That must play hell on Morale! You can just be sitting there in your base area, parking your tail on the stabilizer of a field gun (nice seat compared to more litter box sand) and...maybe you're munching some lunch and having a moment of peace when.....
W H A M O !
A remote controlled hunter/killer team blows you into the happy paradise in the sky.
I imagine survivors come to get REAL skiddish about even being near their own vehicles, buildings or crew weapons when that can happen any moment, just...because you happened to be where the drone was flying that day.
Unfortunately, we're all addicted to the high tech gizmo garbage these days, which usually costs so much per copy? It literally becomes too expensive to risk in something as dangerous as combat. (Never understood that with Billion Dollar bombers..but another thread perhaps).
I've read about a program called 'Italian Green' (among other things), from a few different perspectives now in Vietnam. It would have been PERFECT for ISIS. Basically, special forces and CIA people who found V.C. weapons caches in the jungle didn't always take it or blow it in place. Sometimes, they took real effort to leave it precisely how they found it ...except for a few rifle rounds with explosive instead of powder or mortar/rocket rounds with more boom in the propellant than the warhead ever had. The one to use them just kinda ceased to exist in a big pink cloud. (war is hell...and that one had enough deserved and given to go all around)
Given that ISIS basically owes the vast majority of its heavy weapons to Iraqi losses ...I.E..OUR STUFF...it would have been intelligent to seed those ammo dumps to make those people so paranoid of using any of it, they wouldn't even target shoot small arms after awhile. Instead...we're facing our own older guns. Always a joy, I'm sure.
That is why war with Russia scares me like no other nation in the world ever could at this stage. China is working on it, and it may well have a closer alliance under the table than we know of (I almost expect that at this stage) but Russia has the history, depth of collective memory and rabid determination to defend down to a person that wins wars. Whether that starts out lower tech or not.
After all, in 1941, the Japanese kicked our ass then complained we'd had the bad form to be in the Pacific in the first place. They didn't do that by the Nippon Empire being culturally or naturally superior, anymore than we are to them, in that way. They had faster planes, battle tested warships and a population truly believing they were superior in race and history to make the future theirs to take. That carried them a good period of time, too.
A few years later, they were shooting wooden bullets..where they could fashion any ammunition at all anymore...waiting for a land invasion that would likely have erased Japanese culture from the face of the Earth...had it continued as planned.
Some folks look at our high tech (and few systems in raw numbers) to think we're Buck Rogers! We can take on all comers! ....and yeah..we can take on all comers. We don't have the DEPTH of defense to win though.
