Chinese UAV/UCAV development

plawolf said:

This right here is why the PLA only release silly pictures. Because the ‘pics or it didn’t happen brigade’ can’t or won’t apply even a little bit of imagination and common sense to look beyond what has been literally shown to see the obvious potential.

If such drones can drop MREs, what’s stopping them dropping off ammo to a besieged and/or cut- squad so they can hold out until reinforcements can reach them?

Similarly, such drones can be used to drop off specialised medical equipment/supplies to save soldiers’ lives; or specialist mission gear you would not expect troops to carry with normally.

That, in turn opens up all sorts of possibilities in terms of how you equip your standard squads. They could potentially not need to hump a lot of low probability of use gear since those could be rapidly dropped off to their location when actually needed.

On the flip side, cargo drones can be dispatched to exfil high value intelligence caches regular grunts come across on the ground.

The possibilities are almost endless, not no, let’s all instead just laugh at how silly it is to drop off MREs. Because we all know once you load a drone with MREs, that’s all it can ever carry.

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Blitzo said:

The use of drones to resupply, even in such a tactical manner, is not controversial, even if it is just here demonstrating a resupply of some meals.

But what is somewhat unimpressive here -- or at least uninspired -- is the half hearted adaption of an off-the-shelf consumer multicopter drone in providing the resupply (I think this is a DJI Matrice 600).
Consumer drones obviously have their role in certain domains of modern warfare if you don't have anything else, and for some roles, consumer drones outdo custom made military drones (short range tactical recce is one aspect where foldable mavic drones can outdo most competitors at its given performance/cost point).

This is an example of the PLA using a very low effort, off the shelf solution that might have been done as part of primitive experimentation/demonstration of resupply by a non-sophisticated UAV, which doubles as a photo op that might impress your average person on the street who doesn't know anything about consumer drones and the sort of requirements for drones in a true wartime tactical resupply role.


Overall, calling it a low effort photo op that is at best "neat" is about right.
It certainly isn't very impressive, but that's fine as well because there's nothing wrong with having some average or lame pictures now and then.

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Blitzo said:

The use of drones to resupply, even in such a tactical manner, is not controversial, even if it is just here demonstrating a resupply of some meals.

But what is somewhat unimpressive here -- or at least uninspired -- is the half hearted adaption of an off-the-shelf consumer multicopter drone in providing the resupply (I think this is a DJI Matrice 600).
Consumer drones obviously have their role in certain domains of modern warfare if you don't have anything else, and for some roles, consumer drones outdo custom made military drones (short range tactical recce is one aspect where foldable mavic drones can outdo most competitors at its given performance/cost point).

This is an example of the PLA using a very low effort, off the shelf solution that might have been done as part of primitive experimentation/demonstration of resupply by a non-sophisticated UAV, which doubles as a photo op that might impress your average person on the street who doesn't know anything about consumer drones and the sort of requirements for drones in a true wartime tactical resupply role.


Overall, calling it a low effort photo op that is at best "neat" is about right.
It certainly isn't very impressive, but that's fine as well because there's nothing wrong with having some average or lame pictures now and then.

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AssassinsMace said:

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What are they going to do? Buy Chinese anti-drone guns...?

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plawolf said:

Have you not considered that they might be using commercial drones for training to avoid the wear & tear and inevitable losses due to accidents and screw ups that happens during training costing a lot more if they used their military drones?

The low effort tac-ons could just have been done to give these commercial drones similar performance to the dedicated military ones they have ordered/purchased.

Besides, even if they are using commercial drones, what of it? It might not look tacticalKool, but if it gets the job done, what’s the actual value in reinventing the wheel?

These are logistical drones, they don’t need to be all gucci’d to high heaven.

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tankphobia said:

They should give their guards on the frontier bullets, thing was practically stationary for a while... Failing that, slingshots to throw the rocks further.

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Blitzo said:

I'm aware of all of those points, however for the purposes of tactical resupply, using an off the shelf consumer Matrice 600 is not what I would consider to be viable as a fleet wide platform.

There are a few consumer drones from DJI which are appropriate for service wide use even off the shelf -- I think buying a Mavic 2/3 or newer Mavic Mini for every platoon or squad would be very tactically useful despite the fact that they are "mere consumer" products, simply because their cost/performance tradeoff is worth it. Their flight performance, compactness, sensor quality and control range, and cost, is not something that many other products in the world can offer.
A Matrice 600 in the tactical resupply role OTOH is nowhere near as unique.

Not every decision the PLA makes is a master stroke of procurement wisdom that can or should be applied, and I doubt this particular application of the Matrice 600 in those pictures will be any sort of systemic service wide procurement either, and instead just represents a relatively primitive example of experimentation with a COTS solution

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