I also wonder about a point raised by russian propagandists (which imho is valid): the ukrainian things are relatively low and don't have that mast (see here: https://www.twz.com/ukrainian-drone-boat-appears-to-have-bee...). So how do they find their (relatively small as of late) targets in a 20x100km² area 600km off their deployment point without a) sending those on an industrial scale (unlikely given the western supply chain...), b) these things loitering for days (unlikely given the size?), c) having some very advanced sonar things (which also would need some more depth if I look at publically deployed solutions), d) Russian captains are really incompetent (likely) or e) they are actually guided by the plentiful western surveillance assets. Which would be just like the Houthi missiles which are a) fired in volleys and b) probably depend on data by the iranian/chinese ships lurking around ...
The last 2 points make this thing really very good in this specific war (surveillance assets can do whatever they want and russian captains seemed very complacent), but very inefficient anytime else. Also I'd say you should be able to easily adapt something like the various CIWSs (which currently have ancient designs...) to this threat. Also: once you notice the threat (which 2/3 last incident did?), why not level the playing field for your (hopefully not all drunken...) sailors and just flare up the whole environment (which should have helped here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwXzaBixvL8 - also I don't really agree with this guy, that more ships help in defending against a swarming attack when they don't know how to kill the swarm...)
I know nothing about the area, but it strikes me that it's all about the amount of resources you put into each weapon. In the same way that you can make more drones than planes for your $, you might be able to make more underwater drones than submarines for your $.
Although I guess the line between torpedo, mine and underwater drone gets blurry.
So at some point most war machinery will be automated and not carry humans inside, I think this is easy to accept. A little bit harder to accept, but what would be really cool is to just realise that if there's no humans, and the whole thing is automated, why not just simulate it?
The same way mythical armies of literature used champions to fight it out - causing less mysery, why not just simulate the war itself and figure out who wins?
I guess the main issue with this is that right now there's multiple components that help you win a war that are still super relevant, logistics, manufacturing and so on. Once algorithms become the dominant aspect and those other physically bound ones are no more, could we move war fully to the digital realm?
The same reason we don’t simulate Facebook Farmville plots to produce all of our food.
War isn’t some hobby soldiers play at to earn points for their side, it’s the continuation of policy by other means. There is no “simulating” it anymore than you can force someone to kill themselves and all their friends and family by asking nicely.
It's not the same thing. The outcome of war is "who gets to impose their will", which is something that can change without any physical change. We could declare tomorrow that there's a new king of the world and if everyone accepts that, nothing actually needs to change. Producing food is not like that.
The point is eventually all that matters is algorithms. If everything is automated, if a lot of war is cyber war etc, you know already that the best algorithms applied to physical stuff will win, so why not just pit them against each other virtually?
As for the argument of "why wouldn't they just go at it in the physical world next", well they could, but after 10 or 20 wars where you see the outcome is going to be aligned to the algorithmic winner anyway you see there's no point other than to kill your own population.
For what it's worth I don't think this happens in 10 or even 100 years - it's stretching it to a much longer timespan.
> why not just simulate the war itself and figure out who wins?
This only works if the consequences of losing are no big deal.
If all that changes is which set of leaders get to collect taxes vs having to swear off politics and go into industry or whatever, then sure.
If instead the losing population is removed to provide more land for the winners? Maybe expecting them to do as the simulated result says is a bit much
.
Also on a vaguely related topic, I'd like to note that bank robberies are still a thing despite being well known to be approximately impossible to get away with.
It cannot be simulated because many aspects of military capability are a secret by design and as a matter of functional necessity. The available information is supposed to be inaccurate. Uncertainty around capability and causality is a fundamental part of the deterrent and battlefield shaping effects during conflict.
How do you prove the fidelity of the simulation with respect to actual military capabilities? How do you prevent a party from claiming capability in the simulation that they do not actually possess? Countries like Russia constantly churn out supposed super-weapons that are routinely found out in real combat.
If war became all about simulation engineering rather than actual capability, a country is going to recognize the arbitrage opportunity and take advantage of it in the physical world.
It is a bit like conflating e-sports with the real thing. One is not a substitute for the other because the constraints and incentives are fundamentally different, optimizing for very different things in execution.
