Killer drones pioneered in Ukraine are the weapons of the future

The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots.

Can we please just fight all of our wars on the moon with giant robots like God intended?

Drones currently outpace their countermeasurs. This will definitely not be a thing forever. I think the effectiveness of cheap drones will go down as be countermeasures are invented.

We already see new very effective military drone jammers starting to come out

Western countries have been slow to absorb these lessons. Simple and cheap weapons will not replace big, high-end platforms, but they will complement them. The Pentagon is belatedly embarking on Replicator, an initiative to build thousands of low-cost drones and munitions able to take on China’s enormous forces. Europe is even further behind. Its ministers and generals increasingly believe that they could face another major European war by the end of the decade. If so, investment in low-end drones needs to grow urgently. Moreover, ubiquitous drones will require ubiquitous defences—not just on battlefields but also in cities at peace.

I think that any war determined by who can churn out more low-end drones is going to be dominated by China, given their overwhelming share of the consumer market. Consumer drones are made there because China has comparative advantage.

That will only change if the basic methods of manufacture change, like, production is far more heavily automated. And even then, it's not clear to me that China has a disadvantage in industrial automation.

I think a more-interesting technology question is who has better counters to low-end drones. There, I can imagine room for a technological advantage. As things stand today, though, we really don't have a compelling answer, and we probably should have come up with one by now.

Anyone have a non paywalled or more info on the subject? All signs point towards an impending global war and I’d like to be as prepared as possible.

Better brush up on my e-sports skillz, then.

Drones were weapons of the future back in the 90's. The weapons of the future are coming right up.

Bombs strapped to remote controlled planes aren't the weapons of the future. The American military has fucking autonomous robot dogs that carry machine guns and have thermal imaging sensors.

I have accidentally seen far too many videos from !ukraine@sopuli.xyz to know that these things are fucking brutal.

Knowing full well that on a metric of pure numbers, these don't compare to other weapons of war, but there's something about the personal nature of these fuckers that are just so fucking soul-destroying.

Those videos are definitely NSFL (and are usually marked as such, in fairness), but most of them have zoomed-in, full-screen footage of the carnage they leave behind. They are mostly individual or 2-3 individuals hiding/cowering alone in a trench, blown to literal pieces and left dying, completely unaware that somewhere on the other end of that drone is an operator watching their final excruciating moments of life.

It is one thing to be operating a long-range artillery weapon, or a drone flying at several thousand feet firing long-range missiles, or being in a close-combat life-or-death situation, but it's a completely different experience watching a shell drop on a defenseless, terrified and cowering human (likely coerced into war or forcibly compelled to the front-line) as if you're 10 fucking feet above them, while yourself are completely out of immediate harm.

Fuck war, but especially fuck these drones in particular.

There are consequences to such design.

What sucks is that us hobbist's can't get FPV, motors, ESC's, or batteries at reasonable prices (if at all)

The reality of it, is this is short lived.

Anti-Air meant for small drones like this is coming and soon.

And it will shut these down quickly.

You mean Ukraine was just a proving ground for drone warfare? Shocking.

No shit sherlock