Side note: FaceID only unlocks if you actually look at the screen. If you’re careful to avoid that, one would have to physically force your eyes to do that without also covering other necessary areas of your face.
A kid and I sometimes engage in a game where they try to get me to look where necessary, so far without success.
RISC-V's instruction encoding is designed to keep the bits of literals in common positions between different instruction types. I believe this is to simplify/speed up instruction decoding. The MSB of the literal is always the MSB of the instruction, which makes sign extension consistent. Most of the other bits in the J-type encoding line up nicely with the I-type or U-type encodings.
I think the insight is that you need a high-low mix. Some threats call for top of the line capabilities (like early days of the Iran conflict with stand-off munitions and top-spec interceptors being used against Shahed drones and cheap cruise missiles). Some threats can be more economically serviced by a less capable, cheaper, and more available system.
It's always been about the biggest, fastest, longest range punch. That is extremely useful for deep strike (which has always been NATO doctrine), but when the range is short you need quantity and mobility far more than you need quantity.
Being able to cut off your enemy is an extremely effective weapon if your enemy needs massive supply. Drop the major bridges between Moscow and Ukraine and the war would soon be over.
But when you can't do that for whatever reason you need quantity and mobility far more than you need quality.
There's a very interesting fallacy at play here. It's true that Ukraine is doing absolutely amazing and ingenious things on a shoestring budget across all military domains. It's also true that the armed forces of other world powers have a lot to learn from them, especially when it comes to drone warfare.
The fallacy comes in when blindly transferring these lessons to other wars and other armies.
In a perfect world with unlimited production and budgets, Ukraine would love to use Patriot or SAMP/T to shoot down every slow moving drone. In the real world, they make do with what they have, because the alternative is defeat and annihilation.
Ukraine is using propeller trainer planes to shoot down Russian drones because they have them and they can be quickly modified for the mission. That doesn't mean that an air force starting with a clean slate would prefer to use a cheap propeller plane in an anti-drone role. Instead, given enough time and budget, they'd probably prefer to build a custom-designed, more expensive and more capable solution, which still lands in a better spot on the shot exchange curve than Patriot vs Shahed. Think interceptor drone (which are usually several times more expensive and capable than their targets, but that's air defense) or 21st century gun systems.
Ukraine is a post Soviet state with a huge stockpile, engaged in a drawn out attritional defensive conflict where neither side has claimed air superiority. They have no choice but to be efficient, and to make everything they have go as far as they can. From an economic point of view, the USA can afford to be less efficient when fighting into Iran.
For the USA, shot exchange as an economic problem is mostly theoretical. The real problem is supply exhaustion. It doesn't matter if the air defense interceptors cost $10,000 or $10,000,000 if the total stockpile and yearly production capacity of them is only enough to fight for 3 months.
It isn't reasonable to expect that propellor drones will be used long term - they are too easy to shoot down. you need just enough ability to force the enemy to not waste they energy making them when something more expensive is harder to shoot down and thus more likely to work.
The armed forces know this well but many of the internet commentators do not. Many have over-learned the lesson from Ukraine, going all the way from "drones are an important (and even potentially dominant) new tool of warfare" to "everything more expensive than a drone is a huge waste of money - just buy more drones". The real world is rarely so simple.
There are strategic winners and losers of a drone dominated world, just like there were when the machine gun or the airplane began to dominate combat. Calvary charges did not play a major role in WWII for a good reason. I would guess that the F-35 (and in general, fast stealthy attack jets) will continue to deliver a lot of value even in a world with drones. Think more like destroyer and less battleship or horse.
If you made me guess which systems would become obsolete as a result of this, my first guess would probably be attack helicopters. Much of their role can be filled by other less expensive and less vulnerable systems.
Shot exchange is indeed a problem, but it's far more complex than this makes it sound. The opportunity cost of _not_ shooting down the drone isn't the cost of the drone, it's the cost of whatever it's going to destroy if you don't shoot it down.
