Drones and how to kill them?

Kat Tsun said:
Protection against a 40mm HEAT grenade is trivial on AFVs lol. SPz Puma is immune at pretty much every angle except maybe the bottom. Mole drones the next phase of warfare? Aerial drones are not a significant issue to demand anything more than a PABM grenade launcher and a typical APS radar with a 100-500 meter range against RPG/ATGW/FPV drone class targets.

The only problem is just that most vehicles lack this and will for the foreseeable future.
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Well, you've got 500m range defensive weapon..... wa la drone designer does this:
cr500-image05 (1).jpg

For any fixed defense, there is an offensive strategy that work against it. Instead you need mixed defenses and mixing offense and defense.

Interlocking air defense bubbles with different performance characteristics combined with CAP is the name of the game.....
 
What if a drone designer makes a helicopter gunship? I guess you shoot it down with an HVM just like any other helicopter gunship.

That tanks lack the ability to defeat close in anti-armor threats like ATGW, RPG grenades, and FPV suicide drones mounting 40-90mm HEAT charges is not news. All of these are effectively the same threat though and can be handled with a combination of counter-missiles and PABM grenade launchers tied to an automatic fire control and target tracking complex.

The more immediate solution is to simply have enough tanks and stockpiled firepower to eat your opposition's army in the trenches.
 
Kat Tsun said:
Protection against a 40mm HEAT grenade is trivial on AFVs lol. SPz Puma is immune at pretty much every angle except maybe the bottom. Mole drones the next phase of warfare? Aerial drones are not a significant issue to demand anything more than a PABM grenade launcher and a typical APS radar with a 100-500 meter range against RPG/ATGW/FPV drone class targets.

The only problem is just that most vehicles lack this and will for the foreseeable future.
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Retrofitting a small 360 radar and FCS to a 30x113mm RWS is trivial. The radars are a $1k part from Ford or whoever. Again, smart cruise control systems, use 4x panels for 360 coverage. FCS is already worked out from either an AA gun or a CIWS, I'm not sure which one to grab off the shelf.



jsport said:

MEI Hellhound (grenade) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Penetration: 90 mm (3.5 in) mild steel at normal impact with anti-personnel fragmentation
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mild steel is not RHA.
 
shin_getter said:
Drone developers just put 40mm GL on their drone, and now thanks to newton it out ranges your launcher.
View attachment 710703

If one wants to think about the mid-term arms race of drone/counter drone warfare, the thing to think about isn't specific weapons but relative advantages of different chassis.

For example, I predict traditional vehicle chassis will survive as it transports far more payload for more range than drones. The AA vehicle will always have far more payload for cost compared to drones with regardless of other tech factors. Still, the relationship falls within traditional airpower theory: mobility, initiative and mass remains with the air mobile force.

My previous post don't rate infantry high, as infantry have worst payload for cost for infantry scale combat.
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What about:

en.wikipedia.org

Barrett XM109 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
Scott Kenny said:
Retrofitting a small 360 radar and FCS to a 30x113mm RWS is trivial.
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How many thousands of M60A3s and M1A0s will get it retrofitted at SIAD, or even the current National Guard M1A1SAs? Because those are going to be the tanks that will be used when the 800 or so M1A2s are destroyed in combat and their battalions need replacement wagons.

The problem is that Ukraine has shown that loss rates of heavy armor in a protracted ground war are more significant than predicted.

No one has had time or the inclination to adjust procurement rates to account for this, mostly because they've spent the past 30 years thinking otherwise, with their past decisions and biases being colored by Desert Storm for the most part.

It's not something that can be fixed overnight, as it would probably require a decade of serious work, which means a couple years in wartime.

Drones will continue to be a lethal threat until people have absorbed the lessons that you need more tanks, and those tanks need to be more sophisticated, unless you are the former Soviet Union where you can just find tanks hiding under a mattress (like bed bugs) or something. On the other hand, they're not some entirely new weapon form that is going to obsolete older weapons like shin_getter seems to think, either. Payload fraction limitations are going to remain a serious concern for drone engineers for probably at least the rest of the decade, and if that's ever solved, they can potentially replace expensive rocket-powered anti-tank missiles entirely.

That just means it's an evolution of existing anti-tank threats of light anti-armor weapons and anti-tank missiles at the end of the day.

The most immediate defense will probably be radio jamming and datalink ESM, using a software-defined radio, to alert the crew to the presence of a man controlled assault drone and attack its operator electronically, and then you can follow this up with active armor systems that can destroy projectiles mid-flight, because that will require more serious investment.

Everyone has sort of known this was going to be a threat, literally for decades, people are just lazy and will defer change until it bites them.
 
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Scott Kenny said:
mild steel is not RHA.
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IMHO research into 40mm warheads has/should not have ever ended so, classified or evolving energetics research will bring any practical vehicle armor under threat from some standoff.
 
jsport said:
IMHO research into 40mm warheads has/should not have ever ended so, classified or evolving energetics research will bring any practical vehicle armor under threat from some standoff.
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Some of the Lancet upgrades have a standoff EFP warhead combined with automatic target recognition.

