![]() A tank on the move has a target painted on it. Any AI good enough to cut through it is an intelligence officer, not a piece of equipment.Ī tank backed into the underbrush is still effective, because it is hard to find, and you may only find it when it opens up on you. Your intel problem is noise - the more raw intel, the more noise. So you should have plenty of scouts, including a robotic fly on the wall of the other side's headquarters. They can be very small and stealthy, making the Predator look like a B-36. Reconnaissance robotics, on the other hand, will be hard to take out. Thirty meter mecha, sad to say, make for very clear targets. Give precision weapons a clear target and they will take it out. This goes for guerillas, it goes for power armor troops, it goes for laser armed tanks, trimaran cruisers, aircraft, and spacecraft in low orbit. The general principle of future surface war, it seems to me, is that if you are caught out in the open you are headed for the celestial choir. What might happen, in fact, is broadly what happened in 1914: Everyone goes to ground. It did not work out that way in 1914, so I hesitate to say it would work out that way now, or in 2114. 1870 was the prelude 1861-65 merely an example of a semi-modern war fought entirely by blundering amateurs. The Next War would be a come-as-you-are war, settled in months if not weeks by whoever ran out of arms and ammo first, if it weren't won a week earlier by strategy and tactical execution. The general prognosis was that 1900-modern weapons were so accurate and effective that when turned on each other they would pretty much wipe each other out, and quickly. Industrial age Western armies had shown how well they could scythe down waves of natives, usually. We don't know, but we have seen this movie before, in flickery black and white a hundred years ago. What happens when post industrial forces fight each other? ![]() Which brings us to something that has not been tested yet. But y'all want grunts, preferably in power armor, supported by coolific armored vehicles and aircraft, with subs and trimaran assault cruisers out to sea. I intended to deal first with the space context. Warfare on non-habitable planets is an ambiguous case, with features of boarding operations in space. This I will take a bit more broadly as warfare fought on habitable, shirtsleeves planets, including sea and air operations. Ask, and ye shall (sometimes) receive: A reader emailed asking me to discuss future ground war.
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