Analyst: new weapons systems echo 1980s Cold War tech

A firearms and military analyst who posts under the handle Gatnerd has drawn attention on X to a pattern in recent Western weapons development: several systems now being marketed as new technology closely mirror concepts first tested during the final years of the Cold War in the 1980s.

The commentary centers on the FireAnt uncrewed ground vehicle, built by U.S. robotics firm Swarmbotics AI. FireAnt is a lightweight, attritable combat platform designed to detect, track and engage armored targets like tanks while operating in coordinated swarms under a single human operator, according to the company. The U.S. Army has been testing the system.

“The new FireAnt UGV is especially notable, as not only the concept but even the name is identical to the the Fire Ant tested by Sandia in 1987-88,” Gatnerd wrote.

Sandia National Laboratories, the Department of Energy-run research lab, has a long history of developing robotic ground vehicles for hazardous and high-consequence military applications dating back decades, including systems intended to keep personnel out of dangerous environments.

Gatnerd listed several other modern weapons systems the account said trace their design roots to the 1980s.

“Shahed 136 drone is a modernized version of the West German DAR from the 80’s,” Gatnerd wrote.

The DAR, or Drohne Anti-Radar, was developed by German aircraft manufacturer Dornier in the mid-1980s as part of a joint U.S. and West German effort to build a low-cost drone capable of destroying Soviet radar installations. The delta-wing aircraft weighed about 110 kilograms (243 pounds), had a range of roughly 600 kilometers (373 miles) and was designed to launch from trucks that could each carry six of the drones. The DAR program was canceled in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse and never entered service with the German military. Iran’s Shahed-136, later supplied to Russia and produced domestically as the Geran-2, shares the DAR’s delta-wing shape and truck-launched deployment method, though the precise lineage between the two designs remains disputed among researchers.

“B-21 Bomber is a modernized version of the B-2 from 1989,” Gatnerd wrote.

The U.S. Air Force’s B-21 Raider, now in flight testing, uses a flying-wing design that traces directly to the B-2 Spirit, which first flew in 1989. Northrop Grumman builds both aircraft.

“Typhon ground launched Tomahawk a return to Gryphon GLCM from 1983,” Gatnerd wrote.

The U.S. Army’s Typhon system fires Tomahawk cruise missiles from ground-based launchers. The concept revives the ground-launched cruise missile role the U.S. abandoned under the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which eliminated the Gryphon GLCM system fielded in Europe starting in 1983. The United States withdrew from the INF treaty in 2019, reopening the door to ground-launched cruise missile systems like Typhon.

“Fiber Optic FPV’s are a modern take of the FOGM and EFOGM fiber optic TV guided missile 84-98,” Gatnerd wrote.

The U.S. Army’s Fiber Optic Guided Missile and Enhanced Fiber Optic Guided Missile programs ran through the 1980s and 1990s, using a spooled fiber optic cable to transmit real-time video and guidance commands to a missile in flight. That same basic principle now underpins fiber-optic first-person-view drones, which Russian and Ukrainian forces have adopted at scale because the wired connection resists electronic jamming.

Gatnerd framed the pattern as a reflection of how advanced 1980s weapons development had become, not as a criticism of the programs now reviving those concepts.

“This is not meant as a knock on these weapons programs, and all these new weapons do indeed use much more modern technology and materials,” Gatnerd wrote. “But it is a sign of both how advanced 80’s weapons development really was, as well as how calcified weapons technology became after the end of the Cold War, the ‘Peace Dividend, and GWOT shifting technology toward battling sand people vs peer adversaries.”

The pattern extends to naval drones as well. Howard Hornsby developed the OWL MK II, a modular unmanned surface vessel, beginning in the late 1980s and tested it extensively through the 1990s, as The Defence Blog reported last year.

The privately funded platform operated under U.S. Navy DET 1 in Bahrain from 1995 to 1997, conducting harbor protection, minehunting and littoral anti-submarine warfare missions, and later variants reached speeds over 70 knots. A planned Navy order for 15 units was canceled shortly before the USS Cole attack, and the program never became a formal program of record. “I see everything from 30 to 40 years ago just now coming about,” Hornsby told The Defence Blog. “Very sad.”