afghanistan and
| Vietnam.
| speakfreely wrote:
| I've been purposely avoiding logging in to be more
| passive and less invested in the comment wars going on,
| but I just reversed my policy to congratulate you for a
| succinct and valuable post.
|
| The political environment is so toxic that anyone who
| points out any flaw or bad news regarding the NATO
| strategy is somehow labeled a Putin apologist. It's a
| horrible state of affairs. You cannot gaslight your own
| population into a war victory, it's doesn't work like
| that.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| >The Russians already did the math. They are accepting
| the butcher's bill because the trendline is obviously
| heading towards a Russian victory.
|
| If it was so simple no war would ever be fought since the
| losing side would just decide it's not worth the fight.
| It was clear Japan and Germany would lose the war the
| moment the USA entered, yet they fought on for four more
| years.
| CapricornNoble wrote:
| I recommend reading Wages of Destruction:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction
|
| Part of the problem is incorrect assessments of the
| balance of power, combined with stubbornness. Both the
| Germans and the Japanese assessed that their martial
| spirit would enable them to overcome their industrially-
| superior adversaries. Both were wrong. Also militaries
| the world over have a culture of stoicism under
| conditions of adversity. At the tactical level it
| sometimes means you can turn around what _appears_ to be
| an unwinnable situation. I 'd have to dig to see where
| this has reliably worked at the strategic level. My
| initial thought is "it doesn't, but military officers who
| have spent their entire adult lives inculcated to act
| otherwise will never acknowledge that".
|
| Look at some of the ridiculous propaganda that was
| written at the start of Ukraine's 2023 summer offensive:
| https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/09/british-made-
| tan...
|
| There's been interviews where Ukrainian troops said "we
| thought the Russians would just run away after the first
| day of seeing our Leopards".
|
| Both sides in this conflict have underestimated each
| other in different ways, but industrial attritional
| warfare is the great equalizer: it doesn't matter what
| men THINK will lead to victory if enough steel is thrown
| in the other guy's direction to remove all subjectivity.
| zh3 wrote:
| None the less, at the heart of the matter it comes down
| to economics. Russia's GDP vs the colective West's says
| who's going to win this one - at least, assuming it goes
| to the long haul and nothing changes (which of course it
| will, unexpectedly, at some point).
|
| Also the Ukrainians are fighting for survival from the
| top of the country to the bottom (motivation makes a big
| difference). For the other side, the view at the top is
| very different from the view of those going into the
| fight (often unwillingly) at the bottom.
| CapricornNoble wrote:
| Not all GDP's are created equal, though. The US/West has
| the capital to bury Russia....but isn't mobilizing it the
| same way it did in WW2. Which of course begs the question
| of "Why not?", the answer to which is: the US doesn't
| care as much about the fate of Ukraine as Russia cares
| about the fate of Ukraine. If we're not in it to win it,
| then why prolong the death and destruction? Unless the
| death and destruction was the point all along?
|
| >>>Also the Ukrainians are fighting for survival from the
| top of the country to the bottom (motivation makes a big
| difference). For the other side, the view at the top is
| very different from the view of those going into the
| fight (often unwillingly) at the bottom.
|
| Do you think the Ukrainians aren't suffering from serious
| motivation problems? Regular reports of men drowning in
| freezing rivers trying to cross into Romania. Hundreds of
| thousands of Ukrainian men in hiding from the roving
| bands of "mobilizers". [1][2][3] The Russians, by
| contrast, are mostly there because they are from
| impoverished regions of Siberia and the enlistment
| bonuses are gigantic.[4] Russia is basically depopulating
| its ethnic minorities from Siberia to fuel its war
| machine. For a country that has its very survival on the
| line, Ukraine has a TON of men who aren't picking up
| rifles.
|
| [1] https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-faces-an-
| acute-manpo...
|
| [2] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/draft-dodgers-
| are-underm...
|
| [3] https://archive.is/IeGf3
|
| [4] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-doubles-
| signing-b...
| anovikov wrote:
| Even if Ukraine is doomed to lose, we need to still
| continue supporting them, simply to win time to rearm,
| and also to kill enough Russians to make further
| aggression unlikely.
|
| In WWII, Soviet Union suffered 7.9M combat dead and
| dead/incapacitated ratio was way softer back then simply
| because healthcare was on the lower level - it was 80
| years ago. Meaning, for each dead there are more
| incapacitated today simply because severely wounded
| people (with heavy concussions, explosive amputaions,
| multiple fractures and shrapnel, infections), mostly died
| in WWII and now they survive so don't add to the dead
| statistics - but are useless for warfare later.
|
| Soviet Union had 190M people in 1941 and Russia has 145M,
| plus in 1940, 6050K kids were born in the USSR and in
| Russia today, barely 1200K are born each year. So
| availability of manpower is about 75% of 1941 and rate of
| replacement is only 1/5 as high.
|
| In 1945, Soviet Union was a country of invalids and
| widows. It utterly lacked any mobilisation capacity -
| 1946 conscripts served for 5-7 years in peacetime army
| because there was no one to replace them (my grandfather
| was conscripted in 1947 and served till 1953 while there
| was no war going on).
|
| Easy to see that approximately 3, or max 4 million combat
| dead (1/2 to 2/3 the share of population) will bring
| Russia to the same position, considering lower
| replacement rate of manpower, and lower share of young
| population.
|
| What is the fraction of those that need to be killed for
| Putin to see it's going nowhere? My bet is with 1
| million. Losing 1 million dead before Ukraine falls means
| he will not be able to do much else after it does,
| putting him in a bind. It will be enough for even the
| most mindless dictator to stop.
| rainworld wrote:
| Dear Russian Liberal (in exile, no less),
|
| No matter how many of your countrymen you wish dead or
| try to sell down the river, the Westerners will never
| like and respect you. You will always be one of _them._
|
| Best,
|
| A Westerner
|
| PS: The numbers you throw around are gobbledygook but you
| should have the brains to figure out that the scenario
| where Russia loses a million is the scenario of literal
| THD. But what's that to a Russian Liberal who must endure
| the existence of Vladimir Putin. In exile, no less.
| fpoling wrote:
| The models do not account for attack drones which kills
| most Russian soldiers these days. They also do not
| account that due to observation drone presence attacking
| leads to greater losses.
| CapricornNoble wrote:
| >>The models do not account for attack drones which kills
| most Russian soldiers these days.
|
| If you have data that reliably attributes Russian
| casualties to the weapon systems causing them, I'd love
| to see it. I know that Twitter and Tiktok are chock full
| of Ukrainian "drone drop" videos but again that is part
| of the information operations and shouldn't be taken as
| an accurate reflection of the battlespace writ large.
