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This has been part of the plan since at least the 80s, and there's alot of OS stuff out there about this subject if you're interested in going down that rabbit hole, viz:
Countering Swarms: Strategic Considerations and Opportunities in Drone Warfare
States should plan to employ drone swarms after careful consideration of their risks and implications. Some literature acknowledges the conceptual application of drone swarms in certain strategic military contexts. For example, one strategy expert theorizes that armed fully autonomous drone swarms (AFADS), a subset of drone swarms, could be considered a weapon of mass destruction (WMD).18 A U.S. Army wargame applied methodology to demonstrate how drone swarm weapons might provide operational advantages in parallel attack.19 One of the originators of the DOD directives on the employment of autonomous systems states:
Deploying fully autonomous weapons would be a weighty risk, but it might be one that militaries decide is worth taking. Doing so would be entering uncharted waters. . . . Hostile actors are actively trying to undermine safe operations [in wartime]. And no humans would be present at the time of operation to intervene or correct problems.20
Countering Swarms: Strategic Considerations and Opportunities in Drone Warfare
The Department of Defense and the U.S. Government face a significant national security challenge in adversarial use of small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS). The available technology to create swarmsndupress.ndu.edu
Picking what you hit, and with much smaller warheads?What is the difference between plastering a city with UAVs that have pre-determined targets and dumping an Arc Light load of Mk 82s from a great height?
Picking what you hit, and with much smaller warheads?
Setting LOAC aside, depends what effect you’re trying to achieve.So the "AI" drone swarm is an improvement over carpet bombing.
Well, for one, carpet bombing is a war crime according to the Geneva Conventions, if the city has protected persons (civilians, POWs, etc)What is the difference between plastering a city with UAVs that have pre-determined targets and dumping an Arc Light load of Mk 82s from a great height?
Well, for one, carpet bombing is a war crime according to the Geneva Conventions, if the city has protected persons (civilians, POWs, etc)
One man’s carpet bombing, another’s strategic air campaign…Well, for one, carpet bombing is a war crime according to the Geneva Conventions, if the city has protected persons (civilians, POWs, etc)
We should probably be avoiding the mass slaughter of civilians, regardless of the semantics.One man’s carpet bombing, another’s strategic air campaign…
I for one, am fully onboard with mass slaughter of Russians until they leave Ukraine. I would not shed a tear…We should probably be avoiding the mass slaughter of civilians, regardless of the semantics.
No, but you can make a war civil.You can't make war PC. No matter how hard you try.
Russian troops or PMCs? Definitely.I for one, am fully onboard with mass slaughter of Russians until they leave Ukraine. I would not shed a tear…
She has a partial and very weak pointAnd drone swarms = WMD, apparently...
Conceivably they could be scaled up to trigger the definition, but so could just about any weapon system. To say that a rifle bullet could be a weapon of mass destruction if you fire a billion of them at one time is equally valid and equally stupid.Drone swarms are the newest weapons of mass destruction. Due to their scalability, they have the potential to meet any threshold in terms of mass destruction.
That shows a naive understanding of both tactics and technology. "Prone to" connotes that something is likely to happen. One can't deny that a drone may "go rogue" but, once again, that's a possibility with any weapon system regardless of whether a human is in the loop. Failsafes can be built into drones.Furthermore, the impossibility of a human operator to effectively control every action of the swarm renders them prone to be indiscriminate and disproportionate.
She has a partial and very weak point
No, but you can make a war civil.
I'll see myself out.
I’m not suggesting firebombing Moscow (though I’m not overly opposed to it), but their industrial and energy sectors have civilians - and those need to be targeted.Russian troops or PMCs? Definitely.
Random Russian civilians in Moscow or [insert city here not near the front]? I’m not so sure.