Putting an off-route mine onto a ATGW motor is a plausible pathway to defeating more primitive APS systems. Against high performance systems from the '00's when people thought APS and long range anti-armor threats were easier to grapple with than they turned out to be, like the South African/Swedish Mongoose or the American QuickKill, it wouldn't really work.
 
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www.economist.com

Trenches and tech on Ukraine’s southern front

Drone pilots have become increasingly valuable—and are targets for both sides
www.economist.com www.economist.com

The drone can come from behind your own positions, and masquerade as your own. The cameras are not great. But running at speeds of 150-160kph, it will always outpace you. “If your cover is poor, then you are likely a dead man,” he says. Major has survived a pursuit four times, the last time in mid-October. Two of his closest comrades have been less fortunate. “God, not physics, decides if you survive,” he says....

In a war increasingly dominated by aerial killing-machines, the hunters are rapidly becoming the hunted. The controllers for most drones leave their own electronic trace, and if a pilot isn’t careful, the enemy can home in on them. “Hummer,” a commander in Ukraine’s 47th brigade... says the Russians fire everything they have once they identify a target. They can use their own strike drones, but they also apply high-precision artillery, mines, glide bombs, and even, on occasion, saboteur groups. Major says he has lost 15% of his colleagues over the last few months. Hummer says his figures are lower, but refuses to elaborate.... A lot of people want to become drone pilots because they think the work is further back and safer. The reality is that it’s extremely dangerous to be flying battlefield drones.”

But the small fpv battlefield drones have challenged many accepted rules of war, and doctrine is struggling to adapt. “The future is already with us,” says “Genius”, a deputy battalion commander in the 47th brigade. In mid-October, a Ukrainian pilot set a 22km record for the distance at which he incapacitated a Russian tank, 18km behind the front line. His commander says the Russians have imposed a 10km no-tank zone behind the front, dramatically decreasing the value of such weapons. Hummer says that his own forces have a 58% success rate in hitting targets. But the traffic is not one-way, and the Ukrainians have many losses too. Russian fpv drones have destroyed several Bradley Fighting Vehicles (each worth some $2m) and even a Leopard tank.

Earlier in the summer, some units began to equip higher-value assets like tanks and artillery with jamming boxes, which create high-energy fields around an object so that signals from around it simply stop working. Attacking such equipment, without video feedback, is a difficult if not impossible task. Ukrainian units by and large don’t yet have the same technology. “fpv drones have completely changed the tactics of armoured infantry battle and we have to adapt better,” says Yuriy Momot, the deputy general director of a company developing technology jamming countermeasures for Ukraine. “Before, only brigades thought about electronic warfare. Now company-level units need equipment that can detect and defend themselves against fpv drones.”
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Kat Tsun said:
Everyone has sort of known this was going to be a threat, literally for decades, people are just lazy and will defer change until it bites them.
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Cost of retrofitting was prohibitive till about 5 years ago, when adaptive cruise control became standard, if not legally required. When every car needs 2x or 4x MMWradar or lidar boxes, the cost per antenna array goes way down.
 
The solution to aircraft carriers is more AA guns and more battleships, than we can fight jutland 2 after making airplane useless! It is clear that airplanes have awful throw weight compared to 18" artillery, obviously you can just defend against them right? Just shell the enemy ports with your battlefleet and win the war!

I mean, why didn't this reality happen? It wasn't a lack of trying, and multiple evolutions of ship-missile-airplane arms race happened but battleship never returned.

Well, lets start over:
1. Why are there ships
2. The comparison is ships expanding shells, ships expanding rockets, and ships hosting air breathing engined vehicles

Well, ships have lowest cost for payload and infinite endurance, so for strategic and operational reasons it is the most efficient platform for moving stuff. So ships stay:

So there is shells, rockets and engines.

Shells is lowest cost per ton delivered but does not scale up to greater ranges and have low throughput
Rockets have greatest throughput, scale up to good ranges but worst cost to payload
Engines have lowest throughput, best cost to tonnage payload (if not destroyed) and best ranges

If warfare is a long ranged, high lethality situation, rockets is superior to shells. Guns is inferior to rockets when number of shots is low, which happens if time of survival under attack is low. If throughput is necessary for defense saturation attacks, rockets is also far superior. There is also far more freedom in projectile performance with rockets, with huge warheads and penetration aids available on small platforms, and even higher velocity than guns is available if one engages opponents at range. It is clear why with guidance systems and completed kill chains, rockets become superior to shells in mirror fights as all advantage leans towards rocketry.

So ships with rockets is a thing. Note that even in the near perfect perfect interception regime does not move ships into guns, because guns can not defeat defenses in due to low throughput and low projectile performance, gun does not work as general defense due to low throughput (though can be efficient against other guns) and guns are outranged by rocketry. People that played video games with perfect intercept regimes find the optimal strategy is to pack ships full of small short ranged missiles and defend against everything before alpha strike everything once in range by maxing out in staturation.