| That said....if they were killing >500 Russians daily
| with drones, which almost all have recordable video
| footage, we should be seeing maybe 10x as much footage as
| is getting released.
|
| One work-around would be to find the most appropriate
| weapon system that _IS_ in the model and see if it could
| cover FPV drones. I think QJM aggregates weapons systems
| but goes down to the squad level, so maybe it accounts
| for specialized infantry tasks like snipers. Insert a
| weapon into the model that is a "sniper" but with a 10km
| effective range. Then run the numbers again. That still
| ignores the effects of Russian EW but hey...this is an
| iterative process.
| fpoling wrote:
| There are reports that drone loss for Ukraine is like 3-5
| drones per a successful attack. There are also reports
| that Ukraine carries like 4000 daily drone flights. It is
| not clear how may of those are for observations and how
| many are for attacks. If one assumes that there 3000
| attack flights and 600 reach the target, it can easily
| explain 50% of Russian losses.
|
| In addition a sniper is a bad analogy. The drone warhead
| is at least a hand-grenade useful against hard targets. A
| better analogy would be a guided light artillery shell if
| such exists in models.
| CapricornNoble wrote:
| Hmmmm, I'll look for an approximation of a laser-guided
| 60mm mortar.
| bluGill wrote:
| Those are Ukraine numbers, so there is double counting,
| propaganda, and other such reasons to take some salt with
| them. Different countries have different estimates but
| they publish them less often. Those numbers are the best
| we have, and give a similar magnitude to other estimates
| but they are also higher than others.
|
| Of course there are also things that nobody can see and
| there is reason to believe Russia is intentionally not
| counting some thing.
|
| On the other hand we also have reason to believe Russia
| is recruiting about 1000 men per day, and the number of
| troops they have is not increasing. So while the numbers
| above are suspect they cannot be too far off.
| JoachimS wrote:
| Those are Ukraine numbers, but they are repeatedly
| confirmed by ISW and others. There are of course errors,
| uncertainties. But they seem not to be inflated. Often
| they instead seem to be somewhat conservative compared to
| other sources.
| cassepipe wrote:
| 1000 a week seems more in line with the numbers I have
| seen
| jeltz wrote:
| If that was the case the Russian army in Ukraine would be
| growing quickly. We know that Russia recruits around 1000
| people per day and their army stays virtually the same
| size. That pretty much proves that the casualties are
| close to 1000 per day.
| anovikov wrote:
| My point is mainly that "drone only does something of
| value 1/4 of the time, rest of them are lost uselessly"
| isn't a bad statistic. Even if it took 10 drones to
| significantly wound an infantryman, or 100 to blow up a
| tank, that would be still a very good use of them.
| moring wrote:
| What makes an artillery shell so expensive compared to a
| drone?
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Artillery shells are quite complicated. Aerodynamics, must
| land whee it's supposed to. Not exploding when fired. Fuse
| needs to explode as designed.
|
| They are big chunks of metal that needs to be identically
| machined to tight tolerances and filled with explosives and
| a fuse.
|
| $3k is pretty cheap for custom work.
|
| Then you need to transport and store them.
|
| You can buy drones off the shelf made with cheap
| components.
| sqeaky wrote:
| So you're saying artillery shells would be cheaper if I
| could get them on Amazon Prime with free same day
| delivery?
| klyrs wrote:
| [x] this item is a gift [ ] gift wrap this
| item
| mrguyorama wrote:
| What you're actually asking is "Would artillery shells be
| cheaper if we could offshore all the actual work to cast,
| machine, and fill an artillery shell to China and then
| just ship the end result over by boat?"
|
| And the answer is yes, China makes their artillery shells
| cheaper. American labor is very expensive and American
| military manufacturers tend towards low volume nowadays,
| because they don't trust the government to commit to 1
| million shells a year for two decades, because every time
| there's a changing of the guard in the whitehouse, plans
| get gutted seemingly as a "Fuck you" to anyone who worked
| with the previous admin.
|
| That being said, I'd like to see a citation for the $3k
| figure being thrown around. The number I've seen is more
| like $800
| rcostin2k2 wrote:
| "the U.S. currently pays $3,000 for its most modern
| shells, according to an Army spokesperson. That price
| includes the charge, fuze, and shell body." [1]
|
| [1] https://www.defenseone.com/business/2023/11/race-
| make-artill...
| nostrademons wrote:
| The tooling and electronics for one drone model is
| amortized across millions of consumer drones, and also
| shared with other consumer electronics.
|
| The tooling for an artillery shell is used only for
| artillery shells. Not many consumers looking to buy 152mm
| shell casings and high explosives.
|
| In the industrial age, volume production is the usual
| solution to keeping costs low. Artillery shells would be a
| lot cheaper if we built as many of them as we did in WW2.
|
| (As a side note, this is one reason why housing was so
| cheap in the post-WW2 1950-1970 era. There was a whole lot
| of surplus construction equipment leftover from WW2, so you
| could acquire the tooling needed to build a subdivision
| really cheaply. Once the surplus aged out and there was no
| economic reason to build a huge number of new diggers and
| bulldozers, construction got a lot more expensive.)
| imtringued wrote:
| The drone weighs a few hundred grams and carries nothing.
| The moment you look at anything close to a carrying
| capacity of 50kg, you are well beyond the $20k range.
| imtringued wrote:
| The payload of a drone is nowhere near that of an artillery
| shell and even if it was, you're going to spend X+$1000+$3000
| instead of just $3000, where x is the cost of the drone.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Not cheap just for the wire, consumer drones with autonomous
| functionality is better realistically.
|
| It's $80,000 for a switch blade drone, which can loiter for
| 40 minutes.
|
| Buying a consumer fixed wing drone with similar flight time
| costs <$1000.
| bawolff wrote:
| Does it have to be fiber optic? Surely the same principle would
| work with copper wire
| stavros wrote:
| I assume copper will be many times heavier and resistance
| will make it useless at a much shorter distance. Plus, it's
| many times more expensive.
| m4rtink wrote:
| The TOW missile is guided via electric signals over metal
| wires, but is much more expensive and less flexible (and
| probably has a very different flight profile) than drones
| and FPV drones. More modern wire guided missiles do use
| fiber optics (Spike, etc.).
| tomooot wrote:
| I've converted a PS10 trash tier quadcopter to run off of 30G
| wire. Only 5 meters range, and the weight and momentum of the
| wire cause extremely difficult to control oscillations, but
| it still flies (badly)! The transmission losses over such
| thin wires are massive but the way around that is to supply a
| higher voltage than is required, and include a linear
| regulator inside the quad to burn off excess voltage when
| current draw is low.
|
| I specced the wire purely based on the weight reduction I got
| from stripping out the cameras, battery, and then replacing
| the main body with a 3D printed skeleton, as the original
| battery contributed more rigidity than I had realised.
| pbmonster wrote:
| Sounds like you were supplying power. That's unnecessary in
| this case. Just leave the battery in.
|
| The question is if you can reliably push video down a 5
| mile pair of copper wires and send control inputs back up.
| And the answer is yes, even for an unshielded twisted pair.
| With the right encoding and enough voltage, you can get
| GBits down that wire.
| yard2010 wrote:
| I think maybe a copper wire is susceptible to an RF attack?
