Prior to the start of the Ukraine war, it was assumed that the Russians, if they desired, could quickly smash the Ukrainian army. Russia is a big country with a big army and Ukraine is not as big, but few understood that it had a big army. At the start of the war, it had an army of 350,000, with a similar number in reserve. Fewer anticipated the hundreds of billions in NATO weapons and money. Everyone, including the Russians, expected a short war, but instead it is a long war.
One main reason for this is technology. The Russians badly miscalculated how the war would unfold, but they also failed to adapt to new technology, specifically the use of drones in frontline battles. Their first taste of drone warfare was the Bayraktar TB2 drones supplied by the Turks to the Ukrainians. This is a medium-altitude long-endurance vehicle that allowed the Ukrainians to precisely aim their artillery at Russian formations, as well as directly attack those formations.
The Russians have proven to be quick learners. They rushed to embrace the new technology and have now taken it in directions few anticipated. First person video drones are now the primary weapon in the Russian arsenal, used to not only attack Ukrainian men and material, but used to shape the battlefield. This new use of drones came to the fore in the Ukrainian Kursk offensive, which concluded last week with a stunning Ukrainian defeat.
The “Kursk incursion” as the Ukrainians called it, was an attack across the Russian border to gain control of the nuclear facilities in the Kursk region. There is a nuclear power plant there and a storage facility for nuclear weapons. It is unclear what weapons, if any, are stored there, but Ukraine wanted to gain control of it as well as the power plant for the purpose of nuclear blackmail. The Russians would either surrender or Ukraine creates another Chernobyl.
The Russians managed to stop the Ukrainian offensive, but instead of it becoming a stalemate or requiring the Russians to spend men and material to keep the Ukrainians bottled up, it became a killing field for Ukraine due to the Russian use of drones to police every square meter of the region. The air over the Ukrainian formations was full of drones twenty-four hours a day. Any effort to move men and material at any scale was detected and attacked by drones.
To understand how drones are now used by the Russian army and to a lesser extent the Ukrainian army, this Turkish YouTube channel provides video of drone attacks with a AI generated voice over. There are three things to notice. One is that the drone operators can fly these things into the tightest of spaces. This allows them to hunt for assets inside of buildings and hidden in wooded areas. These things are like a swarm of birds that have cameras and explosives.
The other thing is they can now operate at night. This is a Russian innovation that Ukraine has not matched. Russian FPV drones have night vision and infrared cameras, so they can spot men moving around at night. The “solution” to constant drone surveillance during the day was to move men and material around at night, but now there is no hiding from the drone swarms after dark. In Kursk, the Ukrainians were under twenty-four-hour surveillance and attack.
The third thing is the drones are essentially networked together either through the tether to the drone operators or through the over-the-air system. Fiber optic drones rely on a fiber optic cable to communicate with the operator. The operator is then connected to the Russian command and control system. The effect is that the drones in the sky have created a twenty-four-hour-a-day information space over the battlefield. This massive data collection system is then used to anticipate changes.
These parts of the evolving use of drones all came together in the stunning rout of the Ukrainians in the Kursk region last week. The Russians could accurately predict where Ukrainian men and material will be at all times, so they could plan the stunning move through the gas pipelines to put troops behind the Ukrainians in Sudzha. They could also be ready for when the Ukrainians reacted to hit them with drones and drone-controlled artillery and glide bombs.
Kursk has become a model for drone attritional war. Filling the sky with networked suicide and surveillance drones is the first step. This prevents the enemy from gathering their forces for an attack. Instead, they are required to spread out and hide everything from the ever-present drones. The next step is to use the drones to shape the activity of the enemy in order to create an opportunity. The final step is to use the drones as part of combined arms assault on the enemy.
Of course, the same rules apply to the attacker. Even though the Ukrainian drones are not as good and numerous as the Russian drones, they still have lots of them, which means the Russians must disperse their resources as well. The battle for Kursk quickly turned into two armies spread thin across a wide area in order to avoid becoming an easy target for drones. This is why it took seven months for the Russians to dislodge the Ukrainians from the area.
To understand how this changes war, imagine if two armies are only equipped with long bows and crossbows. One the one hand, the longbowman can attack any grouping of men on the other side and vice-versa. Everyone must hide in buildings and underground bunkers. On the other hand, small assault groups of crossbowmen go out to hunt the enemy in close quarter assaults. Once they secure an area, more men come into to take up positions.