Ships with engined aircraft lacks firepower throughput, so how does it even work? Well in a low intercept regime, max range and attacking first is decisive. In a high intercept regime, aircraft can extend weapon ranges thus induce advantageous munitions exchange, where cheap munitions is used to exhaust expensive munitions. Also, aircraft's long range and above horizon capability enables situation awareness as force multiplier.
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Now there are a few questions left open: First is what attack-intercept regime means for tactics. Well, the way to defeat interception is maximum concentration of firepower for saturation. The way to defense to counter the offense is maximum concentration of defense.

So this means the defense in the intercept regime would have maximum force density. This force can not spread out of mutual support range without inducing vulnerability. The only way for this force to control large space is to have long range firepower, and it needs a lot of it to defeat enemy's intercept regime.

Short ranged forces that is spread out to cover space is toast. It neither have defensive firepower to defeat saturation attacks, or ability to quickly mass offensive firepower to defeat defensive firepower.

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Land warfare have historically not worked like naval warfare. Why is this? The biggest difference is concealment. Forces are detected at semi-random, often very short ranges. The other issue is minimum efficient cost and platform size is low and small, so the relative cost of precision defeat munition is much higher than anti-ship weapons.

However, sensors are now very cheap. The existence of low-cost, omni-terrain movement sensing platforms means concealment is dead for land forces whose minimum mobile size is much bigger than aerial drones. If you are blasting radar, EW, DEW everywhere you are not stealthy.

So stealth is dead, and precision is cheap moving everything into the attack-first and attack-intercept regime means naval-like warfare.
 
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Scott Kenny said:
Cost of retrofitting was prohibitive till about 5 years ago, when adaptive cruise control became standard, if not legally required. When every car needs 2x or 4x MMWradar or lidar boxes, the cost per antenna array goes way down.
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Yet, somehow, a much poorer country (Israel) could afford to refit its tank fleet with a large proportion of APS systems, even if they didn't account for top attack weapons like Javelin or FPV drones. The cost is only prohibitive until America gets involved in a Cast Lead-style operation that loses a lot of tanks to close range LAWs. Bad press, Congressional hearings, and caskets are the three primary motivators for the bulk of military change.

Anyway, much like how the U.S. Civil War and Boer War foreshadowed the catastrophic combination of radio-electromagnetic combat, indirect fire, and positional attrition-based warfare in WW1 that was never acted upon by any of the major powers, the necessary change won't happen until someone suffers immense casualties first hand.

shin_getter said:
The solution to aircraft carriers is more AA guns and more battleships, than we can fight jutland 2 after making airplane useless! It is clear that airplanes have awful throw weight compared to 18" artillery, obviously you can just defend against them right? Just shell the enemy ports with your battlefleet and win the war!

I mean, why didn't this reality happen?
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It literally did.

Kamikazes could always penetrate the Big Blue Blanket because The Bomber Always Gets Through, but they struggled against the Iowas' wall of 40mm and 5" DP guns. You just have a comically exaggerated folk memory of it, for some reason. The Japanese lost not because their carriers were bad or something but because they had poor AAA defense (and anti-submarine training) and weak grasp of carrier-on-carrier combat. Carrier-on-carrier action was not a deficiency of the U.S. Navy after like 1928 and even then it was still building battleships, because the fast battleships complemented the fast carriers in a way that was logical, true, and real.

Tanks are having a moment only because their primary air defense system is a .30 caliber machine gun.

When it becomes a radar, datalink offboard, or infrared guided airburst GMG, or blast-frag rockets, tanks will regain the 500 meter or so airspace around them. Assault drones will rapidly escalate in price, to become more comparable to a NLOS-LS or something to compensate, and we'll be back where we were in like 2018, but with more expensive tanks.

Your arguments are slightly sillier than the people who tried to proclaim the death of armor because of shaped charges, the people who claimed the death of surface navies because of atom bombs, and the people who claimed the death of tanks because they ran into some Malyutkas in a desert.
 
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Kat Tsun said:
Yet, somehow, a much poorer country (Israel) could afford to refit its tank fleet with a large proportion of APS systems, even if they didn't account for top attack weapons like Javelin or FPV drones. The cost is only prohibitive until America gets involved in a Cast Lead-style operation that loses a lot of tanks to close range LAWs. Bad press, Congressional hearings, and caskets are the three primary motivators for the bulk of military change.
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Israel also only had like 250 Merkavas to refit, the US has something like 2000 active Abrams to fit. Plus Bradleys (~3000), Strykers (~1500?) etc.


Kat Tsun said:
Tanks are having a moment only because their primary air defense system is a .30 caliber machine gun. When it becomes a radar, datalink offboard, or infrared guided airburst GMG or blast-frag rockets, tanks will regain the 500 meter or so airspace around them.
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The problem is that doing so drives the cost per tank from ~$2mil to $12mil or more. And then Congress freaks out.

