US Army Should Ditch Tanks For AI Drones, Says Eric Schmidt (theregister.com) 63
Former Google chief Eric Schmidt thinks the US Army should expunge "useless" tanks and replace them with AI-powered drones instead. From a report: Speaking at the Future Investment Initiative in Saudi Arabia this week, he said: "I read somewhere that the US had thousands and thousands of tanks stored somewhere," adding, "Give them away. Buy a drone instead."
The former Google supremo's argument is that recent conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine, have demonstrated how "a $5,000 drone can destroy a $5 million tank." In fact, even cheaper drones, similar to those commercially available for consumers, have been shown in footage on social media dropping grenades through the open turret hatch of tanks. Schmidt, who was CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, then executive chairman to 2015, and executive chairman of Alphabet to 2018, founded White Stork with the aim of supporting Ukraine's war effort. It hopes to achieve this by developing a low-cost drone that can use AI to acquire its target rather than being guided by an operator and can function in environments where GPS jamming is in operation.
Notably, Schmidt also served as chair of the US government's National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), which advised the President and Congress about national security and defense issues with regard to AI. "The cost of autonomy is falling so quickly that the drone war, which is the future of conflict, will get rid of eventually tanks, artillery, mortars," Schmidt predicted.
The former Google supremo's argument is that recent conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine, have demonstrated how "a $5,000 drone can destroy a $5 million tank." In fact, even cheaper drones, similar to those commercially available for consumers, have been shown in footage on social media dropping grenades through the open turret hatch of tanks. Schmidt, who was CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, then executive chairman to 2015, and executive chairman of Alphabet to 2018, founded White Stork with the aim of supporting Ukraine's war effort. It hopes to achieve this by developing a low-cost drone that can use AI to acquire its target rather than being guided by an operator and can function in environments where GPS jamming is in operation.
Notably, Schmidt also served as chair of the US government's National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), which advised the President and Congress about national security and defense issues with regard to AI. "The cost of autonomy is falling so quickly that the drone war, which is the future of conflict, will get rid of eventually tanks, artillery, mortars," Schmidt predicted.
End of the tank, predicted for almost 100 years (Score:5, Informative)
Re:End of the tank, predicted for almost 100 years (Score:5, Insightful)
A tank will protect you from basically every weapon not specifically intended to stop tanks. Small arms fire, stray artillery, anti-personnel mines. Would you rather cross a mine field in a tank or on foot? Moving forward means tanks. In practice it turns out you need boots on the ground if you want to control territory, and tanks are extremely helpful when it's time to move forward. In a truly modern, combined-arms military, you have anti-aircraft weapons that will hold the airplanes back and destroy drones.
Drones are an important part of the modern combined-arms battlefield, but so are airplanes, and so are tanks.
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Even with drones, there are advances like the metal "tents" being welded onto the top which are helping to mitigate blasts from drones, which are having some effect. Eventually, as laser weaponry catches up, tanks will have some defense against drones, if not perhaps having their own drone swarm themselves in the air to automatically intercept anything coming their way.
Tanks are not going anywhere. Yes, drones used to have the upper hand for a brief bit, but that combat advantage is narrowing. Armies an
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The newest Russian T-14 tank has anti-drone systems [wikipedia.org], but that got cancelled so instead they weld cages onto their tanks and pray (ie, die).
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It sounds like you are arguing more for Infantry fighting vehicles, and armoured personnel carriers than tanks.
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Those can't take the kind of incoming fire a modern tank can. Or even an older flawed tank like the T72.
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I know you meant that tongue in cheek but you actually make a good point we can see in mmorpgs.
The tank player is the key defensive hero there to suck up incoming fire while everyone else is there to heal or buff the tank or using the tank's aggro ability to hide behind, dish out lots of raw hard damage from glass jaw wizards and rogue type characters.
Combined arms warfare but in computer gaming.
If your party was all tanks, your team would fail most harder boss quests for lack of healing and other support.
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Infantry are great. Tanks are great. Together they are better. You also need bulldozers. [youtube.com] Infantry can't do their job.
This video shows how US combined-forces work together to move across a defended trench [youtu.be]. Anything not in an armored vehicle in that environment is dead. If you compare it to videos of Ukraine, it works a lot better than this [youtube.com].
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The "drones destroy tanks" argument is great if you base just on what's going on in Ukraine. Both sides there are using tanks from the 1990s. In the case of Russia now tanks from the 1960s and apparently they just moved onto T-34s build just after WWII.
In Lebanon and Gaza there's the same environment in the sense that both sides have huge supplies of drones. You've also got a very similar situation with one side very willing to do fanatical attacks and try to commit genocide whilst What just isn't happening
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Drones are going to make the Air Force obsolete way before tanks.
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Drones are a minor side show to modern warfare. Energy weapons are starting to become available as real battlefield weapons. They'll make mince meat of drones.
What you are seeing is a new weapon that no one has specifically made defenses for. Tanks have had 100+ years of cat n mouse development to become what they are today vs things designed to kill them. The answer was combined armed tactics to keep tanks alive while proving them space to shoot back. Once we start with serious anti-drone defenses you
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one EMP and those old tanks will be making a comeback, can you just imagine getting a blue screen during a battle???
throw me the latest patch, hurry ...
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Oh c'mon, man, just reboot. You don't need to wait for the patch.
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How long have they predicted the end of this or that?
Yet stuff still holds on.
And drones! GREAT! Ever see how well they work with to much decent interference?
Not that it STOPS drones.