This is the battlefield in the drone age. Tanks and armored personnel carriers still operate, but they are easily spotted by drones. Even those equipped with electronic warfare countermeasures are vulnerable. Often, they are simply used to transport men on a one-way trip. As soon as the vehicle is disabled by the drone, the men scatter before the drones finish off the machine. Armor is often just an expensive delivery mechanism for small groups of men.
This is why the Ukraine war drags on. On the one hand, the Russians are unwilling to lose men and machines on big assaults due to the threat of drones. On the other hand, they have adapted the new technology to slowly hunt small groups of Ukrainians and individual pieces of equipment. Since Ukraine is fixated on holding territory, this attritional drone war lumbers along at a snail’s pace. In Kursk, the Ukrainians lost about four hundred men a day to these small-scall attacks.
We are, of course, at the cusp of drone war, but it is not hard to imagine how this could change the nature of war. At the start of the technological revolution, technology was the great dis-equalizer. It gave America a massive edge over the rest of the world in terms of military power. Now, at the end of the technological revolution, technology is becoming a great equalizer. Cheap drones are turning expensive, high-tech weapons into liabilities and returning war to a battle of men and wits.
If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!
Imagine drones being used for good, to better humanity like searching for unpermitted chicken coops and then hammering the lower middle class owners with fines.
Just picture all the Amish who can be rounded up for selling unpasteurized milk!
Can’t be more than a few years before Sheriff Smoldik Roscoe and his diversity deputy L’Shelle are telling residents of Pine Fork Bluff Anytown USA that the 9-man PD will need a fleet of 50 drones next year, no questions asked, Gus.
Or taking out people who post hurty words on things like unrestricted illegal border crossings!
In my city (pop 250,000), I phoned in a complaint about a “POD” that was being used as additional storage on my very narrow, minimal parking street.
“Tap tap tap…yeah, I can see it’s been there a few months. Call this number and the city will take care of it”.
I’ve no idea what he was looking at on the other end of the line at his computer screen. But my general impression was before/after drone and/or routine aerial surveillance taking photo sweeps.
No doubt the Zombie National Review soon will make The Conservative Case for Liquidating Zoning Code Violators. Drones are very much part of the police state apparatus that runs this country even now.
Interesting anecdote. This may explain why the China balloon and NJ drone stories became a sensation. You hype up the China menace. Check! You set the stage for normalizing constant drone surveillance to safeguard against China and other terrorist threats. Check!
Reading this comment section of people who seem up on the latest in military tech and it seems that Ellysium was a premonition where they consulted SV and the MIC.
Brilliant! Consider Langley notified.
The longed-for Singularity is when the drones Become One with the chickens. The Big Bio-Merge.
As Le Orange says, it is a beautiful thing. And these are beautiful, uh, people.
Chimkins r not real!
Which raises questions regarding the 4th Amendment. Police cannot search your property without a warrant, but what about the airspace above your property? How far above your property does that airspace extend?
Look up: Curtilage …. Had to work with that on missions in my old life.
You will be told that if you have anything observable from the air, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
Same regarding “curtilage”. You can’t trespass upon it for the reason of finding evidence, but if you can see it from the “street” all bets are off.
I’ve read that insurance companies have been using drones (to assess the condition of a roof or ‘clutter’ in a yard) to then cancel home owner’s insurance – at least in Florida and California. People complain, but I have not heard of a law suit trying to ban this on constitutional grounds. Hint: When in doubt, do not put your trust in ‘constitutional rights.’
They also do that with car insurance, to see determine if there are uninsured drivers living within a household driving vehicles insured by somebody else like their parent.
Soon enough, drones will be everywhere observing everything. You won’t be able to spit on the street without a drone observing it, IDing you with facial recognition, and ordering a computer to send you a citation.
“IDing you with facial recognition”
That won’t apply to dark brown ghetto rats who, already, are allowed to ride local public transit with their faces masked even in warm weather to prevent detection.
