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…
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…