Drone warfare has always been equal parts distressing (it’s impersonal, it’s too easy to leverage, and therefore too easy to abuse) and incredible (ultra-thin fiber as a kite line? Brilliant!) to me. These advances are no different.
That said, I do fret we’re staring down a new age of guerrilla warfare. Drones are cheap, widely available, and increasingly autonomous. Their countermeasures are either impractical for communities (AA Cannons or automated firearms) or costly (jammers, interceptors). The programming can be set-and-forget, meaning operations can be staged months ahead of deployment and make it difficult to find or prevent. The autonomy of target termination specifically raises concerns for the immediate future of violent uprisings, coups, and civil wars.
As an engineer, I am fascinated by it all. As a human, I am horrified that we democratized violence on this scale.
I'm also fascinated by the political implications on state formation, state size, and form of government.
State formation tends to track the relative military effectiveness of large highly-trained standing armies vs. small distributed arms making. The Roman Empire collapsed when they ran out of money to pay their legions. The smaller tribes and kingdoms of the Early Middle Ages unified into the larger kingdoms of the High Middle Ages as the longbow and mounted knight gave the advantage again to large, highly trained standing armies. These collapsed into the city-states of the Rennaissance because the gunpowder musket rendered all the armor of the knights useless. Then the nation-state took over as mechanized arms and airplanes became military weapons, and needed the resources of a large territory to produce them.
It's likely that the drone, being both cheap to produce, easy to use, and extremely lethal to existing weapon systems, will produce a similar political revolution. And it seems tailor-made for smaller political units: drones can lay waste to an invading army, but they suck at power projection because their range is only ~10-20 miles. Might we see a return to city-states as the primary form of political organization? Maybe all the arguments about whether Russia vs. the U.S. vs. China will come out on top are moot, because the very concept of a nation-state will disintegrate, and instead we'll have Beijing vs. Shanghai vs. Shenzhen vs. Moscow vs. Kiev vs. the Bay Area vs. NYC vs. Washington DC? Drones are also ideal for defending shipping lanes, so perhaps we'll see a loose confederation of economically-bound city-states, but each having their own culture and social laws.
IMO the supply chain for drones requires the stability and resource extraction on the scale of a state. SoCs, radios, optics, batteries etc all require high tech manufacturing.
Guerilla use of drones need off the shelf microcontrollers from somewhere, they aren't fabbing them in their backyard.
I would like to see evidence behind this claim on two fronts:
1. all parts are produced in other countries
2. slightly higher prices
There are countries (including Ukraine) that produce on-board flight controllers, but the controllers themselves often rely on components from China. I actually do think it is feasible to create a passable quadrotor using non-Chinese components only but I do not know of a rigorous study or a manufacturer that does this.
I would not provide you with links, sorry. I follow different drone manufactures and over the last years they all had periodic issues sourcing components from China including chips for flight controllers so they found alternatives (i.e. not manufactured in China) for all major components AFAIK .
I've heard that the most difficult to replace is the camera sensor. Drone cameras are produced now in Ukraine as well, however non-Chinese sensors as far as I know are very expensive.
"It's likely that the drone, being both cheap to produce"
If you can buy the parts, then yes, but producing a complete drone all on your own is not that easy I think.
Still easier than a stealth air plane or a cruise missile, though. So your predictions might come true, because I also see most state armies being really slow to adopt to this new reality.
> As an engineer, I am fascinated by it all. As a human, I am horrified that we democratized violence on this scale.
How do you even defend against this in a terrorist use case? When a small drone with a grenade or homemade explosive is so accessible? Any Christmas market in central Europe these days is surrounded by car barriers to prevent mass run-overs, but what do you do when soon someone has the idea of dropping some molotov cocktails from drones in public places? Answering my own question I guess you can already throw one manually without a drone. Securing public places is weird, I'm glad it's not my job.
It's going to be an analogue of the situation with firearms today where the assailant has an asymmetrical advantage over civilians but not the countermeasure (police).
Also, the US military has been stockpiling kinetic drone countermeasures for about four years now. The idea is you get a hardened, ~11 pound autonomous drone that slams into the target at roughly 90 mph and physically destroys it before returning home. Add on 1-2 year-old US EW technology that now disables autonomous drones (yep, even autonomous drones), and you can establish a very comprehensive defense. The point I'm making here is that the tech is not only possible, but it exists.
Is it perfect? No. Though defense against firearms and explosives today isn't perfect either. Namely because of response times of the countermeasure. So in that sense, we aren't entering a uniquely dangerous situation.
Edit:
I think what will happen is that the first time a UAS is used on civilians, flying drones around population centers will be banned without permit. That way, if a drone is seen flying without a permit, it gets taken down on sight.
> The fact that we haven't had more drone terror attacks says more about the technological slowness of terrorists than its infeasibility.
Also motivation and incentives. The reason we haven't seen many drone attacks on civilians is that it is far more lucrative to get civilians to buy your product than to kill them, and the companies that actually have the resources to mount a credible drone attack are making a lot more money doing the former.
Terrorism in general has always been far more overhyped than actually a problem - the median number of terrorist deaths per year in the U.S. from 1970-2020 is 4, making your odds of being killed in a terrorist attack significantly lower than being struck by lightning. And the reason is simply that it's deeply irrational. What do you have to gain from killing a random stranger?
non-terror life opportunity
vs
terror life opportunity
Why you tend to have domestic terror in places with bad economies (and high economic equality). And why beliefs often drive it (religious, political, etc.), by adding righteousness to the terror side of the equation.
But requisite minimum skillset is also a consideration, and that's where drones are dangerous.
We're talking (play videogames and some soldering) instead of (chemistry or biology).
The median is more relevant than the mean simply because it's less sensitive to outliers. 9/11 was an outlier; 85% of all U.S. terrorist deaths in the last 50 years happened on that one day.
> How do you even defend against this in a terrorist use case?
You can't, and you don't. That is why it is called terrorism. Safety and freedom are sometimes antagonistic goals. This is an example. Terrorism is defended against by not changing society despite the terrorism. It is violence with a political goal, if the politics do not change, the terrorism fails. Not every soft target can (nor should be) hardened, there will always be soft targets.
Interesting, my take is completely the opposite - you defend against terrorism precisely by changing the society as the material circumstances change, so that the disenfranchised can have their interests represented and achieve a political goal without having to blow stuff up.
(1) Depends on the society. We perhaps agree based on which society we are discussing, and who the terrorists are.
(2) "Defending" soft targets I posit is just an impossible task unless society becomes so locked down that it is unrecognizable. Lots of Sci-Fi has been written on this topic, eg: 'thought crimes', 'judge dredd'.
Sticking to the theme of point (1).. The French revolution was lead by terrorists. They terrorized the aristocracy (and arguably had no other outlet): "cede power or you'll keep getting your heads chopped off." The aristocracy then ceded power. Whether society is forced to change or voluntarily changes is almost an immaterial difference at that point.