Yep. The one saving Grace may lie in the public’s revulsion of such. In my State this worked in the aspect of “red light cameras”. These were banned Statewide. However, the companies that market and run such continue to buy off legislators and the aspect of reinstatement comes up frequently. The solution is to take out the monetary incentive for the camera’s use. That of course evades the typical pol’s we put in office. On the other hand, technology advances in new cars can make possible self reporting for driving infractions, such as speeding. Insurance companies now offer discounts for… Read more »
Insurance companies are using drone surveillance on their customer’s homes to raise rates and cancel policies. Only the beginning of unrestrained corporate and government abuses.
Yeah, one ongoing thing I harp on, on local pages, is how local Democrats were more than happy to fleece us through traffic cameras so long as they were getting bribes under the table from Redflex. And the dumb Democrats happy with their subsistence living on the plantation won’t ever hold them to account.
Wait. At the beginning of this war, Ursula von der Leyen said the Russians only had computer chips “cannibalized from washing machines.” They must have some great washing machines.
Those shovels must’ve been pretty hi-tech as well!
It was a preview of the official history. The Russian army will have been Korean concentration camp prisoners wielding shovel-shaped novelty cocktail stirrers from the backs of petting zoo miniature donkeys. Elite Ukrainian snipers pushed aside their camwhore ring lights and killed them all, two or three to a bullet. Their remotely operated butt plugs never wavered (visibly).
“They must have some great washing machines.”
The origin of up-to-50%-whiter White Russians.
Washing machines with GPUs who would thunk it!
Why the hell are there any washing machines with computer chips in them? It’s a terrible environment for chips and an easy point of failure. I think LG has a washing machine with wifi and remote control of the washing machine via this wifi and a phone app. WHY? What purpose could this possibly serve given it’s a washing machine that you have to physically visit in order to put clothes in it! It’s just another spying machine. I remotely monitor my fully analog washing machine with a new invention called my ears. Despite being a lifelong lover of tech,… Read more »
Any home appliance with a board and chips in it is utimately useless. We wasted a LOT of money replacing the burned-out board in my GE dual fuel (gas burners and electric oven) stove – twice – because it could not withstand the heat from the self cleaning option. Now I have a simple, older gas stove that runs on propane. Wish I had more space and could better adjust the burner flames, but it has no chips. Also, never buy a fridge with the ice maker in the fridge section (i.e. freezer on bottom but ice maker in the… Read more »
You are right to be suspicious. In some cases, the “reason” is blithely revealed. Our electric power company once offered to replace our a/c thermostats with the new “NEST” model(s). The catch being they would remotely control them during power events, like brown outs. In short they reserved the “right” to turn your heat down or your a/c up when they thought it necessary to preserve the “grid”. My suspicion is that such actions are being considered for other electronic appliances you once thought you “owned”. What could go wrong? BTW: I bought Ecobee’s and programmed them myself. Best couple… Read more »
Tars-
You should go to YouTube and search for teardown videos that compare 80s era washing machines to those from the modern day.
They are very instructive. It becomes apparent the older machines were more robust in key areas. There was also some ingenious engineering going on back then.
Have you ever seen a European washing machine? They’re mass-produced for 800 million people all speaking different languages. Operating one is like translating freaking hieroglyphics. I just cover my eyes and push a button and hope for the best.
I had to use a crappy front loader in Europe 1980-82 (I think it was a German-made one, not sure). Took eons to heat the water (instead of relying on heated tap water) and tiny tub that couldn’t be used for blankets. And then one needed a separate spin dryer. I LOVE my all-American top-loading Speed Queen.
One corollary to all this is that the US can pummel third-world foes but can’t project power against first-world adversaries. Another is that Russia could never take over the rest of Europe with conventional (non-nuclear) weapons. A third is that Israel probably let Hamas attack them on Oct 7th so they could have the excuse to level Gaza. Israel is expert at drone and electronic warfare. I refuse to believe the BS story that they were “surprised”. There really is no “element of surprise” anymore in modern warfare with drones and satellite overwatch. So the fourth is that the Russians… Read more »
like the houthis? They seem to be doing well with drones too.
The usual rejoinder is that “muh airplanes beat your airplanes!” Our Air Force is the biggest, the Navy is the second biggest,and the Marines are third biggest air forces on the planet.
Didn’t Russia demonstrate last year it can take out, say, Ramstein AFT in Germany using a Iskander with a non-nuclear payload that can target anything sitting around on the ground?
Modern war with a peer competitor is completely non-winnable. It either ends in nukes or it never starts in the first place.
