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135
Flying under the radar: Chinese drone tech soars in Russia-Ukraine war (interestingengineering.com)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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https://archive.is/Ut310

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This is the story no one is talking about. Trillions invested in the US millitary industrial complex in terms of r&d, strategy think tanks, you fucking name it.

And yes, 1 fly boi w/ some 3d printed parts beats their ass. Not that the US approach to militarism is irrelevant, but a country can produce 10k drones for the price of 1 tomahawk. The US went way too far over its handlebars in terms of its monolithic approach to "high technology", treating it like a moat. Afghanistan was the MS thesis publication on this, but man, Ukraine has been the PhD work.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago (2 children)

As much as I love drones, the current tech has a lot of limitations. They’re awesome for small kamikaze stuff, but they don’t even compare to real weapons like a tomahawk if it really came down to heavy combat. With that said, drones offer so much more precision and a safer war.

  1. Power the weight ratio is pretty bad. 7” drones or smaller can’t carry a large load.
  2. Battery life is pretty awful with lipo and li-ion lasts longer but much less burst power for maneuvering.
  3. Range is decent, a few miles (Tomahawk can go 100’s of miles), but need a clear flight path and longer distance introduces more latency. Additionally any interference can ground you easily especially at very long range, granted you can program return to home.
  4. Wind plays big factor especially at high elevation.
  5. Not very stealthy. Granted a war zone is loud, but you can hear a drone coming pretty easily.

All that said, I’m very interested in where drone tech will be in 20 years.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

don’t even compare to real weapons like a tomahawk

You can't surrender to a tomahawk. Drones are extreme counters to tanks and warships that could get close enough to force a surrender.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago

That’s true. Totally different purpose.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

To be able to force a surrender, you're asking this drone to do a whole lot...

It needs to be large enough to carry tank killing munitions, and it needs to be either fast, tough or stealthy enough to survive to make it into close range, then it also needs an antipersonnel weapon to prevent it from simply being shot down once it's in close range, and finally it needs loud speakers that can be used to actually make surrender orders. (Adding speakers may sound trivial, but it's an additional system that draws power and adds weight and volume, both of which are at a premium with aircraft of any kind). Oh, it also needs to be able to sustain a very long flight time, because it needs to hover there in place until troops arrive to escort the captured soldiers... (Which could take a while in a warzone)

At this point, you're talking about a $20 million drone that requires at least two people to operate.

And forget warships, you can't force a warship to surrender with a drone any more than you can with a missile.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

To be able to force a surrender, you’re asking this drone to do a whole lot…

My point was to force surrender, you need tanks, ships, infantry. Drones prevent surrender, by being effective against those deployments.

A drone doesn't force surrender either.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Maybe you've missed the point of the comment. Lets put drones aside for the moment.

The US basically lost both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why?

We're tits over handlebars, ass-over-tea-kettle, on a strategy for global war-fighting, that is still predicated and fundamentally structured for fighting/ challenging an opponent who is approximately on relatively equal footing in terms of high military technology.

The problem, is that you can't "high-technology" your way out of a local insurgency/ guerilla war. The philosophy which underpins US war-fighting is incredibly vulnerable to insurgent, local, non-linear approaches to fighting. The US taxpayers has effectively paid trillions of dollars in taxes to develop and maintain a war-fighting force that is not adequately built to win the two previous direct conflicts that the US has engaged in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You're not being terribly specific about what you think America is doing wrong. So, we can't derive what "doing it right" might look like. This is great for you, because it makes your statements difficult to refute, it's not great because it makes your statements mostly meaningless.

So, what should America be doing differently?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think I'm being well enough specific. I'll give you two examples of mistakes that highlight the philosophical issue.

A Teledyne hornet costs 200k. A very very capable fpv drone with night vision can be manufactured with off the shelf parts for 2k. You can probably put a Temu version together for 1k.

