I fought in Ukraine and here's why FPV drones kind of suck

I assume this is like a pilot in WW1 reporting how finicky and hard to use bi-planes were. No doubt a bunch of weapons manufacturers have seen this and the special operations Ukraine did in Russia and Israel did in Iran and the wheels of progress are turning and the result will be terrifying.

What terrifies me is that the next step may be AI swarms, where one side sends thousands of drones at the same time and let each of them autonomously choose what they want to target.

It's all technically feasible up to "choosing wisely".

In a sense it's already happening with the Shahed drones. Maybe not smart AI, but the end result is still the same: you have no clue where they will end up.

Allegedly there's lots of field tests of these swarms in the war already.

Likewise, ysterday I was reading about Chuck Yeager's first jet flight, in a P-80, and how most of his time was spent manually juggling the fuel flow to prevent the engine either overheating or flaming out. He barely had time to think about actually achieving anything.

A decade later, automated fuel flow was standardised and aircraft were flying twice as fast and high.

What's eye opening about the recent iran israel conflict is how drones were used. Iran fired about 1000 drones and israel easily destroyed all but one of them. On the other hand israel used drones to devastating effect.

I'm not sure what to make of that, but it's clear that drones as a primary means of warfare is simply not effective. hamas and hezbolla have no notable successes with drones, except for on october 7 where they used them to great effect to destroy specific machine gun emplacements and a couple of tanks. They will be part of the future, but never the future itself.

Israel has been serious about defending against simple weapons for a long time. And expect them to have doubled down on this since 10/7. As far as I know they are the only modern power to have done so.

Whats their power and computing budget tho? The gap between what can be done in data center and on a $2 arduino chip is still vast.