During World War II, the Wehrmacht developed the remote-controlled Goliath tracked mine to take out tanks, fortifications, and other targets. Despite some models packing a whopping 220 pounds of explosive, they sort of looked like a toy a child could ride on, and would almost be adorable if it weren’t for the fact that they were Nazi death bombs.
Who’s an adorable little Nazi death bomb? You are! You are!
As in so many things, Ukrainians have rediscovered and deployed (kinda) another lost weapon/tactic from World War II. Namely, they’re using remote control vehicles as suicide antitank bombs.
I’ve long thought you could use even smaller, slightly modified off-the-shelf RC cars in mass to take out softer targets like trucks. Or drive into a enemy barracks with just a couple of pounds of plastique studded with roofing nails.
The Russo-Ukrainian War continues to expand the possibilities of drone warfare, and I trust the Pentagon (and every other military in the world) is taking notes.
Tags: drone, Military, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, tanks, Ukraine, World War II
I’ve been saying this for years.
But, the US military ain’t going to notice it until someone rams it up our mutual and collective asses sideways without lubricant.
Couple of points… We should have had similar tools going years and years ago, but the vision simply isn’t there. Urban warfare labs have been playing around with remotely-piloted everything, and the tech has been experimented with as far back as the late 1990s. The problem? Nobody has gotten behind it, and it’s an orphan weapons technology.
We should have had our machinegun systems mounted on these little wheeled and/or tracked RPV systems years and years ago, in order to be able to deliver fires the way we should be able to out to the full range of the MG. Because we’ve got a bunch of dolts with zero imagination, here we are.
Hell, I proposed a tripod system with camera and control unit that could put the gunners below line-of-sight for the guns, and they said it was “unrealistic”. Ah, well… Someone will no doubt do it, and we’ll still have the optics mounted above the barrels, getting our gunners killed for decades to come.
The root problem here is that the “system” is sclerotic and unable to observe and adapt. We knew from watching the bush wars in Africa during the 1980s that IED and mine warfare on surface lines of communication would be a critical problem for anything we did. But, did the system take action? Were any of the people warning of this ever paid attention? Nope. “Not our problem…”
That’s going to be the epitaph for a lot of dead GIs, I’m afraid.
Oh, and there was a nifty little autonomous anti-tank system that Boeing or someone was working on as a part of the FCS system. The mines were basically these passive little deals that would network on the battlefield, identify where the enemy had put in breaches, and then work autonomously to move themselves and reseed the breach.
They had future iterations in mind that would quite literally follow the enemy tanks home to wherever they were lagared up doing resupply and refueling ops, and then home in on the fuel and ammo resupply trucks rather than the tanks themselves.
Whole thing was quite “Second Variety”-ish, ifyaknowwhatImean. One of the developers had apparently been reading his Philip K. Dick.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxqouF4XyVc
2. “They sent a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.”
Everything old is new again.
A remote controlled toy car with a bomb was a murder weapon in The Dead Pool.
@Kirk
Ah, the autonomous FCS mine concept. One of technical issues (and an issue with drone-swarming tactics generally) is how to model radio propagation and network congestion for these systems. Most of the technical literature on building out radio networks assumes a static set of high-mounted base station transmitters. On a battlefield, static + high up + transmitter = blown up, so you go to pure peer-to-peer radio links. There has been progress on this, with walkie-talkies now relaying location data, text, and digitized voice to each other en-route to a command hub, but a true scatter-your-radios-all-over-the-place spontaneous network requires re-thinking a lot of the basic math. When I was working with this stuff (some years ago, to be fair) the prevailing assumption among Pentagon brass was that massive computing power would make anything possible. The notion that combinatorial explosion will outrun even arbitrarily advanced computers is a tough sell when the simulation software people have such cool-looking demos.
Kirk, they have your gun system, look up C.R.O.W.S. (Common Remote Operated Weapon System), usually mounted on vehicles (so no more standing out of a hatch), but no reason it couldn’t be on a wall.
Note that one issue with deploying small drones is fratricidal EW. As a result of all the cell phone IEDs, we’ve pushed low-power jammers down to lower echelons. That means you can’t reliably use commercial/hobbyist drones; they have to have comms that can’t be easily jammed by your own EW.
My brother worked for a CA firm that built police robots. They developed on that had a 50-shell shotgun on it. That was 10 years ago at least. No reason they couldn’t be built stronger and with a machine gun or bomb.
Main problem would be comms, but with AI maybe it would just be launch and forget.
JNorth,
Fully aware of CROWS. What I want is a man-portable version that they can give the MG crews so as to get our guys below line-of-sight.
Something the Germans had with the MG34/42 family and Lafette tripod systems back in the 1930s. German MG teams have periscopic sights that mean you don’t have to expose the gunner’s heads to fire. Something we still haven’t figured out decades later, and being the “World’s Most Bestest Army Evah…”
Yeah, I’m still pissed about it. One of the young men I trained as a gunner got his head blown off by a Taliban sniper in Afghanistan, and I remain convinced that if I’d ever gotten anyone to listen to me about better tripods, that might not have happened.
However, a Lafette and a periscopic sight is too simple for us. The most likely sort of thing would be a man-portable CROWS, because that’s high-tech, sexy, and some contractor could make millions selling them. Put it on a robot, and it’d be even more probable to get adopted.
Meanwhile, it’s a sad historical fact that WWII German MG teams were better equipped, more effective, and more survivable than the ones we field today. F*cking criminal, to my mind.
The US has these type of drones in helicopter, plane and tank versions. They have high explosive warheads. They are nothing new and came into widespread use mid GWOT. One of the most common is an R/C plane called the “Switchblade”.
M.Rad,
I only ever saw the conceptual stuff, not the issues they might have run into doing actual development. I thought it was a nifty idea, but I didn’t think that the technology of the time was going to make it even possible, let alone affordable.
Now? LOL… I would not be one whit surprised to hear that the Ukrainians are homing their drones in on the Bluetooth signals put off by Russian smartphones, or that they’re using cell phone towers to vector in attacks. You wouldn’t hear anything about that, because OPSEC, but I’m willing to lay you long odds that once this is over, there’s going to be a whole new set of issues about electronics on the battlefield.
I was doing position papers prior to our 2005 deployment about social media and all the attendant crap with people having cell phones and satellite phones in theater. At the time, everyone above me thought I was nuts. Then, we had an “incident”, and suddenly people got concerned about the issue. I would suspect it’s even worse, today. Hell, I know it is… People’s FitBits apparently gave away a multitude of secret operations in Afghanistan, and that was something else I figured out was going to be a problem back in 2005. Not necessarily that there’d be a FitBit, but that the issues of connected technologies needed addressing before they became a problem. Obviously, nobody paid attention…
You also have the evidence from exercises, where the Norwegians were given away by Tinder profiles showing hot young Norwegian chicks out in the countryside, far away from civilization.
The parameters of worry in modern war are constantly expanding.
I have heard the Pentagon is working on robotic lawyers that will be deployed to stop the combat robots from carrying out their mission.
@AndrewJ,
Sadly plausible, I fear.
The Russo-Ukrainian War continues to expand the possibilities of drone warfare, and I trust the Pentagon (and every other military in the world) is taking notes.
I trust that the Biden / Obama Pentagon is obsessing about DEI, and couldn’t care less how many members of the US armed forces DIE because of non-US actions
I doubt the Pentagon is doing more than staffing their WOK DEI office to impose that burden on the branches as well as instilling that Climate Change is the true threat to America…
On the bright side, there’s likely to be a bit of a growth industry for us retirees who had Cold War experience, when they get around to rebuilding the military…