It's not that the Teledyne isn't better. It's that it's not 100x better. It may only be 15-30% better. Even if it's 100% more capable (twice the vision, twice the range, half the acoustic profile), I can still buy 50 fpvs for every one Teledyne.

But I can outfit every unit with a 2k night vision drone. I can't outfit every unit with a Teledyne. And fundamentally, it's the same parts and plastic going into each.

Another example will be the f35.

Part of American exceptionalism has been the ability to sell a vision of "this is what the future holds, so you've got to do it this way". The entire "next gen fighter" development project is predicated on the notion that the people asking you to pay for it's development know what they're doing and are right about their predictions in the future.

And the F35 is amazing. It's one of the loudest machines I've ever heard. It can do ridiculous things in the air and to watch one take off is both frightening and awe inspiring in a terrible way.

And maybe this is me getting a bit over my handle bars, but if Kiev had the option of one f35 or a fleet of f16s, which do they choose?

The f16s are going to be easier to repair, easier to train for, more reliable, and probably in the range of 80-90% as capable as the f35.

But the extra billions, they go to that extra 20-30 % capability.

70% capable costs 10x 50% capable. 80% costs 10x that. 90% 10x that. 95% 10x that. 97.5, 10x that, 98.75, 10x that. Maybe 90-95% as capable is plenty.

There are diminishing returns from a focus on the "highest of the high" technology. An F35 or Teledyne are more capable than their off the shelf counterparts. But not 100x as capable. Often only a few percentage more capable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

So again, to be clear, is your argument that the US should be using lower cost off-the-shelf or lower tech weapons? Presumably, with the ability to field more of these much lower cost weapons for superior ultimate effectiveness?

I mean, the example you have with the f-16 vs f-35, is a bit of a false dichotomy. The f-35 isn't intended to totally replace the f-16. The two planes have a different set of capabilities and can be used in different ways. Ideally, they should be used in tandem, with the 35's stealth, superior electronics, and sensor suite, it can fly deeper into contested territory and designate targets for other planes to safely engage from further away. So maximizing the value of weapons like the f-35 is in fact dependent on combining them with other (usually much cheaper) weapons already on the field. But when done this way, adding just a few of these new top of the line planes can increase the effectiveness of entire fighter groups.

All that is to say, the f-35 is in fact a bit of a complicated case to use as an example.

Also, this is sort of how the entire US military is designed to work, with each element making other elements around it more effective. For example an aircraft carrier alone is extremely vulnerable, so it has a whole "carrier group" with destroyers, cruisers, and subs all supporting each other against different threats. As a group each part is more powerful that it would have been alone.

I brought all that up to point out that providing "X" weapon to a foreign nation is always likely to be an inefficient use of that weapon. By providing just one specific weapon, it makes it likely that those forces won't have all the supporting tools to make it most effective.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

The arguments I'm making are fundamentally about the philosophy that underpins the assumptions that the decisions you've outlined above, are the right decisions to be making or even the right framework for making decisions.

Core to what I've been saying is that how we think about power; how we think about force: how we think about these things and the assumptions we make sets the stage for how we'll think about technology, development, how to fight a modern war, or what a modern war would even look like.

This scene from Dr. Strangelove demonstrates the ideology clearly:

We wouldn't want a doomsday gap would we? Look at the big board!!

Although satire, this movie highlights the basic mentality both the US and Soviet union had, which established both the soft power aspects of diplomacy, as well as the conclusions each country made around what military technologies to develop, how to develop them, and what the future of war and projection of force would look like. What we think about the world dictates how we behave in it.

Just try to see within what you are saying, the ideological assumptions you are implicitly making about war fighting, about the use of power, about projection of power, about soft versus hard power. You are treating them as immutable inevitabilities when they aren't.

Take the scene even further; the Russian diplomat:

In the end we could not keep up with the expense of the arms race, the space race and the peace race, and at the same time our people grumbled for more nylons, and washing machines.