Sometimes it makes sense to use a million dollar missile to destroy a $5,000 drone, if that drone would otherwise destroy an even more expensive air defense radar or energy production facility. This says nothing about the cost and value of the lives that might be lost in an enemy strike.
We would not be safer if the enemy had cheap drones and we had no weapons capable of fighting back.
The main problem is that air defense interception is incredibly challenging and expensive primarily because a mid-course defensive interceptor needs considerably greater capabilities than the weapon it is intercepting, because it needs to catch up to the incoming missile or drone mid-flight.
Sure, this can lead to massive overkill problems. Yes, the US should invest more in the low end of the high/low mix. But no, this does not mean there's no place for the high end, or that they should never be used to destroy lower end targets if that's all that is available.
A more interesting challenge, if you ask me, is in the naval domain. Imagine a capital ship has two options for defending against incoming threats - either fire an expensive and limited stock interceptor missile with a 99% kill chance, or wait until the threat is inside the range of a cheap cannon or laser system with a 95% kill chance. There's a real command level tradeoff to be made here. If you shoot every drone with interceptors, you lose shot exchange badly, and you just run out of interceptors. But if you let every target through into the engagement range of your close range systems, you run the risk that one makes it through to your ship, potentially causing damage and casualties.
The future of war is going to be wild one way or the other.
I disagree on air defense inherently being very costly.
Old school was guns. Price per round was cheap. But the expensive missile kills the platform holding the cheap gun, you have to go with missiles. But the drone war is a different beast entirely. Drones can't shoot back. Thus the answer is guns. How well will their light drones fare against a Cessna armed with an automatic shotgun? How would the jet drones fare against a WWII warbird?
Lots of cheap, mobile guns. No meaningful self defense but doctrine is to always depart after shooting.
The naval one is much harder because you're not free to disperse your ship into many pieces. But, still, consider your cannon. Let's step down a bit, cheaper cannon with a 90% kill rate--but you put several of them.
IMO, modern sensors paired with robot controlled guns are one of the most promising hard kill solutions for drone combat. Gepard and the newer Skyranger 30 have proven themselves against low-spec threats in Ukraine. C-RAM (aka Land Phalanx Weapon System) is an already deployed system that is very effective against even higher spec threats like missiles.
Of course, there are always tradeoffs. Even the best guns have much shorter ranges than air defense missiles, and that means you need more systems to provide the same area coverage. As you mentioned, the guns themselves (and the sensors and networks feeding them) become a target.
As usual though, likely the solution will require a mix of capabilities across the spectrum, working to cover each others' weaknesses. Nothing is fool-proof, but all can force costly adaptations. Take EW for example. Nothing is cheaper than jamming out the drone's comms or nav. This forces adaptation to autonomy or fiber optic drones, which have their own costs, supply pinch points (Russia now consumes somewhere around 10% of the world's fiber, for example), and tradeoffs.
This is nothing new - layered air defense has been around a long time. The new thing is the explosion of cheap, low-spec threats forcing development of a cheap and sustainable answer to them.
Nets, EW, beam weapons, gun systems, interceptor drones, AMRAAM, Patriot, SAMP/T, etc etc... all fill an important role in targeting different threats.
>Sometimes it makes sense to use a million dollar missile to destroy a $5,000 drone, if that drone would otherwise destroy an even more expensive air defense radar or energy production facility. "
If that $5000 drone was alone then sure. However if they launch 200 drones (money equivalent of one missile) you'd be looking at totally different picture. Also they usually launch combo. Few missiles and whole bunch of drones. even worse
It's _not_ that it's necessary for users. It's that Anthropic got Opus 4.6 ripped off so hard by MiniMax that they no longer want to expose true thinking tokens to random developers. If you're one of the blessed class, you can still get real thinking tokens, but you need to be a major enterprise customer, like the companies that they gave Mythos access.
Room 641A was leaked in 2006. To some extent, this all started in the 1940s with the Enigma and JN-25 code breaks. After that, everyone knew that intelligence was the future of power.
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