OTOH, consider if someone started blowing up libraries in the US. If the response is to shut down libraries, then the population has been terrorized. Bombings in subways were common at a point, if the subways shut down - the population has been terrorized.
In the 1960s, (US) police used dogs against voter registration organizers. To have been terrorized would have been to stop voting, stop voter registration. That terrorism was not successful.
OTOH, lynchings in the US were a prevalent form of terrorism. IE: "this is what happens when you 'don't know your place'". It worked. I recall there is data showing a large change in regional population dynamics for _decades_ following a lynching.
Timothy McVeigh could have done stuff within the libertarian party, but instead chose a path of violence. Timothy McVeigh failed, he blew up a building and that is all that happened.
The 9/11 hijackers chose a path of violence as well. The 9/11 terrorism OTOH was arguably massively successful - a huge wedge developed between cultures & religions, US society radically changed and the US government was successfully baited and began fighting wars that drained its diplomatic, military and financial power.
So, I think for repressed societies, one persons terrorist is another's freedom fighter. In 'open' societies, the terrorist is trying to change the society in some way, through violent means (a shortcut). Changing the society in that way is achieving the aims of the terrorist.
Strictly speaking, the original, “terrorists” for whose “terrorism” in instituting “the Terror” those terms were all coined as specific terms and later genericized were Robespierre and certain other top leaders of the regime established by the Revolution; that groups overlaps with, but is not coextensive with, leaders of the Revolution; the aristocracy already had their legal power stripped before the whole head chopping thing (which was very much not limited to the aristocracy, the vast majority of the ~15k formal executions and the ~10k who died in custody without trial were commoners, and the ratio is even higher for the ~300k killed outside of judicial process during the Terror.)
well, in another case of individual resorted to act thru political violence in New Zealand's Christchurch mass murder... the PM changed the State-wise gun-law but one can also argue that deterrance against 'spreading of terrorism belieaf system' can also be enhanced if the State was to re-enact death sentence for home-grown mass-murderer, no? Soft-targets will always be there and so is mass hysteria, yes?
Thank you for the video! This is so much coming. Plus with thermal cameras too which is even more scary.
On the same topic it reminds me Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (from 2005!) where an AI called "Masse Kernels" was automatically creating missions sent to different PMCs, managing war assets, supervising the war effort, coms, and the like... Feels also that's coming, at least in some forms for now.
Well you can’t just throw a Molotov because in that case you’re going to get caught. You can place a drone, go home and have it drop the Molotov the next day and no one would know who did it.
fwiw, I think the car barriers never had the purpose to stop cars, but to show people that at least on some level someone cares about their perceived safety.
At the weekend, I was at a small town which had a half a mile long main road blocked off for a market day. They put up bollards to do so.
Chances are, there were 0 persons planning a car attack on it. So there was an element of "We don't think anything's going to happen, but if it were to happen, we're prepared.". A bit like having a fire extinguisher when there's never been a fire.
But would seeing the bollards also have the effect of discouraging the insane people of the idea of driving the car through the crowds the next time a market day is held?
Oppositely, if they didn't put up any barriers, a psychopath seeing this and the realization that cars can be weapons might give them the idea of "I know what I can do for my act of terrorism..."
I mean…you can’t, at least not right now, not for civvies. Let’s consider some of the current countermeasures:
* Flak/Shrapnel/Birdshot: An excellent last-minute defense if you’re calm enough to line up an accurate shot, but data shows that equipping civilians with these sorts of weapons en masse is a bad idea for safety and well-being. That’s a no-go.
* Nets: Popular for defense, but it’s a matter of time before drones adapt by flying under the nets or changing payload to something to dissolve it. A kamikaze drone could also be enough to destroy an opening for more to swarm. In a civilian context, they’re an excellent deterrent for high-population areas, for now, albeit unsightly.
* Buildings: Safest for now, provided the structure is relatively hardened and the windows are secured. But most civilian structures aren’t guarded against explosions or external attacks, and even those that are require a human to vacate it eventually. Once inside however, there’s more options for stopping an attack - for now - like interior netting, small arms with pellets or buckshot, or even lasers to blind the optical sensors. Impractical for civilian deployment at scale, presently, and highly variable.
* Jammers: Good against piloted drones, but as the article points out, the current crop of dev work is geared towards autonomous slaughterbots instead of human decision-making. Jammers are restricted by most countries and, if left functioning after an attack, could hinder first responders. If left on constantly, would disrupt civilian work. So that’s a no-go.
* LASERS! Probably the best deterrent in the short term for civilians, I would wager. A randomized strobe of a high-powered IR laser could devastate a swarm of drones’ optics, making navigation or target acquisition difficult or impossible. Sticking a piece of protective glass on the sensor would likely nullify it long enough to finish its mission, though.
And that’s what distresses me, ultimately. The future depicted in Slaughterbots or Horizon is rapidly approaching, where autonomous drones can murder with impunity and are affordable enough that any threat actor could get their hands on it. Combined with modern databases of humans - faces, biometrics, profiles, locations, habits, schedules - we’re nearing an era where assassination or murder is a drone away.
That is what horrifies me. And if there’s one thing my time in the defense industry taught me, it’s that nobody is trustworthy with that kind of power. Companies making these absolutely will use them (or condone their use) against dissidents, opposition, regulators, and governments. Pandora’s Box is already open, and I don’t think enough folks appreciate the horrors it will bring.
>Nets: Popular for defense, but it’s a matter of time before drones adapt by flying under the nets or changing payload to something to dissolve it.
Worth noting here that the Ukrainian armed forces have already repeatedly deployed drones with the ability to spray pretty impressive amounts of napalm all over their targets from fairly high altitudes. Fittingly, they've been called "Dragon drones", and I wouldn't want to be under any anti-drone net if one of those arrives.
The "Dragon Drones" also drop thermite [0], a material with massively exothermic high temperature 2000°C+ redox reaction, which can melt through most metals. Thermite is often used to weld rail tracks [1].
Shooting people with a rifle is not scalable and there is a high risk of getting caught. Imagine if school shooters could kill thousands instead of dozens, and at zero risk.
The school shooter type seems to want to be present locally, to go out with a bang, and to do it somewhere they are connected to.
They are not aiming for maximal scalability nor chance to get away.
Of course, other threat actors might, like a Unabomber type or groups designed to destabilize society (perhaps foreign sponsored) by doing repeated actions etc.
I don't want to ban you because you've also posted good things, but if you keep posting ideological and/or political flamebait, and especially religious or nationalistic slurs, we will. Therefore, if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
That would be one approach, though I think it is unlikely to be a successful one.
The topic is autonomous drones. Presumably these drones don't stop to go through customs on the way to their targets, and have no reason to respect borders. They're too small for existing radar to track, so enforcement would be difficult.
For that matter, since they can be left in a quiescent state for relatively long periods, there's no requirement that anyone involved be inside the country. They could be shipped internationally through existing shipping services to arbitrary addresses near a target, unpack themselves by cutting through their packaging, and attack a preplanned target.