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Copper is indeed vulnerable to RF/EM attack. (shielding
| makes it a little less so, but adds weight)
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon
|
| That Wikipedia page contains a link to a picture I've always
| found totally mind blowing:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon#/media/File:No...
|
| Insanity.
| metadat wrote:
| What do you find mind-blowing about this pic?
| tivert wrote:
| > What do you find mind-blowing about this pic?
|
| Not the OP, but the massive concentration of naval ships
| (literally to the horizon), beach landing, and the (to
| modern eyes) surreal presence of barrage balloons all
| together in one picture is pretty mind blowing. I mean,
| just imagine all that activity.
| M95D wrote:
| Too expensive to ever see that again.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Wait a few more years..
| sqeaky wrote:
| Nothing is too expensive when the alternative is death.
|
| We'll see it again as soon as two super powers are
| engaged in an active shooting war.
| anovikov wrote:
| All of these ships are tiny. These are not ships, just
| landing craft. This is by any measure not a big
| concentration of ships, armor, or anything. D-day
| landings were impressive in 1944 but today these won't be
| big at all. Today, similar amounts of cargo and people
| can be delivered by planes, not by boat.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Where would you land a plane full of tanks in Normandy,
| if not in the airports they already control? Not a war
| expert, just logistic curious.
| zhengyi13 wrote:
| I dunno what might have been done back then (if the
| planes of the day even had the capacity to airlift
| tanks), but we can and do drop tanks via parachutes
| today. No airfield/landing required.
| tivert wrote:
| > but we can and do drop tanks via parachutes today
|
| I don't think that's actually true. Some quick Googling
| shows the US M-1 Abrams tank is _not_ air-droppable, and
| maybe the best they can do is air drop light armored
| vehicles which are _much_ lighter.
| lou1306 wrote:
| The ships in the pic are not _that_ tiny. I just looked
| up "US 310 ship" (the rightmost one) and it was a
| 100-meter lander that could definitely carry at least a
| dozen heavy tanks, or ~30 trucks [1]. You would need a
| lot of planes for that.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_LST-310
| onedognight wrote:
| Around 1000 of these double decker tank landing crafts
| were built during the second half of WWII to cross the
| Atlantic for the invasions. This one was sponsored by
| woman, Mrs. Pearl Magdalene Frick. [0] Fascinating. I
| don't see mention of her elsewhere on the web.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_LST-316
| CapricornNoble wrote:
| >>This is by any measure not a big concentration of
| ships, armor, or anything. D-day landings were impressive
| in 1944 but today these won't be big at all.
|
| The US pushed ~28,000 tons of supplies ashore in the
| first 5 days of Overlord. Eight days later it had grown
| to 117,000 tons. [1] Can you show us your loading and
| sealift plan for delivering 10,000 tons per day of
| supplies, sustained, in a partially-contested airspace,
| especially over a beach? We're not talking about
| unloading a Maersk Triple E-class [2] at a container port
| in peacetime.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_logistics_in_t
| he_Norm...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_E-
| class_container_ship
| anovikov wrote:
| Over such a short distance as back then? Well, i'm sure
| San Antonio class amphibious transport docks will be an
| overkill, but each can carry up to 14 tanks that are,
| today, over 70 tons heavy (in general, a 25K ton
| displacement ship can carry a lot of stuff easily). These
| alone will be easily enough to bring all necessary
| personnel, supplies, and heavy vehicles (light vehicles
| being much more numerous, could be problematic).
|
| As for assorted supplies without too heavy or bulky
| separate items, 10K tons per day is a joke and can be
| shuffled by helicopters alone. Remember distances were
| absurdly short, 120-150km, easily within helicopter
| range, and they can make several sorties per day at this
| short range. Over time, pilot fatigue will become an
| issue and accident rate might get bit too high, but for
| combat operations this isn't a big deal because there
| will be higher losses to enemy fire.
| CapricornNoble wrote:
| EDIT: Made a major mistake in my numbers. Reworked the
| calculations but the substantive part of the argument
| remains the same.
|
| A San Antonio has ~20,000 square feet of deck space
| usable for vehicles and cargo. If you stuffed it with
| TEUs you could fit 125.[0][1] Maximum mass capacity for a
| TEU is ~21t, let's call it 20t for easy math.[2] So a San
| Antonio moving containerized beans/bullets/bandaids is
| only lifting ~2,500 tons per sortie. There are only 12
| active San Anontios, and keep in mind roughly 1/3 of any
| fleet is down for maintenance), so you would need half of
| all likely available LPDs (4 of 8 available with 4 in
| yardwork) of the largest (by tonnage, not hull numbers)
| Navy on the planet.
|
| As for helicopters, you can carry palletized cargo
| internally on a CH-53 (one of it's few advantages over a
| CH-47). The K model, with stronger engines (and therefore
| payload capacity) than the E model, can move ~12t at
| 200km.[3] Let's just call it 10t at 200km, again for easy
| math. You would need 1,000 sorties in a day to move 10kt.
| If you pushed your aircraft to 3 sorties per day (limited
| by ground crew ability to turn the aircraft), you could
| do it with ~333 heavy lift helicopters. The US only has
| ~20 operational CH-53Ks, and ~140 CH-53Es. So no, moving
| 10kt per day is not a joke, and can't be shuffled by
| helicopters alone.
|
| It would take both asset classes combined, let's call it
| 3xLPD for 7.5kt and ~80 CH-53s flying 240 sorties for
| 2.4kt. That would pretty much be a maximum effort for the
| Navy-Marine Corps Team, which is inarguably the largest
| and most capable military power projection and
| expeditionary logistics force on Earth.
|
| So even in 2024, what they accomplished on D-Day is not a
| trivial amount of effort.
|
| [0] https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/Team-Ships/PEO-
| Ships/LPD-17...
|
| [1] 20000 / (20ft long x 8ft wide TEU) ~= 125 TEUs worth
| of deck space, assuming you use ALL deckspace but
| can't/don't stack them 2 high
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-
| foot_equivalent_unit
|
| [3] https://www.navair.navy.mil/product/CH-53K-King-
| Stallion
| nostrademons wrote:
| One of those LSTs is in service with Cross Sound Ferry,
| ferrying cars across Long Island Sound:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgdDJDQA0Ek
|
| It's the largest ship in their ferry fleet.