Yes, I agree. Things go up the “escalation ladder” pretty fast against peers. Air power is mainly to intimidate pissant little countries.
the Oreshnik ballistic missile is what you are thinking of?
I disagree. Heaven forbid we go to war with China and it will be demonstrated. Size matters. We likely still have a technological edge against China, but that would be overwhelmed with sheer numbers and our inability to replace losses in a time frame relative to a war.
Stalin said the Germans lost the war cuz they thought wars are won on the battlefield while wars are actually won in factories. War with China would be a disaster for the U.S.
israel went way beyond allowing the hamas attack, they (israel) intentionally executed dozens of their own people, especially at that music festival.
Oh, hush. You’re attacking our democracy with anti-Semitic comments like that, and it’s not even a week after the wrap up smear called Purim.
There was a Jewish woman beheaded by Hamas who had been one of the festival go’ers. She was childless unmarried at 31 and living in Berlin working as a tattoo artist, living the Bohemian go-girl life, merely visiting Israel to do drugs and party. The Zionist point of view is that she was useless. She contributed nothing at all to their homeland, certainly not the thing that matters most: children. The manner of her death was used as a propaganda point, because that’s all the utility she had to offer. She and the rest of the useless druggie dumbshits were… Read more »
As Matt Bracken pointed out, paraphrasing: “The $4000 decked out rifles the preppers have put together are now completely obsolete. The preppers are now like African natives talking to each other about what properties make for the best spear.”
The preppers would be better off setting up some kind of anti-air system based around 12 gauge shotguns.
I seen videos of Russian soldiers using 12 gauge shotguns to shoot down close in drones. It’s like hunting pheasants when I was a boy.
exploding pheasants
I will hold on to my rifle and shotgun. I doubt many urban ghetto denizens will be invading the rural South armed with assault drones.
Some 00 or No. 2 Buck should do it.
Microwaves
I doubt there’s a “prepper” anywhere stupid enough to believe he’s preparing to go into battle.
In fact, after the 2020 election when Bracken called on the InfoWars audience to load up, occupy DC, and storm the Capitol—what an odd thing to say!—no one came.
Guns are for answering the door.
Correct. Further and at best, guns drive up the costs of blue-clad thugs and lower their quality due to an off-chance of death or injury. A good argument can be made that private firearm ownership has bred unwarranted complacency. I prefer to live in a nation that allows private gun ownership, to be clear, but also realize a government that has no problem incinerating troublesome women and children in a Seventh-day Adventist compound will do things even the most depraved and trigger-happy individual cannot imagine.
Very true. Especially after the initial hostilities are over.
This is why we’re getting to the point where no country, big or small will be able to project military power (other than nuclear) much beyond their border regions. Movement of large number of troops across oceans would be impossible and naval assets would be under constant drone attack. Whatever drones the houthies are using are probably basic at best, but if the US stupidly attacks Iran, all bets are off. One would think the US military has figured this out, but who knows. What we should be doing is droning the hell out of the beaner cartels and maybe… Read more »
Drones don’t have the range to fly across oceans (yet anyway). They need platforms to carry them (sort of like aircraft carriers) if they are to threaten a blue water navy. But they can make brown water navies not just obsolete but non existent. So that the USN (for instance) could only project power 3/4 of the way across the ocean, rather than all the way across, to a place like Taiwan. It could no longer enter an enclosed body of water like, say, the Persian Gulf. We’ve already seen the Russian navy more or less abandon the Black Sea… Read more »
Ultimately a drone is just any aircraft that can be piloted remotely or autonomously. There’s no technical reason you can’t do that with a C17 … or a B-52.
Then you’d run the danger of making America great again, and we can’t have that.
The next development in drones, which a few countries probably already have, are Ai directed drones. They won’t need to communicate with an operator or use external GPS. They will be given a mission to seek and destroy pre-programmed targets, including individual soldiers. So they won’t be jammable and will learn in real time to find new targets on the fly as the battlefield conditions change. Taken to a higher level, drones will eventually be able to detect friend from foe with zero errors and even target individuals by race, sex or their specific face. Until a credible anti-drone technology… Read more »
I hate to be that nerd but Metal Gear Solid talked about this sort of stuff over 20 years ago. Insanely grim.
