Except you can't survey an area with a an artillery warhead.
Sure, you can use your spotters to scout ahead, but why put them in danger of an ambush and have them get killed by a sniper or hidden machinegun, when you can survey that area from a safe distance, and take out the sniper/machine gun if you see one?
This is not meant to replace artillery battalions and scouts, but to complement them.
Cheaper to use a drone for spotting instead of a FIST unit. That's what's working for the UA.
Kamikaze drones have a role for the smaller units, but at the battalion level, it's better to use a surveillance drone to coordinate fires from mortars, MLRS and artillery. The rounds fired from these systems typically have longer range than a drone, a higher rate of fire, and larger warheads.
I think these are pretty complementary. Switchblade 300 is a 10km range Javelin (same warhead in fact) with integrated surveillance capability that can go beyond range of sight. It is not there to replace mortars, artillery and MRLS, which are area weapons.
Artillery has been used by Ukraine, and by a lesser extent by Russia, extremely effectively as a precision weapon against all kind of targets, including MBTs.
You can survey with a drone. Merging the observation with the munition is what makes it a loitering munition, but drones for observation/targeting/correction + traditional corrected or guided artillery is very similar (especially guided shells like Excalibur etc which are also themselves similar to loitering munitions just that they loiter very briefly…)
I’ve heard varying numbers about the range of the artillery. Somewhere between 15 and 45 miles. Whatever the range, hundreds of drones covering the country could allow for extreme precision.
There is no such thing as a single "intelligence". "IQ" is measuring at least three different forms of cognitive ability, is an inherently flawed and culturally biased tool and may be illegal to administer unless you can prove it's relevant to the work.
Additionally, what matters is not natural talent but the set of skills and techniques an individual has built up using those talents, compensating for their weaknesses and taking advantage of their strengths. I've met plenty of very, very smart people who flounder the first time they encounter a code base they can't hold entirely in their head at once: someone who was less "smart", with a smaller working memory, but who has been developing skill with abstraction and system metaphors since CS 101 is often a better actual developer.
The myth that developers need to be "smart" is pernicious, and the cause of most of the really horrific code bases in this industry.
> [IQ tests] may be illegal to administer unless you can prove it's relevant to the work.
Not any more than any other means of assessment on which outcomes differ on a protected axis of discrimination like race; yes, the rule was first articulated in a case involving a fairly blatant use of IQ tests to effect racial discrimination, but it is by no means restricted to IQ tests.
