US Army Should Ditch Tanks For AI Drones, Says Eric Schmidt (theregister.com) 110
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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that's per design. the stated goals (defeat hamas and rescue hostages) were never realistically meant to be met. you can't really decisively defeat hamas (a resistance) without cleansing the whole area, and even if you did a new one would spring up. if anything the brutalization will just produce more volunteers. so cleansing it is, which was the actual goal to begin with and will take time. that's good news for netanyahu because the state of "war" keeps him in power anyway. hostages help with that too, any
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how? and ... why?
russia is already winning. neither americans nor europeans have ever sent enough to ukraine to really make a difference, nor would they, for good reasons. the trickle of old abrams, leopards, atacms and f16s with restrictions ... never really was meant to make a difference, just to keep up the hopes long enough for russia to implode on its own. that backfired and there's no plan b except keeping up the lies until ukraine runs out of meat, apparently.
that's not to say that russia doesn't hav
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Re: End of the tank, predicted for almost 100 year (Score:2)
"they advance everyday huge amounts"
Really? Cause the front line is about where it was in 2014, as far as I can tell. There's some wiggling at the border, but Russia is no closer to winning this war than they were during the Obama administration.
For Russian, this is fine. The most important thing for them is Crimea and the overland routes to get there, which they solidly hold. But they're unable to push forward.
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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.
Re: End of the tank, predicted for almost 100 year (Score:2)
Modern (American and British) tanks are highly resistant to EMPs. They're designed to operate in nuclear theaters, where EMPs are expected.
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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.
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Then early in the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, even before the very major drone use, some people claimed that the Javelin had rendered tanks obsolete. And now drones.
It kinda is what is happening in Ukraine. Both sides are using tanks more as moveable artillery rather than something that can push through the enemy lines. Russia is using literal infantry meat waves to inch forward.
It's not at all comparable to WWII, but rather with WWI before the tanks.
Re: End of the tank, predicted for almost 100 year (Score:2)
WWI before tanks was all trench warfare, no? Not much movement. While Ukraine's war isn't like some ideal modern combined arms moving assault (like, say Iraq I), I think it has more in common with modern urban warfare (like, say Iraq II) than it does with trench slogs.
Nice story, General Armchair (Score:5, 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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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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Always blows my mind the platform we give people that were good at one random thing but feel the need to tell the armed forces how to do their job.
Maybe the tech weenies should a. Do some research and b. Join the military and get qualified. Simplistic assumptions like this are irksome.
I'd give the US Military more credit if they'd considered how their GPS guided rockets responded to GPS jamming [interestin...eering.com].
The US military is in the exact same place as great powers were going into WWI and WWII, they're built to fight the last war not accepting that technology has completely changed the landscape. And yes, those generals who have been war gaming and training on those systems for decades are REALLY reluctant to accept that a lot of what they thought is obsolete.
In Ukraine the tank is just holding on as
Re: Nice story, General Armchair (Score:2)
You can't extrapolate Ukraine's war to understand American combined arms capability.
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Always blows my mind the platform we give people that were good at one random thing but feel the need to tell the armed forces how to do their job.
Maybe the tech weenies should a. Do some research and b. Join the military and get qualified. Simplistic assumptions like this are irksome.
Plenty of us were in the military. I served after the first Gulf War in Operation Southern Watch. Based upon nothing more than a gut-feeling, I'd guess that maybe tech weenies had a higher per-capita vet count than many other groupings of people... War is high-tech now, friend. War has been high-tech for many decades.. I maintained the Attack Control Systems in the F-15E Strike Eagle. That thing had a multi-CPU central computer back in the late 1980s. Aircraft Maintenance Logs went electronic during
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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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Re: Congress loves tanks (Score:2)
"Is the missile more expensive that the target you're trying to protect is also an important factor"
It can be. But it often is not. American economic might dwarfs that of any nation it would ever realistically fight.
We essentially won the cold war and collapsed the Soviet empire just by manufacturing so much stuff their entire economy collapsed trying to keep up. And Russia is a pale reflection of the USSR.
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They do not know how many they will need. They know they have a budget and hope they have enough tanks because they are certain they don't have enough of other things.
You do understand how the government budget process works, right? You've been part of a team submitting proposals for government funding for government projects before like I have, right? Yes, I could tell you were super experienced with how that works. Right?
Alternative lesson (Score:1)
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
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A couple of things will happen in the future. I think the far future like 50+ years future for the first one. The other 2 are happening right now.
1) there will be a lot of AI on the battlefield but it'll be wickedly powerful not this fake crap being shovel out by Eric Schmidt's company trying to cash in on the current ai craze before it collapses.
