Swarming. Especially in areas denied by electronic warfare. Currently the Shaheds are built for cost (and sanctions) reasons, and are ‘dumbfired’ at coordinates/an object. GPS and inertial navigation fly towards the target, but it doesn’t make any decisions. Launch, set orientation, hit waypoint, next orientation, next waypoint, repeat until final attack phase.

What it can’t do is react. To anything: bad weather, Ukrainian EW/air defense, tall trees or buildings, other aircraft nearby, etc they just fly along their pre-programmed flight plan, providing any defenders with a predictable heading and airspeed to intercept and shoot at.

Add onboard autonomous AI and Russia has a lot more options.

The camera sees/microphone heard a bunch of tracer bullets flying past? Start evasive maneuvering, diving and changing speed. Much harder to hit an approaching/leaving aircraft that is also changing speed and/or direction.
Other Shaheds launched earlier are getting signal loss from EW or shot down? The remaining craft can send and receive that info to all the others, and re-route the pack around that area of air defense.
Image recognition of high value targets like HIMARS or Patriot/IRIS-T allows the Shaheds to immediately ditch their pre-programmed mission, and all focus fire on that newly discovered target instead of the original hospital or apartment building that Russia was targeting.
Data sharing among Shaheds in flight can allow more efficient use, so instead of committing a dozen or so Shaheds to a single target like a military command post to ensure at least a few get through air defense and hit it, now they can communicate if it actually has been hit or not, and refocus/divert the remaining Shaheds in that wave.

Essentially think of it as the difference between the dumbest box of rocks AI in a video game that doesn’t react, versus going player versus player online.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I am sure these kinds of tactics will have impacts but it just doesn't make sense to me why this is going to revolutionize the effectiveness of these weapons.

[–] Milk_Sheikh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Fly high = very, very easy to spot for active radar and passive sensors. Which is why almost everything that isn’t yeeting glide-kit dumbbombs from half a country away, flys incredibly low. Like “scraping the trees” low, because hiding among the EM backscatter makes evading airborne sensors like AWACS or interceptor jets easier, and ground radar has a real hard time with that whole curvature of the earth thing.

So the Shaheds are going to be under 100m AGL elevation, which means the AA gun trucks and airburst-flak are the answer for Ukraine - so the counter is back to either dodging bullets, or dodging the defender’s location . The old Shaheds don’t, they blithely soak up Ukrainian gunfire without reaction before blowing up. These new AI powered models represent a big jump in credibility.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

No, the whole point of all this flurry of concern is that shaheds are flying higher because AA gun trucks and airburst-flak have already been effective enough to strategically deny the low altitude backline of Ukraine at large to Russia.

So the shaheds have to fly higher... and thus dodging or making smart manuevers becomes less and less of a salient concept when you are thousands of meters from the nearest terrain feature that isn't an empty void.

On the otherhand, as smart as the Shaheds get, they could have actual living human brains inside them.. and coordinated machine gun fire from teams of humans would still hard counter low level flight. Have you ever bothered to watch how good humans can get at shooting clay pigeons with a shotgun...? Notice how there isn't a large crisis in the shotgun hunter community that birds have gotten too smart to shoot anymore and they can only hit clay pigeons....

Russia desperately needs its shaheds to be effective, which means along some hardware or cost metric they need to be upgraded, changing the brain out so that when a .50 cal round blows through the wing the internal computer starts writing poetry about its impending death instead of resorting to a basic evasive manuever routine isn't going to help things that much... I am sure there are major scary gains to make here but just saying "well now they are SMART" is the equivalent of the Windows commercials I see that are always trying to sell me new laptops in them that have AI WOW and are super vague about how that actually effects things materially...

I don't buy it, Russia can have their super smart shaheds, I will pick your grandfather with a heart behind a machine gun....