China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) just demonstrated its latest drone swarm tech on state TV, showing a single soldier controlling 200 units.
According to the South China Morning Post, the drones are launched from the Swarm I land vehicle, A.K.A the High Mobility Swarm Weapon System, which can simultaneously launch 48 fixed-wing drones that work together.
Each unit can then autonomously communicate with each other, allowing the entire swarm to fly in precise formation and divide tasks among themselves, like conducting multi-target reconnaissance and strike operations, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said in the report.
Not that I think drone swarms are particularly far-fetched in the realm of unmanned systems, but haven’t we learned by now to not just automatically believe whatever military tech China “announces” on state television?
Since at least 2024, China has been publicly trying to crack down on rampant corruption in its weapons procurement and R+D sectors, a lot of it connected to vaporware fake military tech.
It’s crazy how fast this new war tech is moving.
Conflicts around the world are going to move to drones, not just Russian/Ukraine.
Whoever can build millions of these, yearly, and cheaply will have a significant advantage. Will be able to sell them to other conflict zones
An AK-47 is only piratical to 100meters. It was cheap machines guns that rolled back colonial empires like the British, and French, in places like Africa.
I can only wonder what cheap drone tech will do to change world politics?
Flying 200 drones at the same time is easy, having them do anything useful/effective is hard. Seems more like bluster than anything effective at this point in time, given AI systems aren’t really there yet for precise targeting.
200 drones, each with a high explosive. Cast like a net. Each bomb has a radius of 10ft. So know you have 2000 square feet of carpet bomb, that you can somewhat direct.
That’s neat for like attacking dug in bases or large structures. But I feel like most front lines are held by a much smaller amount of ppl and equipment. Plus in Ukraine I think we’ve seen a return to trench like warfare to hide from drones. Seems like you might be blowing up a lot of nothing to get lucky on the few somethings you actually want to destroy. But hey if you got the money
I called something like that years ago. Whether the report is true or exaggerated or not it is only a matter of time before this becomes reality. This is a terrifying weapon. You can overwhelm any defender with this.
But what I really dread is when someone finds a way of affordably making these drones capable of autonomously identify and attack targets. Imagine what releasing a swarm of those in a crowded city center with instruction to “wander around and attack any human you identify” would do.
A “centaur” is a human being who is assisted by a machine (a human head on a strong and tireless body). A reverse centaur is a machine that uses a human being as its assistant (a frail and vulnerable person being puppeteered by an uncaring, relentless machine).
…
His job was to be the “human in the loop” for an AI that wrote the articles, but on a schedule and with a workload that precluded his being able to do a good job. It’s more true to say that his job was to be the AI’s “accountability sink” (in the memorable phrasing of Dan Davies): he was being paid to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes.
He was, in other words, a reverse centaur.
I’ve been wondering when stuff like this would start to be a thing. Imagine this scaled up, like a carrier that instead of launching planes, launches and coordinates hundreds of thousands of these simultaneously.
Or a small pick-up with a 200 drones in the back, launched close the front of a battle field. Russia lost much of its navy to Ukraine. Anything large and slow is a good target.
