Are you seeing this, Amazon? British military steps up robot tech tests with drone capable of carrying 60kg payloads The British military's push towards autonomous war machines continued as the Royal Marines tested various items of robot battlefield equipment during a recent exercise in Cyprus. Marines from the Littoral Strike Group, which spent the last three months deployed to the Mediterranean and Black Sea, tested what the Ministry of …
And not very often. The last was about 40 years ago and the Commandos landed with the Paras, who don't do water. Whatever, it was a mess with blokes getting soaked and freezing cold from the off. As for the later operation involving the Welsh Guards, the less said the better.
60Kgs might sound a lot, but it's only a dozen 81mm mortar rounds.
I have no idea if this drone is viable but all military tech starts off as some shiny thing and it has to prove itself or get discarded.
As for landings, I assume you're referring to the Falkand Islands conflict. In which case, how do you think the armed forces may have fared if the commandos had no preparedness for conduct landings (or march over mountains for that matter?). It's not like armies often get a 12-month written notice of some upcoming conflict so they have to maintain a state of readiness to potential threats even if in hindsight they didn't happen.
That was the last time it was done at Brigade strength, for about the last 60 years 3Cdo Brigade have been tasked with securing Northern Norway which is an amphibious role. We haven't used the parachute regiment in an airborne operation since WWII and we've used armour properly in anger what twice? but we still need the capability and we still need to train with it.
As for Bluff cove, the major causes of that were:
1. 5 Brigade being shipped down and opening up a second, unnecessary front, with no logistical backup and being unable to yomp similar distances to the marines and paras.
2. A para officer comandeering 4 LCUs at gunpoint that were allocated to move the welsh guards, meaning half the battallion then had to go via LSL
3. Army officers refusing to accept the advice of RN and RM officers to offload the welsh guards first and when finally ordered to do so by 5 brigade HQ insisting that an Ambulance unit (including vehicles) be unloaded have priority.
If it had been Marines onboard they'd have been off the LSLs before the air raids came in.
When QinetiQ was formed in 2001 they weren't allowed to manufacture. This was to protect existing manufacturer suppliers from what they saw as unfair competition from this new, government backed contractor. Don't know if that is still the case 19 years later but maybe the corporate culture is still against manufacturing.
QQ have been able to operate commercially from the outset (2002), certainly since they floated in 2006. DERA weren't allowed to manufacture commercially as they were a Govt wing (despite having lots of v nice tech), so that's why it was split into the commercial side (Qinetiq) and DSTL (the Govt scientists).
If you look at the history of making excessive money for nothing then that might be the driver of QQ's corporate culture, as detailed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinetiq
Let's hope the forces don't come up against the Israeli Drone Dome which allegedly downed and caught the perpetrators of the Gatwick drone crisis a while back. That is according to this YT video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGuryrnuBCQ starts at 10.02.
I have been keeping up with some of the claims in the Nagorno-Karabakh spat and one or two other conflicts and all of them seem to have a range of different drones available to them that seem to work, including for both attack and fire direction if the videos are to be believed, so why is the UK military having such a hard time getting their drone force off the ground?
Well the thing is, the public never should know about the drones we already HAVE. And only redacted figures on the cost. What we get news of, is the price of the goodies that they want to build for the NEXT set. So they tell us these stories. And then, when they get THAT money, they build things with entirely different functions.
Your mother never learned what you did with that Christmas toy Erector set she bought you, did she? I believe these industrious fellows operate along those lines...
It certainly is. I once worked for a certain company that made a certain drone based on a paraglider, that was meant to carry a 120kg payload.
Sadly the management seemed to believe that it was a simple matter of scaling up a 12kg design based on hobby servos & RC gear, that mostly worked and only occasionally flew off into the sunset.
The 50kg version was unstable on take-off and nearly killed some of their customers.
The 120kg version was meant to have both a petrol engine with long-run tank, and a large lithium battery on board, and would still be suspended from a flammable, collapsible piece of cloth, which if it tugged on the control lines too much, or if it hits the wrong thermal, collapses like a borked kite and ceases to produce lift.
How the heck do we make that safe?
Their solution was to hire more 'systems engineers' to validate a non-existent and infeasible design, fire anyone who disagreed with their vision (ahem, no, I am not bitter, they really were a bunch of clowns), shut their eyes and throw wads of investor's cash at it.
I've had to deal with the bloated RC model approach also, on a conventional fixed wing.
Single engined - over populated areas
Single control mechanical system - you need redundancy to cope with failures
Single control link
Crude autopilot - anywhere interesting and you need a preprogrammed escape plan in case you lose control
No transponder
Total dependence on GPS
The list goes on and on
Having known someone that worked in the Department of Transport, the tests required to deploy something to a motorway would probably preclude most of these.... Hopefully the tests for the armed forces will be much more vigorous and wide ranging... Or it'll end up like uk trains where the wrong leaves/snow etc prevents normal operation.
If the statesmen figure on making war a non-human participatory event, they should just computerize the whole thing and pit supercomputer against supercomputer. I know this means far less money in bribes from hardware contractors, but it's so easy to envision these robots going off the rails and causing collateral damage where human warriors might make the odd mistake but, a whole artillery group is unlikely to be hoodwinked into a leveling an old folks housing estate on their side through bad intel from the other side.
Sci-Fi authors have beat this sort of thing to death already.
If the statesmen figure on making war a non-human participatory event, they should just computerize the whole thing and pit supercomputer against supercomputer. ..... MachDiamond
You nearly got that right, MachDiamond. Supercomputers figure war mongering states personalise sub-human participatory events and are agreed to remove/destroy/kill the problem drivers by any and all means and memes available is not so very wrong. And is a much more entertaining and effective use of available human assets ....
* One of those "Ok Houston, we've had a problem here but profiteering warriors are now taken care of/annihilated at source and purged from future fields of COSMIC Play" solutions. A quite perfectly clinical no nonsense approach for eradication of deranging destructive cells from humanity.
And who cares whenever there is no one else somewhere else to try and blame whenever you can say the machine does/did it with ITs Remote Virtual Command of/with AI at the Panels of Controls/Almighty Levers of Power and Energy. The machine certainly doesn't and it and IT are wholly responsible and accountable.
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