2) drones are new to the battlefield. No one has put real anti-drone tech out there to counter them yet so they seem magically powerful and the answer to everyt
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.
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Modern warfare is what's happening in Ukraine right now. I think if I was making drones that would operate competitively in that heavily drone-infested conflict, I would be finding out quite a bit about the environment that the typical armchair general doesn't know.
Re: heading in that direction (Score:2)
Ukraine is post-modern warfare. Real modern warfare involves high altitude bombers levelling cities with impunity, ICBMs, long range cruise missiles, bunker busters, etc. Ukraine is like play-acting war. It's warfare for journalists.
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Setting the stage (Score:1)
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:4, Informative)
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 enemy infantry from overwhelming them at close range from ambush positions, and other lighter faster vehicles with a variety of offensive and defensive capabilities to allow the tank to do what it does best: blast shit with high powered shells at several kilometer ranges while moving at night and able to take return fire from all but the heaviest incoming fire which is specifically designed to kill tanks.
Wrong lesson learned from Ukraine.
Former Google chief apparently has no knowledge or experience of how modern warfare is successfully conducted and should keep his nose on things he understands like privacy rape online and shoving ads down people's throats.
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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
Re: Author learned the wrong Ukraine lesson (Score:2)
"So is America the only country with modern options?"
Yes. We thought Russia could field a modern war before Ukraine, but it turns out their economy can't support it. Even if their most expensive tech is still pretty good, they can't produce in quantities necessary to engage in war, or can't navigate corrupt defense spending well enough.
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> combined arms tactics are vastly superior to non-combined arms tactics.
It's a lot like an NBA team, different people and different positions specialize in different things. If a team had only 7-footers, the shorter players on the other team would simply out-maneuver them.
And if you only have point guards (short players), they can't block tall shooters.
The most successful teams do well at most positions. Yes, there are exceptions, as usual, but they tend not to stay top for long, perhaps because other t
Re: Author learned the wrong Ukraine lesson (Score:2)
"Eventually Britain wore out its interests"
Yes, but it didn't happen with the Revolution. It happened much later, with the War of 1812. They got pulled in too many directions from colonial overreach, most especially India which was their golden goose.
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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 enemy infantry from overwhelming them at close range from ambush positions, and other lighter faster vehicles with a variety of offensive and defensive capabilities to allow the tank to do what it does best: blast shit with high powered shells at several kilometer ranges while moving at night and able to take return fire from all but the heaviest incoming fire which is specifically designed to kill tanks.
Wrong lesson learned from Ukraine.
Former Google chief apparently has no knowledge or experience of how modern warfare is successfully conducted and should keep his nose on things he understands like privacy rape online and shoving ads down people's throats.
What the hell does the US know about modern warfare? The US hasn't fought a war against a remotely comparable foe since the 1970s.
I mean, what was the US tactic for dealing with a minefield? Drive through with tanks that could take a mine blast. So what did the Russians do? Start stacking mines.... Damn, I guess someone should have tried that in the war games.
Sure, not a lot of Ukrainian troops have great combined arms training (though a bunch do now). But how many US troops have combined arms training wher
Re: Author learned the wrong Ukraine lesson (Score:2)
American bases in the Middle East regularly get attacked with drones. You don't hear about it cause usually nothing happens.
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And actually, airplanes are absolutely outstanding against drones, because you don't go after the drones, you blow up the drone storage and logistics hubs. Drones are just really fancy hybrid between an artillery shell and a missile, with relatively short range and VERY slow moving. They have to be stoc
Dunning-Kruger is worse from actual smart people. (Score:3)
We keep getting Eric Schmidt stories this year (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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Why would anyone care about his ideas,
He's using the military to get practice. And in a decade or so, the tanks he picked up at a 99.99% discount will be roaming the countryside while wardriving.
....
Radio Operator: Sir! Signal detected!
Commander: Wait for it
RO: They're visiting Duck Duck Go!
C: Right. At two o'clock, distance 800 meters. Load.
Infantryman: Loaded!
C: Aim.
I2: Target in sight, Ready.
C: Fire. (BOOOOM.) (Remote explosion.)
RO: Signal gone. Wait, there's another one! Looks like they're using Bing!
C: It's a fri
BOLO! Keith Laumer had the solution (Score:1)
Anti-Tank is not Tank (Score:2)
Tanks have uses (Score:2)
False vacuum (Score:2)
One of these days someone is just going to bolt a computer controlled gun on to the top of a tank that will simply destroy any drone that gets anywhere near it. The Israelis already have something close to it.
IIRC (Score:2)
I remember an article some months ago, the USA was selling so much ordnance to Israel and Ukraine, they didn't have enough to invade a country themselves. This is why the USA has a lot of equipment stored somewhere (*cough* Japan *cough*).