Awesome, thanks for the share. What a gift to come up with a funky idea and having a ready to go Star Trek episode about it! If only it was like this with all the cooky ideas we come up with.
Interesting thought. I guess war is a kind of "proof of work" which identifies the society that is more able to productively employ its resources. This includes strategically and tactically on the battlefield but also all the logistical and economic support. Simulations fall short on that. Cyberwarfare might come closer though as we become more digitalised so maybe that's the direction things will move in?
From what i understand this is already mostly the case. The military excercises by USA and China produces reports that shows an attack is too expesive or leads to a standstill. This is works as a deterrence to the other side, unless the other side acts irrationally, which is known to happen…
> So at some point most war machinery will be automated and not carry humans inside, I think this is easy to accept. A little bit harder to accept, but what would be really cool is to just realise that if there's no humans, and the whole thing is automated, why not just simulate it?
War is effectively just an escalation of using force to impose one's will over another. You don't need a war if you're China and trying to get your shipping passage rights through Suez or Panama. You'd need a war it you're Russia trying to obtain land illegally from your neighbors.
What’s to stop the side that loses the virtual war just having another go in reality? Can you really imagine Putin or Saddam Hussein just accepting a loss and giving up?
Meanwhile a delay in real time while the virtual war is prepared and fought would almost alway be significantly more beneficial to one side over the other.
What’s to stop the side that loses the virtual war just having another go in reality? Can you really imagine Biden or Zelensky or Netanyahu just accepting a loss and giving up?
I can’t cite any but there were several old (i.e. 70s era) science fiction story where disputes were decided by having, essentially, Champions of sorts battle each other using war simulations. Such as re-fighting some famous ancient battle using a war game console.
James Gosling before joining Amazon, he worked for a similar company. I remember listening to one of his fascinating talk about building USV like those, leaving them run for months, and flying to a remote location to dive underwater to debug them.
You are thinking of Liquid Robotics[0]. I always found it interesting that they used a Java implementation of MapReduce to do their substantial onboard data processing, which seemed very much at odds with the other issue of being extremely power constrained.
I see a small, autonomous boat carrying a torpedo. Make that boat something like a lifeboat, but filled with foam instead of air and it is almost unsinkable. Design it to sit low in the water like narco submarines do, and it will be hard to detect. A flotilla of those can effectively shut down a straight without the expense of manned submarines.
Torpedo is not a wunder weapon. It may miss, there are lots of anti-torpedo techniques since WW1. Ukrainian drones are hand-guided until the moment of impact.
I imagine you can strap a detachable, properly sized solar panel to a torpedo and use the sensors and engine on the torpedo to do most of the work and seed it everywhere.
As someone who works in oceanography: it's very sad that the first and very animated comment thread about these USVs is to do with naval warfare. Like, goddamn, it's ALWAYS "ooooo how do we apply this to naval warfare!!!"
Just let me strap a multibeam and some deep water towed chemical sensors to it and leave me in peace.
I guess it's on everybodys mind due to the war in Ukraine: They sunk 1/3rd of the Russian Black Sea fleet with drones, without having a real navy of their own anymore. Is there a good overview of civilian applications so far?
Also, what chemical sensors are you talking about? I am currently building a small buoy for data logging on sweetwater lakes and would be curious what chemical sensors I could include :)
My guess would be that the chemical sensors generally used are those looking for pollution and runoffs, including oxygen levels. It is important to keep track of water quality in harbors, and dead zones near coasts (and the Baltic ocean).
I am not aware however if mapping ever get combined with environmental studies.
Not to defend Russia, but rather to battle hyperbole: Ukraine temporarily disabled those ships, and I think it's debatable how we're counting "one third" of the black sea fleet. Obligatory Putin sucks and should jump in a lake
I work for usv company. Most of the interest we receive for boats is either multibeam work or illegal fishing enforcement in marine protected areas. We nearly ended up doing some naval work but there was a large internal backlash and the contract was turned down.
When you look at the defense budgets of many countries, it becomes almost impossible to make a viable business plan without the military as a customer. Plus, if the military and luxury markets allow you to provide your product/services to the academia and research (which typically have little funding), so much the better.
Not saying I like how we spend so much on warfare, just being a realist.