Literal enemies don't need an invitation. Ukraine was able to smuggle several literal trucks loaded with weapons, deep into literal enemy territory, and put them near airbases where cruise missiles were launched from.
Let's not be naive. Aid programs are a great idea when practical, and I'm certainly not in favor of indiscriminate bombing. But unfortunately in many countries, including Middle East conflict zones, any foreign aid is just stolen by local armed groups and used to fund terrorist activities. How do you think the leaders of Hamas accumulated billions in foreign bank accounts?
Leaders of Hamas has no bank accounts, AFAIK. Did you mean cryptocurrencies? If so, it's unlikely that these funds are personal savings.
Usually, locals doesn't steal from locals in conflict zones, because their throats, or throats of their families, will be cut by other armed locals in no time.
Invaders and mercenaries often rob or kill locals in many, many cases.
Don't be naive. Leaders of Hamas have control of foreign bank accounts. Probably cryptocurrencies as well now. Those funds are the personal proceeds of theft and embezzlement. They steal aid money directly, or steal supplies and sell them for cash. The locals can't do anything to stop them because Hamas has all of the weapons: there are no other armed locals. Hamas violently suppresses the locals who even try to protest against theft of foreign aid.
I don't think any country welcomes extremists like ISIS combatants willingly. So you would need a way to weed them out. It's not just difficult, it's practically impossible.
>How do you even defend against this in a terrorist use case? When a small drone with a grenade or homemade explosive is so accessible?
I can see this from the other perspective. I've read stories for the past 30 years now about police forces and swat teams abusing people, murdering people because someone filled out the address wrong on a warrant, etc. And I wonder, in the coming years, if those sorts of scenarios will be quite as one-sided as they are today. What will that world look like?
>Answering my own question I guess you can already throw one manually without a drone.
Sure, but can you throw one from 2 miles away, can you throw 30 simultaneously? Can you then instantly escape without much of any evidence of who you are being left behind, not even a blurry traffic cam picture? The scale of the mayhem is a quality all of its own.
Speaking just for myself, I am not currently stockpiling explosive-carrying drones in preparation for an encounter with over-zealous police. Yes, such incidents happen. They could even happen to me. Still, I don't worry about them enough to go to that length. (Nor do I see things ending well for me if I did.)
Give it a go and you might be surprised! Stockpiling explosive-carrying drones in preparation for an encounter with over-zealous police can be an educational and absorbing hobby. Many people are sceptical of how things will end for them, but once they start they are drawn in by the friendly and supportive community and doubts like this are quickly forgotten.
Also, the fear of drones is their offensive use. I'm not sure a cop intending to officer-involved-shooting you for looking vaguely like a shoplifter is going to clearly announce his intentions, then wait for you to dig your weaponized drone out of the trunk of your car, boot it up, and get him with it.
Whatever fear Russians have of drones isn't in their offensive use. They're only being used defensively by Ukraine. Similarly, if you're a jackbooted goon, you might well fear their defensive use as I outlined above. But yeh, you have nothing to fear from the defensive use of drones, because you're not attacking anyone... in the coming years, however, the narrative will likely be twisted so that you do come to fear such people as might use them defensively, because the establishment needs you to despise them.
This article did not even cover some of the weird solutions being deployed against drones. For example, Russia has surrounded many of their critical infrastructure sites with huge nets (similar to golf course barrier netting). They have also developed anti-drone drones that drop nets from above, catching and tangling target drones in a bunch of netting that simply snags the blades.
In my opinion, AA guns will become again popular to counter drone swarms. None of the modern weapons are that effective like old AA Guns.India proved this with Pakisthan massive drone attacks recently.
> They have also developed anti-drone drones that drop nets from above, catching and tangling target drones in a bunch of netting that simply snags the blades.
Yeah if we could just all agree that from now on, all warfare is limited to drone-on-drone engagements.
If we could agree on that we'd agree on simply simulating war, no need to actually send drones. But it's unlikely to happen for the same reason hero fights instead of army fights didn't happen like in the movies. Ultimately war is about a difference of opinion strong enough to not care about loss of life, so after a country would lose the simulation they'd just go onto the real war part anyway.
> The programming can be set-and-forget, meaning operations can be staged months ahead of deployment and make it difficult to find or prevent.
This is something I haven't considered before. What's the worst case here? Is it feasible for me to go live on a farm in <country I want to harm>, buy a fleet of DJI drones at flea markets etc, stick something harmful to them, then hide them in the woods.
I can move away, wait a year or two, and then have them fly to the nearest metro area and wreak havoc. This seems to be cheap and relatively straightforward, and hard to detect. What am I missing?
In a pre-drone world you can get explosives, divide them into X equal sized packages, add a timer set to the same point in time to each, then travel around the country hiding them in high-traffic areas.
Yes, that approach is inferior to the drone version. You have to hide them inconspicuously, and a bomb sniffing dog could find them. But you can visit a lot of places in a single European country or US state within one day, and unless the country is already on high alert you can hide something for that time span in public. Yet this doesn't happen. Even regular bombings are rare.
The reasons are manifold: In most places getting explosives isn't actually all that easy (unless you go the homemade route) and is a good method to get attention from authorities. But another factor is that there just doesn't seem to be a large interest in doing that kind of complex attack unless there is already an ongoing civil war. Actual terrorism is fairly rare, and the terrorists tend to be not all that sophisticated.
Are these kinds of drone attacks a scary new possibility? Yes, absolutely! Are they likely to happen? Not really. We might see it as a method to assassinate officials (imagine staging drones at a place where you know the US President will hold a speech in a couple months), but I doubt it will play a major role against the general population
The drone scenario is very different, all you have to do is get close-ish to your target. This is very different than having a stick of c4 sit on your target for months. You have to get them to drone-range, say in the back of a lorry, on a roof somewhere, in a box. Then the programming and or AI can kick in and do the last mile for you, whenever you need. Case in point is the Ukrainian attack on the air fields, they parked a lorry nearby.
Attentive people would find the bombs. Especially if they're on alert, which everyone who knows about terrorism will be at least to some degree.
Back in the day, if you forgot a bag on a British bus the driver would get it and run after you, so that it wouldn't be a bomb issue taking the whole day.
Not much. Autonomous targeting and control are quite new and currently take a fair bit of knowledge and skill to get right, but I expect those barriers to lower dramatically in the coming years. There might be power issues with such a long delay, but I'm not sure. I think the main drawback once this tech gets slightly more widespread is that most people who want to terrorize cities don't want to wait a year or two to do it.
For long running conflicts (Israel vs Iran for example) I expect we'll see some fascinating and horrifying attacks in the near to medium term. Of course anti-drone tech is also evolving quickly and I expect that to continue so the shelf life of any specific attack will probably continue to be rather short.
