Ukraine–Japan Drone Alliance Builds a $2,000 Answer to a $2 Million Air Defense Problem

Temu drones versus Ali Baba drones

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Japan’s back in the Kamikaze business, ayyyy

Self replicating drones. No way this ends poorly.

for now, I'm... 51% convinced that armed warfare getting cheaper and cheaper is overall more a good thing than a bad thing. Especially, since the pricier the weapon, the more only the rich and powerful can hoard such. 70% overall a good thing if cheep weapons manufacturing is paired with renewable energy, especially solar energy which is very hard to hoard.

The next war is gonna be war of resource-attrition.

The funny thing is that several rts games relies on this type of mechanic, where you need to waste less expensive units to take down costly one in order to win in the long run, and even small difference matters.

China wins this one

No the real arms race is still an AoE energy weapon that can disable whole areas of the sky, there are already a few that are nearing the end of R&D. One of them made the top of a military sublistnook a few days ago, it looked like some of the foldable mobile radars and used some form of microwave or electromagnetic pulse to fry a couple dozens drone simultaneously and nearly instantaneously at various ranges in one general direction. As far as drone on drone I’m seeing an increasing number of drones armed with metal spikes/spears, which is an odd meta and once on telegram I saw a drone that appeared to fire a shotgun at close range but I’ve never been able to find that clip anywhere else and I’ve been looking, it seemed highly effective.

In a vacuum no I think it’s the opposite. Automation on both sides means the largest GDP wins. But since Ukraine has the EU GDP behind it yes an automated war leans toward Ukraine (assuming inevitably both sides develop autonomy).

Really weird, the latest japanese defense budget has 7 different UAVs in development + USV + UUV + modular UAVs. And at their defense expo there were a lot of japanese startups showing different UAVs, there were also several ukrainian companies showing their different drones. Maybe the "never be sold to military" is more about how big Mitsubishi, Kawasaki and other large japanese companies in the defense sector are, so chances of the JSDF buying to small japanese companies are pretty low? seems reasonable. Besides, those big companies already have all the components, for example, for a new cruise missile, Kawasaki just took the engine they used on a Subaru military drone, and put it on a missile. So pretty easy for them to use already tested components and create new weapons. Similar thing Mitsubishi did with an anti ship missile, JMOD asked for a an hypersonic anti ship missile, so Mitsbushi took their anti ship missile and added a couple of ramjets and now you have an hypersonic missile. Besides, i guess is hard to compete in terms of R&D with such stupidly large companies, they also invest tons in R&D for civilian purposes. Any sensor, radar or semiconductor technology they develop can be used directly on their military divisions. Those Fujitsu ARM supercomputers? easy to put on a plane, maybe ideal to work with loyal wingman UAVs. NEC produces communications systems for civilian satellites as well as military satellites, even the JMSDF frigates have NEC systems. Yeah, guess they are fucked.

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Those don't work well enough if there is even a little rain or fog. There is a middle way though: machine gun mounted on a robot arm paired with radar and AI or at least autoassisted aiming. We have something approaching that already, but drone swarms will make the need for AI much greater because only a computer can aim from drone to drone fast enough to knock out a huge swarm. Ideally you "set and forget" it so it protects you automatically.

We need to get some robotic sharks too

Those things are a tax scam at this point. They are expensive af and hard countered by cheapo drone swarms unless you think they can shoot down hundreds at a time.  Obsolete before it even hits the shelves and we all paid so dearly for it and c*** like it. 

coordinated multi-placement making a laser net like force field.

China would be a bigger threat of this than America. China's labor market is far less expensive.

Basically the AK47 of air superiority