| worstspotgain wrote:
| The picture's caption is kind of unnecessary. That's only
| happened once in history. If you haven't seen Saving
| Private Ryan, the landing scene still stands the test of
| time.
| arethuza wrote:
| Speaking of concentration of naval power I'd have loved
| to have seen the surrender and the German fleet in the
| Firth of Forth in 1918 - between both sides there were 43
| battleships, 14 battlecruisers, loads of cruisers and 170
| destroyers:
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-46273928
| DannyBee wrote:
| I mean, aliexpress sells the same spool for 289 bucks, so ...
|
| https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805873589421.html?gateway...
|
| The fiber does not appear jacketed or supported.
|
| I'm not horribly surprised - even for real installs in the US
| you are starting to see them take bare G.657B3 fiber and just
| staple it to the wall because it holds up fine.
|
| (I would never do this but ...)
|
| Obviously not the same exact use case but bare fiber is a lot
| more resilient than it used to be.
| zh3 wrote:
| Although the headling says it's 0.125mm the spec says it's
| 0.75mm.
|
| https://www.aliexpress.us/item/1005006059904173.html?gateway.
| ..
|
| The smaller sizes are more expensive (as are much larger), it
| seems like 0.75 is around the cheapest per metre. However
| it's a lot heavier (0.75/0.125)^2 = 36 times) so less useful
| for this purpose.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > They'll be back to barrage balloons next.
|
| Already happened: https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-use-
| wwii-tactic-defen...
| barelyauser wrote:
| Beam riding is also a thing. The missile is guided by a sensor in
| its butt, therefore making it harder to jam.
| pbmonster wrote:
| That requires line of sight with the target. Most drone usage
| right now is far beyond line of sight.
|
| You could get around that by having a relay drone at high
| altitude, but that complicates the system by a lot, and you'd
| have to somehow defend your relay.
| jandrese wrote:
| Beyond the limitations mentioned in the article (shortish range,
| reduced payload capacity), these drones also leave behind a trail
| pointing directly at wherever they were launched from.
| xphilter wrote:
| That seems solvable with a payload of a transceiver that is
| dropped outside the range of the jammer. Then you only need a
| spool as long as the radius of the jammer + some margin.
| renerick wrote:
| Unless you get some magically high quality camera on your own
| drones, the only realistic way to follow this trail is on foot.
| You can't just guide artillery or missiles to the other end of
| the wire, and if the Drone was launched over the frontline -
| there is little to do about it. And nothing stops the operator
| from pulling at least a part of the wire back, even if it's
| ripped in the middle - the trail is gone.
| jijijijij wrote:
| They could shine a very bright light into the fiber and see
| which tree lights up on the other end, at night :D
|
| I mean, mostly joking, but maybe an IR beam could actually be
| visible to a night vision equipped drone?
| zh3 wrote:
| It's surprising how hard it is to find low-diameter fibre if it
| drops off the desk, never mind through undergrowth.
|
| Of course, if it was monomolecular wire [0] you'd just encircle
| the opposition and reel in the loop, cutting them in two
| (horizontally).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomolecular_wire
| chatmasta wrote:
| Who says the base needs to be a ground station? You could have
| a hot air balloon above the drones.
| 42lux wrote:
| Because your opponent will thank you for the nice juicy
| target and you will not only lose your drone but also all the
| others tethered to your carrier.
| chatmasta wrote:
| As opposed to a ground station that costs a lot more and
| can't be moved?
|
| I suppose you could have a mobile ground-based launcher
| though.
| Max-q wrote:
| A normal car or motorcycle
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| This is a consideration, but not a deal breaker. Most weapons
| leave a signature (though to be fair, usually much more
| transient) of the launch location. Artillery has to operate
| under the threat of counterbattery radar and fires. I'm certain
| the Russian operators have figured out acceptable mitigations.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Depending on how you want to count either the Chechens or the
| Soviets invented a sophisticated method called Shoot-and-
| Scoot [1]. I wager this method also works great for drone
| operators.
|
| You're not going to respool that wire anyways, those drones
| either find their way back autonomously or all have to find a
| target. After the attack just cut the wire and leave. You
| just have to be extra careful not to be detected before the
| attack.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot-and-scoot
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Shoot and scoot doesn't work with lots of drones near front
| line. You will be most vulnerable when you "scoot"
| actually. You need to dig in well instead
| geoffmunn wrote:
| Based on their endless meat wave attacks, I'm pretty sure we
| know what their "acceptable mitigations" are.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| If it's not a problem for the TOW-2 anti-tank missiles using
| wire guidance mentioned in the article, why would be a problem
| for these drones?
| sangnoir wrote:
| It's hard to track a sliver of _transparent_ 0.125mm optic
| fiber back to the operator, unless you 're doing it
| Ariadne's-thread-style - but you'd have to find it first (post
| explosion).
| kumarvvr wrote:
| If it was me programming it, I would program it to cut off the
| cable and fly off diagonally into the air and scoot as far as
| possible.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Why put the spool on the drone? I'd think you'd put it at the
| base station, and maybe have a way to cut the fiber on the drone
| so you can pull all the fiber back to the base station. Ah, but
| maybe that makes it easy to find the base station, but unless the
| drone can be autonomous after some point and take the fiber with
| it far from the base station, I'm not sure the base station's
| location can really be protected.
|
| EDIT: Ah, the real reason the spool has to be on the drone must
| be that the drone can't pull the fiber through snags, and if the
| spool is on the drone then it doesn't have to.
| melevittfl wrote:
| I'm guessing the strain on the spooled end is less and you want
| the end most likely to detach close to the ground where you
| might be able to reattach it, vs in the drone where it would
| fall to the ground and be unfixible.
| bearbin wrote:
| The whole concept is unfixable. Once the fibre comes out,
| it's not going to go back in. It's that deadly combination of
| fragile and cheap. Just unpack a new drone and off you go.
| Don't spend a week (and 10 casualties going into the grey
| zone to collect it) winding it back up only to find it's
| broken in the middle.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| No, it's a one-time use kamikaze device. The fiber
| intentionally, continuously, invisibly drifts to the ground.
|
| The drone contains explosives. You _really_ do not want it to
| come back to you in one piece.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Cables drones would (and likely do) make better relays than
| as attack drones. A relay drone flies out to the horizon
| and relays the LoS signals to an attack drone flying over
| the horizon from the perspective of the base station.
|
| The relay then gets to spend far more of its power budget
| on the relay-drone segment and has a very low power relay-
| base segment. Relay drones also perform surveillance while
| they're on station. Better bandwidth to the base station
| from a "wired" connection means a higher fidelity feed or
| potentially additional cameras to cover a wider area.