It doesn't really take much knowledge to set up an autonomous drone mission. It's not DJI-levels of consumer friendliness, but I know multiple people that made and fly their own drones, and it's not something you can't do with a few YouTube tutorials.
They're battery operated, so I think there's a time limit of a few months. Then, you want to be very careful with the infrastructure you leave behind (little pop-open doors/roofs for them to fly out of) to avoid future investigation. You're going to need some practice, your first try will just go to shit perhaps. Opsec while you're setting all this up is still a big deal that amateurs will have trouble getting right. But none of these are particularly insurmountable. With the correct software and careful planning, this will succeed at its goals.
Things you can't help: they will discover the remains of the drones, and also their origin. This evidence will eventually lead back to you (unless you have the aid of a enemy nation-state). Not a big deal if you're dying in a suicide attack, but maybe you don't want the extended vacation in the CIA's worst black ops rendition site.
What you're missing is the will to go through with it. Even state actors would get spooked spending months or years setting this up. One slip-up and you're in prison for life. When your country's existence is at stake, the process is easier.
Battery degradation, a year or two's worth of leaves and debris accumulating on and around the drones, literally all of the elements affecting them, animals, etc.
If I've gone to the hassle of setting up a high tech bombing attack, wouldn't I have also gone to the trouble of putting the drone in a self-opening container?
You can probably get unsuspecting couriers to deliver last mile. Build a drone dock with cutter to open top of boxes. Mail a weaponized drone to an address within range of target.
Jammers don't work against optical cable or AI vision controlled drones. That's a big problem today in Ukraine for both sides.
As for defense, first of all it's detection and tracking. Copters and long range gas powered drones are very loud and easily detectable. Ukraine uses a net of cell phones. Several devices with microphones can accurately pinpoint all drone like sources in real time. That's cheap to install miles around important targets. Then we need just fast AI interceptors 'on hold', in the air if can afford. The last part is missing today, but we'll get there soon.
As for danger, etc. Small remote controlled firearms were easily available for decades. Drones _are_ trackable. When one takes off in big city Russians know immediately where. By using radio scanners. All DJI drones, and most others, communicate and simply broadcast their coordinates. This is used in Ukraine to find their operators.
What is also distressing is that drones make false flag attacks even easier. Add to that the fact of AI generated media/propaganda means no war will be factually comprehensible to anybody.
I think the idea of a false flag will also be completely destroyed by ai video tech. Once everyone knows everything is fake, how will they know that the false flag was real?
>horrified that we democratized violence on this scale
Violence has always been pretty democratic - you've always been able to punch someone or hit them with a rock and the US seems to have more guns than people.
Pandora's box is now open and multiple groups have access to drones[0].
This is something that I think escapes engineers in this line of work - that something they invented will eventually end up (legally or not) in the hands of people with no scruples.
I'm very interested in the consequences of vigilante applications of this kind of technologies. Imagine a scenario where people start taking out corrupt police officers who have until now been able to terrorize small communities with impunity.
It may motivate actual reform in policing because law enforcement will realize that police officers who kill innocent people with no regard for the law are safer in prison than out on the streets with a paid vacation / desk job punishment.
You need drones to do it in a way that significantly reduces the risk of getting caught.
As it is vigilante action against law enforcement in the west is a sure death sentence and probably life long reprisal against your family once you're dead which is what keeps people in line.
If the development of drone technology significantly reduces the risk of that then you're likely to see many more people respond to violent abuses of authority by law enforcement with vigilante action.
War has (probably) existed since before the dawn of man. Even chimpanzees engage in something like tribal warfare so that behavior probably goes back to a common ancestor species at least 6M years ago.
Also spoofers that could take over a drone - not sure how much encryption is used in most of these off-the-shelf drones, but it would seem like it wouldn't be too difficult to create a Flipper Zero-type device that could spoof the codes used between controller and drone.
The latest attack deep inside Russian borders were apparently using ArduPilot [1], it is mentioned in the Atlantic article [2]. ArduPilot also has C++ source code in Github [3], also adding an article specifically about ArduPilot and Ukraine [4]
To be clear, that's because Ardupilot is a really pretty routine UAV navigation project with obvious civilian/industrial/enthusiast application. People hack on Ardupilot because it's fun to see your drone fly around on its own. That you can also put a grenade on it is sort of an obvious extension, but the payload is very much a separate feature.
The big difference is they can now run this on the copter instead of being remotely controlled; a 100$ raspberry pi has enough processing power for this, and so does several other off-the-shelf mini computers powered by lithium batteries.
So what did they do, just stick GPS coordinates and the drones were that successful autonomously (talking of the Russian fighter base attack from the last 48 hours)? I'd be shocked if they didn't manually pilot these things.
There are so many possible scripts that could be based on what has happened since 2022 in Ukraine. There would be no need for exaggeration of the heroism, bravery, and loss. The only issue might be that people would not believe it actually happened.
From Zelenskyy, a previous comedic actor refusing to flee, "I need ammunition, not a ride," to the defense of Snake Island "Russian warship, go fuck yourself," to all the brave women who volunteered, the farmers towing abandoned Russian tanks, the constant drone attacks on residential and commercial areas, the 40,000 stolen Ukrainian children, this most recent attack on Russian air bases...
If this was a movie, I would probably think it was a bit much myself, but this all happened. We witnessed it.
OpenCV and other onboard computer softwares can be trained to recognize shapes, 10+ years ago there was a demo of a NodeCopter controlled small drone following red flags.
Stick the GPS coord, fly there, and once in a geofence look for a shape to crash into doesn't seem impossible given what was possible 10 years ago.
Hell, 30 years ago I was working for the MOD (they sponsored my PhD and turned it into an RA) in the UK creating context-aware neural network inference engines for FLIR (Forward-looking infra-red) data. We had all sorts of "fun" stuff running on a Meiko computing surface, with parallelised network training and implementations, temporal and spatial averaging, and relaxation labelling all thrown into the mix to aid the recognition engine, done with a voting system of various architectures sharing to a "blackboard" where information could be posted to and read from. Visualisation was all on high-end (for the time) Silicon Graphics workstations.
The context (together with the features extracted) was the killer (forgive the pun) feature though - everything else reduced noise, but context increased signal.
My gast remains flabbered that the sort of thing I was working on back then hasn't become commonplace in the interim. The computing power available today, compared to then, and the accuracy we had (I know for a fact at least one of the designs was made into real hardware, it was called RH7, and "RH" stood for "Red Herring" - oh how we laughed) ... It beggars belief that it was just left to digitally rot.
There is often quite heavy GPS jamming or spoofing. Also in some of the published videos I think you can see a "no GPS lock" status message - but maybe they just did not bother with GPS if all the drones were manually piloted anyway.
Yes, I assumed they didn't need GPS because they knew exactly where the trucks that were the launch sites were to be placed and they knew approximately their targets would be sitting on a certain section of airport tarmac. The pilots would have had a detailed satellite photo map of their entire route until visual target ID was possible. While GPS was probably partially jammed, that deep in Russia I doubt it would have been as severe as near the front lines. Plus there wouldn't have been heavy jamming of the local drone control frequencies because they weren't expecting a drone attack there.
