Burn on the 4th of July
Fireworks, drone swarms, military history and the military future. Oh and China always China.
This is a followup to
The 101st Chairborn: History is a Prankster
The key new point is drone *swarms* that is thousands of drones in coordinated flight. the point is that e even if a drone is slow so that the chance of shooting it down is 99.99%, the chance of shooting down all of 10,000 isn’t (0.9999)^10000 = 1/e because the drones draw fire from each other and overwhelm the defence.
Now the key is to control 10,000 drones without 10,000 human drone operators. To do this one must have say 100 drone operators each of which controls a drone which is somehow followed by 99 other drones.
Something like this has been displayed, say of the 4th of July somewhere. Fireworks now compete with drone swarms for ooohs and ahhhhs.
This would not be the first time that an important military advance was introduced as entertainment. For a long time, gunpowder was used to make fireworks. Later people started using it to kill each other.
I think that drone swarms are the black powder of the 21st century.
I note that the gunpowder, the fireworks and most of the drones were all made in China. History doens’t repeat itself but it rhymes.
Robert:
I know you are right. Like I said in my answer in your last commentary and also your answer to me, US needs to send the Ukraine shipping containers of drones every week. Technology will catch up with this. For now, it is a cheap black powder solution.
With the drone warfare taking place in Ukraine, we’re seeing the fulfillment of most of the 20th military doctrines regarding aerial warfare take place. “The bomber will always get through” was one of the favorite phrases of the 1930s. It didn’t prove true during WW2 so much, but lots of cheap drones controlled from afar shows it can be done. Later in the century the idea “If you see it, you can kill it” came to the fore. Lots of aircraft seem to have problems over the Ukrainian battlefronts, but swarms of drones flying low, slow, and made of materials able to avoid modern electronics are showing how observation can be avoided — or aided if the drones are reconnaissance models. I seem to recall some statement about the “spade being mightier than the sword” when the trenches got dug in the early days of WW1, but these drone swarms make even trenches useless in defending against efficient enemy attack.
Is it time to worry when economists are thinking deeply about armaments, bang-for-the-buck wise?
A Reporter’s Journey Into How the U.S. Funded the Bomb
NY Times – yesterday
Watching “Oppenheimer,” a journalist wondered (perhaps a bit obsessively): How did the president get the $2 billion secret project past Congress?
(As I recall, one of the measures taken was to ‘borrow’ all of the silver & copper from the US Treasury – coins were melted down, valuable metals were replaced with zinc – for use in purifying uranium. Such metals were returned to the Treasury after the war.)
I wasn’t always like this.
I used to be a biologist thinking about bang for the buck.
plus since then we’ve survived 43 years (see post above)
A guy I knew in college was a band geek and wanted to write band geek software for marching formations. The idea was that, as in an actual marching band, each marcher followed a set of simple rules about spacing and following to maintain formation while a single leader, or perhaps a handful of leaders, would guide the entire formation. He got into computer animation and, having done some seminal work in animation, started working on his marching formation idea except with flocks of birds or schools of fish. It took him a while, but he’s the only guy I know from school who won an Oscar. It was a technical Oscar, but I think he was given it by Jennifer Garner, so there’s that.
It sounds like his work is still as relevant as ever. I haven’t kept in touch, but there’s a chance he’s working on drone swarms now.
You’ll also notice that the same mechanics that let one control drone swarms also makes it easier to counter them. Maybe it’s a time to fire up the emulator and play a round of Lemmings.
I knew a guy in college who was into getting computers to talk, and to listen.
What a wacky idea that was.
But, it turns out, you can actually do that.