The future of ground war: Drones · 6:18pm Nov 27th, 2014
Call me late to the party, but I was discussing the future of ground troops with some friends and realized we're on the cusp of a huge change.
Today, any warlord that can field a bunch of guys with guns has an army that can control territory. A real nation with an air force will do very well against such a rag tag group, but not without taking some losses. That might not be the case for much longer.
Today, anyone with a few hundred dollars and a wi fi transmitter can buy a drone that beams back live video of it's flight allowing it to go anywhere. What happens when the DOD duck tapes a RPG to one of these and starts installing 50 packs of them onto the side of every hummer in the army? All of a sudden you have macro air superiority, and micro air superiority (below 300 ft). Just as carrier aircraft made battleships with guns obsolete, and air to air missiles made gun using fighter aircraft obsolete, I think we're on the cusp of the same thing happening to ground troops.
Think about it: if you have the best army in the world, and your opponent has a 100 pack of single use RPG drones on the back of a hummer twenty miles away, who's going to come out on top? Thermal camera's on the drones could pick your guys off at a distance they couldn't hope to shoot back from, and the two guys in the hummer could take out the entire opposing force before they ever got close enough to fire a shot.
Does anyone see anything that will prevent this from becoming the new reality in about five years?
Target discrimination, versatility, intuition, and mechanical failures.
Robots are great and would put soldiers further out of the line of fire, but in the end, what makes us human also makes us better than robots. We can discriminate targets. We can make tactical calls on the fly that allows us to survive in a rapidly changing combat environment. We can feel when something is not right, and follow our guts to survive. We don't break down like robots do, what happens when one of them has a software or hardware malfunction?
We utilize unmanned equipment because we still control it, we rarely use actual autonomous machines because you are then putting a computer on the trigger that calculates whether or not it shoot, not if it's right to shoot.
Perhaps ECM and ECCM warfare will get a boost in the arm?
I mean, it is one of those 'harms yourself almost as much as the enemy' but if such a RC army was something I was going up against, I'd at least try to slam together a few radio jammers.
Still, you are right in that the pirates and insurgents are probably going to turn into even bigger nightmares as soon as they start getting a hold of stuff like 3D-printers, and the like.
2619613 Exactly: I'm not saying anything about AI driven drones, I'm saying that if we can do this with a civilian drone, than it isn't much of a stretch for the army to put a bomb on one.
2619615 Good point, but think of the value of a single thousand dollar drone to the army... They'll be as expendable as bullets. It would be trivial to put a line in the code so that if control is lost due to jamming, the drone homes onto and fires on the source. Suddenly it doesn't seem like such a great idea to lug a jamming unit around on your back... The only real defense against them would be a miniature version of one of these.
2619787 This is a reply to both points.
The video clearly shows why have an army of drones wouldn't work. What happens when something breaks, things go south quickly. You either screwed the pooch, or have given the enemy valuable intel on the design of your weapons to better counter them. That's no bueno. Not only that, the cost for a military drone, let alone a large number of drones, would be ludicrously high and not feasible for most of the US Military at this time.
During OEF, the THOR system was made to jam RCIEDs (Remote Controlled Improvised Explosive Device) while on foot. It wouldn't seem like a stretch to adapt them to combat drones, nor to make it harder to trace unless the drones could act autonomously and triangulate the THOR position. Then you have the issue of whether or not it would actually accomplish its mission. Considering the issues that I have personally had with UAVs, I would say that it could work, but not that well.