But create a hurdle that needs to be overcome.
Not to mention the benefits of the tank platform tends to make it more versatile a weapon system.
And more, nothing stops drone from being used IN CONJUNCTION.
So please try to predict a successor to the technological paradigm....please.
Nice story, General Armchair (Score:3, Insightful)
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What's more stunning is that they think they know what the hell they're talking about it. The platform is unearned, but the arrogance and ignorance of their ignorance is on the likes of Schmidt, Musk, et al. Extreme wealth seems toxic to the human mind, replacing curiosity and creativity with hubris.
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I watch a Youtube channel hosted by a retired tank commander, Colonel Daniel Davis https://www.youtube.com/@Danie... [youtube.com]. He has a unique perspective that you don't get, really anywhere as far as I can tell...
If anyone's interested in stuff like this... Yeah drones are absolutely a game changer. Obviously not the onesie-twosie drone attack, but the kind where 1000 cheap as hell drones swarm a target. We're at an odd time in history where 10K drones are being intercepted with 1Million dollar missiles. That's
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Sure, something like MetalStorm would pose a SERIOUS challenge to a tank platform.
Doesn't mean there aren't tech bases that could create a threat to a platform like that making further tank development a viable avenue for development.
It eventually devolves into Batman can beat up superman.
Re:Nice story, General Armchair (Score:5, Informative)
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Winner! Winner! Chicken dinner!
This.
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Congress loves tanks (Score:2)
https://www.military.com/daily... [military.com]
This nonsense has been going on for years. Of course the US military has a bunch of extra tanks lying around that nobody wants. Congress won't stop ordering more! Maybe they've cut back recently but we probes till have leftovers from procurement bills ten years prior.
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probably still, not probes till
meh
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What's a left over tank? One you don't need? No one knows how many tanks we'll need for the next war.
I'd rather have too many in storage than run out during a war. Ukraine is a great example of what happens when you need weapons but don't have them. It's not pretty.
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Yes, we realized the hard way we weren't keeping good care of our supply chain for the not-sexy stuff. That's now being fixed.
As far as sending tanks to Ukraine, why? As has been said by me and others here, tanks are only truly effective in a combined arms military structure where different combat types support each other on land and in the air. Ukraine doesn't have the right equipment or training or military philosophy to pull that off. We could send them 2000 tanks. They'd all end up shouldering wrec
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Alternative lesson (Score:2)
Get rid of infantry, defend your tank with drones instead, and then get rid of tank crews and make your tank another drone.
There's always a use for the kind of guns that fit on tanks, and even a fairly largish UAV can't carry the same kind of power around. Flight takes a lot of energy and your craft is always exposed while in action.
Hell, maybe have an ADV - an Armoured Drone Carrier, and instead of firing tank shells, launch drones from your portable base.
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The crew does more than aim and shoot.
Here's a simple example: your tank throws a tread. The AI can't fix that.
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So your AI tanks will cost $1m instead of $5m each because each crew member costs $1.3m? So we're going to build 5x as many tanks.
Uh no. The crew members cost a lot to train but that is in addition to the $5m for the tank which isn't going to be dramatically cheaper, if at all, with your drone running it.
So is your magical AI drone tank going to correctly identify targets on its own? Will it choose intelligent strategies and tactics for the situations it finds itself in that were not part of its training
heading in that direction (Score:2)
Schmidt's company is "developing a low-cost drone that can use AI to acquire its target rather than being guided by an operator and can function in environments where GPS jamming is in operation", so he probably does know something about this subject. Tanks carry a lot of clout but they are painfully vulnerable to mines, artillery, shoulder-launched missiles, etc. Throw in some bombing by multiple drones that can't be jammed and it does seem like a platform with limited usefulness.
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Yes, he knows he needs to sell drones at his new drone company.
He doesn't seem to know anything about modern warfare.
Setting the stage (Score:2)
Life is following art again as in Robert Sheckley's "The Battle".
The Armageddon War (Stuart Slade) used people, but it was set in 2008 or a bit before.
Author learned the wrong Ukraine lesson (Score:2)
What he should have learned is that combined arms tactics are vastly superior to non-combined arms tactics.
Ukraine doesn't have the military forces, training, or combat philosophy to do combined arms. Sending a few tanks out without support is crazy town shit. Of course they got demolished. That's not the situation they were built for.
Modern tanks are supposed to be part of a larger force working together. Air Force over head to control the sky (killing those drones), infantry on the ground to keep enem
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>>Sending a few tanks out without support is crazy town shit.
>When and where are you claiming this has been regularly happening?
In Ukraine by both Ukraine and Russia. Numerous times. The Russians are more guilty of this but only because they have more tanks to send out to die without support. There are plenty of videos online from pro Ukraine partisans showing Ukrainian tanks in singles and pairs with zero support forces mixing it up with Russians.
>>Modern tanks are supposed to be part of
Dunning-Kruger is worse from actual smart people. (Score:2)
We keep getting Eric Schmidt stories this year (Score:2)
What's going on? Why would anyone care about his ideas, one way or the other, on any topic except maybe those regarding Google/Alphabet?
Tanks are just cars for infantry (Score:1)
Tanks are to infantrymen what cars are to the most of us. They aren't going anywhere ever.
Maybe evolve into electric or smaller size but they will always be there as the sole means of traveling across battlefields where bullets are flying and roads are bombed up and /or you need to control that larhe area of land.
BOLO! Keith Laumer had the solution (Score:1)
Anti-Tank is not Tank (Score:2)