See also the complaints about the costs of the Constellation class FFGs, which have Aegis installed.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Israel also only had like 250 Merkavas to refit, the US has something like 2000 active Abrams to fit. Plus Bradleys (~3000), Strykers (~1500?) etc.
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America only has ~800 M1A2SEP tanks in the Active Army. The remaining 900 or so M1A1s are in the National Guard and probably won't get anything, because it's the National Guard. There's a similar number of M2s there too.

www.defensenews.com

With issues resolved, Bradley to get Iron Fist protection system

The U.S. Army's Bradley infantry fighting vehicle is getting Iron Fist after a successful round of testing in 2022.
www.defensenews.com www.defensenews.com

Strykers aren't quite important enough to be on the priority list for APS, not the least of which because they lack the SWaP for it.

The problem is that the Iron Fist APS on the Bradley had fire sector problems (i.e. the Bradley turret is very crowded and elements like the CITV would block launchers) and the M1 has near crippling mass issues that the Army is already wringing its hands over. The reason Iron Fist got delayed is because after the 2018 live fire trial they found they couldn't hit half the arcs and had to redesign the launcher. DA are recently finishing up a second round of trials where the Decoupled Iron Fist APS is performing well.

Likely the first brigade equipped will be around 2030, but if they get enough money, they can do 2025. That's not up to Congress, obviously, that's up to the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the Internal Revenue Service.

Scott Kenny said:
The problem is that doing so drives the cost per tank from ~$2mil to $12mil or more. And then Congress freaks out.
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Yeah, and they'll freak out more when the Army gets soundly defeated in the next war, like they always do. The Army will likely see a lot of staff turnover because of it. The hard part is going to be figuring out what to do when SIAD has to start pulling M60A3s and M1IPs from storage to replace losses, tbh.

The rock and a hard place DOD finds itself between is that you need a lot of tanks, and tanks are going to be silly expensive, so you're either gonna have a lot of caskets or a lot of dollars burned. Until the U.S. Army fights another Kasserine Pass or Pusan Perimeter there won't be much change though.
 
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Kat Tsun said:
America only has ~800 M1A2SEP tanks in the Active Army. The remaining 900 or so M1A1s are in the National Guard and probably won't get anything, because it's the National Guard. There's a similar number of M2s there too.
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My local Guard unit has M1A2s, not sure about which SEP.

Probably helps that we were the "finishing school" for units getting sent over to Afghanistan, since southern Idaho is very similar to Astan. Green valley bottoms, brown hills, 110degF in the summer, -20degF in the winter. Only about 3000ft elevation, though.


Kat Tsun said:
The rock and a hard place DOD finds itself between is that you need a lot of tanks, and tanks are going to be silly expensive, so you're either gonna have a lot of caskets or a lot of dollars burned. Until the U.S. Army fights another Kasserine Pass or Pusan Perimeter there won't be much change though.
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I'm hoping it won't come to that, but you're probably right.
 
Well as long as the U.S. Army doesn't lose future wars, it won't need to, because that would imply the U.S. Army is doing everything right.
 
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Kat Tsun said:
Well as long as the U.S. Army doesn't lose future wars, it won't need to, because that would imply the U.S. Army is doing everything right.
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No? The public is very casualty sensitive - both from soldiers and civilians, and will likely push back a lot against any military involvement.
 
IlikeCKEM said:
No? The public is very casualty sensitive - both from soldiers and civilians, and will likely push back a lot against any military involvement.
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America's alleged casualty aversion is largely mythical. Its leaders just choose to fight meaningless wars instead of important ones, or its opponents are so vastly overwhelmed economically and militarily they can inflict little to no harm to it, depending on if you want to talk about Afghanistan/Vietnam or Bosnia/Desert Storm.


But if that turns out to not be the case, then the solution to defeating America is pretty simple: sink an aircraft carrier or a couple LHAs and it will just go home. This is perhaps trivial for even relatively inefficient navies like the PLAN, but I somehow doubt that is the case anyway. The Imperial Japanese Navy certainly thought this!

There's a certain inevitability to fighting wars you're not prepared for, and eventually America will fight one again, as it did in Korea and WW2.

Mismatches in expectations versus reality means casualties in war. Drones are not really unexpected, but maybe saboteurs using tunnels and magnetic mines were, and the countermeasures for both are lacking due to the actual expectation that both were far in the future. I'm pretty sure of the Hamas stuff coming out of Gaza is straight out of early 90's techno-thrillers. To that, well, there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen has never been more true.
 
