Taiwan has unveiled its first domestically-made submarine as it bolsters its defences against a possible Chinese attack.
President Tsai Ing-wen presided over the launch ceremony in the port city of Kaohsiung on Thursday.
US officials have warned that China could be militarily capable of mounting an invasion within the next few years.
Taiwan is a self-governing island which China regards as a renegade province and has vowed to reclaim one day.
I’m sorry, you seem to be trivializing how much a difference drone warfare is making right now.
It is not through the incompetence of Russians that the drones are so effective. They are effective because they can pop up at the least expected of times. Can easily be deployed near or even on the frontline. They are much much cheaper than the intended target. So you can send dozens of drones to destroy one parked plane or docked ship.
How do you propose your raspberry pi deals with said drone? Lets somehow assume it has a 100% detection rate, what are you going to do about it? Those tiny $2000 drones dropping grenades may only injure a handful of troops but it is enough to stall an advance or pin down enemy movement. Shooting a tiny target 60m in the air is harder than it looks.
How do you protect from multiple low profile unmanned boats laden with explosives coming at your warship in the dead of night on a moonless night?
Make no mistake drones are a game changer. They will not outright win the war, but they bring many advantages to a battlefield. Even just the live feed updates that can allow commanders a birds eye view of the battlefield in real time will change maneuver warfare. I haven’t even started on 6th Gen fighters with fighter drone integration
No, that is almost all incompetence. With the last step coming from some fairly simple technology that we already have.
Let’s just go through your bullet points:
Just to make it clear: Drones will revolutionize war in the same way that night vision has. And they already have been doing this. Drones for surveillance have been getting deployed with recon units for years now. And… just go ask Iraq and Afghanistan how they feel about drones for the offensive capability. But the use of consumer grade drones with grenades and c4 attached (because clearly Ukraine are big fans of I Did A Thing) are more or less an anomaly with a lot of other explanations. And against a military that is not being actively constrained because other nations don’t want this war to end too quickly: We would be seeing laser guided munitions doing MUCH more damage in the exact same situations. And if russia were… let’;s just say competent? The drone based attacks would largely be isolated cases (which they already may be. Propaganda is hard)
But, much like with night vision: There is a limited window of dominance. Their takes are often times very questionable and naive, but Task and Purpose’s youtube channel has touched on this a lot. There was a time where the US and its allies were more or less unstoppable at night because of NVGs. We could shoot anyone we wanted and nobody could stop us because nobody could see us. Then… even consumer grade night vision has gone a long way toward stopping that. Maybe aiming is hard. But those handy dandy beacons we used to not kill each other? Those stick out QUITE a bit to a sentry with the cheap goggles and that is usually enough to turn on the flood lights and alert the camp. Same with thermal vision being rendered MUCH less effective by a freaking space blanket.
And, because I am having fun, it is anecdote time. A year or two back I went out into the woods with a couple buddies and a few of the interns we were working with. Using open source computer vision and anomaly detection libraries (the same stuff that Frigate and other event detection solutions for home security cameras runs on) and a webcam we wanted to see how “real” “sniper school” was. Trained on some photos we had taken over the years and maybe an hour in the field. Then we went to go place a few objects somewhere on a mountain side.
When we turned on the camera? it freaking detected some of the twigs we had broken while walking off the trail. Like, almost instantly we had the trail and could even see where I had slipped on the trail itself after scrambling across some class 3 (okay, more like 4…) terrain to place an object.
ALSO detected a lot more trash that we picked up on the way back up to grab our shit.
Through drones we are seeing a first hand view of the war. First time I’ve seen a person shot, someone blown up. It’s not like the Hollywood films that’s for sure.
No bleeding, missing arms like every war film in Hollywood. You don’t see anything, they get shot and just become lifeless. No visible blood or anything. Similarly the drone dropped grenades, I would have thought they would be missing body parts.
But on the outside you wouldn’t even know it’s terminal injuries. And there was another one where the tank commander landed on the roof due to a cook off in what seemed to be in one piece. But then someone calculated the G force as 300gs.
Thanks to drones I now know people mostly go out on a whimper and not a bang.