To me the more interesting question is how they managed sending the real-time video feeds and control data. Since the trucks were mobile, I assume it had to be via a bunch of mobile phones signed up to Russian service providers since Starlink doesn't work inside Russia. To reduce latency, I wonder if the phones were connecting to a covert site in Russia which had a high-bandwidth wired link, maybe a front company established for the operation with servers and broadband internet connections.
GPS is heavily jammed throughout Russia, and the ArduPilot overlays shown on the videos released directly show there was no GPS lock (might not have been equipped as I'm sure they'd be expecting this).
Given these are static targets, it might be possible to relay precise GPS information from that morning’s satellite data. No real time intelligence required. Just dead reckoning to the target coordinates.
Operation in GNSS-denied areas is already a stock feature on many relatively inexpensive commercial drones. The manufacturers talk about it euphemistically for obvious reasons, but they're designing drones specifically for the Ukraine war. There's a huge amount of engineering effort going into building drones that can remain operational in an extremely hostile RF environment.
Compensating for wind drift is a fairly straightforward software problem when you've got a fast processor, a bunch of high-resolution cameras and a laser rangefinder.
If you have a downward facing camera you can track your movement like an optical mouse by just watching the terrain. Error will creep in, but you only need to fly a few kilometers till you find something that looks like a strategic bomber.
Apparently, there were hundred+ drone pilots available who were spread across several timezones should the AI not be able to find their way visually. If you see some of the streaming video snippets, it says GPS fix unavailable likely due to jamming of GNSS systems and disabling of civilian GLONASS near bases. As such, Russian domestic cell carriers were reportedly used to stream video and for manual terminal guidance following visual cues, hence the daylight timing of the raid.
One report said the drone attack was sequential, not swarming. So perhaps only one remote operator per truck, with about 2-3 minutes between each drone launch, depending on how far the previous one had to go to reach its target.
Source on the 100+ drone pilots an cell carriers? I've been hoping to find an article on how they staged the pilots for manual guidance. I imagined they would have had to tunnelled all that traffic to each operator from the truck, but the cell towers is clever
He could be telling the truth, he could be lying... A drone programmed to automatically boot up , check its location, and if it's at the right coordinates, take off and crash at some other coordinates (the airfield) is more satisfying to "fans" of automated warfare.
For extra fun, add some other code to "look for plane-like objects to crash into", but now you're approaching dangerous territory of "What if a civilian 737 happens to be boarding at this airfield"...
The reports also mention the truck roof opening remotely, one could also use GPS coordinates to trigger this. But doing it manually from a distance, after checking the surveillance cameras that the coast is clear, is more reliable.
I guess they used smartphones and SIM cards with mobile data for the remote communication...
> For extra fun, add some other code to "look for plane-like objects to crash into", but now you're approaching dangerous territory of "What if a civilian 737 happens to be boarding at this airfield"...
Civilian 737 boarding airfield where Russia keeps strategic nuclear bombings? Russians would shoot them down faster than any drone could get them.
>Civilian 737 boarding airfield where Russia keeps strategic nuclear bombings?
I'm not sure if the Tu-95 is hosted at any joint-use airports, but joint-use themselves airports are not uncommon. Pskov is joint-use, Ukraine launched a smaller-scale attack on some Il-76s there a couple years back. The scenario that an attack on legitimate target aircraft could be happening metres away from civilian aircraft is realistic.
Because whether or not they're justified in doing so, Ukraine has made it clear that they have no interest in targeting civilians. They've been incredibly surgical and precise in their attacks. Unbelievably so, honestly.
It's a military airfield, so no civilian 737 there. There seems to be a video from the drone, meaning some kind of connectivity was present with or without autopilot.
Reportedly it was just running over local mobile internet connectivity. The attack was over so quickly they would likely not even have time to shut it down.
It's strange - blocking GPS is typical around military sites. So, assume the drones were hard-coded to zero a location - they couldn't do it, as GPS would be blocked. They had to be piloted. Interesting.
In theory. In practice you would not allow a single camera drone to be the single point of failure of a mission with such lengthy and risky planning, and dire consequences.
I understand that you’re probably just gonna reply with “still only need one camera”
…but if GPS is jammed, and there’s only one camera per fleet, how exactly are the other drones supposed to navigate towards the spotted targets unless they’re all equipped with cameras?
You are just continuing to spout nonsense. All of the drones have cameras. Using a single designated camera drone is a stupid idea, overly complex and completely unnecessary.
I think the problem is an assumption that people are too stupid to grasp their brilliant idea.
That being said, having all drones equipped with cameras could enable a more robust version of what they’re talking about:
If uplink with human operators is lost, but short-range comms between drones exist, they could use their video feeds to autonomously coordinate amongst themselves.
So now the camera is pointed at the target? How is it checking that the other drones are headed in the right direction? And the personnel on the ground? They're just chillin' waiting for those other drones to come intersect with the stationary spotter drone's line of sight?
We have two years of footage from Ukraine, where camera-equipped drones are launched from a several miles away at most, and where there are networks of pilots and support specialists to assemble and launch more drones in case of (frequent) failure.
I don’t think it’s wise to wager the success of a 6-month mission deep in enemy territory on a plan with a single point of failure, especially when the alternative is equipping each drone with < $100 cameras.
lmao what? You want to loiter with a camera drone to guide other drones to target? How would that work if neither drone knows where it is (drones had no GPS lock, it's a fact, not a speculation)?
there was this German talking head "Nico Lange" who made this claim first without providing evidence for it. He is an ex politician and a regular in the Munich Security Conference and I assume this is who was (mainly) responsible for spreading it.
AI gets so much boost from this nonsense. Because now it's about saving our lives.
"ArduPilot can handle tasks like stabilizing a drone in the air while the pilot focuses on moving to their next objective. Pilots can switch them into loitering mode, for example, if they need to step away or perform another task, and it has failsafe modes that keep a drone aloft if signal is lost."
Not for this task, but could be used autonomously. If they trusted that these planes were still in the same spot, and their GPS coordinates were accurate to 10 cm, then what they could do is just program the drones to fly a preset route at preset heights, stop over the plane's wing and then descend all the way to 0 meters.
Even with that level of target knowledge (I suspect the US has the investment in the sensor-targeting links to be able to use satellites to know within cm where planes were within a five minute window, but am not sure about other nations) you'd want to have some that were available for later re-targeting to handle misses. Nuclear weapons war plans solve this by relentlessly re-targeting again and again (declassified 1960's USAF war plans called for over 70 different missiles to hit Moscow alone) but with the smaller damage radius of conventional weapons you either end up with a second strike to make sure you get all the survivors of the first strike- or have a trained human who knows the targeting priority in the loop available to update targeting on the fly.