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Kat Tsun said:
America's alleged casualty aversion is largely mythical. Its leaders just choose to fight meaningless wars instead of important ones, or its opponents are so vastly overwhelmed economically and militarily they can inflict little to no harm to it, depending on if you want to talk about Afghanistan/Vietnam or Bosnia/Desert Storm.
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Well even in Afghanistan, which to my understanding had extremely low casualty rates the public was still broadly against it, at least that was the opinion I got from whenever I talked to somebody about it. Additionally, I was also talking about civilian casualties. Both the left and right can score easy points by saying the military is "woke" or "ruthless" or "murderers" or "soft" depending on their base. It seems that the publics' base opinion is that the military is doing something wrong, and it takes Ukraine or a similar event to get most of it to support it.
Kat Tsun said:

But if that turns out to not be the case, then the solution to defeating America is pretty simple: sink an aircraft carrier or a couple LHAs and it will just go home. This is perhaps trivial for even relatively inefficient navies like the PLAN, but I somehow doubt that is the case anyway. The Imperial Japanese Navy certainly thought this!
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Well not necessarily, as I would say that the Americans also have quite a strong revenge drive politically - when somebody takes American citizens hostage, prisoner or what have you abroad it usually gets a big response.
Kat Tsun said:
There's a certain inevitability to fighting wars you're not prepared for, and eventually America will fight one again, as it did in Korea and WW2.
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True, but the military dose seem to be trying to avoid this by overkill the prime example being NGAD

Kat Tsun said:
Mismatches in expectations versus reality means casualties in war. Drones are not really unexpected, but maybe saboteurs using tunnels and magnetic mines were, and the countermeasures for both are lacking due to the actual expectation that both were far in the future. I'm pretty sure of the Hamas stuff coming out of Gaza is straight out of early 90's techno-thrillers. To that, well, there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen has never been more true.
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You do have a point. I have not been following the events in Israel and Gaza as I find it to depressing. With Ukraine at least there is a democracy I can support, with the Israel situation I can't sort out the ethics.
 
Kat Tsun said:
Drones will continue to be a lethal threat until people have absorbed the lessons that you need more tanks, and those tanks need to be more sophisticated... On the other hand, they're not some entirely new weapon form that is going to obsolete older weapons like shin_getter seems to think, either.
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You can win with pretty much anything if you spend enough resources on it. I am sure you can win wars with swords even today, you just need a billion under arms and run the other side of ammo and infiltrate all undefended locations.

The point of technology is achieving goals at low cost.

Think about this, why do you need to spend money to have more and better tanks to win, when the opponent doesn't? If tanks is necessary, the opponent will lose if they don't invest in tanks. Why is it that only your side need tanks, and not the other side?
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Kat Tsun said:
Mismatches in expectations versus reality means casualties in war. Drones are not really unexpected
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The existence of FOGM in service in the mid 1980s and the complete lack of countermeasures by armor forces by 2020s suggests to me that most military organizations do not seriously attempt to correctly evaluate reality.

Cavalry against machineguns and tanks is what we should expect to happen again, given that governmental organizations have not resulted in superior performance in all other domains of operations.

Force structures with long lead times is very suspect if their countermeasures is evolving at a far faster pace.

Kat Tsun said:
Your arguments are slightly sillier than the people who tried to proclaim the death of armor because of shaped charges, the people who claimed the death of surface navies because of atom bombs, and the people who claimed the death of tanks because they ran into some Malyutkas in a desert.
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Kat Tsun said:
The more immediate solution is to simply have enough tanks and stockpiled firepower to eat your opposition's army in the trenches.
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Surface navies not very relevant in nuclear wars, yes. Tanks can always be relevant if you fight opponents without anti-tank weapons. Any asset can be made to be useful if the opponent does not own or use the counter.

Tanks as understood in the 1980s is dead against peers. We can watch Russians try to beat trenches with tanks and how much success that has been. The tanks of 1960 - 2020 backed by "nation bankrupting" production numbers could not overcome 1980s defenses.

Tanks have to be "rescued" by currently non-existent technology.

If you are a upcoming country building an army in 1990, there is a good case of not getting any tanks whatsoever. The tanks available are defenseless against ATGM and thus not an advantage over lighter armored vehicles and would be so for another 3 decades. Tank forces are zombies and we don't know if they can be revived again.
 
IlikeCKEM said:
Well even in Afghanistan, which to my understanding had extremely low casualty rates the public was still broadly against it,
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If you read the paper I linked it would explain why.

IlikeCKEM said:
Additionally, I was also talking about civilian casualties.
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The last time the U.S. fought a war that could potentially injure it, in any shape or form had it lost completely, it considered civilian casualties to secondary to enemy infiltration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Gun_Ri_massacre That it achieved status quo ante was something of a victory for it though, even if it was more of a victory for the PRC.

IlikeCKEM said:
Both the left and right can score easy points by saying the military is "woke" or "ruthless" or "murderers" or "soft" depending on their base.
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No one would agree with this if a U.S. carrier were sunk in Yokohama harbor except actual America First types. Those viewpoints are always popular until the shooting starts, then they suddenly become not very popular, because the root of the idea is that all tension is misunderstanding rather than true animus. If you forgot about how popular Iraq was, at least until the occupation fatigue took hold, between 60% to 80% of Americans supported the Iraq invasion until the election.

For that matter, consider the lack of a war between the U.S. and USSR. That wasn't because of detente but detente was a symptom.