This. Boats are expensive. Operating them is expensive. Keeping the corrosion off the bottom is expensive. Military/Public Sector funds help cover those costs plus the R&D to build new ones. Luxury market is pretty saturated with cat/tri designs and solar paneled everything because they want to live on it.
Readit News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwXzaBixvL8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jeCwHViFGw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvwPiiyY-_c
https://www.forces.net/ukraine/watch-dramatic-moment-russian...
https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1ag8...
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/europe/ukraine-cla...
But I wonder if for a normal navy a small submarine with a torpedo isn't more effective.
More so because right now there aren't thatany effective counter measures (some drunken sailors firing wildly in the dark), but that will change.
The last 2 points make this thing really very good in this specific war (surveillance assets can do whatever they want and russian captains seemed very complacent), but very inefficient anytime else. Also I'd say you should be able to easily adapt something like the various CIWSs (which currently have ancient designs...) to this threat. Also: once you notice the threat (which 2/3 last incident did?), why not level the playing field for your (hopefully not all drunken...) sailors and just flare up the whole environment (which should have helped here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwXzaBixvL8 - also I don't really agree with this guy, that more ships help in defending against a swarming attack when they don't know how to kill the swarm...)
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Although I guess the line between torpedo, mine and underwater drone gets blurry.
Dead Comment
The same way mythical armies of literature used champions to fight it out - causing less mysery, why not just simulate the war itself and figure out who wins?
I guess the main issue with this is that right now there's multiple components that help you win a war that are still super relevant, logistics, manufacturing and so on. Once algorithms become the dominant aspect and those other physically bound ones are no more, could we move war fully to the digital realm?
The same reason we don’t simulate Facebook Farmville plots to produce all of our food.
War isn’t some hobby soldiers play at to earn points for their side, it’s the continuation of policy by other means. There is no “simulating” it anymore than you can force someone to kill themselves and all their friends and family by asking nicely.
The point is eventually all that matters is algorithms. If everything is automated, if a lot of war is cyber war etc, you know already that the best algorithms applied to physical stuff will win, so why not just pit them against each other virtually?
As for the argument of "why wouldn't they just go at it in the physical world next", well they could, but after 10 or 20 wars where you see the outcome is going to be aligned to the algorithmic winner anyway you see there's no point other than to kill your own population.
For what it's worth I don't think this happens in 10 or even 100 years - it's stretching it to a much longer timespan.
This only works if the consequences of losing are no big deal.
If all that changes is which set of leaders get to collect taxes vs having to swear off politics and go into industry or whatever, then sure.
If instead the losing population is removed to provide more land for the winners? Maybe expecting them to do as the simulated result says is a bit much
.
Also on a vaguely related topic, I'd like to note that bank robberies are still a thing despite being well known to be approximately impossible to get away with.
How do you prove the fidelity of the simulation with respect to actual military capabilities? How do you prevent a party from claiming capability in the simulation that they do not actually possess? Countries like Russia constantly churn out supposed super-weapons that are routinely found out in real combat.
If war became all about simulation engineering rather than actual capability, a country is going to recognize the arbitrage opportunity and take advantage of it in the physical world.
It is a bit like conflating e-sports with the real thing. One is not a substitute for the other because the constraints and incentives are fundamentally different, optimizing for very different things in execution.
War is effectively just an escalation of using force to impose one's will over another. You don't need a war if you're China and trying to get your shipping passage rights through Suez or Panama. You'd need a war it you're Russia trying to obtain land illegally from your neighbors.
Meanwhile a delay in real time while the virtual war is prepared and fought would almost alway be significantly more beneficial to one side over the other.
So many other factors, but that’s a start.
I'm dead serious here.
Not if we can't even get belligerents and defenders to uphold their treaty agreements.
Early eSport if you will.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_on_Earth_(novel)
[0] https://www.liquid-robotics.com
Just let me strap a multibeam and some deep water towed chemical sensors to it and leave me in peace.
Also, what chemical sensors are you talking about? I am currently building a small buoy for data logging on sweetwater lakes and would be curious what chemical sensors I could include :)
Have a look at these though! https://atlas-scientific.com/
I am not aware however if mapping ever get combined with environmental studies.
Not saying I like how we spend so much on warfare, just being a realist.
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