You can also see the careful departure of drones from containers in the videos, without extra panning or yaw. Not quite how a human operator would fly them.
Via the regular mobile network according to one article I read. The Ukrainians said that all operators where safely out of Russia when the news broke, so I doubt they where at the airfields several hundreds of kilometers from Ukraine.
To reduce latency, I wonder if the phones were connecting to a covert site in Russia which had a high-bandwidth, lower-latency wired link, maybe a front company established in Russia for the operation with servers and broadband internet connections. Or maybe just a colocated server at a major backbone site in Russia was rented by a Russian front company. Seems like the kind of thing intelligence services do. While I'm sure Russia has more restrictions on renting colocated servers than the U.S., it's still something that needs to happen every day. Russia also has a fairly robust underground economy of less-than-legitimate companies doing illicit things, so there have to be ways for those companies to avoid restrictions (probably involving bribing certain people).
If the attack was coordinated this way, I assume whoever sold the colo to Ukrainian intelligence thought they were simply setting up yet another server for a shady Russian scam company. Foreign intelligence services often avoid scrutiny by using the same methods as domestic criminals in the target country.
Yes, I assume it probably does except maybe during periods of elevated alert. A large military airbase capable of being home base to bombers is like a small city, with thousands of civilian workers.
Anyway, the drones used mobile internet between the launch point outside the base and the pilots in Ukraine. The connection between the launch point and the drones was point-to-point drone control frequencies which does not use the mobile phone network.
Yes, Ukrainian military leadership has admitted that Starlink has been so vital that they would have had no chance without it. Starlink latency can be faster than cable in some parts of the us. Remember light travels faster in air than through metal wire as radio.
Assuming they were remotely operated - at least partially during the final few minutes of the attack - I wonder if the pilots remained in Ukraine or were hidden somewhere close by. I'm assuming they remained in Ukraine, thousands of kilometers away. If so, how did they pull off the remote connection over enemy territory? The only option somewhere as remote as Irkutsk seems to be Starlink, unless the trucks carried custom transceivers (which seems like it would be easily discovered during transit).
Over cellular modems in the drones with Russian SIM cards. The operation was prepared for months in advance. Getting a bunch of pre-paid SIM cards from the Russian equivalent to 7-11 (which might just be 7-11) was probably the easiest part of the operation.
Stores won't sell a SIM card without the buyer providing valid state ID, and SIM cards are disabled by carriers if they suspect you are using someone else's card and you can't provide an ID for it. This is one of the recent laws. Getting a phone number/data plan that isn't associated with your real identity (and instead registered to someone else, usually a homeless guy somewhere) isn't impossible, but those wouldn't come from a grocery store.
They've been planning this for over a year and this is the SBU we're talking about. I'm pretty sure they could figure out a way to light up a data plan on a cell phone in Russia when needed.
Or just their civilian phones. Suddenly occurs to me how effective that would be as a source of SIMs. Won't last forever but can be produced in the month preceding the op.
Maybe just tourist SIMs that let you roam into other countries? Buy a load of SIMs in Kazakhstan or somewhere like that, roam into Russia, now you have internet?
Jamming only works when there's equipment in place and activated. Prior to this attack there was no reason for Russia to even have jamming equipment located at a base deep inside their borders let alone active.
Now in its third generation, the Ghost Dragon has come a long way since 2022. Its original command-and-control-band radio was quickly replaced with a smart frequency-hopping system that constantly scans the available spectrum, looking for bands that aren’t jammed. It allows operators to switch among six radio-frequency bands to maintain control and also send back video even in the face of hostile jamming.
“In the perfect world, the drone should take off, fly, find the target, strike it, and report back on the task,” Burukin says. “That’s where the development is heading.”
That's the problem in a nutshell. A few years back, few would argue against keeping a human in the kill/no-kill decision chain. It just took one war to get pop tech authors writing on it without even a mention of the ethical considerations or autonomous killing machines.
It highlights an awkward apparent fact that 'ethics' and 'honor' are luxuries to maintain when one is on top and they will be thrown out the door as soon as they face an actual threat. Not saying that it is right but that it appears to be the predictable response.
I suppose it highlights axiomatically the terribleness of ethics when they must be defined in a might-makes-right manner. All very high minded and complex questions which leave the awkward question unanswered: what are we supposed to do?
I don’t really want to argue this side, but is it that different from a smart bomb or guided missile? A human is in the loop; the human issued the coordinates of the target to the delivery vehicle.
That kind of operation seems extremely different from a stationary turret or patrol robot with standing orders to shoot upon arbitrary targets at any time it decides to.
India used oldschool L70 Guns, zu 23 and ZSU-23-4 Shilka against pakisthan's drone swarm attacks. They are modernized to track, lock, and fire automatically. But they are cheap.
Immediate post-WW2 vintage. The classic design of AA gun.
As far as I understand it from talking about Turkish drones, you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayraktar_TB2 style, aircraft size drones, rather than the quadcopter size ones? The latter can more easily hide in terrain.
We have multi-layered low signature and passive drone detection system, including radar, radio frequency (RF)-based systems, electro-optical sensors, IR, and video tracking. We also have Thermal imaging for all weather use. And all are integrated into a single command and control system. These upgraded Old school system proved to be worthy to shot down more than 500 turkish drones sent by Pak.
None of them caused any casualities or any damage to infrastructure. As we have multi layered defense system with
L70 and Zu23 for very short range Defense agains drones and UAV, Spyder for Short Range, Akash for Medium range, s400 for Long range and high value target, exact kill rate of Guns are unknown. In press briefing, officials said that these were so effective against drones.
The strength of a reflected radar signal generally decreases with the fourth power of distance: r-squared to the reflector, and r-squared back from the reflector (assuming more-or-less uniform backscattering). Which means that a low radar signature is usually still detectable, the object just needs to get moderately closer.
So being stealthy in the radar spectrum is pretty difficult, and I often wonder if stealth planes are mostly a means to transfer money from the state to defense companies.
There hasn't been much coverage because it's not as sexy as drones but the degree to which AA tech that was formerly the domain of well funded armies has proliferated down the economic spectrum in recent years is really hard to overstate.
> There hasn't been much coverage because it's not as sexy as drones but the degree to which AA tech that was formerly the domain of well funded armies has proliferated down the economic spectrum in recent years is really hard to overstate.
A lot of the key AA tech that has suddenly become important in the era of drone swarms began proliferating to mid-tier forces around the 1980s (or earlier), and was retired by well-funded armies between then and the 2000s, because compared to SAM systems, it was suitable only for lower, slower, less capable targets.
Turns out, suddenly large numbers of lower, slower, less capable targets are being fielded, and its really expensive to take them on with SAM systems optimized for dealing with modern manned aircraft, cruise missiles, and/or ballistic missiles.
If your country is an adversary of China, I would be scared. I've seen videos on YouTube of how the drones from Chinese drone light shows take off and return to their launch areas. They have remarkable accuracy.
