Technology

My German U-boat neighbors are seething right now.

So, one of the really interesting things to me about this approach is that it offers the same asymmetric value proposition that cheap attack drones do to modern pre-drone IADS.

That is: this is a platform that costs 10-15k, and an AGM-88 of modern manufacture costs almost 900k, and a Kh-31 costs about 550k - and, just as importantly, both require a long time to manufacture. So, you could theoretically make a moderately large distributed array sprinkled over a few square kilometers, and even if they’re ALL turned on, it quickly becomes logistically infeasible to knock them all out without spending a silly quantity on antirad munitions, as well as massively attriting your stocks of antirad munitions. And if you turn like 10-25% of them on at a time and cycle through your array, the problem becomes even harder for the attacker. And if you have some sort of process or mechanism - like, oh I don’t know, figuring out how to do light aerial transport with cargo drones, or even figuring out how to mount these distributed array nodes on the drones themselves, and some sort of lightweight tether for providing power - the problem becomes a MASSIVE pain in the ass for an adversary (especially that last idea, which introduces z-axis and immediate maneuverability, such that the array could feasibly detect and altogether avoid an incoming antirad munition).

And that’s the paradigm of modern warfare - not just drones, but also networked and attritable systems that maintain functionality when elements are taken offline

This is absolutely a thing. I remember reading a story about this, this was years ago, but this guy worked for the air force of some nation in heavy conflict. One of the most used weapons in this war was an anti-radiation missile, it would loiter for some time until it detected an emissions target then lock on and destroy it. Whenever they needed to use radar, they would hotwire a bunch of microwave ovens to work with the door open, then plug them in with like six extension cords plugged together. The missiles would lock right onto those microwave ovens and blow them up. He was joking about how the enemy would boast they destroyed 15 aircraft that week on the ground, when his force only had 10 aircraft to begin with.