The current Russian federation is a perfect example of how a country (the Soviet Union) had one attitude towards war fighting, soft power, hard power, use of force, projection of power and pivoted to a completely different mentality with regards to how to do all of the above (The Russian Federation). And now, they've effectively beaten their age old enemy without even having to launch a missile. They've rendered the F35 inert, because they changed their philosophy of power, and were able to effectively capture the US government by proxy through imbeciles, nationalism, and stupid red hats.

Its also greatly telling how in the Dr. Strangelove scene, the Dr. quotes the "BLAND" corporation, which is a play of the RAND corporation; a consultant firm which has effectively dictated how the US government will develop itself militarily into the future for nigh on 60 years. My point is that the manner in which the US have developed itself militarily wasn't selected for based on its effectiveness: its been demonstrated since Vietnam to be highly ineffective. Its only Hollywood blockbusters that keep any charade of the US military being able to accomplish its goals up. The manner in which the US military developed itself was selected for in a manner which would optimize profits for the Defense contractor industry.

The F35 is an incredible piece of technology. Like I said before, I've never experienced anything as loud. But it misses the moment in terms of what war fighting will look like in the future of now. Its not next gen fighter jets winning or losing in Ukraine (or that won in Afghanistan, or Iraq).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oh my God... In that whole post, you've said absolutely nothing of substance! That was astonishing! I mean, actually impressive in a way...

In my post I had essentially only asked one question (and that question was "what are you actually suggesting?") and you managed to not even address it. Instead, you went on a meandering tangent about Dr Strangelove. You continue to make assertions about military doctrine, that actual decisions about actual, tangible weapons are incorrect, but instead of explaining how they were incorrect or suggesting what specific alternative choices should have been made, you instead talk about vague philosophical misunderstandings... That's bullshit.

Honestly, as useless as it is, I feel like I have to ask at this point, are you an LLM? (I can't really expect any useful response to this whether you are an LLM or not, but it still feels right to ask)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I can now see that you are too dense to have a conversation on this matter. In the future, please, just be an obtuse buffoon earlier so I don't have to waste my time putting together respectful, thoughtful responses for an idiot like yourself.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

An easy copout, I could have predicted that...

Well I'm happy to be done with this exchange.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Well I'm happy to be done with this exchange

I mean, it's had value for others certainly, to spark thinking on the relationship between how we think about power and the role that has in how we choose to which technology to develop and how.

It also puts you on display as a vapid and worthless void, fully absent of a thought worthy of responding to, so we all benefit from knowing more in that regard.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Explain how weapons lost those wars.

Full scale war weapons are not effective in guerrilla warfare. Agreed. But when the shit hits the fan you’re gonna want big guns.

Also agree the US has overspent on their toys. Just saying we should invest in both.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

My argument was that philosophy lost those wars. The the philosophy of war fighting we applied in those conflicts is the culmination of 60+ years of cold war, "super powers" Mckinsey consultant thinking.

And the thinking was wrong. Or maybe it was right for a while, but it's wrong now. Super power technology may or may not be the way to win a super power v superpower war, but it doesn't really help you in a guerrilla, insurgent conflict.

In metaphor, it's depth versus width. We went incredibly deep on our tech stack. We should have gone wider. The technology that is showing itself is that which can be made cheaper, faster, and is less dependent on specialists. The US tech stack is the opposite of all of that, because it was selected for by the military industrial complex not for it's war fighting capabilities, but to enrich and entrench existing manufactures.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

That’s fair. I think they have access to both. Look at what the little militias aka the police are using on us.

Anybody with a soldering gun, a laptop and the right know-how can whip up a drone. You can’t just slap together missiles.

EDIT: they need microprocessors too

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Look at what the little militias aka the police are using on us.

Its enough to make one want to start hording microwaves.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

What’s the microwave for? I’m imagining fighting toys in Small Soldiers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

A magnetron, some sheet metal and an idiot dumb enough to turn on something I wire together, and bam, you've got a tool for knocking drones out of the air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6XdcWToy2c

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

Haha I would probably kill myself trying to do that