You outfit your army in 15-20 years with the types of “suits” envisioned by PK Dick in “A Scanner Darkly,” in which the exterior “skin” of the person is in constant flux from one skin color and set of features to another, with no ability to know who the person is at any given moment.
Sounds sci-fi crazy, but we’re now at the stage where human beings have individualized bullets called drones that can fly hundreds of miles to stalk and kill a particular enemy. Who would’ve thought.
The more relevant P.K. Dick story is, “The Second Variety,” which dealt with the consequences of unrestricted AI drone warfare.
In 1995, this story was converted into the grim, thought-provoking B-tier sci-fi movie, “Screamers,” starring Peter Weller.
A very underknown short story.
‘Through a glass darkly’ is how we perceive this world of illusions and deceit. Perhaps we can’t handle the full truth, fried circuits. It’s a world of predator and prey, after all.
Old Philip Kindred saw the future so clearly that it killed him.
The Russians are already deploying these. They are released over an enemy area with the purpose of finding and attacking men and equipment without control by a human. They also work in groups, communicating with one another.
Mesh networking technology whose algorithms were first perfected and deployed on a civilian battlefield in spam bot networks now deployed in physical bots on the military battlefield.
We’re just hangers on in someone else’s world.
This sounds like a beta version of Skynet Hunter-Killer autonomous aerial vehicles being brought online.
What a wonderful addition to our timeline.
“Defense network computers. New… powerful… hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination.” — Kyle Reese
It’s been a priority for a while now
.it’s always a competition.
Drones are the current game changer. It’s been closely watched in this latest hassle & many experimental countermeasures are being fielded.
Only the dead have seen an end to war.
Excellent post. The second battle of Kursk may, in time, be seen as more significant than the first. The Ukrainians and the Neocons did not expect the plodding Russians to be able to adapt to this new age of war, which explains why they believed, not entirely unreasonably, that they would win. Stalemate would eventually lead to Putin’s fall, and they could have replaced him with Navalny, or whoever. Then it’s back to the Yeltsin days of free shit for the Khazars.
Unfortunately for them, this is not your grandfather’s Russia.
“…Neocons did not expect the plodding Russians to be able to adapt to this new age of war,”
That’s one reason I don’t despair for the lack of this weapon in the US arsenal. The simplicity of the system and the readiness of response/alteration/improvement as shown by the Russians. We can do the same, IFF we do not let the MIC drive the spec’s out of all reality. Good enough, is good enough. Make them cheap, make them plentiful. The Russians (and Iranians, and Turk’s) have shown the way.
Drones are a game-changer in military affairs, but it doesn’t stop there. Lethal hunter-killer drones can be manufactured in a garage and equipped with a $30 Raspberry Pi CPU that enables AI-driven visual recognition and autonomous targeting control. They can be pre-positioned anywhere and lie in wait until remotely activated by a surveillance drone or other command signal. Static minefields are now obsolete and being replaced by active pursuit drone fields. Soon bio-soldiers will also become obsolete at the front and it will become drone versus drone warfare. Them EMP weaponry will step up to kill everything electronic on the… Read more »
Thus, it doesn’t pay to throw away that $4000 customized rifle …. Ultimately, it always “becomes” again about people on people. Just have to wait until next technology swing comes around again. Just like all the goofy SOBs who thought since Trump was elected (or, yes, in prior elections where Rs were returned to power too), that it was ok now to sell off the AR and ammo they’d squirreled away. You never know ….
Bows, crossbows, knives, even garrotes and sticks, too will always have their place in human affairs.
If I understand correctly, it sounds like the technology you are describing could be used by a civilian to kill another civilian with little chance of being caught.
So what all this tells me is: The first thing taken out in any war will be chip manufacturing. Perhaps the strategy of the future will be EMP strike, then troops.
there is an argument that the russians intentionally allowed the AFU to stay in kursk specifically so they could more easily be attrited.
surprised you didn’t mention the new AI equipped (rus) drones that autonomously find and attack targets, and can spontaneously co-operate with each other.
And all of these new advanced drone technologies have been defeated by the greatest Russian innovation of them all: the net.