IlikeCKEM said:
It seems that the publics' base opinion is that the military is doing something wrong, and it takes Ukraine or a similar event to get most of it to support it.
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No, it takes a war where shooting happens and people die, and some flimsy rhetoric to support it.

Stalemates, occupations, and protracted conflicts decrease American incentives to fight, because they convince the U.S. public that the war is not being won, and that a status quo armistice is preferable. What's the worst that could happen? The enemy we weakened pays a higher-than-expected price? Sounds like a victory for the history books, truly.

This is what happened in Korea, what happened in Vietnam, and what is presently happening in Ukraine.

It didn't happen in Iraq or Afghanistan because Iraq is an Iranian ally now and Afghanistan is ruled by the same people from 2001.

IlikeCKEM said:
Well not necessarily, as I would say that the Americans also have quite a strong revenge drive politically - when somebody takes American citizens hostage, prisoner or what have you abroad it usually gets a big response.
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It hasn't yet in Gaza and it barely registered in Iran, outside of a outpouring of prayers during the Superbowl, so it's not very important. The American public is much more intelligent at weighing the ramifications of wars than you seem to imply too. It's not a quasi-instinctual egregore. Again, the paper I linked discusses this.

IlikeCKEM said:
True, but the military dose seem to be trying to avoid this by overkill the prime example being NGAD
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NGAD won't arrive in time, at least if DOD assumptions are correct, and will potentially never be deployed anyway. U.S. intelligence expects a war with the PRC very shortly now, anywhere from as brief as "the next fiscal quarter" to "a hair under 4 years", and it will probably be nasty.

The only major things that might show up are another 200-300 F-35s, maybe a battalion of M1 tanks, potentially a battalion of ERCA guns, limited pre-production quantities of GMLRS-ER and Precision Strike Missile, a handful of LSMs (like 3 or 4), LCAAT assault drones, and a several dozen F-15EX. F-22 and A-10 are both on the chopping block to pay for a couple of these to boot.

It's not nothing, but it's certainly no super fighter, and that's only if America has the maximum amount of time it thinks it has.

shin_getter said:
You can win with pretty much anything if you spend enough resources on it. I am sure you can win wars with swords even today, you just need a billion under arms and run the other side of ammo and infiltrate all undefended locations.

The point of technology is achieving goals at low cost.
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If you can't understand comparative advantage I don't know how to help you.

shin_getter said:
Think about this,
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Would rather not...

shin_getter said:
why do you need to spend money to have more and better tanks to win, when the opponent doesn't?
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...see above.

shin_getter said:
If tanks is necessary, the opponent will lose if they don't invest in tanks. Why is it that only your side need tanks, and not the other side?
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Because some people are good at fighting tanks and other people are good at using tanks.

shin_getter said:
The existence of FOGM in service in the mid 1980s and the complete lack of countermeasures by armor forces by 2020s suggests to me that most military organizations do not seriously attempt to correctly evaluate reality.
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How many American enemies had FOGM? None. You design defenses to defeat enemy weapons, not your own, after all.

shin_getter said:
Cavalry against machineguns and tanks is what we should expect to happen again, given that governmental organizations have not resulted in superior performance in all other domains of operations.
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The last time the U.S. Army fought horses, with tanks and machine guns no less, the horses won.

shin_getter said:
Force structures with long lead times is very suspect if their countermeasures is evolving at a far faster pace.
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FPV drones aren't getting cheaper. Eventually they will be a Javelin missile with CAPS jammers and a propeller on the back vice a venturi.

shin_getter said:
Surface navies not very relevant in nuclear wars, yes.
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Yet they've been relevant for the past 70 years of warfare and will be relevant for decades to come. Curious.

Nuclear wars are no more likely than a massive wall of cheap drones wiping out tank divisions. Israel has lost more troops and tanks to Hamas tunnel commandos with Panzerknackers than it has to Hamas drone pilots dropping hand grenades and flying kamikaze.

If you like old things so much, you should love the return of the Panzerknacker, because it resembles the Imperial Germans' AT weapons!

shin_getter said:
Tanks can always be relevant if you fight opponents without anti-tank weapons. Any asset can be made to be useful if the opponent does not own or use the counter.
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Every opponent America has fought has had horses, magnetic mines, and machine guns, which are proven anti-armor weapons.

FPV drones are only useful because Ukraine sprung them by surprise and the Russians got caught with their pants down. They've stopped being useful as both sides have adapted completely to them, and they are not meaningfully impacting the battlespace much anymore.

Israel has been able to besiege a city in very physical terms and faces a far greater threat to magnetic shaped charge mines than drones.

shin_getter said:
Tanks as understood in the 1980s is dead against peers. We can watch Russians try to beat trenches with tanks and how much success that has been. The tanks of 1960 - 2020 backed by "nation bankrupting" production numbers could not overcome 1980s defenses.
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About as much as Ukraine, except more, actually. Being bankrupt also beats being conquered.

shin_getter said:
Tanks have to be "rescued" by currently non-existent technology.
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Plenty of people have APS for sale.

shin_getter said:
If you are a upcoming country building an army in 1990,
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You would buy Leopard 2s and Marders like everyone else...

