Mighty_Zuk

Why is this your default strawman? No one advised you to make that assumption. No one relevant is going to assume that. Can you assure me your engine oil is on level? No, just open the hood and check it. It's not rocket science. Not out of line for the defeatist mindset though. It's all binary. Either everything is handed to you or nothing gets done and there's no in between. You are literally the only person here who assumed that. K Did you shoot down any Lancets? No. Bam! Proof we can't shoot down Lancets. Did you know that Ukraine doesn't have nearly the developed air power that exists elsewhere? True. False. How Stuart thinks an APS works: Yes it has been. Combat footage was posted here, but if that's not enough, you can also see how much is being invested right now in helicopter acquisitions. It is physically impossible to prove you right.

Made sense then. Makes sense now. But Norway burnt over a year on nothing.

The main point of using an MBT in 2026 (instead of some UGV) is to put a man behind the scope and behind the trigger, and observe and fire, in real time. Throughout history there were many opportunities to cut the man out of the loop, but time and again armies choose to put people in the center of the decision making process. Be it large or small, advanced or dirt poor, they all make that decision. Tanks, APCs and IFVs, artillery and so on, are developed as what was until recently termed "optionally manned". You can take a modified Abrams or an AMPV or M109, and use them completely unmanned, but you choose to put people inside them. Of course you can also choose to not put people inside them. But the "optionally-manned" mantra kind of died down it seems. Because no one really sees the big merit in that. So the reason the M1E3 has 2-3 crewmen for example, is because they want to have those people inside. Not because they must. Not because otherwise it wouldn't be able to drive and shoot. That is not an orthodox mentality. I have heard the same about the F-35. That it's the last manned fighter. That anything after it will be unmanned, definitely. And then we see the F-47, and it's a manned aircraft. What primarily changes aside from the more efficient and advanced manned aircraft is the CCA - Collaborative Combat Aircraft. i.e. Drones accompanying an F-47. So a force of F-47s would have fewer manned aircraft than an F-35 squadron but more overall aircraft with the CCA. They keep the man in the loop. It is one thing to talk to a CCA via satellite from 4,000km away. It's another thing to do the communication in a distance of about 500m to 20km where you can overcome any sort of jamming and spoofing very reliably, and work through sensory data that's much more information-rich with much lower latency. The Ukrainian example also shows that a single dedicated drone strike cell contains no fewer than 5-6 people.

Yes. UH-60 and CH-53 variants for lift, troop transport, medevac, and utility.

If you're a smart feller, you'd know it means being a fart smeller.

As someone who served in the Israeli intelligence community, I can share with you, and it's totally non-classified, that: We have no opinion on attack helicopters. Because we do not operate any. It's actually the Israeli Air Force that operates them. As the anglo-sprechen people say, "cheers". Israel and Poland and China and South Korea and possibly some more I'm missing out. Across many theaters and theater types, the attack helicopter sees solid investment. The US is in a weird spot because it wants to take a leap in helicopter capabilities but it's lower in the budgetary priorities than munitions and 6th gen fixed wing aircraft for the USAF and USN.

Yes. The northern hemisphere already has some 5th gen aircraft. China is going to push some 6th gen there at some point. Long before whatever Canada selects is out of service. An F-35 fleet guarding the northern hemisphere is probably the minimum requirement. True. The case has been made many times that the F-35 can in fact operate in this manner.

That is not yet true. They could overcome EW in maybe 30-40 years. No less than 20.

Not at a rate fast enough to make MBTs obsolete right now. Maybe in 40-50 years sure. But not now. It can be seen by all that AI and automation in general are progressing rather slowly, as they have been for decades, and there is no breakthrough in sight. What we have seen in the past years is a gradual shift to better utilize assets like GPUs and other forms of parallel computing. There has been no serious progress in GPUs for a while, nor is there expected to be, beyond the traditional curve. And with that, the actual capabilities of AI are not actually progressed enough to be sufficient on a battlefield. What exists today in terms of image processing is not very far from what existed 10 or 20 years ago. Current trend is outpaced by Moore's Law. And so we are still far from the time when a weapon can become sufficiently autonomous to replace a significant portion of personnel.

That won't work. Drones aren't nearly robust enough to replace a manned platform. They can only gain sufficient survivability if there are personnel close by.

In that case they cannot.

A UGV with similar capabilities to an MBT would cost anywhere from a quarter to over half the price of an MBT. But since they are not as effective on a 1 to 1 basis and lack some of the critical capabilities of the MBT, they would be part of an enlarged force, which would be overall more expensive than through just MBTs or a mix of MBTs and UGVs. Drones replacing tanks is not possible because that is an oxymoron. The definition of an oxymoron is the combination of two contradictory ideas.

If drones end up being more expensive, how does that make the MBT obsolete? Should be the other way around.

They don't need fortifications. They can use existing ones. Equip them for the task at hand and they'll do it. Usually light forces have their own weaponry and ranged fires. Enough to hold their own until a maneuvering force catches up to them. They have their own functions. Not everything and everyone in the army is all about "DESTROY. ANNIHILATE. MEEP MORP"

SIGINT and multi domain fires are not exclusively SF capabilities. They are instrumental to the operations of conventional forces. In Ukraine. Not as a general rule. How many successful ones before you see the problem is rooted in your choice of anecdotes over nuance? I explained the technological aspects of UAS and C-UAS. You denied them all outright. I explained them in the context of Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Israel, and other theaters. You denied those outright. Go ahead and refute that. Which are? Because every time I raised the matter of technologies you refused to do the hard work and delve deeper. Instead just saying "technology" but never specifying any, how they work, and how they combine. That is because instead of overcoming your technological illiteracy by learning, you choose to run away from any debate and refuse to learn. You then insist on making it other people's problems. Like religious people who say they'll never listen to reason so it's pointless to talk to them. Why would I say that? AFVs and other ground assets are evolving to: Adopt more sensors. Automate data analysis. Streamline and shorten kill chain. Utilize more shooters. That is the natural evolution of AFVs as seen with the Carmel, NGCV, and other projects in Europe and elsewhere. Some of this manifests in new AFV like the Merkava 4 Barak and its relatives Namer and Eitan. Prerequisites for this are also increasingly adopted, such as APS on Abrams and Leopard tanks and lighter AFVs. In the context of helicopters, what was and remains is one aspect of them. A combination of horizontality and verticality. Jets are fast but not persistent. They are one radical end. Ground vehicles are only as fast as the ground permits them to be, and ground also affects how quickly they wear down and slow down from factors other than enemy action. Helicopters are the in-between. They can arrive on scene and depart fairly quickly, they can loiter, and they have significant payload and onboard sensory and computers to bring to the table. Less than a jet, more than a tank. Everything aside from their mobility (which also evolves), is subject to change as much as jets and tanks and other platforms and weapons do. More sensors, more computation and automation, more defensive and offensive measures. Radical orthodoxy is a false description of my ideology here. It is very much possible that the emerging generation and transitional items are driving doctrinal change and if that is the case the doctrine should change to better utilize them. I am indifferent to these doctrinal changes because it is up to the user to decide on that. I care about effective and efficient utilization of technologies. That cost equation always existed. From the early days of helicopters until today and it will persist, and it is true for ships and tanks and infantry. An infantryman costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. A bullet costs a buck. The AK and starving farmer that could severely damage or down it also didn't cost $35k. In wars, there was always some equation of things much more expensive vs things far less expensive. But wars happen because sometimes refusing to fight and expend those resources is even more expensive than losing the war.