A good short story is Philip K Dick’s Second Variety. It isn’t credited as such, but I believe it to be the inspiration for Terminator, not Harlan Elison’s Demon With A Glass Hand.
https://www.jamescamerononline.com/Ellison.htm. the full story
I don’t think the nature of war has changed. To paraphrase Clausewitz, war has a political and human part and is a contest of wills conducted through uncertainty. This has been continuous throughout warfare’s history, despite advances in technology. The character of war does and has changed. Although I think that the influence of drones has been massive and has changed the character of war, I also think they are primarily dangerous as a means of relaying targeting information and not just as hunter/killers.
I have the opinion these days that the Jews are pretty bloodthirsty people. The Russians seem to value the lives of their people and have some fairly harsh memories of losing loved ones during the turmoil of the 20th century. The Jews seem to be cavalier about spilling the blood of non-Jews to accomplish their ends. Makes me wonder if all the propaganda we heard about Stalin, the Soviet Union and their bloodthirstiness wasn’t also driven by the behavior of the small hats within the Soviet power structure.
Same as it ever was.
Can the US manufacture drones entirely of American made parts? My guess is no we cannot.
OTOH, it is likely countermeasures will make the drone revolution less important in the future. Already a lot of these drones are no longer radio controlled because radio is too easily jammed. A lot of them now have fiber optic spools as a workaround to jamming.
If the Russians can use washing machine chips, we can too. The problem as I mentioned above is the MIC making the final version of the US “drone” a technological monster, when good enough is good enough.
Azerbaijan used Turkish and Israeli drones to annihilate the Russian-equipped Armenians a few years ago. It should have served as a warning to those military forces preparing to fight the next war with the last war’s weapons and tactics.
The Azeris also re-purposed lots of obsolete Soviet-era planes by converting them to drones.
What appeared to be a troublesome load of scrap metal became an old skin to put a new wine in.
In one way, this is mine warfare on steroids – in terms of using them to force the enemy to move in a certain direction. Once big companies begin using drones as delivery vehicles – like Amazon – imagine being able to hack into those drones to utilize them for intelligence gathering purposes. You could expand your “eyes” ten-fold.
Seen in this light, the deployment of Euro troops to Ukraine becomes both less ridiculous and more pointless, simultaneously. They don’t need a lot of troops to influence the battlefield, they just need a lot of drones. Which begs the question of why bother at all sending what is sure to be merely a token number of troops? Just send drones.
Smoke bomb technology will be improved to obscure movement and there must be some sort of steel netting/balloon technology to provide protection from drones.
there are now drones that hunt other drones.
shotguns are useful for personal defense
It might be the case that drone warfare opens up new opportunities for airborne units, particularly using HALO techniques (not the game, lol). To my mind Airborne has never really lived up to its potential, but it’s too cool not to be good for something.
One word:
China
JWM
The comparisons to WW1 continue. Even if an army makes a stunning and successful surprise attack [the 1918 Spring Offensives or the Gas Tunnel Attack], it can’t be fully exploited because the defense is too strong due to technology.
It’s a war of attrition.
So, for the hundredth time: Ukraine cannot defeat Russia. Give up, already.
The thing about drones is they’re cheap. A SAM (surface to air missile) is more expensive because of its component parts, and it only sees one use. A drone can be reusable. In the battlefield of tomorrow, cheap and numerous beats big and lumbering. The ultimate cheap and numerous is a virus. In Stephen King’s 1978 novel _The Stand_ a rogue bioweapon — “a constantly shifting flu” — gets out of the lab and infects the world population. 99.4 percent die off. It’s a good read — King’s best book — a reminder that among the panoply of war innovations… Read more »
It’s very very difficult to imagine an happy ending to all of this slaughter.
Hunter Killer Machines butchering Human Beings.
I don’t think that story has an Happy Ending.
My instincts sense only despair and sorrow and heartache and extinction.
Terminators – “It can’t be bargained with; it can’t be reasoned with; it doesn’t feel pity or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”
Didn’t we see that somewhere before?
You get old enough like I am now and you realize this is how things will be declining for the rest of your life, and you won’t be around to see any potential uplift (or any), and you know, you start to reconsider seriously what you’re spending your hours on.
And then you start wondering what you’ve spent all your years on, if this was the result and this is the truth about our nature.
We know our nature pretty early in life and largely choose to ignore it. Developments such as drones simply make it harder to engage in such willful ignorance. You also have to wonder how rare in history it has been to assume the future would be positive; we hardly are unique in expecting a constant state of decline.
