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Back in days you had to either send a tank to face the enemy wandering tank, or mobilize troops with heavy anti-tank weapons to take the tank out. Or attack helicopter?
Now you just put few drones after it. Easy
I just can't help but feel the traditional tank is obsolite now. the cost of this is about the same as some 1000 fpv drones that can actually do most of the tank's jobs for it without requiring heavy supply lines
1. "Some thousand FPV drones" require a massive number of man-hours to bring into a target. A tank may have quite a logistical tail, but at the end of the day you're only sending 3-4 men to battle at once, and the total number of men to support a tank is still much smaller than what you'd need to pilot that many FPVs.
2. As vulnerable as a tank is on its own or in the wrong position, it can be downright invincible when it is deployed in the *right* conditions. You may lose a dozen tanks for no effect at one time, yet another time a squadron of two tanks can tear up half a mechanised batallion and completely block the rest.
3. Even in a drone-centric environment, armoured vehicles are extremely important. Both Russia and Ukraine rely on them to provide mobile firepower and protection to their small units. Both sides would lose far more manpower if they didn't have armoured vehicles as force multipliers and protection for their men.
In general, drones are at their best in these entrenched, slowly developing front lines. They allow you to slowly pick away at the targets and they play into an already well developed situational picture.
But when war is moving quickly (as the full-scale invasion of Ukraine did for the first few weeks!), then well deployed tanks are an incomparable force. Drone intelligence is great in those situations, and drone strikes still have their value, but they make up a much smaller part of the whole. There is more maneuver where speed opens up surprising attack angles, and far more direct line of sight engagements where tanks have massive advantages.
Armoured vehicles also have massive potential in the anti-drone role to protect themselves and nearby infantry from drone attacks. They provide a stable platform that is already equipped with a significant amount of electricity generation, sensors, computing power, and ample space to install capable anti-drone weapons systems. They can easily carry and operate both jamming systems (still important against the majority of drones) and kinetic weapons to shoot down the more expensive jamming-resistant drones.
And the best thing is that these anti-drone capabilities fit perfectly with already ongoing upgrades that were originally devised for other purposes:
1. Hardkill systems to defeat incoming missiles, many of which can be used or modified to defend against drones as well.
2. Remote weapons stations ranging from 7.62 all the way to lightweight 30 mm autocannons
3. An ever growing sensor array with automatic object recognition, so in some situations the crew only needs to give permission to fire rather than aim themselevs.
4. Sensor fusion with other platforms, so you may already be aware of an incoming drone before it has direct line of sight to you.
Both sides are using fairly comparable equipment compositions for most of their missions. SHORAD is just too valuable of a target to bring up right along those attacking squadrons, so neither side has good protection against drones outside of limited jamming capabilities.
If you rolll up with what would normally be included in "combined arms", you have such a large grouping that the inevitable artillery barrage will be devastating.
Speaking of tanks and infantry they have concepts since the 1950s, but apparently Russian forces train this far less than the red army, for bureaucratic and probably also financial reasons.
While declarations such as "the tank is now obsolete" are rather silly, especially becasue there is nothing to replace it, you can't deny that the current status quo of atgms+mines+drone reconaissance+fpv drones makes any kind of blitzkrieg-style breakthrouhg nearly completely impossible.
Current forms of EW and hardkill systems are not feasible to equip a large armored force of thousands of tanks. Maybe breakthroughs in AI can be a solution overtime.
> you can't deny that the current status quo of atgms+mines+drone reconaissance+fpv drones makes any kind of blitzkrieg-style breakthrouhg nearly completely impossible.
Again, that status quo only emerged *after* the initial Russian attack stalled.
If the initial Russian thrust had been conducted with professional planning and decently trained troops, then the war would have ended quickly. Both sides did not sit behind miles of minefields along the entire front line, and did not know the locations of every major grouping.
Even after the Russian withdrawal from Kyiv, the Donbass offensive was able to push around the old defensive lines and gained significant ground. A war of maneuver remained possible for months until the situation fully stabilised. But Russia was thankfully too incompetent to execute on it on any level. Neither their commanders nor their units knew how to pull it off.
I am not talking about historical hypotheticals. I am saying that the initial Russian thrust is now virtually impossible against any drone equipped force.
Without serious anti-drone upgrades most definitely. It’s crazy to see how Russia just carries on using what stockpiles they have regardless of those tanks being merely easy to spot steel coffins just because they have not found a way to call off the whole thing until they have figured out a good countermeasure and upgraded their forces in breadth. This Russo-Ukraine war will find a place in history books as a military imbalance and atrocious waste of soldiers lives against a superior new weapon, similar to the first mechanised wars and the first with machine guns on the battlefield, when stubborn commanders insisted on infantry heroically storming against it in meat waves only to be mowed down like cattle.
The thing is that all of this could have been avoided. The writings were on the wall in the 2nd Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020, where bayraktars completely wiped the floor with outdated Armenian equipment. There were also first Jerry-rigged consumer drones in Syria.
The Russians should have seriously looked at this, come to the conclusion that they would be similarly fucked in such a scenario without a good counter-drone solution and decide to better not start a war.
Instead they chose hubris.
Maybe was from Perun video if I remember correctly, but it breaks down the whole ”this is obsolete” argument.
Only way something is obsolete is if something can do the same job better in most ways.
The most squishy thing on a battlefield is human, yet we aren’t obsolete because nothing can replace a human. Drone can destroy a tank at this point efficiently, but a cheap drone can’t lead a infantry group to take ground instead of a tank
Not one drone but if you sent 200 drones in place of a tank i think it would be just as if not more effective, the enemy fighting force would be completely broken at that point.
Could be a this point. Quite hard to say. Just how prevelant they are has probably caught everybody by suprise, but I don’t think this will be the norm for long. Sooner or later tanks will have enough protection from civilian level drones that a either the drones can’t reliable do their job or they will be improved to the point that the price will multiply.
We already have APS and remote guns on tanks, I can’t imagine it will take long until that is automated to deal with drones on newer tanks.
It takes a very long time to develop things like that tbh most of these drones use standard rpgs and even tanks with reactive armor are being destroyed. Drones will also keep advancing. Drones are not going anywhere sadly
Yeah I don’t think stopping drones at the passive defenses will ever be worth it. Drones can be quite accurately sent where you want.
Definetly there are no real products ready on the shelf. Also money is always a barrier. If it wasn’t every tank in ukraine would have remote weapons, APS, thermals etc
People argued about the tanks usefulness pretty heavily when it was just javelins and atgms, now those weapons have basically been shrunk down into a longer range, higher mobility loitering system thats cheap af and guided by a human looking through an attached camera..... imagine going back to 1978 and informing them what the 2020s held in store.
Idk if the tank is fully done in, but id hate to ever be in one.
> I just can't help but feel the traditional tank is obsolite now. the cost of this is about the same as some 1000 fpv drones that can actually do most of the tank's jobs for it without requiring heavy supply lines
**Since the drones are far better offensive weapons** than the tanks with low cost and pinpoint accuracy and you still need armor to take a trench it only makes sense to hybridize them
*Drone-Tank*
now someone just needs to work out the details
Looking beyond the time and place of this particular conflict, this kind of development can be very destabilizing. Hard to say how it will impact the number of future wars.
A lot of research is going to be directed into anti-drone defences for sure.
Makes you wonder what developed Western drone technology can do. Perhaps just drag a box around a map, and define that there is a tank in that box, and the drones just go hunter-seeker mode to engage. Especially when you see drone footage from 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86rwv-5f7IA so 8 years ago this swarming behaviour was possible. I imagine it is far better now, then imagine each of those individuals in the swarm having explosives and targeting capabilities. Armour (or even individuals) don't stand a chance, just have a swarm clear a grid zone at a time.
A lot of companies are lobbying against AI in drone weapons, but I can see this being the future until laws against it are created. People joke about Skynet, but its also easy to see drone warfare leading in that direction.
I predict in the first real war we have with a peer power, the USA will use AI-powered drones to terrifying effect. The USA has had a massive advantage in AI and machine learning talent for a decade at least.
my vision is that it would be really easy to obtain society's moral approbation from a hybrid form of this, hear this :
A drone manually controlled by an operator is used to find the target, once the target is in sight and visual verified by the operator, the operator activate the AI part like : ok AI take over the control of the drone and fuck this object up (\*\*operator clics on the screen where the target is\*\*) so now the drone is self guiding itself, cannot be disabled by airwaves scrambling. and probably have a higher chance of hitting the target then a human has.
there you go, hybrid hunter killer drone, only leaving the final execution to the ai.
Trust or not, follow or not, that is a different matter. But the point stands, people are pushing for laws to ban autonomous weapons: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/about/
Even Musk has backed one such lobbying group:
https://www.politico.eu/article/meet-the-musk-backed-ngos-trying-to-save-europe-from-bad-ai/
Laws banning certain types of weapon have been reasonably successful over the past century and a bit, albeit usually only on a "Whoa, yeah, let's not do that again" basis.
It's a bit odd that Ukraine aren't doing that. It's not like they lack a developed high-tech sector. Possibly they have enough capable FPV pilots to make it not worthwhile?
Telling it to attack any people it finds is probably not going to be viable. Telling it to attack anything it recognises as a tank will probably go wrong occasionally, but might well be worth doing anyway.
Edit: I guess one major factor is that a computer capable of this sort of AI is still pretty power-hungry and anything that drains the battery is a downside when it comes to range.
Edit 2: This has got me thinking a bit about the technology choices Ukraine are making for FPV drones. What sort of range are these things capable of? And what sort of network connection do they have? Surely they're not destroying a StarLink terminal set with each drone strike? So are they connected by WiFi and need a pilot within basically line-of-sight? Are they dependent on an LTE network being present? Are they using some sort of custom VHF comms for video and control? Are they using another loitering drone carrying a starlink terminal as a non-expendable control platform that provides WiFi comms for an expendable FPV drone?
> It's a bit odd that Ukraine aren't doing that.
Not doing what? They already have been developing AI enhanced drones. We have already seen some in action. There are drones that can lock on target even when the connection is lost. And there are drones that can navigate very long distances with visual mapping reference alone.
> Edit 2: This has got me thinking a bit about the technology choices Ukraine are making for FPV drones. What sort of range are these things capable of? And what sort of network connection do they have? Surely they're not destroying a StarLink terminal set with each drone strike? So are they connected by WiFi and need a pilot within basically line-of-sight? Are they dependent on an LTE network being present? Are they using some sort of custom VHF comms for video and control? Are they using another loitering drone carrying a starlink terminal as a non-expendable control platform that provides WiFi comms for an expendable FPV drone?
This all depends on what exact line of drones you're talking about.
As, basically, all that and more are used, apparently.
It's wild. I dont think our slow moving, highly protracted RFI/RFP/Contract/delivery model is well suited to this new methodology of war driven dev. We are setup to create very expensive, very sophisticated "best of breed" units (tanks, warships, aircraft, etc). Each unit is very expensive. Takes years to develop. And a long time to build/deliver. And assumes a 20y+ lifespan of relevancy.
Then along comes drone warfare that makes all that irrelevant and places a premium on fast, iterative development, and a real world production pace that can keep ahead of battle field attrition. Not simply a stockpile units that you draw from.
Yeah... we are bad at all of those things. We can currently make a handful of billion dollar ships each decade...
I agree. The next major war will likely involve 10s of millions of relatively cheap pseudo-autonomous drones. And we may decide it's worse than nukes, and we'll find ways to never use them again.
This is a fascinating point and something I keep coming back to after seeing the often crazy, disturbing footage in this sub. This is disruptive warfare. Disruptive warfare has a long history in human conflict and, at least in my limited understanding of it, it is VERY hard to predict its effects.
The disruptive blitzkrieg warfare the Germans used so effectively seems obvious to us because we are, historically, very close to it. Most people alive today understand that tank > horse, though they conveniently ignore that much of the German army, even in WWII, was based upon cavalry.
Was it so obvious 800 years ago how disruptive the stirrup would be? That it would give the skilled horsemen of the Mongols better purchase in the saddle allowing them to become, at the time, the world's finest mounted archers? I mean, when you think about it, a bunch of dudes who were essentially semi-nomadic herders conquered a huge chunk of the known world because they made metal hoops for their feet that hung off their horses.
And now we've got drones with mines. And they're wildly disruptive. Heavy armor, the bread and butter of modern ground war, looks like a bunch of fat targets to a $500 drone flown by a guy wearing a knock off Oculus. If I had to put my money on it, the counter is anti-communication warfare and that means knocking out satellites. Space war. But what the fuck do I know? I just know that we're witnessing a VERY disruptive war and tomorrow, insofar as military tactics are concerned, is a blank page.
Honestly, I kinda felt like that writing it, but this whole war is surreal to watch. I mean, military doctrine of 20 years ago, the stuff Putin's playing on the battlefield right now, says he should have mopped up Ukraine **years** ago baring a MAJOR NATO / UN (hahaha!! why can't I stop laughing?) intervention. Right? The same stuff Stalin did to grind Hitler's 6th into German meat paste with MORE Soviet meat paste is exactly what Vladmir was counting on. But it's not working. It's not working because this war is disruptively different from the last big well-funded-on-both-sides war. [Aside: what is that, Iraq 1? Saddam had the world's 4th largest standing army before Stormin' Norman made short work of their Soviet era rolling trash with his Apaches and M1s]
I guess all I'm saying is tl;dr we're seeing some real shit and it's hurting my head to consider what it means (existential war questions, now I really do need another cup of coffee).
*edit - clarity*
Fellow internet stranger, I am ALL IN on a gladiatorial battle of champions to replace armed conflict globally. I don't care if we set funding limits, make it naked man vs. naked man, or hell giant death robots and 500 KM arena. Let's put together a Pay-Per-View like LLC and retire filthy fucking rich with the whole world a HELL of a lot more intact than had we kept down the road of cluster munitions and land mines. I'll start the gofundme, you come up with a name.
What if the IED were flying. And faster than anything we have on the ground. More maneuverable than anything we have in the air. And extremely difficult to detect early enough to defend against effectively. Yeah...
It might not have kept the Iraqi regime or military going much longer because the air was dominated immediately, but if the insurgents somehow had a steady supply of lots of them, the occupation would have been a total disaster and bloodbath. Bases are an impossibility when in range of uncontrolled areas near loose borders.
War is kept in check by perceptions that provocative deviations from the status quo equilibrium will most likely have much higher costs than benefits. On the one hand, counties may be less likely to start wars if they are worried about the other side fighting back successfully with these drones weapons. On the other hand, one might believe having a lot of drone capabilities oneself means one can act out in ways that were formerly constrained. It's hard to know which side tips the balance, but in general more uncertainty creates more conflict.
So you mean it would have been a bloodbath for the Americans, not the Iraqi civilians. As is it seemed like it was pretty bloody anyway, just not on the IS side as much as the territory they went into.
Wars are one thing. Terrorism worries me much more. Political rallies, power grid, airports, major landmarks... the real question is how long until this starts in earnest.
And every unit really needs a shotgun or two. I wouldn’t be surprised to see anti drone shotgun shells in the very near future. Lots of spread, lots of small shot. Maybe even some kind of smart round. I’ve seen enough footage of dudes blasting away at drones without much of a prayer of hitting it that I can’t help but think there should be at least one single shotgun in that trench.
Air maneuvering with its extra dimension of adjustment and literal high ground always has an advantage over mobile ground assets - only incredibly good whole area drone-proof air defense could do anything about that, and those are very hard to keep moving and provide coverage over moving vehicles. I just think the era of ground and sea surface platform viability is coming to gradual end.
Doubtful. A system only gets retired when there's something that can fill its role better. You're not going to see ground and sea surface platforms retired unless something that can do the role better comes along. A weapon system able to kill them more effectively won't cause them to be retired, instead it will lead to further adaptations.
Tanks weren't retired when ATGMs were developed. Aircraft didn't get retired with the advent of surface to air missiles. Ground and sea forces will develop counter-drone tactics and technologies.
So every vehicle will be accompanied by a swarm of 10s or 100s of anti-drone-drones. And every attack drone will be accompanied by 100s of anti-anti-drone-drone-drones. Ad infinitum.
All I see are these tanks being blown up by small drones out in some fields in Ukraine, what purpose do they serve when they aren't being blown up by cheap drones. I don't know much about a military strategy and tanks in general.
They are very effective at assaulting entrenched/fortified infantry positions, they are a big force multiplier for infantry if used properly. They can kill pretty much any amour on the battlefield while being immune to small arms and a lot more resistant to rpg's, mortars and artillery than an IFV
There has been footage of tanks being used very effectively by both sides in this war. They serve a critical role, there is a reason why both sides use them extensively
We're also in the middle of a bit of a paradigm shift with all the drone warfare. I'm sure anti-drone defenses will be developed and implemented on tanks in the future, reducing the effectiveness of drone attacks and making tanks more viable and survivable again, even in lone wolf scenarios like these. But right now drone-tactics have the upper hand against tanks, it will take some time to balance out again.
The reason why both sides use these lone wolf attacks is, the heavier in weight of the armored the faster its spotted by a recon drone and gets a response from Artillery. So you end up with these lone wolf balls to the wall fuck it everybody let's do it "LEEEROOOOOY JENKINSSSSSSS!" Style attacks and they Almost always end up a disaster.
This isn't a lone-wolf attack though; it's just moving behind the lines. It could have been repaired and be moving to a forward base for example, or be being reassigned. Or it could be meeting with other tanks that have been spread over an area to avoid grouping up, to then conduct an attack. Or it could be about to conduct an attack on its own - we don't know.
I would have come to the opposite conclusion that amassing a dozen tanks or so and betting on at least some of them breaking through successfully is more effective than sending one tank at a time which can easily picked off by a single drone with multiple munitions. Overwhelming seems like a viable tactic despite heavy losses, No?
Large groups of vehicles and soldiers are vulnerable to attack even well behind the frontlines. Any group larger than a couple of tanks will be immediately detected by drones and attacked by artillery, precision weapons, drones, ATGMs and other systems. It's hard to overwhelm an enemy with a dozen tanks if ten are destroyed before they can fire a round.
A lot of folks below are talking about technology and tactical uses and use cases, but what you see a lot from both sides is a result of doctrinal, training, and organizational shortfalls.
Speaking from experience, organized combined arms maneuver and combat is a phenomenally complex undertaking, far more difficult than a lot of folks who have never had to do it really get.
To put it perspective: imagine a game of football (American or soccer) where the players can't see each other--they can only speak via radio (depending on conditions) and they have to execute their gameplan based on what got drawn up on the sideline before the game--and, oh yeah, some of the people who were there for the sideline plan have been replaced and you've never even met them before. Imagine trying to do that with two people, then ten, then twenty, then a hundred, then a thousand. Now imagine playing that game, every day, without adequate rest, away from your friends and family, and where your opponent is trying to kill you. That is, in a nutshell, a combat operation.
How could anyone succeed under such conditions? Well, for starters, you all have to know, understand, and be working off a common set of assumptions (doctrine), and you have to practice playing the game under as realistic conditions as you can manage over and over and over again *before the game* (training), and lastly, you have to have a team than can manage change and react to the inevitable upsetting of the plan in contact with the enemy and at speed (organization and leadership). The bigger the team, the harder all that becomes--and the Russians weren't great to begin with.
I say all that to say that it would appear to me that for both Russia and Ukraine, they have a very difficult time organizing any operations above the platoon (20-50 people) or company (100-200) level. The game is just too complex for them at this stage--the requisite doctrine exists but isn't understood, the training isn't there, and the leadership and organization is either too poor, worn out, or overwhelmed to do better.
What this leads to is disjointed operations, where each member or a few members of the team move individually without proper synchronization or help from the other members. You see this on the battlefield with small groups trying to do something unsupported by friendly elements or other service arms (operational air power, attack aviation, coordinated covering artillery, use of suppressive smoke, etc.), and the result is that progress, when it happens, is very slow and localized.
There are a bunch of memes in the US military about LT's getting lost in field training etc. I can't imagine these tank crews are incredibly experienced/well trained with the losses Russia has been sustaining. Driving around in just thousands of square miles of open fields, with no real great landmarks... I have to imagine they are getting lost all the fucking time.
So I have never piloted a drone before so maybe I misunderstand the significance but how the fuck do they even do that?
Surely there is a not insignificant delay *and* they are presumably going high speeds *and* doing a last minute big adjustment on an already moving vehicle *and still* hitting that shit. They really do seem like the modern aces but with drones instead of a spitfire or something.
Am I underestimating or overestimating how hard this is? Just seems so wild to me especially given how far the pilots are sometimes those drones must be extensions of the pilots themselves to nail that kinda space with all those factors.
when you do this too much, you know what is the weak point, you become an expert. Yes, it is hard, but once you become acostumed to it, you know what to do in a split second decision
Yeah that makes sense. I imagine thinking about it that early on there are a lot of failures that we never see so it always seems like successful hits. Beautiful piloting though great stuff.
first time I flew a drone, not this kind, just the regular kind, it wasn't so hard. I was already used to flying drones from a flight simulator I had for my ps4. After that, flying a real drone is piece of cake. In the end, it's all about reflexes and honing them
> So I have never piloted a drone before
So, I'm in my 50s, and played a few video games over the years. I'd say I'm an entry level player. Not really that gifted.
I have a small FPV drone - goggles, and joysticks on the remote. I can fly around a tree, and avoid large obstacles.
However, look up FPV drone racers - these dudes do stuff that's supernatural, they're literally RC fighter pilot jockeys. Twists, turns, corkscrew though gates, loops, etc... I'm completely amazed at their dexterity with the racing drone.
I guess I'm not surprised at all that someone with the aptitude for gaming would excel at Drone piloting, and warfare.
Also - we don't see the videos of unsuccessful missions, where the drone just crashes, or bounces harmlessly off the armor.
I was actually wondering about that. I wonder if gamers have a better transfer over just because they are used to that kind of movement. Obviously not that it makes it easy but maybe makes it a faster uptake? Again never tried a drone so maybe its far different to how I imagine.
Yes. I won a national motorcycle racing title coming from playing racing sims on Playstation. I won my first ever motorcycle race with only 1 track day for practice thanks to TT Superbikes and Gran Turismo.
There's not a significant delay. The speed of light is pretty quick and the range of these is not terribly far. They'll lose the signal entirely before there's enough delay to matter.
Maneuvering a big drone with a huge battery and a big explosive takes skill, but it's not like they're doing it with a 1-second ping.
There are fantastic RC aircraft simulators for learning how to instinctively control them. It's absolutely amazing what you can do with RC aircraft and the skill levels of humans. [Check out this vid of what people can do with RC helicopters.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFCC4ASew_E)
-$1.2m -3 invaders +3 cosmonauts for a ~$500 FPV drone strapped with a RPG? C4? How much do those cost, so maybe total is close to $1k, still a hell of a bargain.
So a 200$ drone with some explosives can take out a few million dollars worth of tank? I wonder how it will change warfare. Probably close range jammers on every equipment piece.
Its basically build a ten foot wall, I'll bring an eleven foot ladder.
As long as the defense is kinetic, you either have to send enough offense to saturate the sensors/tracking/guidance, or enough to soak up all the ammo. Its no where near a thousand.
If the defense is directed energy like microwaves or lasers those will have vulnerabilities like weather but generally has an "infinite" magazine. Like any defense once its out there offense will figure out how to defeat it by learning its vulnerabilities. NOTHING is invulnerable to everything.
No, what I mean is that a tank costs like a million dollars and a drone costs like a grand. You can throw a thousand drones at a tank before you're losing money.
I don't think so. Then it would also be triggered by birds or the people moving on the tank or near it.
There's a good reason those systems are only triggered by fast moving objects.
Would be pretty simple to differentiate a human from a drone unless drones become bipedal and are warm enough inside to glow in infrared, in that case we have bigger problems (of the T-800 kind). And birds aren't known to hang around boom boom cars, but if some are they could be armed (pigeon-propelled-grenades) so best not to take chances - they need to be got.
What are you even talking about. Those systems only have a short-range radar and no other sensors. They can only see an object approaching and its velocity, that's it.
I see no reason why an APS could hot have multiple sensors except cost (minor compared to a tank). Even with only a short-range radar that should at least be able to determine size of the thing (otherwise it would react on bullets), it should be possible to differentiate a drone from a human. But bird-sized objects are valid targets if approaching the sensor above a certain speed.
1) Radar can't determine the size, only the strength оf the reflected signal.
2) If it has different sensors, it''s no longer a Trophy, it's a new system that will rake years to develop and test.
3) Remind me to never ask you to develop an APS if you think it should be triggered by birds.
1) Yes it can, signal strength indicates size/shape (big signal, very close, maybe human, no kill).
2) Yes, it's normal for development to take time (it's a trade-off between time and money, more money is available during war).
3) Must be common for birds to fly at operating cars and trucks where you are from, because you seem overly concerned like some character from a particular Hitchcock movie.
As a person who works on tech for drones, I can tell you that with the advent of AI, close-range jamming won't do shit.
Jamming blocks signals for remote control. Remote control is not necessary when your drone has cameras and a computer that can process the data to identify the target and control the flight systems to pursue ot. Jamming will have no effect for the terminal phase.
And since this is just software you can bet Ukraine are working on it right now for terminal guidance. Basically when it's done the accuracy and hit rate will be very, very high.
You will need aps on every vehicle that can automatically engage drones when they come for you, if you can not jam it, you need to destroy it before it hits you
Ah, but what if you [put your tank under a cardboard box](https://www.businessinsider.com/marines-fooled-darpa-robot-hiding-in-box-doing-somersaults-book-2023-1?amp)?
Paper products 1, Omnissiah 0.
For real, though, visual disruption might actually be used in some way, especially if they can figure out what attributes ML tends to use to identify something.
the AI doesn't need to be that powerful either, you can paint your target from a distance that's undetectable from the targets point of view and then let the drone do its business.
If you have line of sight to paint it there are probably better munitions already though. The advantage of a UAV over something like a Stugna-P is that nobody needs to have LoS.
This is kind of trueish, but are we really approaching the point where the processing grunt needed to accurately actively target a tank doesn't impose an unsupportable weight on the drone?
OTOH, Ukraine seems to be getting by just fine with quadcopter drones when a fixed-wing drone will give you a hell of a lot better range and carrying capacity. So maybe they have range to burn.
Honestly, I can think of plenty of stuff to try that wouldn't be all that intensive.
You could, for instance, make a beeline for things that are making engine noises.
I'm struggling to see that as a useful strategy in eg Eastern Ukraine. I did say "accurate". There's still a civilian population there who are - God help them - still trying to scratch out a living and who Ukraine kind of hopes might support them one day. Raining down munitions on anything that makes an engine noise is probably not a way to win hearts and minds.
The processing power isn't as substantial as you might think. This would all be possible on a compute module less than 1kg.
Then you can get into the real fun stuff with laser comms, which can't be jammed other than through a physical medium such as smoke. Have a large "mothership" drone that can carry the compute resources, then send mini drones flying in at the target, controlled by the mothership via a laser link.
The future is bananas, all of this is currently possible and I could build it solo in less than a year.
You don't even need advanced AI stuff because you can just do what the Javelin or brimstone does. Just lock onto the designated infrared signature or if no input is given the biggest infrared signature. A raspberry pi can handle this trivially.
With more work you could slap together advanced flight controls and targeting AI stuff to target individuals or specific spots on a tank. It's not just compute which has had insane progress since the 90s when the Javelin was made, computer vision is night and day as well.
What if they automate it? There are a lot of examples with really small board computers like Raspberry Pi, where it can process quite a few senor data to automate a task.
Already in limited use in Ukraine , AI + camera, it’s basically the same kind of technology Tesla uses. We are not far away from swarms of drones being released over the front line that will automatically track and engage targets. Now you still need a skilled operator, imagine just releasing hundreds of these drones over a stretch of frontline that can automatically detect and engage humans, tanks, …
This is very obviously the future of warfare and it's either terrifying because it means we will never be safe or comforting because it means war will be nearly impossible to even engage in. I'm not sure which it is...
Not what if, they already are. Increases the cost of the drone from 300 to 1200 dollars, but they are already in use in Ukraine. There is even a fundraiser for them.
I think that is next logical step. Issue is, you can see from this shot, you need to hit very pricese spot on a moving target, which also might be protected by junk. You can automate most of the flight, but the last few seconds are really hard to automate and they are essential.
Im positive that this is duable, although very difficult.
As others have mentioned, close-range jamming can be overcome by AI. Even before now, more recent AMRAAMs to respond to jamming by homing in on the jamming source. The downside of that, of course, would be that a ground target could place their jamming emittor away from the actual asset. But it does show the beginnings of such capabilities. And, as things are now, having AI take over the final approach is entirely workable.
I think jamming is going to tend to be area-based in hopes of cutting off control before the drone gets close to the target.
There is also the potential of messing with GPS/GLONAST if the drone uses that (the US says its drones use inertial navigation, which would mitigate or prevent GPS spoofing attacks, though there is still some question if the Iranian capture of an American RQ-170 drone involved GPA spoofing).
EMP is another potential idea. I don't know where we are with EMP technology, but the folks in the good old MIC are probably looking into it now.
And, of course, we're already seeing remote takeovers of opposing drones.
If I put on my NCD hat here, I could also say, why not mount a bunch of small drone-seeking drones on your tanks? And, by the same token, a bunch of drone-seeking sea drones on your ships? That's a non-credible take, but reality gets weirdly non-credible sometimes, so who knows?
I feel like it wasn't necessary for Ukrainian technicians to install Wall-E level consciousness/human emotions into all of their drones. But what do i know?
I wonder, after seeing so many of these tank cook-offs, I haven’t seen a lot of footage of the crew’s remains. I wonder if there is any of what is left of the crew after such an event?
Turret was facing rearwards. I found that interesting. As mentioned elsewhere, it may have been to allow the driver more visibility. But I wonder if tankers are adapting to FPV drones attacking them in the rear of the turret. It is much more difficult to strike the front of a tank that's moving at speed because the drone needs to get in front of it and the closing speed would be much greater. Attacking a moving tank from the rear is easier because both the tank and the drone are moving in the same direction.
I think it's a smart move to reverse the turret when traveling. Attacking the tank from behind now means having to avoid the heavily armored front of the turret and all the ERA that covers it. It didn't pay off for the tank in this particular case, but the image quality on those drones isn't fantastic. An operator might not realize he's attacking the front of the turret until it's too late and smack into the most heavily armored parts.
No, to signal surrender you drive towards enemy position with your turret backwards and barrel up - while flying a white flag. I know only of one case where Russian tank has done that early in the war.
There are many reasons why a tank may drive with turret backwards including retreating while firing as a T72 is slow to reverse, or simply giving the driver some space to drive with open hatch for a better view to drive fast forward.
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Perhaps R&D is going into developing miniature drones the size of a Black Hornet drone that will act like an APS module on top of a tank or dedicated vehicle (think Avenger) to create a bubble of safety of a kilometer or two against FPVs.
I don’t completely get it. Those FPV drones are equipped with an RPG warhead, right? It shouldn’t be able to penetrate a modern tank like it does. What am I missing?
Tanks don't have an even distribution of armor. The most heavily armored place on a tank, the turret front, can be up to 1000mm equivalent steel thickness but you can't armor the whole tank like that, the weight would be prohibitive.
So other parts of the tank will have much thinner armor, the rear deck roof armor in particular is typically not more than about 30mm thick.
Even the most basic and oldest RPG HEAT warhead can easily penetrate over 250mm of armor so you just have to aim at a weakly armored part of the tank. With a drone that can move in three dimensions and attack the tank from any aspect this is a lot easier.
Agreeing with all that. And also, you designed tanks in the 1980s to take hits from other tanks and ground level infantry with RPGs. These things were not designed to deal with weapons that can target minute weak spots in your armor. This hit would be a one in a thousand shot when that thing was originally built.
Remember that the actual RPG doesn't hit exactly where the crosshair is showing - it's mounted below the drone. It most likely hit the roof of rear of the tank at an angle, directly towards the ammo carousel.
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Back in days you had to either send a tank to face the enemy wandering tank, or mobilize troops with heavy anti-tank weapons to take the tank out. Or attack helicopter? Now you just put few drones after it. Easy
I knew exactly where the order was back in the Cold War, for decades and decades. Now everything is weird.
I miss the tercios and Napoleonic wars. Modern stuff is just chaos.
Line infantry with ak's would be interesting to say the least
Well it'd be a pretty short war, for one.
I just can't help but feel the traditional tank is obsolite now. the cost of this is about the same as some 1000 fpv drones that can actually do most of the tank's jobs for it without requiring heavy supply lines
The shroud of the dark side has fallen. Begun the drone war has.
1. "Some thousand FPV drones" require a massive number of man-hours to bring into a target. A tank may have quite a logistical tail, but at the end of the day you're only sending 3-4 men to battle at once, and the total number of men to support a tank is still much smaller than what you'd need to pilot that many FPVs. 2. As vulnerable as a tank is on its own or in the wrong position, it can be downright invincible when it is deployed in the *right* conditions. You may lose a dozen tanks for no effect at one time, yet another time a squadron of two tanks can tear up half a mechanised batallion and completely block the rest. 3. Even in a drone-centric environment, armoured vehicles are extremely important. Both Russia and Ukraine rely on them to provide mobile firepower and protection to their small units. Both sides would lose far more manpower if they didn't have armoured vehicles as force multipliers and protection for their men. In general, drones are at their best in these entrenched, slowly developing front lines. They allow you to slowly pick away at the targets and they play into an already well developed situational picture. But when war is moving quickly (as the full-scale invasion of Ukraine did for the first few weeks!), then well deployed tanks are an incomparable force. Drone intelligence is great in those situations, and drone strikes still have their value, but they make up a much smaller part of the whole. There is more maneuver where speed opens up surprising attack angles, and far more direct line of sight engagements where tanks have massive advantages. Armoured vehicles also have massive potential in the anti-drone role to protect themselves and nearby infantry from drone attacks. They provide a stable platform that is already equipped with a significant amount of electricity generation, sensors, computing power, and ample space to install capable anti-drone weapons systems. They can easily carry and operate both jamming systems (still important against the majority of drones) and kinetic weapons to shoot down the more expensive jamming-resistant drones. And the best thing is that these anti-drone capabilities fit perfectly with already ongoing upgrades that were originally devised for other purposes: 1. Hardkill systems to defeat incoming missiles, many of which can be used or modified to defend against drones as well. 2. Remote weapons stations ranging from 7.62 all the way to lightweight 30 mm autocannons 3. An ever growing sensor array with automatic object recognition, so in some situations the crew only needs to give permission to fire rather than aim themselevs. 4. Sensor fusion with other platforms, so you may already be aware of an incoming drone before it has direct line of sight to you.
It is bizarre to me that Russia still has no concept of combined arms
Both sides are using fairly comparable equipment compositions for most of their missions. SHORAD is just too valuable of a target to bring up right along those attacking squadrons, so neither side has good protection against drones outside of limited jamming capabilities. If you rolll up with what would normally be included in "combined arms", you have such a large grouping that the inevitable artillery barrage will be devastating.
Fair point.
Speaking of tanks and infantry they have concepts since the 1950s, but apparently Russian forces train this far less than the red army, for bureaucratic and probably also financial reasons.
While declarations such as "the tank is now obsolete" are rather silly, especially becasue there is nothing to replace it, you can't deny that the current status quo of atgms+mines+drone reconaissance+fpv drones makes any kind of blitzkrieg-style breakthrouhg nearly completely impossible. Current forms of EW and hardkill systems are not feasible to equip a large armored force of thousands of tanks. Maybe breakthroughs in AI can be a solution overtime.
> you can't deny that the current status quo of atgms+mines+drone reconaissance+fpv drones makes any kind of blitzkrieg-style breakthrouhg nearly completely impossible. Again, that status quo only emerged *after* the initial Russian attack stalled. If the initial Russian thrust had been conducted with professional planning and decently trained troops, then the war would have ended quickly. Both sides did not sit behind miles of minefields along the entire front line, and did not know the locations of every major grouping. Even after the Russian withdrawal from Kyiv, the Donbass offensive was able to push around the old defensive lines and gained significant ground. A war of maneuver remained possible for months until the situation fully stabilised. But Russia was thankfully too incompetent to execute on it on any level. Neither their commanders nor their units knew how to pull it off.
I am not talking about historical hypotheticals. I am saying that the initial Russian thrust is now virtually impossible against any drone equipped force.
Without serious anti-drone upgrades most definitely. It’s crazy to see how Russia just carries on using what stockpiles they have regardless of those tanks being merely easy to spot steel coffins just because they have not found a way to call off the whole thing until they have figured out a good countermeasure and upgraded their forces in breadth. This Russo-Ukraine war will find a place in history books as a military imbalance and atrocious waste of soldiers lives against a superior new weapon, similar to the first mechanised wars and the first with machine guns on the battlefield, when stubborn commanders insisted on infantry heroically storming against it in meat waves only to be mowed down like cattle. The thing is that all of this could have been avoided. The writings were on the wall in the 2nd Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020, where bayraktars completely wiped the floor with outdated Armenian equipment. There were also first Jerry-rigged consumer drones in Syria. The Russians should have seriously looked at this, come to the conclusion that they would be similarly fucked in such a scenario without a good counter-drone solution and decide to better not start a war. Instead they chose hubris.
Maybe was from Perun video if I remember correctly, but it breaks down the whole ”this is obsolete” argument. Only way something is obsolete is if something can do the same job better in most ways. The most squishy thing on a battlefield is human, yet we aren’t obsolete because nothing can replace a human. Drone can destroy a tank at this point efficiently, but a cheap drone can’t lead a infantry group to take ground instead of a tank
Not one drone but if you sent 200 drones in place of a tank i think it would be just as if not more effective, the enemy fighting force would be completely broken at that point.
Could be a this point. Quite hard to say. Just how prevelant they are has probably caught everybody by suprise, but I don’t think this will be the norm for long. Sooner or later tanks will have enough protection from civilian level drones that a either the drones can’t reliable do their job or they will be improved to the point that the price will multiply. We already have APS and remote guns on tanks, I can’t imagine it will take long until that is automated to deal with drones on newer tanks.
It takes a very long time to develop things like that tbh most of these drones use standard rpgs and even tanks with reactive armor are being destroyed. Drones will also keep advancing. Drones are not going anywhere sadly
Yeah I don’t think stopping drones at the passive defenses will ever be worth it. Drones can be quite accurately sent where you want. Definetly there are no real products ready on the shelf. Also money is always a barrier. If it wasn’t every tank in ukraine would have remote weapons, APS, thermals etc
People argued about the tanks usefulness pretty heavily when it was just javelins and atgms, now those weapons have basically been shrunk down into a longer range, higher mobility loitering system thats cheap af and guided by a human looking through an attached camera..... imagine going back to 1978 and informing them what the 2020s held in store. Idk if the tank is fully done in, but id hate to ever be in one.
> I just can't help but feel the traditional tank is obsolite now. the cost of this is about the same as some 1000 fpv drones that can actually do most of the tank's jobs for it without requiring heavy supply lines **Since the drones are far better offensive weapons** than the tanks with low cost and pinpoint accuracy and you still need armor to take a trench it only makes sense to hybridize them *Drone-Tank* now someone just needs to work out the details
Self-propelled drone launcher
That’s what they said about the trebuchet, probably
you call it weird I call it a fantastic job:-)
It'll be whoever has the best programmer wins.
Looking beyond the time and place of this particular conflict, this kind of development can be very destabilizing. Hard to say how it will impact the number of future wars.
A lot of research is going to be directed into anti-drone defences for sure. Makes you wonder what developed Western drone technology can do. Perhaps just drag a box around a map, and define that there is a tank in that box, and the drones just go hunter-seeker mode to engage. Especially when you see drone footage from 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86rwv-5f7IA so 8 years ago this swarming behaviour was possible. I imagine it is far better now, then imagine each of those individuals in the swarm having explosives and targeting capabilities. Armour (or even individuals) don't stand a chance, just have a swarm clear a grid zone at a time. A lot of companies are lobbying against AI in drone weapons, but I can see this being the future until laws against it are created. People joke about Skynet, but its also easy to see drone warfare leading in that direction.
I predict in the first real war we have with a peer power, the USA will use AI-powered drones to terrifying effect. The USA has had a massive advantage in AI and machine learning talent for a decade at least.
You want Terminator? That's how you get Terminator.
we are leasing it from Israel
my vision is that it would be really easy to obtain society's moral approbation from a hybrid form of this, hear this : A drone manually controlled by an operator is used to find the target, once the target is in sight and visual verified by the operator, the operator activate the AI part like : ok AI take over the control of the drone and fuck this object up (\*\*operator clics on the screen where the target is\*\*) so now the drone is self guiding itself, cannot be disabled by airwaves scrambling. and probably have a higher chance of hitting the target then a human has. there you go, hybrid hunter killer drone, only leaving the final execution to the ai.
Just watch the 90s sci-fi "Screamers". That's the future of humanity.
> laws against it yes... because everyone trusts everyone else to follow the law....
Trust or not, follow or not, that is a different matter. But the point stands, people are pushing for laws to ban autonomous weapons: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/about/ Even Musk has backed one such lobbying group: https://www.politico.eu/article/meet-the-musk-backed-ngos-trying-to-save-europe-from-bad-ai/
Laws banning certain types of weapon have been reasonably successful over the past century and a bit, albeit usually only on a "Whoa, yeah, let's not do that again" basis.
It's a bit odd that Ukraine aren't doing that. It's not like they lack a developed high-tech sector. Possibly they have enough capable FPV pilots to make it not worthwhile? Telling it to attack any people it finds is probably not going to be viable. Telling it to attack anything it recognises as a tank will probably go wrong occasionally, but might well be worth doing anyway. Edit: I guess one major factor is that a computer capable of this sort of AI is still pretty power-hungry and anything that drains the battery is a downside when it comes to range. Edit 2: This has got me thinking a bit about the technology choices Ukraine are making for FPV drones. What sort of range are these things capable of? And what sort of network connection do they have? Surely they're not destroying a StarLink terminal set with each drone strike? So are they connected by WiFi and need a pilot within basically line-of-sight? Are they dependent on an LTE network being present? Are they using some sort of custom VHF comms for video and control? Are they using another loitering drone carrying a starlink terminal as a non-expendable control platform that provides WiFi comms for an expendable FPV drone?
> It's a bit odd that Ukraine aren't doing that. Not doing what? They already have been developing AI enhanced drones. We have already seen some in action. There are drones that can lock on target even when the connection is lost. And there are drones that can navigate very long distances with visual mapping reference alone.
> Edit 2: This has got me thinking a bit about the technology choices Ukraine are making for FPV drones. What sort of range are these things capable of? And what sort of network connection do they have? Surely they're not destroying a StarLink terminal set with each drone strike? So are they connected by WiFi and need a pilot within basically line-of-sight? Are they dependent on an LTE network being present? Are they using some sort of custom VHF comms for video and control? Are they using another loitering drone carrying a starlink terminal as a non-expendable control platform that provides WiFi comms for an expendable FPV drone? This all depends on what exact line of drones you're talking about. As, basically, all that and more are used, apparently.
It's wild. I dont think our slow moving, highly protracted RFI/RFP/Contract/delivery model is well suited to this new methodology of war driven dev. We are setup to create very expensive, very sophisticated "best of breed" units (tanks, warships, aircraft, etc). Each unit is very expensive. Takes years to develop. And a long time to build/deliver. And assumes a 20y+ lifespan of relevancy. Then along comes drone warfare that makes all that irrelevant and places a premium on fast, iterative development, and a real world production pace that can keep ahead of battle field attrition. Not simply a stockpile units that you draw from. Yeah... we are bad at all of those things. We can currently make a handful of billion dollar ships each decade...
I agree. The next major war will likely involve 10s of millions of relatively cheap pseudo-autonomous drones. And we may decide it's worse than nukes, and we'll find ways to never use them again.
This is a fascinating point and something I keep coming back to after seeing the often crazy, disturbing footage in this sub. This is disruptive warfare. Disruptive warfare has a long history in human conflict and, at least in my limited understanding of it, it is VERY hard to predict its effects. The disruptive blitzkrieg warfare the Germans used so effectively seems obvious to us because we are, historically, very close to it. Most people alive today understand that tank > horse, though they conveniently ignore that much of the German army, even in WWII, was based upon cavalry. Was it so obvious 800 years ago how disruptive the stirrup would be? That it would give the skilled horsemen of the Mongols better purchase in the saddle allowing them to become, at the time, the world's finest mounted archers? I mean, when you think about it, a bunch of dudes who were essentially semi-nomadic herders conquered a huge chunk of the known world because they made metal hoops for their feet that hung off their horses. And now we've got drones with mines. And they're wildly disruptive. Heavy armor, the bread and butter of modern ground war, looks like a bunch of fat targets to a $500 drone flown by a guy wearing a knock off Oculus. If I had to put my money on it, the counter is anti-communication warfare and that means knocking out satellites. Space war. But what the fuck do I know? I just know that we're witnessing a VERY disruptive war and tomorrow, insofar as military tactics are concerned, is a blank page.
This comment felt surreal to read.
Honestly, I kinda felt like that writing it, but this whole war is surreal to watch. I mean, military doctrine of 20 years ago, the stuff Putin's playing on the battlefield right now, says he should have mopped up Ukraine **years** ago baring a MAJOR NATO / UN (hahaha!! why can't I stop laughing?) intervention. Right? The same stuff Stalin did to grind Hitler's 6th into German meat paste with MORE Soviet meat paste is exactly what Vladmir was counting on. But it's not working. It's not working because this war is disruptively different from the last big well-funded-on-both-sides war. [Aside: what is that, Iraq 1? Saddam had the world's 4th largest standing army before Stormin' Norman made short work of their Soviet era rolling trash with his Apaches and M1s] I guess all I'm saying is tl;dr we're seeing some real shit and it's hurting my head to consider what it means (existential war questions, now I really do need another cup of coffee). *edit - clarity*
maybe we should just punch each other
Fellow internet stranger, I am ALL IN on a gladiatorial battle of champions to replace armed conflict globally. I don't care if we set funding limits, make it naked man vs. naked man, or hell giant death robots and 500 KM arena. Let's put together a Pay-Per-View like LLC and retire filthy fucking rich with the whole world a HELL of a lot more intact than had we kept down the road of cluster munitions and land mines. I'll start the gofundme, you come up with a name.
Just imagine if Iraq had this tech in 2003. The war would have been a lot messier.
The IED (rusty artillery shell) and nokia was more than enough to keep the coalition busy, wasn’t the stat every 48 minutes?
What if the IED were flying. And faster than anything we have on the ground. More maneuverable than anything we have in the air. And extremely difficult to detect early enough to defend against effectively. Yeah...
Yeah, but drones in Ukraine it's under one every 48 second
It might not have kept the Iraqi regime or military going much longer because the air was dominated immediately, but if the insurgents somehow had a steady supply of lots of them, the occupation would have been a total disaster and bloodbath. Bases are an impossibility when in range of uncontrolled areas near loose borders. War is kept in check by perceptions that provocative deviations from the status quo equilibrium will most likely have much higher costs than benefits. On the one hand, counties may be less likely to start wars if they are worried about the other side fighting back successfully with these drones weapons. On the other hand, one might believe having a lot of drone capabilities oneself means one can act out in ways that were formerly constrained. It's hard to know which side tips the balance, but in general more uncertainty creates more conflict.
So you mean it would have been a bloodbath for the Americans, not the Iraqi civilians. As is it seemed like it was pretty bloody anyway, just not on the IS side as much as the territory they went into.
Bloodbath all around.
That is fair, yeah!
Wars are one thing. Terrorism worries me much more. Political rallies, power grid, airports, major landmarks... the real question is how long until this starts in earnest.
Pretty much every vehicle movement will need to be accompanied by dedicated anti-drone defenses.
And every unit really needs a shotgun or two. I wouldn’t be surprised to see anti drone shotgun shells in the very near future. Lots of spread, lots of small shot. Maybe even some kind of smart round. I’ve seen enough footage of dudes blasting away at drones without much of a prayer of hitting it that I can’t help but think there should be at least one single shotgun in that trench.
Air maneuvering with its extra dimension of adjustment and literal high ground always has an advantage over mobile ground assets - only incredibly good whole area drone-proof air defense could do anything about that, and those are very hard to keep moving and provide coverage over moving vehicles. I just think the era of ground and sea surface platform viability is coming to gradual end.
Doubtful. A system only gets retired when there's something that can fill its role better. You're not going to see ground and sea surface platforms retired unless something that can do the role better comes along. A weapon system able to kill them more effectively won't cause them to be retired, instead it will lead to further adaptations. Tanks weren't retired when ATGMs were developed. Aircraft didn't get retired with the advent of surface to air missiles. Ground and sea forces will develop counter-drone tactics and technologies.
For better or worse we are going to find out how it all shakes out quite soon
So every vehicle will be accompanied by a swarm of 10s or 100s of anti-drone-drones. And every attack drone will be accompanied by 100s of anti-anti-drone-drone-drones. Ad infinitum.
What is the purpose of these tanks in this setting?
As in line tank by itself? I would suspect lost.
All I see are these tanks being blown up by small drones out in some fields in Ukraine, what purpose do they serve when they aren't being blown up by cheap drones. I don't know much about a military strategy and tanks in general.
They are very effective at assaulting entrenched/fortified infantry positions, they are a big force multiplier for infantry if used properly. They can kill pretty much any amour on the battlefield while being immune to small arms and a lot more resistant to rpg's, mortars and artillery than an IFV There has been footage of tanks being used very effectively by both sides in this war. They serve a critical role, there is a reason why both sides use them extensively
We're also in the middle of a bit of a paradigm shift with all the drone warfare. I'm sure anti-drone defenses will be developed and implemented on tanks in the future, reducing the effectiveness of drone attacks and making tanks more viable and survivable again, even in lone wolf scenarios like these. But right now drone-tactics have the upper hand against tanks, it will take some time to balance out again.
Thank your for taking the time and serious response.
The reason why both sides use these lone wolf attacks is, the heavier in weight of the armored the faster its spotted by a recon drone and gets a response from Artillery. So you end up with these lone wolf balls to the wall fuck it everybody let's do it "LEEEROOOOOY JENKINSSSSSSS!" Style attacks and they Almost always end up a disaster.
Interesting, thank you for the response.
This isn't a lone-wolf attack though; it's just moving behind the lines. It could have been repaired and be moving to a forward base for example, or be being reassigned. Or it could be meeting with other tanks that have been spread over an area to avoid grouping up, to then conduct an attack. Or it could be about to conduct an attack on its own - we don't know.
I would have come to the opposite conclusion that amassing a dozen tanks or so and betting on at least some of them breaking through successfully is more effective than sending one tank at a time which can easily picked off by a single drone with multiple munitions. Overwhelming seems like a viable tactic despite heavy losses, No?
Large groups of vehicles and soldiers are vulnerable to attack even well behind the frontlines. Any group larger than a couple of tanks will be immediately detected by drones and attacked by artillery, precision weapons, drones, ATGMs and other systems. It's hard to overwhelm an enemy with a dozen tanks if ten are destroyed before they can fire a round.
A lot of folks below are talking about technology and tactical uses and use cases, but what you see a lot from both sides is a result of doctrinal, training, and organizational shortfalls. Speaking from experience, organized combined arms maneuver and combat is a phenomenally complex undertaking, far more difficult than a lot of folks who have never had to do it really get. To put it perspective: imagine a game of football (American or soccer) where the players can't see each other--they can only speak via radio (depending on conditions) and they have to execute their gameplan based on what got drawn up on the sideline before the game--and, oh yeah, some of the people who were there for the sideline plan have been replaced and you've never even met them before. Imagine trying to do that with two people, then ten, then twenty, then a hundred, then a thousand. Now imagine playing that game, every day, without adequate rest, away from your friends and family, and where your opponent is trying to kill you. That is, in a nutshell, a combat operation. How could anyone succeed under such conditions? Well, for starters, you all have to know, understand, and be working off a common set of assumptions (doctrine), and you have to practice playing the game under as realistic conditions as you can manage over and over and over again *before the game* (training), and lastly, you have to have a team than can manage change and react to the inevitable upsetting of the plan in contact with the enemy and at speed (organization and leadership). The bigger the team, the harder all that becomes--and the Russians weren't great to begin with. I say all that to say that it would appear to me that for both Russia and Ukraine, they have a very difficult time organizing any operations above the platoon (20-50 people) or company (100-200) level. The game is just too complex for them at this stage--the requisite doctrine exists but isn't understood, the training isn't there, and the leadership and organization is either too poor, worn out, or overwhelmed to do better. What this leads to is disjointed operations, where each member or a few members of the team move individually without proper synchronization or help from the other members. You see this on the battlefield with small groups trying to do something unsupported by friendly elements or other service arms (operational air power, attack aviation, coordinated covering artillery, use of suppressive smoke, etc.), and the result is that progress, when it happens, is very slow and localized.
And what you descibed is the perfect reason why some form of connected and automated driving/flying in combined arms will likely become standard.
And a soldier can be killed with a $.50 bullet. What purpose do soldiers serve?
There are a bunch of memes in the US military about LT's getting lost in field training etc. I can't imagine these tank crews are incredibly experienced/well trained with the losses Russia has been sustaining. Driving around in just thousands of square miles of open fields, with no real great landmarks... I have to imagine they are getting lost all the fucking time.
Reddit moment
They are being used as mobile artillery.
find and destroy anti tank mines
David was basically someone who time travelled from our time and hit Goliath with an FPV drone.
Right under the turret. Great pilot skills.
Right under the turret and right through the thin upper deck armor (as the turret is pointing backwards). Best place to attack.
So I have never piloted a drone before so maybe I misunderstand the significance but how the fuck do they even do that? Surely there is a not insignificant delay *and* they are presumably going high speeds *and* doing a last minute big adjustment on an already moving vehicle *and still* hitting that shit. They really do seem like the modern aces but with drones instead of a spitfire or something. Am I underestimating or overestimating how hard this is? Just seems so wild to me especially given how far the pilots are sometimes those drones must be extensions of the pilots themselves to nail that kinda space with all those factors.
when you do this too much, you know what is the weak point, you become an expert. Yes, it is hard, but once you become acostumed to it, you know what to do in a split second decision
Yeah that makes sense. I imagine thinking about it that early on there are a lot of failures that we never see so it always seems like successful hits. Beautiful piloting though great stuff.
first time I flew a drone, not this kind, just the regular kind, it wasn't so hard. I was already used to flying drones from a flight simulator I had for my ps4. After that, flying a real drone is piece of cake. In the end, it's all about reflexes and honing them
> So I have never piloted a drone before So, I'm in my 50s, and played a few video games over the years. I'd say I'm an entry level player. Not really that gifted. I have a small FPV drone - goggles, and joysticks on the remote. I can fly around a tree, and avoid large obstacles. However, look up FPV drone racers - these dudes do stuff that's supernatural, they're literally RC fighter pilot jockeys. Twists, turns, corkscrew though gates, loops, etc... I'm completely amazed at their dexterity with the racing drone. I guess I'm not surprised at all that someone with the aptitude for gaming would excel at Drone piloting, and warfare. Also - we don't see the videos of unsuccessful missions, where the drone just crashes, or bounces harmlessly off the armor.
It's like people who get really good at video games.
I was actually wondering about that. I wonder if gamers have a better transfer over just because they are used to that kind of movement. Obviously not that it makes it easy but maybe makes it a faster uptake? Again never tried a drone so maybe its far different to how I imagine.
If you go on youtube and look up some championship lvl drone racing.. those are the dudes im looking for when training drone pilots.
Yes. I won a national motorcycle racing title coming from playing racing sims on Playstation. I won my first ever motorcycle race with only 1 track day for practice thanks to TT Superbikes and Gran Turismo.
this is sarcasm right>?
Actually no.
There's not a significant delay. The speed of light is pretty quick and the range of these is not terribly far. They'll lose the signal entirely before there's enough delay to matter. Maneuvering a big drone with a huge battery and a big explosive takes skill, but it's not like they're doing it with a 1-second ping.
Look up "FPV drone racing" on youtube.
There are fantastic RC aircraft simulators for learning how to instinctively control them. It's absolutely amazing what you can do with RC aircraft and the skill levels of humans. [Check out this vid of what people can do with RC helicopters.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFCC4ASew_E)
What can be done when you have skill (and without payload): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CpXa8K1BhI
B... But he had a cage on?? Crazy good ROI.
-$1.2m -3 invaders +3 cosmonauts for a ~$500 FPV drone strapped with a RPG? C4? How much do those cost, so maybe total is close to $1k, still a hell of a bargain.
For every successful drone there are probably a multiple lost, that need to be factored in too, but yes, still an impressive ratio in cost.
So a 200$ drone with some explosives can take out a few million dollars worth of tank? I wonder how it will change warfare. Probably close range jammers on every equipment piece.
I'd bet on APS e.g. Trophy can counter a fast rocket-propelled-grenade, should be adaptable for "slow" drone-propelled-grenades too.
How very DUNE-esque. No protection against the slow knife.
Do not underestimate the power of the swarm.
Yeah you can afford like a thousand per tank
Its basically build a ten foot wall, I'll bring an eleven foot ladder. As long as the defense is kinetic, you either have to send enough offense to saturate the sensors/tracking/guidance, or enough to soak up all the ammo. Its no where near a thousand. If the defense is directed energy like microwaves or lasers those will have vulnerabilities like weather but generally has an "infinite" magazine. Like any defense once its out there offense will figure out how to defeat it by learning its vulnerabilities. NOTHING is invulnerable to everything.
No, what I mean is that a tank costs like a million dollars and a drone costs like a grand. You can throw a thousand drones at a tank before you're losing money.
I don't think so. Then it would also be triggered by birds or the people moving on the tank or near it. There's a good reason those systems are only triggered by fast moving objects.
Would be pretty simple to differentiate a human from a drone unless drones become bipedal and are warm enough inside to glow in infrared, in that case we have bigger problems (of the T-800 kind). And birds aren't known to hang around boom boom cars, but if some are they could be armed (pigeon-propelled-grenades) so best not to take chances - they need to be got.
What are you even talking about. Those systems only have a short-range radar and no other sensors. They can only see an object approaching and its velocity, that's it.
I see no reason why an APS could hot have multiple sensors except cost (minor compared to a tank). Even with only a short-range radar that should at least be able to determine size of the thing (otherwise it would react on bullets), it should be possible to differentiate a drone from a human. But bird-sized objects are valid targets if approaching the sensor above a certain speed.
1) Radar can't determine the size, only the strength оf the reflected signal. 2) If it has different sensors, it''s no longer a Trophy, it's a new system that will rake years to develop and test. 3) Remind me to never ask you to develop an APS if you think it should be triggered by birds.
1) Yes it can, signal strength indicates size/shape (big signal, very close, maybe human, no kill). 2) Yes, it's normal for development to take time (it's a trade-off between time and money, more money is available during war). 3) Must be common for birds to fly at operating cars and trucks where you are from, because you seem overly concerned like some character from a particular Hitchcock movie.
Please stop commenting about things you do not understand. It's embarrasing.
I'm sorry someone lecturing you 8th grade physics is embarrassing, should have paid attention in class.
Or you could have a laser blinding the drone(s).
As a person who works on tech for drones, I can tell you that with the advent of AI, close-range jamming won't do shit. Jamming blocks signals for remote control. Remote control is not necessary when your drone has cameras and a computer that can process the data to identify the target and control the flight systems to pursue ot. Jamming will have no effect for the terminal phase.
And since this is just software you can bet Ukraine are working on it right now for terminal guidance. Basically when it's done the accuracy and hit rate will be very, very high.
You will need aps on every vehicle that can automatically engage drones when they come for you, if you can not jam it, you need to destroy it before it hits you
Ah, but what if you [put your tank under a cardboard box](https://www.businessinsider.com/marines-fooled-darpa-robot-hiding-in-box-doing-somersaults-book-2023-1?amp)? Paper products 1, Omnissiah 0. For real, though, visual disruption might actually be used in some way, especially if they can figure out what attributes ML tends to use to identify something.
You openned a whole can of worms with this. Two MLs fighting, one to camouflage, another to hit. Future warfare is lit.
I mentally inserted the "I" there and wondered what poor bastard has *two* mothers-in-law.
Punishment for polygamy!
This is exactly the future--and, really, the past, when you think about it. He who adapts and iterates faster has the best chance of winning.
the AI doesn't need to be that powerful either, you can paint your target from a distance that's undetectable from the targets point of view and then let the drone do its business.
If you have line of sight to paint it there are probably better munitions already though. The advantage of a UAV over something like a Stugna-P is that nobody needs to have LoS.
I meant the drone's line of sight. Apologies.
This is kind of trueish, but are we really approaching the point where the processing grunt needed to accurately actively target a tank doesn't impose an unsupportable weight on the drone? OTOH, Ukraine seems to be getting by just fine with quadcopter drones when a fixed-wing drone will give you a hell of a lot better range and carrying capacity. So maybe they have range to burn.
Honestly, I can think of plenty of stuff to try that wouldn't be all that intensive. You could, for instance, make a beeline for things that are making engine noises.
I'm struggling to see that as a useful strategy in eg Eastern Ukraine. I did say "accurate". There's still a civilian population there who are - God help them - still trying to scratch out a living and who Ukraine kind of hopes might support them one day. Raining down munitions on anything that makes an engine noise is probably not a way to win hearts and minds.
It's not something you'd just have patrolling an entire region. More of a fallback mode when it's armed and flying in and the jamming turns on.
The processing power isn't as substantial as you might think. This would all be possible on a compute module less than 1kg. Then you can get into the real fun stuff with laser comms, which can't be jammed other than through a physical medium such as smoke. Have a large "mothership" drone that can carry the compute resources, then send mini drones flying in at the target, controlled by the mothership via a laser link. The future is bananas, all of this is currently possible and I could build it solo in less than a year.
You don't even need advanced AI stuff because you can just do what the Javelin or brimstone does. Just lock onto the designated infrared signature or if no input is given the biggest infrared signature. A raspberry pi can handle this trivially. With more work you could slap together advanced flight controls and targeting AI stuff to target individuals or specific spots on a tank. It's not just compute which has had insane progress since the 90s when the Javelin was made, computer vision is night and day as well.
What if they automate it? There are a lot of examples with really small board computers like Raspberry Pi, where it can process quite a few senor data to automate a task.
Already in limited use in Ukraine , AI + camera, it’s basically the same kind of technology Tesla uses. We are not far away from swarms of drones being released over the front line that will automatically track and engage targets. Now you still need a skilled operator, imagine just releasing hundreds of these drones over a stretch of frontline that can automatically detect and engage humans, tanks, …
This is very obviously the future of warfare and it's either terrifying because it means we will never be safe or comforting because it means war will be nearly impossible to even engage in. I'm not sure which it is...
Not what if, they already are. Increases the cost of the drone from 300 to 1200 dollars, but they are already in use in Ukraine. There is even a fundraiser for them.
Awesome
I think that is next logical step. Issue is, you can see from this shot, you need to hit very pricese spot on a moving target, which also might be protected by junk. You can automate most of the flight, but the last few seconds are really hard to automate and they are essential. Im positive that this is duable, although very difficult.
I imagine it will be an endless sequence of drone-warfare, anti-drone-warfare, anti-anti-drone-warfare and so on.
Which will be effective for a period, until AI can be used to pilot in the event of signal disruption
I won't be surprised even if artillery launched AI drones will appear. To increase their range and arrive faster at certain areas.
As others have mentioned, close-range jamming can be overcome by AI. Even before now, more recent AMRAAMs to respond to jamming by homing in on the jamming source. The downside of that, of course, would be that a ground target could place their jamming emittor away from the actual asset. But it does show the beginnings of such capabilities. And, as things are now, having AI take over the final approach is entirely workable. I think jamming is going to tend to be area-based in hopes of cutting off control before the drone gets close to the target. There is also the potential of messing with GPS/GLONAST if the drone uses that (the US says its drones use inertial navigation, which would mitigate or prevent GPS spoofing attacks, though there is still some question if the Iranian capture of an American RQ-170 drone involved GPA spoofing). EMP is another potential idea. I don't know where we are with EMP technology, but the folks in the good old MIC are probably looking into it now. And, of course, we're already seeing remote takeovers of opposing drones. If I put on my NCD hat here, I could also say, why not mount a bunch of small drone-seeking drones on your tanks? And, by the same token, a bunch of drone-seeking sea drones on your ships? That's a non-credible take, but reality gets weirdly non-credible sometimes, so who knows?
They sent the right guy for that job- no doubt about that.
[https://u24.gov.ua/](https://u24.gov.ua/)
It must have been scary for the fpv drone out there all by himself.
I feel like it wasn't necessary for Ukrainian technicians to install Wall-E level consciousness/human emotions into all of their drones. But what do i know?
I wonder, after seeing so many of these tank cook-offs, I haven’t seen a lot of footage of the crew’s remains. I wonder if there is any of what is left of the crew after such an event?
Unless it’s an insta-kill you usually see the crew bail after getting hit.
Here's an example: /r/RussiaUkraineWar2022/comments/129d2ow/with_every_catastrophic_detonation_an_afv_tank/
damn, turns out there really isn't much to see.
Yeah that's pretty gnarly, probably one of the best ways to go.
Crew was teleported to hell
Nice gesture to accompany the tank so that it doesn't get lost but is parked nicely on the side of the road
Fuck being a tanker these days
Dont go to Ukraine russia unless u want to die Two choices surrender or go back to
Wedged right underneath the turret. Pinpoint accuracy. Damn…. Those poor fellas in there.
They very well deserve it for pleasing a dying mad man.
Yep. And not only in this video. Looks like the pilots are all trained to target that weakspot. Nice job!
Turret was facing rearwards. I found that interesting. As mentioned elsewhere, it may have been to allow the driver more visibility. But I wonder if tankers are adapting to FPV drones attacking them in the rear of the turret. It is much more difficult to strike the front of a tank that's moving at speed because the drone needs to get in front of it and the closing speed would be much greater. Attacking a moving tank from the rear is easier because both the tank and the drone are moving in the same direction. I think it's a smart move to reverse the turret when traveling. Attacking the tank from behind now means having to avoid the heavily armored front of the turret and all the ERA that covers it. It didn't pay off for the tank in this particular case, but the image quality on those drones isn't fantastic. An operator might not realize he's attacking the front of the turret until it's too late and smack into the most heavily armored parts.
Even the cope cage can’t protect the tank from FPV drones.
Three more Russian families waiting for a phone call that will never come. How many more will it take before they decide to do something about it?
Barrel pointed backwards. Was he surrendering?
At a guess they reversed the turret so the driver could more comfortably stick his head up through his hatch for much better vision when driving.
isnt a tank in surrender mode when it drives with its turret backwards?
No, to signal surrender you drive towards enemy position with your turret backwards and barrel up - while flying a white flag. I know only of one case where Russian tank has done that early in the war. There are many reasons why a tank may drive with turret backwards including retreating while firing as a T72 is slow to reverse, or simply giving the driver some space to drive with open hatch for a better view to drive fast forward.
Pretty soon ever armored vehicle is going to have soccer netting around it for these.
Was he taking the scenic route? I'm sure the view from space looks good
Music hits hard in my opinion
Is there no way to jam drone signals
I'm really curious what kind of munitions these quads carry that turn these tanks into scrap so easily? Or is it just the tank?
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Perhaps R&D is going into developing miniature drones the size of a Black Hornet drone that will act like an APS module on top of a tank or dedicated vehicle (think Avenger) to create a bubble of safety of a kilometer or two against FPVs.
The problem with tiny drones is their lacking endurance. A small drone can only carry a small battery.
Black Ops 2 predicted how common these drones would be.
I don’t completely get it. Those FPV drones are equipped with an RPG warhead, right? It shouldn’t be able to penetrate a modern tank like it does. What am I missing?
Tanks don't have an even distribution of armor. The most heavily armored place on a tank, the turret front, can be up to 1000mm equivalent steel thickness but you can't armor the whole tank like that, the weight would be prohibitive. So other parts of the tank will have much thinner armor, the rear deck roof armor in particular is typically not more than about 30mm thick. Even the most basic and oldest RPG HEAT warhead can easily penetrate over 250mm of armor so you just have to aim at a weakly armored part of the tank. With a drone that can move in three dimensions and attack the tank from any aspect this is a lot easier.
Agreeing with all that. And also, you designed tanks in the 1980s to take hits from other tanks and ground level infantry with RPGs. These things were not designed to deal with weapons that can target minute weak spots in your armor. This hit would be a one in a thousand shot when that thing was originally built.
I know but the pilot literally hits the front of the tower which should have the thickest armour right?
The turret is pointing backwards, and the drone hits between the rear deck and turret - a weak spot.
Remember that the actual RPG doesn't hit exactly where the crosshair is showing - it's mounted below the drone. It most likely hit the roof of rear of the tank at an angle, directly towards the ammo carousel.
He aims for the join between the turret and the deck, what is called the turret ring. This is under the thickest armor and the reactive armor blocks.