These generally just use RTK and a base station; nothing interesting and extremely easily rejected by EW (since they need both accurate global positioning signal _and_ RTK signal).
Inside-out SLAM strategies and on-device ML are much more interesting and are starting to trickle into COTS drones. For example, the latest DJI drones all use SLAM for return-to-home even when GPS denied: https://www.facebook.com/reel/440875398703491 , and the latest Matrice 4 enterprise drones also have end-user ML model runtimes that can fine-tune flight plans using user-provided logic.
Inside-out last-second targeting is also very popular in Ukraine, with off-the-shelf "find the nearest car/person in analog video, lock to it on signal lost, and send Betaflight MSP stick commands to hit it" modules readily accessible on Aliexpress.
Why would you? A glide kit for a Mk84 has twice the range, 100x the payload and the same price tag. The warfighting America does isn't rooted in that domain (even if you can argue drones are smarter).
Eh that's easy enough with inertial or ground navigation and some kind of beacon on the charging bay, the hard part is in enemy territory under the fog of war, jamming, and spotting targets on the fly.
Awesome technology!
Nice to see Dead Reckoning being used with computer vision and offline maps!
Something college students have been doing in robotics competitions here in the USA ;)
Shaheds and Ukrainian long-range drones are based on inertial navigation, the drone knows its coordinates and the coordinates of the target it is to hit, and the entire route between them is covered based on data from accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers.
However, the decision-making based on image recognition mentioned in the article is undoubtedly more effective in more changing fields, when the target is moving
Beyond jamming, I imagine some kind of autonomous laser system could also be pretty effective at downing large numbers of drones within a given radius.
There's a few, but they're large, expensive, require a lot of electricity and have limited range; there's the Silent Hunter [0] which is 30-100 kilowatts max power but which has a range of up to 4 kilometers. Raytheon has a 10 kilowatt palletized version that can go on a truck bed [1]; I can't find any numbers but it's listed as short-range, so I presume it's only effective at distances of less than 1 km, probably only tens or hundreds of meters. Plus they need to detect the drones first, but there's multiple ways to do that. It likely needs a network of detectors though.
What they are good at is target tracking, having started out in satellite communication.
Their tracking system paired with a 30mm Bushmaster cannon and proximity ammo is another solution, and there are apparently 160 of them heading for Ukraine to be mounted on M113 and Kozak vehicles.
Israel published last week that it made a trial run of the iron beam (10km range or so) during conflict with hezbollai. It had 40 intercepts and full operational deployment is scheduled for this year
Lasers aren't effective. Most of the drone is just an empty frame. The control board is pretty tiny, as is the ordnance. Targeting those or the propulsion systems is quite difficult. Sure, you can punch holes in the chassis but it takes a lot of guesswork to hit something vital. It's the wrong weapon. Something with an area of effect, like a shotgun or a net is much better suited to stopping drones.
Are you sure about that? AFAIK effective laser drone defenses are not yet widely deployed proven technology, but I don't think small beam size is a limiting factor. Getting enough power onto the target to disable it is a big challenge, but part of that is fighting the natural tendency of the beam to spread out & be attenuated by the atmosphere - not that the beam affects too small of a spot on the drone.
Having a laser that spreads out to e.g. 30cm radius at 500m is not hard to do if you need an area of effect weapon & can push enough power (ie. your laser is powerful enough, but not so intense that it ionizes the air & blocks itself). Reflections seem like a bigger problem: If the most effective defense includes guys with shotguns &/or there are a lot of unprotected personnel in the area, how do you make sure stray reflections don't end up blinding them?
The point is that a focused laser will put a hole through the drone, much like an armor piercing round, but that is often insufficient to disable the drone. A larger ballistic projectile (think a solid shell or a rock) is much more effective. Alternative energy weapons based on microwaves and SPL also work well.
Already tested. Success rate is too low. A great deal of aenergy gets wasted.
Remember, this is about asymmetric warfare. If the number of rounds or amount of energy required costs more than the drone it shoots down, then it's not an effective deterrent. Militaries are looking for single-shot weapons to take down drones. Fire once and move on. It's the only way to deal with a swarm. Think about it for a bit and it will become very obvious.
Israel published last week that it (trialed) deployed laser system to shoot down drones year ago at North. It had 40 intercepts or so. Full operational deployment scheduled for the end of this year
You mean the demo done recently? The article might be misleading. The IDF tested 20 different systems produced by their military OEMs. It wasn't just lasers, and lasers are far from being the clear winner. Here's the official post, it contains a demonstration video:
Did you read your own article? It was developed last year and one of the weapons tested in February of this year as per the IDF post. The rest is Rafael marketing speak.
>In a historic breakthrough, the IDF on Wednesday announced that an unnamed laser defense system similar to the much celebrated Iron Beam laser system has shot down dozens of aerial threats during the war.
>Already in fall 2024, The Jerusalem Post had learned that the IDF had used laser defense systems in operational situations but was barred from reporting on that at the time.
It was all over Israeli news together with videos of operational intercepts.
it has nothing to do with "february cookoff" of different systems and orders for iron beam were placed in january with deployment by the end of the year
>And do you believe the IDF would conduct a demonsttation after it has already committed to a system?
what demonstration are you talking about ? if you are talking about whatever was published in february, it's mostly for more tactical/mobile use i believe.
there is an issue that north of israel is very hilly, so it's possible to fly drones from lebanon below radar visibility range and then just to get them pop-up 50km away from border. it was major problem last year and the publicized trials a believe concentrated on sourcing systems to solve this issue.
The main defence drones have against both lasers and Bofors-type guns is staying low, such that they are below the horizon or behind ground clutter until as late as possible.
Now imagine that but with a shotgun shooting bird/buck shot at decent ROF. Way better.
The problem with any point defense system is radiating any energy makes you a big target. So you would want a passive (EO/IR?) or triggered active/passive system.
Why nobody us building automated shotgun based solutions for anti-air defenses... maybe they need more than 100-150m reliable reach? Having 300 of those covering one airfield may not be ideal, nor cost effective, nor easy to manufacture and deploy and maintain in such numbers... we talk about russia after all, they let most of their strategic bombers arrogantly unprotected on runways with full gas tanks.
I don't think western common folks grok how depraved that country is in terms of doing good work, reward systems for such and corruption on every single level. puttin' built a mafia state and pushed this behavior from top->bottom, and these are side effects. Not some soviet competence and discipline, which wasn't stellar either but light years ahead of current state.
India had successfully used its age old L70, Zu23 guns to track and shot down 500+ turkish drones sent by pak. All these legacy weapons are modernised with passive drone tracking, locking, targetting and automated firing system.
https://theprint.in/defence/how-upgraded-l-70-guns-or-origin...
I really don't care what Russia does, but in a future war USA is more likely to be attacked by asymmetric exploding drones than to be attacking with them. That I _do_ care about. And for that, a PDS system on a few trucks seems kind of useful. If they can be made cheaply and the expensive bits centralized, then a few $1k every 100 yards is kind of reasonable, don't you think?
