Late on Sunday night, President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed on social media that all of the operatives of the nation’s security services, SBU, who had participated in a a raid earlier in the day that knocked out about $7 billion in Russian military aircraft within the invading country’s airfields, were safe in Ukraine and accounted for.
The operation was dubbed “Spiderweb.”
“An absolutely brilliant result,” the president wrote.
“A result achieved solely by Ukraine. One year, six months, and nine days from the start of planning to effective execution. Our most long-range operation. Our people involved in preparing the operation were withdrawn from Russian territory in time,” Zelensky wrote on Facebook.
Slava fucking Ukraini, bitches!
This was such a brilliantly planned operation, low risk high reward.
Slava Ukraine. 🇺🇦waiting for a reply, good luck damn )
Slava Ukraini!
Fucking Bravo.
This seems like an incredibly effective operation that simultaneously limited loss of human life (even if that wasn’t a metric or the intention).
Machines killing machines.
I just keep thinking… This war has already changed the face of warfare forever because of the drones. But all those drones used on these frontlines are just “dumb” ones, individually operated remotely.
I assume USA (and possibly other players) are working HARD on creating autonomous swarms of these things. Being able to C&C these without a single point of failure is THE future in modern warfare. The first nation that gets this working flawlessly wins supremacy.
That’s just really really scary. Drones will be the new land mines, except they’ll kill us in suburban centers where no soldiers are fighting.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-drones-gaza
Unfortunately that’s already a reality in Gaza. They use AI powered quadcopters murdering civilians there. There have been reports that they would even play recordings of cries for help etc. to lure people out and then shoot them.
Now imagine where this is headed. Genocide drones will be equipped with heat sensors and trained to enter flats through windows and they’ll be instructed to kill any human they can find. It’s only a matter of time at this point because what we are afraid of is already in use, we’re just not at the receiving end of it (yet).
And all of that because most friends/relatives of evil motherfuckers in the world prefer to uphold the “good tone” and family relationships over telling their friend/father/sibling that they are an evil mass murdering pile of human garbage and ideally spitting in their faces. “It’s my job” is how evil wins.
trained to enter flats through windows
Direct residential entry for mass genocide remains unlikely, they’re too vulnerable at close range for this to be efficient at scale. The technology can’t overcome the need for lightweight assembly and will always be susceptible to a good swing from a baseball bat. This will only be used for high value targets or as a last resort while withdrawing from an area.
In urban environments they’re much more likely to just blanket the area with surveillance and slaughter people in line of sight from the air, then starve the sheltering population out like a modern siege. Like what’s literally happening in Gaza right now. It’s far more efficient in terms of ammunition, manufacturing, and psychological warfare.
But I absolutely agree. War is still Hell, but it sure is fucking changing. We’re running out of time before this asymmetry becomes mainstream and groups and leaders that are willing to deploy this technology become the only ones left.
It will still be MAD for nations to use these - as evidenced by the fact that a wartorn underdog can covertly assault a distant air field - but without major global collaboration it will be impossible to stop because unlike nuclear ICBMs these things can be built in a basement and deployed from a shed.
Hunter killers were discussed in Terminator and the Matrix. It’s a terrifying new world we live in.
This is a plot point in An American War
Well and there’s “Kill Decision” by Daniel Suarez. Also, the short film Slaughterbots.
Slaughterbots is likely where we’re headed. It’s a shame that humanity can’t figure out how to constructively coexist.
The good news is, we have already come up with so many interesting ways to almost perfectly self-exterminate, precisely because we can’t constructively coexist. We are the problem, and the problem solves itself! … for the rest of the universe, anyway. This also probably conveniently answers the Fermi paradox, presuming that we have indeed reached one of the great filters and may be about to find out that our species won’t get to pass it due to our persistent inability to peacefully coexist.
Yes, I was thinking that eventually people with critical thinking skills like you and me will simply be eliminated by “unidentified terrorists” and then our murders will be used to justify further backdoors and surveillance laws… Fuck this timeline.
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They already exist, look at drone light shows. And plenty of consumer drones support GPS waypoint automatic navigation.
Bit harder in contested airspace and signal jamming galore. They have to use drones with fiber optic cables for a reason. GPS is very unreliable in the area.
Even if America’s GPS constellation is jammed, what about Europe’s? The Russians have to be using something for their own movements.
The Russians have to be using something for their own movements.
“Go toward sun, Ivan. They are near it.”
GPS and similar systems are extremely low power, meaning it’s trivial to jam them with a higher powered signal closer to potential targets. And you can easily counter multiple navigation systems by broadcasting over a wide range of frequencies.
Much better to augment radio navigation with inertial navigation, terrain mapping, etc.
Imagine this a long term autonomous aerial platform (high altitude blimp) you can nest drones on or bring them in for rearming. Each platform would be equipped with 360 degree optics with additional dedicated sensor instruments.
You see a problem you release a drone or a swarm; new drones are flown up fully armed or the blimp can come in for servicing at a military base 100kms away from the hot zone.
This is tech being developed and fully within our ability to build now
Now put this over a city and your in nightmare territory
That blimp would be particularly vulnerable though.
It would need a pretty robust defense to protect it from missiles/other aircraft
Depends how high it goes. There’s probably a sweet spot for observation and drone deployment somewhere that offers some defense against ground based attacks.
I doubt it would be deployed against an active battlefield probably better suited to monitoring and pacification.
The trick is to make it cheap enough it’s expendable but smart enough to accomplish the mission with the least oversight.
Shoot, I remember watching one of those “Tech of the Future” shows (think Beyond 2000 but it wasn’t that) back around 2008ish. It showcased some future drone tech and was talking about fully autonomous AI driven drones even back then. If its not already a reality in several countries, then its going to be one very soon.
The issue is would you trust an autonomous drone carrying a bomb?
