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The toy-like drones destroyed during an Army field exercise at Fort Sill, Okla., last month weren't anything special; however, the way they were brought down -- zapped out of the sky by lasers mounted on a Stryker armored vehicle -- might grab people's attention.
The first soldier to try out the lasers was Spc. Brandon Sallaway, a forward observer with the 4th Infantry Division. He used a Mobile Expeditionary High Energy Laser to shoot down an 18-by-10-inch drone at 650 yards, an Army statement said.
"It's nothing too complicated but you have to learn how to operate each system and get used to the controls which is exactly like a video game controller," said Sallaway, who hadn't fired a laser before the exercise.
The drone-killing laser was relatively low energy -- only 5 kilowatts -- but the Army has tested much more powerful weapons. A 30-kilowatt truck-mounted High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator shot down dozens of mortar rounds and several drones in November 2013 at White Sands Missile Range, N.M.
Since then, researchers have made rapid advances in laser weapons, said Bob Ruszkowski, who works on air dominance projects and unmanned systems in Lockheed's secretive Skunk Works facility.
"We're really on the cusp of seeing the introduction of lasers in future systems," he said.
Which do you prefer, lasers or plasma weapons?
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday May 31 2017, @05:58AM (7 children)
History is usually written by the gang with more and better weapons.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 31 2017, @06:04AM (6 children)
AI brinksmanship is where each side builds a Skynet and threatens to switch it on.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday May 31 2017, @11:14AM (4 children)
I get the idea that since we are so heavily invested in "megaweapons", an adversary could well suddenly pop up somewhere with thousands, maybe a million, small drones, preprogrammed to wreak havoc on specific targets.
We would be like a hunter with scads of high powered rifles, prepared for bear, but tangled up in a hornet's nest.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 31 2017, @06:25PM (2 children)
China is the only country that could beat the USA in drone mass production. The USA is pretty damn good at producing things.
This is the ideal nuke substitute. Picture a fully autonomous drone, firing sideways like a tiny AC-130 gunship, just large enough to contain a .223 (5.66 mm) rifle embedded in the wing. There could be a million in the air, killing indiscriminately without human operators. Everything that moves gets shot.
Start with a large amount of ammo. After the enemy population thins out, substitute a larger/heavier power source and cut down on the ammo carried.
Since most people don't have weeks of food and don't have supply tunnels, an undesired country could be cleared out in a few weeks. It is thus recycled into unsettled open frontier land, ready to be colonized.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday June 01 2017, @10:43AM (1 child)
That's scary.
I get the suspicion relations between USA and China are pretty tenuous. And China is growing its manufacturing power by leaps and bounds, while American politicians are paying sky-high execumanagerial salaries and pensions to certain politically well-connected elite to lay American technical people off, outsourcing to H1-B.
I am getting the strong idea that the American populace is getting pretty ignorant technologically as the result of all this H1-B stuff and double-whammied with DMCA / DRM / Copyright / Intellectual Property law designed to keep the general populace ignorant so the technologically-based wishlist-enforcement systems of the elite will be obeyed instead of circumvented.
So we have a nation full of ignoramuses awaiting slaughter.
What really scares me too is something like this is predicted in the Biblical book of Revelation Chapter 9, although I thought this was going to be some sort of genetically modified insect like a desert locust.
I probably bring up the Bible too much on this forum, but that book has some really uncanny things going on with it that I can not explain... ( well, others have their Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce... so don't throw the loony-look at me too hard... )
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01 2017, @07:47PM
Hey, I'll take the Bible over the Koran any day, so I must mute my complaints. At least Jesus didn't have a lust for 6-year-old kids, and he wasn't fond of stoning women.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 31 2017, @08:48PM
The naval warfare simulations which gave each side a certain amount of resources would always be won by swarms of small boats (like Kennedy's PT boat) instead of fleets that included large capital ships, unless the side with the capital ships outspent the swarm by a wide margin.
The swarm of small attack vehicles model is very resource-efficient in a shooting war, but the political negotiations are won with large capital ships.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Wednesday May 31 2017, @04:27PM
Doesn't work, because nobody believes it's Skynet ahead of time.
Actually, Skynet itself doesn't make much sense. What's going to happen is that increasing levels of AI will hollow-out middle management *and* the workers until all that's left is a figure-head top-guy. And the AI will do whatever it's been designed to do while ignoring the pronouncements of the top guy even more effectively than middle management currently does. Nobody seems to be noticing that this is already in process.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.