| JoachimS wrote:
| The consequence, problem is ending up with long strands of
| basically invisible fibers everywhere. But that is a
| problem to solve later. After the defeat of Russia.
| bearbin wrote:
| The drone moves, the base station doesn't. The spool goes on
| the thing that moves, so it just has to unspool to move
| further. If the spool was on the fixed position, the drone
| would have to drag thousands of meters of fibre behind it,
| needing more powerful motors and creating a risk of
| snagging/snapping.
| renerick wrote:
| Spool on the Drone means a a bulk of gradually decreasing
| weight, depositing the wire as needed. Spool on the station
| means the Drone has to pull the entire ever increasing length
| of the wire, which can get stuck or even ripped by the trees or
| other obstacles
| akira2501 wrote:
| > DARPA's Close Combat Lethal Recon drone was a fiber-optic
| guided loitering munition for urban combat
|
| Forbes just really loves pushing lethal "urban" technology. I
| personally find the habit to be disgusting.
|
| > "I am already asking Ukrainian specialists to test this control
| technology so that we do not end up behind the enemy,"
|
| It's awesome that after 3 years of this nonsense we're just
| happily escalating the conflict and imagining new ways to destroy
| urban areas and the civilian populations that live in them.
|
| Forbes, of course, loves this because in our current economic
| model there's a lot of money to be had in inventing new horrific
| ways to murder people. Well, that's my "1 of 4 free articles"
| this month, I guess.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > It's awesome that after 3 years of this nonsense we're just
| happily escalating the conflict
|
| Agree, it's unusual and satisfying to see the west backing a
| justified war of defense against a country that's a full-blown
| comic book villain.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > a country that's a full-blown comic book villain.
|
| Have you examined the logic of this position? You
| legitimately see an entire country as a "comic book villain?"
| And this seems rational and is a justified reason to send
| conscripted civilians to their deaths? So much so that it
| "satisfies" you?
|
| Wow.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Have you examined the logic of this position?
|
| Yes.
|
| > You legitimately see an entire country as a "comic book
| villain?
|
| Not an entire country. The leadership of the country, yes.
|
| > And this seems rational and is a justified reason to send
| conscripted civilians to their deaths?
|
| I'm not sending anyone. If the people of Ukraine decides it
| is time to stop defending themselves I will accept their
| decision with a sad resignation.
|
| > So much so that it "satisfies" you?
|
| Yes. It satisfies me that we are on the good side of this
| conflict. Would satisfy me even more if the conflict were
| not happening. But spending my tax money to help people
| protect themselves is much better, much more satisfying
| than the usual status quo which is to spend my tax money to
| hurt innocents.
|
| Eagerly awaiting your further questions on the topic.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| > It's awesome that after 3 years of this nonsense we're just
| happily escalating the conflict and imagining new ways to
| destroy urban areas and the civilian populations that live in
| them.
|
| So the ethical answer is to what, roll over and let the
| Russians win? Wars are awful things. But to paraphrase Trotsky,
| you get to choose whether or not you're interested in war. But
| you don't get to choose whether or not war is interested in
| you.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > roll over and let the Russians win?
|
| Or negotiate for peace. It is known there was a solid
| negotiation process in place and the Ukrainians were
| interested in it. NATO was not and worked to destroy it.
|
| > Wars are awful things.
|
| ...and _Forbes_ acting as a cheerleader of them is
| disgusting.
|
| > But to paraphrase Trotsky
|
| Trotsky was spreading propaganda. In the actual study of war,
| they rarely break out as described, and they often have
| months if not years of time where they could have been
| avoided entirely.
|
| It usually turns out there is someone with vested financial
| interests in war and they always find themselves near the
| people who generate the conflict. Go figure.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| I can't tell if this is Russian propaganda or just terminal
| naivete. This war is going on because Russia, without
| justifiable provocation, invaded another sovereign nation.
| There is nothing for the Ukrainians to "negotiate" about
| other than Russia leaving their land.
|
| If I hypothetically put a gun to your head and told you to
| give me your wallet and the credentials to your bank
| accounts, no amount of "negotiation" would make your
| property legally mine or what I did any less than armed
| robbery. Same here.
| ted_dunning wrote:
| I think the propagandist was trying to make an analogy
| with the distinguishable outcomes of "dead with no
| wallet" and "unharmed with no wallet".
|
| In the case of Ukraine, Russian state media have often
| claimed their goal is to exterminate Ukrainians and their
| culture so that distinction would not exist.
| racional wrote:
| The "the Ukrainians wanted to negotiate, but NATO
| wouldn't let them" line is definitely standard tankie
| propaganda.
|
| And lo and behold, within literal seconds of putting
| forth this perfectly straightforward observation -- which
| granted _might_ sound slightly, vaguely controversial,
| but really isn 't to anyone following the basic event
| chronology of this conflict (and the various false
| narratives that people keep mindlessly repeating about
| it) -- someone had to flag it.
| CapricornNoble wrote:
| >>This war is going on because Russia, without
| justifiable provocation, invaded another sovereign
| nation.
|
| As if nobody anticipated this? You should read what RAND
| wrote in 2019:
| https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.html
|
| Especially the sub-section "Risks" under the section
| "Providing Lethal Aid to Ukraine":
|
| _Alternatively, Russia might counter-escalate,
| committing more troops and pushing them deeper into
| Ukraine. Russia might even pre- empt U.S. action,
| escalating before any additional U.S. aid arrives. Such
| escalation might extend Russia; Eastern Ukraine is
| already a drain. Taking more of Ukraine might only
| increase the burden, albeit at the expense of the
| Ukrainian people. However, such a move might also come at
| a significant cost to Ukraine and to U.S. prestige and
| credibility. This could produce disproportionately large
| Ukrainian casualties, territorial losses, and refugee
| flows. It might even lead Ukraine into a disadvantageous
| peace._
|
| and then under "Likelihood of Success":
|
| _Increasing U.S. military aid would certainly drive up
| the Russian costs, but doing so could also increase the
| loss of Ukrainian lives and territory or result in a
| disadvantageous peace settlement. This would generally be
| seen as a serious setback for U.S. policy._
|
| So in other words....one of the principal US defense
| industry think tanks KNEW THIS WOULD BE SOME OF THE
| CONSEQUENCES OF OUR ACTIONS.
|
| >>There is nothing for the Ukrainians to "negotiate"
| about other than Russia leaving their land.
|
| This has been the _Palestinian_ position since 1948. But
| the US & EU throws their support behind Ukraine, and not
| behind Palestine. It should come as no surprise that the
| rest of the planet gives less and less of a shit about
| the hypocritical declarations related to white Europeans
| killing other white Europeans, while it willfully arms
| the principal party bombing brown people back to the
| stone age.
