United States Trump 2nd Term - Planning and Beyond
- Thread starter bullethead
- Start date
Please oh let them get this done. Seriously, the time changes are a blight upon our society, especially when we set clocks forward there is a known spike in automobile and industrial accidents as well as a spike in heart attacks many of which result in deaths.
Elon Musk And Vivek Ramaswamy Toy With Eliminating Daylight Saving Time Changes—As Some States Push To End Practice
The co-leaders of the new Department of Government Efficiency have suggested the twice-yearly time changes are inefficient.www.forbes.com
Musk is very much not a military guy. He is a tech pioneer guy with ideas that sometimes work out. And sometimes not.
The military arms race stuff with adversarial competition is not something he has to deal with.
Long story short he has no idea what is he talking about.
If he thinks he does, he knows the way to prove himself right - he can produce those awesome hypothetical drones that will totally obsolete manned aviation. He has the money, he has the contacts, and he has the tech startup experience, and there's huge money to be made on such military hardware. It's a great bet for him if he's right, even if he could take away just half the military aerospace market of all NATO countries, that would add up to something close to SpaceX...
The reality is that most of the biggest players in that market tried or are trying to make those drones since a decade or two, but it's just not working out too well for various reasons.
The MIC is waiting on the long-term business: long after Trump dies off the scene & Musk fades into oblivion.
If US one does, then French, UK, Japanese and so on would jump to backstab them.
...well, the thing is, you ask Musk to do that, he may not hand the tech to the DoD, and instead create his own PMC to 'enforce peace' from outside of the US DoD command chain or international agreements.
And Trump is the sort to let Musk do that, if he wants, and it is perfectly kosher with the 2nd Amendment.
ITAR might get in the way on some things, but exemptions and amendments to ITAR can happen too.
Musk with his own Diamond Dogs/Black Knights full of AI drone swarms and loyal operators would be a thing of wonder and terror I expect.
And then they run into the problem of... EW. And EMP guns, which we can rather trivially make. EMP guns are shit against actual vehicles because of EM shielding, but drones... can't have that by their very design.
Do you understand what having Starlink as a downlink, instead of normal drone links, allows Musk to bypass several types of infantry level ECW/EW devices, and there is such a thing as just staying out of range of a grunt with a EM gun or jammer on his back.
Laser comms are a thing, and Musk has been testing out laser-based sat links, laser-down links are just a slight engineering change from that set up.
And with powerful enough lasers, and AI, he may not need to even get close to the ground to do a CAS strike for a theoretical PMC.
I understand that drones have vulnerabilities, and ways to be countered even at altitude, but quantity and AI control are a beast we've not truly seen, and few outside the Ukrainian-Russian war have any inkling as to how this sort of thing could go in practical combat applications.
Despite what sensationalist headlines will have you believe AI is nowhere near good enough to be counted on for truly autonomous warfare agents. The cutting edge right now are still manned by people with joysticks and will be for the foreseeable future. Musk is making statements like he does at Tesla but unlike Tesla the DoD can not afford to pretend self-driving weapons are coming next year for 2 decades they have to plan for real weapons to fight real opponents. Musk is out of his depth here and even people who love him but are familiar with defense tech will acknowledge this.
Surely one day tons of the military will be fully automated with people responsible only for verification and strategic decision making, that will be long after Musk has the ear of the president.
Good fucking luck with that. Eric Prince can go that far only in his dreams, and he has more experience with this stuff.
ITAR as name suggests applies to specific arms technology and the like. As long as its drones he's free to go full hog even as that's a dual use technology "hack" in arms regulations so far.
It would be... if it would be true. But by nature of the matter, unlike some civilian areas that Musk targeted successfully, the military tech sphere is quite cutthroat competitive due to the international conflict focus.
If the laser comm is to be received, the satellite needs to know exactly where the drone is.
How is it going to get that info? From the drone? With GPS jamming and signal spoofing saying that the drone is behind enemy lines?
By own laser comm? Ok, now you need to stick a ground to orbit laser on the drone with a very precise stabilization mechanism...
That might cost as much as the whole rest of the drone, if not more.
And that still is going to be vulnerable to clouds, smoke, foliage for ground drones, and Russians shining their own lasers at the comm lasers to blind them.
Meanwhile making the drone full AI runs into the problem that if you want the fancy capabilities for analyzing sensor inputs, you would need to put a small fortune worth of computing hardware into the drone, which is already done with said sensors, but also power it, which generally isn't, and would make the plane as big and expensive as the manned ones, negating most of the benefit.
We can rethink that one when we all have hardware to run local AI models for much simpler tasks instead of relying of having to pay for server ones for decent results.
What's currently worked on with drones is a fancier software version of what AGM-65's image guidance system already did during cold war, nothing revolutionary.
We are talking a revolution or two in laser technology. Meanwhile we are only on experimental "damaging" lasers for ships and aircraft with very limited range, and they still aren't fielded in quantity.
Before this flies, several pieces of the technological puzzle are missing. About half of them, Musk is probably underestimating badly.
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Some are 5G based. Good luck getting that kind of bandwidth in a warzone, with jamming.
You mean the ones they do during festivals and the like? Yes.
Blowing up satellites is not a hard thing to do. It's objectively worse to use them for guidance and targeting than ground or air based systems. Now, something that could work well is a drone swarm controlled by, say... the F35.
Even worse, especially since 5g is so short range too.
A video of one of those is what caused Elon to say what he said.
Yep, almost like that was the point
