Yeah FPV drones have massively increased the cost of invading a country. It's basically a return to WWI style trench warfare, except no man's land is the size of the range of the drones (20+ KM).
replythe gray zone is ~200km so long as you have ISR drones able to see it
replyartillery, missiles, and long range drones are in the mix too. AI enabled spotting makes ISR detection rapid and effective.
some kubernetes container spots a random pixel that means hidden vehicles and a HIMARS strike is dispatched ASAP
It's always been pretty horrific. We just didn't have bodycam livestreams invented during trench warfare times.
replyHopefully making the real horrors of war visible to the public/world will make war less frequent. Alas...
replyHumans just adapt and normalize things too quickly, so long term seeing more violence will just desensitize people and make it more acceptable. Just look at the difference between protected kids in suburbs vs kids growing up in bad areas.
replyPeople have been saying this since Vietnam (and actually now that I think about a little more, this may actually have happened).
replyIn the late 1960s daily TV news coverage revealed the horrors of war to the American public as never before (just as Brady's photos had done in the Civil War). That palpable gruesomeness was instrumental in the rising tide of unpopularity enjoyed by the war (and Johnson) by the elections of 1968.
replyHas seeing the horrors of the Ukraine war made you want the west to stop it and force a surrender? More horrors don't make people want less war. If anything, it may be the opposite. People pretend to be anti-war right up until there's a war and then suddenly it turns out they're actually anti-losing-the-war.
replySurrendering to an aggressor will let the aggressor get what they want, hence making war more appealing. So it's coherent for anti-war people to resist and make it as hard as possible for an aggressor. Even Gandhi justified defensive war.
replyI want less war. I'm against attacking other countries, but totally in favor of defending yourself if you get attacked. Those aren't contradictory statements.
replyActually nothing cheers me up more than seeing Russians being hunted down and killed by drones. Fuck them.
replyMost of us who build weapons of war live with some awful dilemmas. One of them is:
replyWe want to perform our work skillfully, effectively, and professionally. But we never want our tools to actually be needed.
(Another is that we can't effectively create a shield without the risk of it being used as a sword.)
Or as my dad, a CSAR pilot, used to say, "I'd be happy to be out of a job."
replyA month ago Sternenko had a crowdfunding campaign for the secret drones. Recently he showed the fruits of that campaign: new drones have better connection and now you can watch kills in 4k!
replyAlso recent advances in battery tech brought increased energy density: the same drones which had range 20km now have 40km.
Yes, but it's not necessarily more horrific than the unseen effect of the 155mm shells. It's just that those don't come with killcams.
reply(The killcam is a WW2 invention, starting with linking cine cameras to the machine guns of fighter aircraft)
Depends on who's on the receiving end.
replyI agree. Nightmare fuel.
replyInvaders getting blown up from the sky. What’s not to love?
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