The U.S. not having tanks would have made it lose Vietnam, Korea, and Iraq even faster.

shin_getter said:
there is a good case of not getting any tanks whatsoever. The tanks available are defenseless against ATGM and thus not an advantage over lighter armored vehicles and would be so for another 3 decades. Tank forces are zombies and we don't know if they can be revived again.
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Tank forces are more like skeletons and they just need some meat on their bones though?

America and its friends have just spent the past 30 years thinking they would be able to cut into the meat of the armored forces and get away with a dozen tanks lost after fighting 12,000 tanks, all because of Desert Storm, and it was a bad lesson that will take years to correct. C'est la guerre. Whether America has enough tanks in SIAD to handle the next major ground war it gets involved in is an open question. No one knows.

We only know Russia and Ukraine do, and both probably has at least two more wars left in 'em, though.

Tanks are necessary for a very simple reason: infantry cannot protect themselves against bullets and walk at the same time. You will need to fundamentally alter the schema of post-WW1 ground combat. A slightly more annoying anti-tank weapon is not going to do this lol. That just means you need more tanks, maybe making them easier to repair (have more welders?), and perhaps harder to kill.

If infantry evolve into tanks, by putting on bulletproof armor that lets them walk around at 30 kph, we can talk about abandoning tanks. That's the only way you can abandon tanks because they form one of the three points of shock action. The other points are infantrymen and artillery.

There's also nuclear weapons but if you have enough tactical nukes everything is easy. This is why the Army hated Pentomic Divisions: they made it into a push-button force that required no real soldiering or skill.

FPV drones and mortar/grenade quadcopters do something similar for armies without TOW missiles or the ability to do trig.

They're not exactly "game changing" in any real sense.

The Canadians have learned that simple camouflage measures and common sense makes FPV drones far less effective, after all.

They're just another threat to be dealt with in the long line of defense versus offense. As has been the case since the 1990's (at least), the defense is stronger than the offense, and breaking the defense will require more serious integration of robotic systems than "carbon fiber propeller anti-tank grenade". Things that have not been considered yet, or are nascent ideas, so nothing from FCS or its related successors.

All of these nascent ideas, mysteriously enough, still envision tanks as one of, if not the primary, intended use platform.
 
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There are two ways to think about small drones. One is to think of them as battery powered missiles, and the other is to think of them as the first kind of functional robotics. The former implies no significant change, while the latter changes everything.

If you could build terminators at low cost, there is no need for traditional infantry. Okay, you can't build terminators, but you can build flying drones that have same terrain access and lower than infantry cost to payload ratio. The biggest weakness is low range but that is what carriers are for.

Infantry is getting disrupted as a load baring and combat platform. Infantry just don't carry enough for their cost to produce functional defenses. Infantry have historically have poor payload capacity for cost, it is their unique up to this point ability to access complex terrain that makes them essential. Small drones currently can easily access trenches and is only a few developments away from decent capability indoors and in tunnels. Until low cost ground robots are developed, flying micro air vehicles will come to dominate complex terrain ground combat.

Some people are thinking about new tanks as a way to re-enable mobility in a static battlefield. Well, what is needed to re-enable mobility via vehicles is enough CRAM firepower to defeat the artillery branch which is not something you can do by bolting something on the roof. (though might be possible by dedicated entire formations at it)

What is a practical way to re-enable mobility is the ability to increase strength, operational tempo and density of drone operations. All things equal, attacks are for sides with more forces. The reason why ww1 warfare can become static is that the need for dispersion denies the attack the use of mass except in artillery which is immobile. The reason why current warfare can become static is that even tanks can't mass against improved artillery, mines and non-density limited tank destroyers like attack helicopters of NLOS missile shooters.

Air power is mass and mobility due to access to 3rd dimension and speed. The scale and inability to influence complex and defensive terrain have limited its impact. With airpower that can clear terrain, ground combat can operate at tempo of air combat. Mines, mud, artillery and wire? LOL, I can fly~

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As for the tank as a combat vehicle, it has too little anti-vehicle and too little anti-air, and far too much anti-machinegun to be the center piece in combat today. If you are not shooting at fortifications there is little reason for large direct fire gun, and you don't need it if a drone or improved indirect can take care of it. Vehicle formations obtain targeting grade tracks each other at extended ranges for one or both sides due to sensor ranges and drone screens and long range engagement becomes more and more decisive. The most important weapons are those that either project long range fires or defeat long range fires.
 
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Scott Kenny said:
"Pull!"
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GTX said:
www.armyrecognition.com

Belgian Air Force adopts Italian Benelli M4 shotgun as counter-UAS sol

The Kleine-Brogel Air Base in Belgium has made a significant advancement in air security by introducing the Benelli M4 Super 90, a shotgun specifically ada
www.armyrecognition.com www.armyrecognition.com
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Something with a bit more range might be nice....

