Here's Putin proposing a showdown or duel on who has the best weapons.
http://www.youtube.com/live/fxOVY0Rg0c8?t=1418

PUTIN:
"There is no chance to shoot down these Oreshnik missiles, well if those Western experts you mention think so, that Oreshnik can be shot down we suggest they and those in the West and the United States who pay them for their analysis conduct some kind of technological experiment - a high-tech Duel of the 21st century. Let them name some object let's say in Kiev, concentrate all their air defense and missile defense forces there, and we will hit it with Oreshnik and see what happens. We are ready for such an experiment. Is the other side ready?"

FYI, it was Donald Trump who backed out of the INF treaty.

President Donald J. Trump to Withdraw the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty - February 1, 2019
http://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-withdraw-united-states-intermediate-range-nuclear-forces-inf-treaty/

Thanks for the feedback Maverick.

It's not just kids the government wants to muzzle/censor/protect. They missed out on the M.A.D Bill, won the idea of censoring under 16s on social media, and now they might have had a win muzzling the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Peter Jennings, now with Strategic Analysis Australia, was ran ASTPI from 2012 to 2022, writes that there have been many attempts to muzzle the Institute that John Howard wanted to put “Defence on its mettle”

Ex-public servant a vice-chancellor of the University of Queensland, Peter Varghese, was put to work earlier in the year to review government spending on institutions working on defence matters. The ASTPI receives about $4 million a year out of an annual $40 million.

In Canberra, the review was referred to as the “kill ASTPI” review because it annoyed Labor ministers by exposing China's attempts to subvert Australia's sovereignty. The 99 year lease of the Port of Darwin, for example. ASTPI also advised against the CCP'S attempt to get control of our 5G network; did work on human rights abuses against Uighurs, the CCP’S cyber espionage. You name it, ASTPI was on it. They also changed policy thinking in Washington DC, London, Tokyo, but Canberra was embarrassed.

Defence doesn't like their “plain English” assessment of the defence budget, either.

Jennings doesn't bag all of the Varghese report, but thinks that most of his recommendations would constrain the work of ASTPI, and some of the recommendations could help the government “shut down informed and independent commentary about the most important strategic issues facing Australia”.

Jennings finishes his piece: “The bureaucracy never wanted ASPI. Now they have a government glass-jawed enough in temperament and dull enough in imagination to let the Institute die a death from slow strangulation”.

An interesting take there thinkabit.

It seems that since I don't think like he does ("like I do" ) then that means, by definition, I'm not " saying sensible stuff." Only people who agree with thinkabit are sensible, it seems.

Here's the thing about drones, be they autonomous unmanned planes or quadcopters or marine drones or whatever. They are the current flavour of the month in a very specific war fought only on land and in confined waterways between two relatively technologically unadvanced powers with limited manufacturing capacity. A serious, technologically advanced response has yet to be developed. But counter-measures will come.

The success of drones on land and confined waterways doesn't tell us anything about how it would play out in a blue water battle in the Pacific. We get an inkling of how relatively easy it is to counter drones on the open water by the way the Houthi attacks have been deflected using a relatively small force. The Israeli Iron Dome also gives a pointer here to the future.

Sending a thousand drones against a carrier group is a very different thing. It takes an heroic assumption to think that that would be successful and that that is a substitute for things like subs and vessels of the line.

Again drones have their place and that place will expand over the years. We know that US and Taiwanese planners think they could deflect a Chinese invasion by overwhelming use of drones, but again this is a restricted waterway from a home land mass. Completely different to anything Australia might be involved in.

Trumpster

You tout yourself as some kind of military genius, well lets not laugh, you're not alone, a few other right wing Forum dills think the same as you. What is the sum total of your military experience? Hummm, ZERO! Maybe watching re-runs of COMBAT is that the full extent of it?

Hi mhaze: when you say "It seems that since I don't think like he does ("like I do" ) then that means, by definition, I'm not " saying sensible stuff." Only people who agree with thinkabit are sensible, it seems."

I see that you misinterpreted what I was trying to say when I said "like I do". What I was trying to convey to you is that this is "what I believe", just so that you knew where I stood on the matter. However, I can clearly see how what I wrote could give the impression that it meant what you interpreted it to mean. Sorry about that sloppy writing.
So what I was saying was something like: "I believe that someone could lead a successful attack on a carrier group by using quadcopters. Yet you don't seem to think so, why is it that you don't think so?"

To attack a carrier group I would use a David v's Goliath strategy (ie: in spirit similar to how in the myth David confronts Goliath with a mere sling and stones). Because I feel that the last thing that the navy commanders would think someone would use to attack a carrier group are small quadcopters (for obvious reasons, such as them usually being stationed 100s of km of shore). If you wished to sink the whole fleet I would strike the radars and the anti-aircraft systems - using small bomblets like they are using with quadcopters in Ukraine. Then follow up with another more conventional attack using bigger weapons. If you wished to just disable the aircraft carrier for a while hit the catapult launch system.
The obvious tricky part is how to get the quadcopters in range since the action takes place far away from land. And for that I would use underwater gliders.
By-the-way: if you don't like the Goliath/David reference for personal reasons, you could just replace it with any of the other rehashes of the story that we have: like the original Starwars movie where Luke Skywalker destroys the Death Star.

-continued below-