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Burn on the 4th of July

Summary:
Fireworks, drone swarms, military history and the military future. Oh and China always China. This is a followup to The 101st Chairborn: History is a Prankster The key new point is drone *swarms* that is thousands of drones in coordinated flight. the point is that e even if a drone is slow so that the chance of shooting it down is 99.99%, the chance of shooting down all of 10,000 isn’t (0.9999)^10000 = 1/e because the drones draw fire from each other and overwhelm the defence. Now the key is to control 10,000 drones without 10,000 human drone operators. To do this one must have say 100 drone operators each of which controls a drone which is somehow followed by 99 other drones. Something like this has been displayed, say of the 4th of

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Fireworks, drone swarms, military history and the military future. Oh and China always China.

This is a followup to

The 101st Chairborn: History is a Prankster

The key new point is drone *swarms* that is thousands of drones in coordinated flight. the point is that e even if a drone is slow so that the chance of shooting it down is 99.99%, the chance of shooting down all of 10,000 isn’t (0.9999)^10000 = 1/e because the drones draw fire from each other and overwhelm the defence.

Now the key is to control 10,000 drones without 10,000 human drone operators. To do this one must have say 100 drone operators each of which controls a drone which is somehow followed by 99 other drones.

Something like this has been displayed, say of the 4th of July somewhere. Fireworks now compete with drone swarms for ooohs and ahhhhs.

This would not be the first time that an important military advance was introduced as entertainment. For a long time, gunpowder was used to make fireworks. Later people started using it to kill each other.

I think that drone swarms are the black powder of the 21st century.

I note that the gunpowder, the fireworks and most of the drones were all made in China. History doens’t repeat itself but it rhymes.

Robert Waldmann
Robert J. Waldmann is a Professor of Economics at Univeristy of Rome “Tor Vergata” and received his PhD in Economics from Harvard University. Robert runs his personal blog and is an active contributor to Angrybear.

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