Although that thinking can end up with a multi-billion dollar development program and a $5,000,000 missile too complicated for 90% of soldiers to use.
 
By the way, a 12-caliber hunting rifle works very well against quadrocopters and light drones. With fraction No. 3 per duck.
 
Please consider that micro-UAS will be way less relevant in a moving environment where armored vehicles excel. When the front line moves by dozens of miles everyday, drone operation can't keep the pace to be as much predominant.
The high level of losses due to drone will be tackled that way.
 
Kat Tsun said:
How many American enemies had FOGM? None. You design defenses to defeat enemy weapons, not your own, after all.
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If you can design a weapon of given performance, you should assume that your enemies can, too. Russian equivalent will probably be a bit heavier, but so what?
 
1635yankee said:
Something with a bit more range might be nice....

Although that thinking can end up with a multi-billion dollar development program and a $5,000,000 missile too complicated for 90% of soldiers to use.
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Oh, for sure. But it's hard to make a cheap and longer ranged system. Okay, yes, Federal flight control wads that don't pull off the shot columns till about 25m exist and let you shoot ducks at 50-75m, but if you want 100m+ range you need something a lot fancier. like a Programmable Prefragmented Projectile, a mini AHEAD round.
 
Scott Kenny said:
you should assume that your enemies can
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This is the reverse of "the enemy has something so we should have it as well".

The only NLOS ATGMs fielded by any American adversary are the HJ-10 and HJ-16. LMUR could also count but it's twice as heavy as Hellfire and is more in the class of Maverick, and is only deployed from helicopters to date AFAIK.
Currently HJ-10s are battalion assets if my memory on Battle Order is right, and organised into batteries of 6. So that's 48 Hellfire-class missiles ready to fire at any given moment at a killbox. No tank would survive such an assault. HJ-16 is TOW-like in implementation, so imagine every ATGM post and IFV gets one. The new PLAGF 8x8 probably gets 4 of that, idk.
Fielding counter-NLOS APS on every MBTs would be a money sink, for one. It's not worth it, comparing to, let's say, giving every platoon HQ an organic ADA squad with MADIS-equipped vehicles that could defend from drones, artillery, and traditional air threats with both hard-kill ( 30mm prox, Stinger/Coyote) and soft-kill (HPM jammers). Or, new sensors allowing immediate post-launch target track and kill linked to AFATDS enabling M777s to rapidly execute CBAT missions on these launchers.
 
asVAL said:
This is the reverse of "the enemy has something so we should have it as well".
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Knowing that something is physically possible means that you should at least have plans in place for how to face it.


asVAL said:
The only NLOS ATGMs fielded by any American adversary are the HJ-10 and HJ-16. LMUR could also count but it's twice as heavy as Hellfire and is more in the class of Maverick, and is only deployed from helicopters to date AFAIK.
Currently HJ-10s are battalion assets if my memory on Battle Order is right, and organised into batteries of 6. So that's 48 Hellfire-class missiles ready to fire at any given moment at a killbox. No tank would survive such an assault. HJ-16 is TOW-like in implementation, so imagine every ATGM post and IFV gets one. The new PLAGF 8x8 probably gets 4 of that, idk.
Fielding counter-NLOS APS on every MBTs would be a money sink, for one. It's not worth it, comparing to, let's say, giving every platoon HQ an organic ADA squad with MADIS-equipped vehicles that could defend from drones, artillery, and traditional air threats with both hard-kill ( 30mm prox, Stinger/Coyote) and soft-kill (HPM jammers). Or, new sensors allowing immediate post-launch target track and kill linked to AFATDS enabling M777s to rapidly execute CBAT missions on these launchers.
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I think that both NLOS APS and the ADA vehicle per platoon are going to be necessary in the future. That's just flat the cost of playing anymore.

Because as you say every single ATGM post in the PLA is potentially an NLOS weapon.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Knowing that something is physically possible means that you should at least have plans in place for how to face it.
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Defend from NLOS via smokes, top cover, manpack jammers, or just plain running away?
The US Army just tested a manpack jammer for infantry so at least it has the theoretical ability to knock out RF-linked NLOS ATGMs like Spike-LR2 or HJ-16, while the wire-guided ones, limited in range and speed, could be knocked out by MSHORAD, Sentinel-cued Stingers, and if it's a dense terrain, out-maneuvered by modern MBTs with actual reverse speed and neutral steering.
Scott Kenny said:
I think that both NLOS APS and the ADA vehicle per platoon are going to be necessary in the future
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The problem is that it's too expensive. Trophy is decade-old by now and the US Army is still struggling to field them on SEPv3s slated for upgrade.
Asking the US Army to spend hundreds of millions buying new APS, when it's already busy with funding the LRPF portfolio into service, MSHORAD, ALE/FTUAS, FVL, NGSW et al all stretched across a tight budget and schedule is wishful thinking. The US Army has far too many areas it has ignored as a result of decade-long SOCOM propaganda, politics and mismanagement, and only now is it moving to fix those weaknesses while being cash-strapped to the extreme.
 

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