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.
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.