Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

I’ve been watching a bunch of these videos where they war game realistic and pretty far fetched battle scenarios https://youtube.com/@grimreapers?si=lvRNWBee9RfnkxBI. They’ll cover stuff like a Chinese carrier group vs a US carrier group using slightly futuristic weapons. What often decides the outcomes of battles are the accuracy of ships’ air defenses and how many missiles they have onboard.

Shooting down supersonic, hypersonic, and stealth missiles is hard. You may need to fire multiple anti-air missile just to hit one attacking anti-ship missile. But doing so depletes your magazine faster and it can just come down to who has more ammo.

If you’re able to fire a couple anti-air missiles, and then recover the ones that miss, or have them loiter and acquire a new target, I could see that as being an advantage.

> What often decides the outcomes of battles are the accuracy of ships’ air defenses and how many missiles they have onboard.

I always do wonder how realistic these war games actually are?

They (at least the war games that are public) always assume at least one or both sides are near 100% competent with their systems.

The Ukraine war has at least showed that that is not the case, the best example perhaps being the sinking of the Moskva, or the multitude of times Ukraine has managed to pierce Russian air defenses (who, mind you, has the most AD of anyone).

I'm pretty certain that a lot of these war game scenarios, of played out in real life, wouldn't play out the same way. There'd be miscommunication, technical issues with equipment, massive total surprise on both sides and so forth.

> I always do wonder how realistic these war games actually are?

> They (at least the war games that are public) always assume at least one or both sides are near 100% competent with their systems.

Uhhh... that's not a wargame.

A wargame is when you send actual commanders into the actual field, with their actual troops, and roleplay a scenario.

Yeah, there's walkie talkies that go back to HQ where the top-level generals are rolling dice saying "That unit, you got shot, pretend you're dead", and such, but war-games are a scenario to test your generals, admirals, and chain of command. And often times, require physical movement of the lowest level troops.

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But at a minimum, you're testing the commander's reaction times in these scenarios.