| mopsi wrote:
| The quoted parts have nothing to with how the events
| really unfolded. US military aid to Ukraine remained at
| stable 300-400m USD per year in the six years preceding
| the full-scale invasion - without a "counter-escalation".
| The opposite happened: by 2021, the fighting in Ukraine
| had died down to sniping and sporadic shelling on the
| frontline. Ukrainian losses for the entire year were 79
| soldiers.
|
| If anything, the greatest single US-related factor for
| the full-scale invasion was the humiliating retreat from
| Kabul, which signaled that the US would not stand by its
| commitments. Russian planning for the invasion began
| around the time of the retreat.
| CapricornNoble wrote:
| >>>Russian planning for the invasion began around the
| time of the retreat.
|
| Do you have a source for that? I'd love to read any
| insight into that process.
|
| My personal, totally unsubstantiated, opinion is that
| Russia began planning an invasion in 2019 after
| Poroshenko signed a Constitutional Amendment pledging
| Ukraine to seek NATO membership, which was followed up by
| Zelensky promising a NATO referendum the same year.[1][2]
|
| I suspect Putin initiated planning but was unprepared for
| anything prior to mid-2020....and then invasion planning
| was derailed by COVID. Forces couldn't be postured until
| they got that mess under control, and then you also need
| a big annual exercise as pretext for moving that much
| combat power into their assembly areas. Hmmmm....I need
| to go back and take a hard look at the early force flows,
| as well as Russian rhetoric in response to the 2019
| political decisions by Ukraine.
|
| [1] https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-president-signs-
| constitution...
|
| [2] https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-president-promises-
| nato-refe...
| racional wrote:
| _As if nobody anticipated this?_
|
| This is an attempt to distract from the parent's main
| point, rather than respond to it.
| Ray20 wrote:
| >There is nothing for the Ukrainians to "negotiate" about
| other than Russia leaving their land.
|
| Are the Ukrainians aware of this? Because massive forced
| conscription and closed borders for leaving are strongly
| pointing out against it.
|
| >no amount of "negotiation" would make your property
| legally mine
|
| Negotiations are needed not for legality, but for
| example, to stop mass forced conscription of people who
| doesn't want to die for political ambitions of Zelensky,
| corrupt Ukranian government or for something else, that
| they think doesn't worth dying for.
| racional wrote:
| The Ukrainians will decide for themselves if and when to
| negotiate, and on what terms.
|
| They will also decide -- for themselves -- whether the
| losses they are taking are sustainable, or "worth" the
| just end to this war that they seek.
|
| Your idea of what they "need", what is worth dying for or
| otherwise valuable to them, or your general view of their
| government -- just doesn't factor into it.
| Ray20 wrote:
| >The Ukrainians will decide for themselves
|
| Does not seem like it. They are not asked. They are
| banned from leaving the country. They are captured right
| on the streets and forcefully, under threat of death,
| sent to fight in war.
|
| > They will also decide -- for themselves -- whether the
| losses they are taking are sustainable, or "worth" the
| just end to this war that they seek.
|
| No, it's already decided for them - and decided
| otherwise. That's the reason borders are closed and
| Ukrainians are sent to frontlines against their will
|
| > Your idea of what they "need", what is worth dying for
| That's not my idea, that's their idea - otherwise there
| would be no need for closed borders and forced
| conscription.
| racional wrote:
| You still don't get to tell them when they "need" to
| negotiate.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Let me rephrase that more accurately . . . the
| democratically-elected government of Ukraine is
| exercising its legitimate authority to draft people into
| its military during a severe war that it did not start.
|
| Just like the Allies did in World War II.
| racional wrote:
| So presumably their view would be that the Allied cause
| during WW 2 was wholly illegitimate, because after all,
| those nations had conscription policies as well.
| racional wrote:
| _They are captured right on the streets and forcefully,
| under threat of death,_
|
| The "under threat of death" part is pure BS of course.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| You are doing a great job of simply parroting Russian
| propaganda points here.
| Tarq0n wrote:
| Forbes is just a blogging platform nowadays, not sure there's
| any editorial intent behind it.
| rolph wrote:
| fiberoptic drone control and feedback surveillance during initial
| phase of engagement
|
| such ordinance, would provide telemetry and situational
| intelligence resources while transiting the first kilometers of
| range, thus the ordinance is munition and reconaisance device.
| 42lux wrote:
| Is it only control or also power?
| darksaints wrote:
| I'm familiar with a number of methods that are being used in
| Ukraine, and the ones that drone operators seem to be most keen
| on is autonomous targeting. Basically, using computer vision and
| other sensor networks to identify and subsequently target a
| threat (usually in a cordoned off zone). Unfortunately the
| cameras, sensors, and compute hardware is expensive enough that
| they're trying to preserve the drone by using droppable ordnance,
| which is a lot harder to hit accurately. And the prices
| essentially mean they only get used to take out jammers, with
| normal FPV drones being used otherwise.
|
| They do rely on drones being able to switch between autonomous
| modes upon detection of jamming attempts, which seems easy enough
| to do (though I know nothing about the techniques). My thought
| was if the detection of jamming attempts is easy enough,
| shouldn't it be just as easy to use RF direction finding and a
| fairly simple greedy seeker algorithm to find and destroy the
| jammer?
| edaemon wrote:
| There are systems that can target jammers, like an anti-
| radiation missile (ARM): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-
| radiation_missile. Advanced systems like ARMs use complex
| sensors and algorithms to determine the location of the emitter
| before guiding themselves to its location. That allows them to
| hit an inactive radiation source and avoid terrain, but it
| requires sensors that are too expensive to use on quadcopter-
| type drones.
|
| As far as I understand you can't simply follow the emitter
| signal because the jammer can easily take countermeasures. For
| example, putting the jammer inside a building or vegetation
| would prevent any unpiloted drone from causing any harm. Even
| if the jammer was exposed, cycling it on and off every 30s
| would still effectively interfere with flight but prevent a
| signal seeker system from reliably finding the jammer. Plus,
| many drones don't have the range to reach a jammer.
| darksaints wrote:
| I know I'm just some dude and people on the ground likely
| have tried all of these ideas, but I guess then I would take
| the approach that you can use that sort of expensive sensor
| array on autonomous forward observer drones, which detect and
| map out jammer locations which can then be targeted with
| basic artillery. Basic terrain avoidance and autonomous (non-
| RF dependent) flight algorithms can be implemented on simple
| $500 drones with IP cameras and rpi onboard computers (I've
| built some of my own). I would imagine that within an order
| of magnitude of $500, you could get an autonomous drone with
| enough payload for any type of sensor array you could want
| for detecting jammers. The big problem that Ukraine has faced
| has been jammers operating within FPV ranges, which are
| typically about half the range of a 155mm artillery shell, so
| leave the targeting to them.