Nah, things always get better for most people. I had to turn off outdoor outlets cuz homeless were using them to charge their phones. It is all a matter of attitude. China people are all optimistic about the future. Maybe cuz they got rid of all the complainers n troublemakers…uh-oh…..
Very well stated, Arthur, and I’m there too. It’s just insanity in every direction. I quake for my grandson.
Sadly, you are correct.
Arthur Metcalf: “You get old enough like I am now and… you start wondering what you’ve spent all your years on, if this was the result and this is the truth about our nature…“ I’m with you, Bro, I’m with you. Between the V@xxpocalypse, and these hunter-killer Drone technologies, it’s very easy to imagine mountains of corpses in our not-too-distant-future. Darwinism is an icy cold mistress. Whatever became of GHWB & Lady Thatcher’s so-called “Peace Dividend”? That world which GHWB & Lady Thatcher promised us; that world which never materialized in ackshual meatspace reality? It was a ridiculously ludicrous fantasy which they… Read more »
Terminators are certainly technically plausible. Unlike faster than light travel, a machine that rudimentarily thinks and makes decisions could be walking the earth in 20 years. It gives one chills.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m3iUHplvQE
Stop shilling for your blog, retard.
It really makes me wonder what happens to the MIC. What is stopping GAE’s enemies from attacking an aircraft carrier with as many drones as necessary to sink it? Aircraft carriers cost $13B to make according to Google, cost $6M a DAY to operate, and have a staff of 5000 people. The government put a serious amount of time and investment in all those people. Drones cost a few thousand bucks and have a guy sitting in a room operating it (maybe). It’s just not a far fight. Of course, nothing really is going to change until the GAE’s military… Read more »
Your average small battlefield drone, as seen in Ukraine, can’t carry enough ordnance to do much to a carrier. And they don’t have much range. It takes larger drones with more range, which are more expensive, and which are easier to intercept than the smaller ones. The farther out to sea the carrier is, the less vulnerable. Of course their mere existence diminishes the power of the carrier, which now must stand off at a greater distance.
Well, one, obviously, but what about 5,000? How many is needed to do real damage? Whatever it is, it’s a fraction of what the aircraft carrier costs. I know someone at Rand has done this math.
Even now, the US is spending billions of dollars to attack a bunch of guys who live in tents and fire rockets and use cheap drones against Israeli shipping vessels. Yes the USA can print the money and spend the resources but this imbalance is crazy and the guys living in tents can do far more damage than they could at any other time.
This makes the 4th (or 5th?) consecutive US presidential administration that has bombed the same country (Yemen.) To the best of my knowledge, that’s a record. Good Jeopardy question. I don’t think Ike bombed Vietnam. Pretty sure JFK didn’t either.
Why 5000 of anything? The hypersonic missile technology—already proven—can take out a carrier well away from their attack range. What Russia demonstrated was simply a short range use of a fairly long range weapon. It only takes one as this weapon carries 36 war heads—yep it’s a MIRV.
JZ-
We are fast approaching the point where we are going to find out if the Houthis or Iranians can overwhelm the air defenses of a carrier battlegroup with a swarm of missiles and decoys.
You wouldn’t have to sink it, only render it inoperable as an airfield.
If it ever became conclusive that a simulated war using drones, satellites, robots, unmanned floating vehicles, in land and sea, and AI, then in the future we could see bloodless wars with no real casualties. If you can’t win the war game you can’t win the real deal.
If the simulation says “you lose and China’s the boss now” I don’t think the simulated outcome will be given much weight. Partly because only a fool would trust it, partly because it would have to be offering a sort of Monte Carlo simulation which would likely show some percentage where China doesn’t win and thereby gives hope of pulling off a win, but mostly because “fuck that I refuse to sccept it and I’m fighting anyway”. And to the elite, normal people’s blood is pretty cheap. Why go down without a fight?
So then our elites will have us drawn by lottery and forced into disintegrators.
WCiv911: “If it ever became conclusive that a simulated war using drones, satellites, robots, unmanned floating vehicles, in land and sea, and AI, then in the future we could see bloodless wars with no real casualties. If you can’t win the war game you can’t win the real deal.”
They did that way back in 1967, Star Trek TOS, “A Taste of Armageddon”, produced by Desi Arnaz & Lucille Ball’s “Desilu” production company.
WARNING, SPOILERS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon