OT: Revolution in Warfare

[Raellus]

The more content on the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East that I consume, the more I'm coming to think that we are witnessing the beginning of a revolution in warfare as profound as the introduction of steam power, or the machine gun, or motorized aircraft, or radio.

Unmanned vehicles are changing the game, rewriting the rules as we watch on the internet.

Just last night, Ukrainian drone boats sank a Russian corvette with a crew of approximately 45.

A couple of months ago, an off-the-shelf quadcopter costing a couple hundred dollars, armed with a primitive shaped charge that cost even less, knocked out an Israeli Merkava IV MBT fitted with state-of-the-art passive armor and active countermeasures, with a crew of four on board. The total package of that Merkava costs tens of millions of dollars.

There's a profusion of footage coming out of Ukraine of UAVs (mostly FPV types) targeting single soldiers. How cheap has the life of a human soldier, sailor, or airman become? The cost-benefit analyses are getting insane. It's quite alarming.

And we haven't really seen swarm or AI tech in large-scale action yet, but we will soon. See the Loyal Wingman program, or....

https://www.twz.com/sea/interceptor-...ut-by-pentagon

Is there a silver lining? Are we drifting towards warfare without human combatants? What would that look like (especially the end game of any armed conflict)?

I'm really interested in what others think about this.

-