| edaemon wrote:
| Well, on terrain avoidance, yes, that's fairly simple.
| What's not simple is avoiding terrain until you reach a
| certain point, after which you want to collide with the
| terrain. Identifying that point and autonomously targeting
| the correct bit of terrain is the problem.
|
| There are systems that can detect and locate a signal like
| an RF jammer, but you have to 1) deploy that system into
| the area, 2) operate it, 3) maintain it, and 4) protect it.
| Then to make use of the intelligence it produces you need
| to have some sort of ordnance or PGM available. That is,
| you need to dedicate and risk plenty of materiel to take
| out a simple RF signal broadcaster, with the reward being
| the use of drones (including the enemy's drones).
|
| I don't think your approach is ill-conceived or anything,
| but the reality for both Ukraine and Russia is that it's
| really difficult to properly implement that approach.
|
| I think the calculation is pretty simple, really: the cost
| of developing and using a reliable jammer-seeking drone is
| much higher than the cost of a second jammer.
| maxglute wrote:
| >Unfortunately the cameras, sensors, and compute hardware is
| expensive enough
|
| I wonder how much more expensive. My feeling is a better
| equipped military with greater ISR capacities can probably
| better discriminate targets and hence make more
| efficiently/economical use of smarter/expensive drones. What's
| the proverb where the poor stays poor because they have spend
| just to keep afloat and never get chance to invest. A force
| with inferior ISR has to spam cheap drones because they don't
| have the expensive hardware to employ less highend drones that
| probably take less manpower etc etc, and problem spirals. By
| highend I don't mean US MIC shitshow like switchblade that cost
| 60-80k, there are DJI drones with AESA radar (more advanced
| than most gen3.5 fighters) that cost 8k, which is to say the
| highend component costs can be "reasonable"
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| Alrighty then. Let's start the doomsday clock for the date when
| real SkyNet goes live.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Most drone controllers sold on the market today already have a
| built in feature to detect loss of signal between the receiver
| on the craft and the transmitter. It's usually called Fly Away
| Prevention or failsafe and the detection method is pretty
| simple.
|
| I think the major issue with having RF seeking drones is the
| direction finding itself. Being able to do that cheaply would
| probably require a fairly expensive antenna array and SDR to do
| the processing.
| lnyng wrote:
| What if deploy some high altitude balloons as base stations.
| tguvot wrote:
| baloons, kites and relay drones. already done
| swamp40 wrote:
| I don't see fly-by-fiber getting very popular. The only goal is
| anti-jamming. But if the drone was fully autonomous, there would
| be no signals to jam. And the fully autonomous drones are coming
| fast. Meta's SAM 2 can follow pretty much any object anywhere,
| and people are beginning to get it running on the NVIDIA Jetson
| Orin. That's 75% of the work. The other 25% is autopilot and a
| way to disable it if it flies back over friendly territory. 6
| months I'd say, for amateurs starting now. I'm sure some
| companies already have prototypes working.
| c_o_n_v_e_x wrote:
| Anti-jamming is the intermediate goal. Fly by fiber allows the
| pilot to retain control of the drone while over the
| battlefield.
|
| With a completely autonomous drone in contested space
| (presumably with EW around), there's no way for a pilot to tell
| the drone "fly a little to the left to see what's behind that
| tree." Each drone has very specific use cases.
| JoachimS wrote:
| fly-by-fiber used to be very popular. And still is. The systems
| Russia is getting from North Korea is fly-by-fiber. Though I
| agree that autonomous drones is probably where we are heading.
| Ukraina has already shown swarms of autonomous drones working
| together.
|
| You even have different types of drones providing different
| function. A mama drone carrying smaller drones to the place of
| operation for example.
| pbmonster wrote:
| That just moves the arms race from anti-jamming to anti-ML
| targeting, doesn't it?
|
| Litter your trenches in inflatable mannequins (anti-CV), put
| all your soldiers in ghillie suits (anti-CV), have cheap
| fireworks ready to spread chaff (anti-radar) and flares (anti-
| IR).
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| The obvious solution is to target civilians with autonomous
| drones. Not much different to sanctions in terms of civilian
| casualties, but much more effective at stopping the enemy
| infrastructure. Since sanctions mostly kill children and the
| elderly.
| pbmonster wrote:
| Ah, war crimes.
|
| At that point, isn't it easier to just shell those
| civilians if they are in drone range, or cluster/fire bomb
| them if you need to fly in an aircraft to deliver the
| drones anyway?
|
| Terrorism by non-state actors is a danger, of course, but
| guys with AKs and pipe bombs storming a football stadium
| seems easier to pull off and yet hasn't happend so far
| anyway.
| imtringued wrote:
| What's the point of doing that? What kind of mission
| objective does that achieve? If you want to scare civilians
| away or deport them, you don't need to kill them at all,
| you just need to make them run for their lives.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| The same reason you starve hundreds of thousands of
| children. To spread democracy of course.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Any reasonable autonomous control system is going to have
| sensor fusion to combine different wavelengths of sensor data
| together. Kalman Filters are a thing, even outside of
| military applications. You're going to need countermeasures
| that are anti-CV, anti-radar, _and_ anti-IR measures in one
| source to confuse a well-made autonomous drone.
|
| Even then, if they just put a bullet into anything that has
| the approximate optical & heat signature of a human, it'll
| work fine. Who cares if you blow up a few inflatable
| mannequins and flares if you _also_ get all the soldiers?
| 10000truths wrote:
| This is very clearly divorced from the realities of
| warfare.
|
| * A Kalman filter is an algorithm, not a magical wand. How
| is that algorithm implemented? What are the parameters? How
| are they tuned? How is the state, and uncertainty thereof,
| modeled? How accurate is that model in the field? Details
| and implementations _matter_. Finding answers that _work_
| reliably in the field, even for a limited set of
| circumstances, takes huge amounts of time, money and
| talent, and involves a continuous process of trial and
| error.
|
| * Drones have a limited payload capacity, which means a
| limited amount of ammo to burn on false positives, and a
| limited amount of smarts and sensors with which to process
| their environment.
|
| * Many attacks rely on the element of surprise to catch the
| enemy unaware, or leave them with little time to plan -
| shooting fake targets alerts others to your presence and
| can quickly give away your position, providing time to take
| cover and/or stage a counterattack.
|
| * The people developing the smarts for these drones are a
| limited resource that need to be found, hired, and paid,
| and they have to play a cat-and-mouse game to maintain the
| robustness of the targeting system.
|
| * Asymmetric warfare is a time-honored guerilla favorite.
| It doesn't matter how fancy and sophisticated your drone's
| targeting system is if rendering it useless is cheaper, and
| wasting ammo on non-targets can very much tip the scales
| here.
| pbmonster wrote:
| That system is already orders of magnitude more complex
| than a small autonomous suicide done with a cheap camera,
| and probably not within reach even for the big players for
| at least a couple of years. At least of you want to do that
| with a solid, reliable targeting system and have at least
| some friendly fire prevention in place.
|
| And more importantly, that's what I mean with arms race.
| Now the mannequins in the trenches get a little heater
| element to keep them at body temperature, and they get
| internal water bladders with the appropriate radar cross
| section, ect. Easily doable today, and orders of magnitude
| cheaper than a sensor fusion drone.
|
| Add counter drones and point defense cannons, and the
| attack drones need rocket motors for final approach, which
| makes CV another order of magnitude more difficult, ect
| jrexilius wrote:
| There are multiple roles for a small airborne asset. One of
| them is ISR (video feed), used for targeting artillery or
| movement tracking and such. Jamming can block the down stream
| feed and defeat that support role.
| some_random wrote:
| ISR is probably more important than hunter-killer drones, at
| least right now
| trabant00 wrote:
| Any fully autonomous drone that can be produced in the near
| future will be easily foolable. And if it has a remote fail-
| safe deactivation system the enemy can figure it out and
| deactivate it too. So you solved absolutely nothing of what a
| wire solves. And made the same pitch we have for every ML
| product right now: we're X% there, next year we're there. When
| in fact next year we're still going to be next year away from
| there.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| There's a simple way to build a failsafe that the enemy can't
| figure out. The basic rule of cryptography--assume your enemy
| knows everything but the key.
|
| When the launcher and the drone connect they make up a
| completely random key. It is known only to the launcher and
| the drone. The drone will self destruct if it receives said
| key. The enemy could jam the destruct but they couldn't
| trigger it. Note that no encryption is even needed.
|
| One time pads are inherently unbreakable crypto other than by
| compromising the pad. And in this case the secret is known
| only to the drone and controller.
| trabant00 wrote:
| But if the destruct is jammable it's not a real fail safe.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Maybe look at real-world use of drones right now in Ukraine?
| Where it's literally life and death.
| holoduke wrote:
| Autonomous can still be jammed. They can and probably will
| still use gps, visual info, sonar, sound, magnetic fields, or
| pressure. All which can be jammed from the outside. And this is
| already happening.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Which is humorous to me as consumer drones get these sorts of
| features, meanwhile the military industrial complex charges
| 100-1000x the price.
|
| "But they have to test to guarantee safety"
|
| Nobody cares, there's a reason Ukraine is using cheap
| consumer/commercial drones, because they're effective as hell,
| and you get much more bang for buck without most of your money
| going into the back pockets of defense company executives.
|
| If national defense is sooooo important, why aren't defense
| companies publicly owned?
| m463 wrote:
| One goal could be really high bandwidth. Wonder if you could
| power it somehow too (or would that need copper or other
| conductive metal?)
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| I hate that robot warfare continues to advance as if scifi hasn't
| been warning of the dangers to humanity forever. Everybody is
| just full ahead as if it'll all workout fine. I consider it one
| of Obama's major failures, USA was a few years ahead in drone
| tech so Obama went trigger happy blowing up "terrorists" all over
| the middle east instead of putting together a UN coalition to
| come up with a weapons treaty to slow down the spread. The short-
| term war is always seen as the top priority instead of the long
| term consequences. I'm still amazed at the gift to humanity that
| was the coalition building and foresight of the post-ww2 years
| during which these kind of things were possible, and which we
| currently seem determined to squander.
| pbmonster wrote:
| > instead of putting together a UN coalition to come up with a
| weapons treaty to slow down the spread
|
| I fully agree with the sentiment, but do you think that would
| have done anything?
|
| The barriers to entry are just very low, and the off-the-shelf
| components are heavily dual-use, which makes containment
| extremely difficult. I think even minor powers would have an
| extremely easy time doing the development anyway, either in
| secret (China) or by just eating the sanctions (Russia, Iran).
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| I mean... why wouldn't a non-radio control channel defeat RF
| jammers? Breaking: enlarging the drones sufficiently to include a
| cockpit with avionics for a human pilot also defeats any RF
| jammer.
| sklargh wrote:
| Long distance fiber guidance is not a new concept. Most proximate
| example I can call to mind are the American TOW and Israeli Spike
| which have fiber guided variants/control options.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| I'm surprised how few people are pointing out that you can simply
| trace the wire back to the control station. At roughly 1 km of
| actual range, that's not just mortar range, that's fucking
| grenade launcher range.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| .
| bobthepanda wrote:
| You could still disrupt the communication pretty easily and
| someone has to go and physically set up the box
| mndgs wrote:
| BS. Though a RPG could travel 1km (not sure), I know for sure
| that an effective RPG range is 300-400 m, after which accuracy
| degrades substantially.
|
| And even if you try walking up the fiber cables (if you manage
| to spot them), you will become a target yourself much earlier
| than you manage to locate the origin of the fiber, i.e. the
| drone crew.
|
| So, that wouldn't work.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| An automatic grenade launcher firing 40 mm rounds can reach
| up to 2 km on a parabolic trajectory.
|
| It'd take a lot of grenades, but there are videos from the
| Ukraine war of Ukranian infantry landing hits at range on
| Russian positions using drone spotters.
| ermir wrote:
| I've been thinking a lot about this setup, and it seems it's a
| major advantage if you can pull it off:
|
| - The drone can send HD video with no interruptions through the
| fiber, shifting all the AI calculations to the backend, and you
| don't have to sacrifice your GPUs that you would otherwise add to
| the drone.
|
| - The fiber drone can act as a radio relay, so you can have many
| other radio drones connected to it, making jamming much harder
| and also you can use it as a relay for ground forces as well.
|
| - The fiber can potentially be replaced or augmented with copper,
| and you can then replace the battery with a transformer, and keep
| sending electricity from the base station. Such tethered drones
| already exist and can fly for hours, but maybe they have not been
| used in war before.
| psd1 wrote:
| Power transmission is going to be lossy. If you want kilometre
| range, you'll need heavy cable.
| ermir wrote:
| A few things to consider:
|
| - You don't have to worry too much about efficiency from the
| ground, since resources are plentiful unlike the sky where
| every gram counts. For example it would be completely fine to
| have a 20% efficiency from the ground to the sky (if we don't
| take into account the heating of the wire), for example spend
| 2kw to get 400w in the drone. Not ideal, but acceptable to
| many.
|
| - Also, the efficiency can be greatly improved by using high
| voltage AC and a transformer on both ends. Very similar to
| how the power grid works, you can use thin cables to deliver
| a lot of power, I would not be surprised if 90% efficiency
| can be achieved. This field has been well researched,
| tethered drones can fly for hours, but the ranges that are
| useful in war (10+ km) are a novelty.
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