12 gauge would be fairly strong medicine, but it has to be close in. If the drone is a stabilized gun platform with the ability to aim decently well (<4 MoA @ 100 yards) that's not going to be a winning battle.
Taking the discussion back to reality, almost all uses of drones at the moment are via suicide ("wire guided COTS missiles", you might call them), or just plain old recon. There are probably still plenty of grenades dropped from hover as well.
For those uses, there's a fairly decent approach ["missile"] or hover ["bomber"] stage that is probably plenty vulnerable to autonomous PDS via 12 guage medicine.
Tracking / detection could even be passive, partly acoustic, partly EO/IR, with only a small fire control radar if you really want it.
There's a huge difference between firing back at an enemy that is attacking, and spraying radio signals all over the horizon even though nobody is attacking yet. The former won't tell them anything new, but the latter (which I'm talking about), is (was?) considered somewhat dangerous.
When I said "triggered" I meant you would enable it when under attack, at which point it doesn't matter if they know you're there anymore.
Take 5 drones, sneak from other directions and simply overwhelm the system. If in pair, multiply the attackers via some decoys, it becomes just a statistics game.
I can imagine this protecting some future US bases in same way C-RAM is used. But from what I read from ie Iraq veterans they had it turned off most of the time for the fear of shooting down its own planes. So much for trust in high tech if its too powerful and automated.
Chinese have some systems, but from demo I've seen the laser beam took some serious time to shoot a single missile. Drones are smaller and way more fragile (so also harder to hit) but this ain't Star trek or Star wars.
Bigger picture - if knocking the laser defense off-line slashes the unit cost of destroying bombers, then it may be the obvious first move in any competent attack.
One thing I haven't seen explored is using autonomous drones as defense. Like hand sized drones optimized for speed and maneuverability intercepting larger drones. They should be super cheap. They would also be small enough for troops and vehicles to carry one.
I'm thinking the same thing. You don't even need to fully destroy the drone, if you manage to damage the camera sensors or the exposed lithium cell it's game over for the drone.
How close are we to making a system that can have multiple counter measures autonomously deployed?
(1) if prop based, launch something to snare the props
(2) if reflective, pre-launch something to spray black non-reflective paint at it, and followup with laser
(3) if evasive, approach with random manouvers
(4) if unknown, launch everything and see what works, and feed it back to the training data ...
etc, etc.
Mirrors are not an effective defense against military lasers. The power levels are too high and dielectric mirrors only work over narrow wavelengths. In the specific case of US military tech, some of the platforms use white lasers such that even dielectric mirrors are pointless.
I would try a shotgun style subsonic load with an adjustable fin/spoiler system that can be calibrated relative to the range of the target. The projectiles fin would flare out to reduce speed as it approached the target. Then an explosive charge would release a spray of super glue or pancake syrup, or something to gunk up the mechanism or disrupt the airflow on the propeller.
Maybe not completely, at least not for the camera sensors. If it has good enough initial targeting data - or a good enough last image from the camera - it may be able to find the target by inertial navigation from there (depending on laser range, of course).
It still takes few seconds per target with technologies available right now. That's likely the reason why an operational anti drone laser turret is not a thing yet.
“The Silent Hunter has been used by Saudi Arabia to guard against Houthi drones and missiles.”
“During the World Defense Show in Riyadh the February 05, 2024, Poly Technologies announced the first hard-kill engagement of a one-way attack drone.[6]”
Again, it takes few seconds per target with current laser tech. Which means they don't have important simultaneous multi target engagement capability.
The targets, whether it's plumbing pipe rockets or lipo drones, come in at 100-1000 yards/sec, so you don't really have that many seconds per target.
They work in the demo in which you just shoot down the sole target as it fly perpendicular to the machine for both physical and career safety, but when it comes to deploying the thing around your bed, guns make a lot more sense.
The quotes suggest that system has actually been deployed and used successfully in real world conditions.
Also, your objection doesn’t really fit how drones have been used. Massive highly coordinated drone swarms are extremely unusual, the threat is mostly individual drones or small clusters.
Many very dangerous drones are well under 100y/s aka 200mph.
1000 yards/second aka Mach 2.7 is well beyond the ‘drones’ people are concerned with and into expensive missile territory. Which is where anti missile systems get used.
More powerful than what? If StyroPyro can build handheld 200W+ LED laser device in his workshop [0], why wouldn't a sufficiently funded military be able to build an anti-drone laser with the same (or higher) power output?
Note that his laser burns through various reflective materials, including mirrors, copper, aluminium, and steel.
If a drone is 90% reflective it doesn't need a weapon besides your laser.. (If the star wars approach weren't a scam to enter an ever more expensive race as the side with more money than sense.)
Hoping and praying someone in the administration is able to convince Trump to align closer to Ukraine (even if only slightly) because of this.
The Ukrainians pulled off an absolute coup on Sunday. A third of a nuclear-armed country's strategic bomber fleet inoperable for the foreseeable future. Someone at NORAD probably said "they should have sent a poet" while looking at the satellite imagery.
If middle powers like Ukraine can do that to Russia, they can do that to countries like the US. We need to be on their good side.
The US seems to have given up on the concept of being on the "good side" of anyone and retreated to the safety of bullying and threatening to invade Canada (as a "joke"?)
Most people have given up the concept of being on the "good side".
That's how Trumpism can gain any traction at all. The amount of international engagement Russia had as Putin made himself tsar was embarrassing, and to a person with no scruples if the money is right - like Trump - it just illustrates that the guardrails aren't really there.
> Most people have given up the concept of being on the "good side".
“The revolution eats its partisans” is the most accurate description of it. People on “the good side” turn against their peers for not being on the good side enough. To wit, people who turn away don’t generally first notice that the good side isn’t so good; they first notice being bullied by that side, then they reflect on what it means to support the good side’s points of view (spoiler: A crime against humanity).
Oh, it's elsewhere, too. There are plenty of illiberal candidates winning elections across the West.
There's also an argument to be made that Europe more or less sold themselves out for cheap natural gas. Nordstream 2 was constructed after the Russians (at that point, under Putin's puppet Medvedev) had invaded Georgia.
12 destroyed. Hard to tell if the others were only damaged, and of course, how badly.
The first casualty of war is the truth.
That being said, any sort of materiel loss on weaponry as important as strategic nuclear bombers is a massive problem for Russia. The logistics of repairing them, if possible, is going to be complex.
Do you know how many they still had operational? Not that many, somewhere between 50 (more realistic) and 100 (rather idealistic if the rest was fully gutted for equipment).
This was a massive damage, not directly interfering with war against Ukraine that much, but overall power projection. Plus a pretty good insult to russian's FSB and GRU services who had no clue, just like today's Crimea bridge blow.
I do not want to give any credit to russian secret service but as we have seen in 9/11 and 7th October - secret services in any country are sometimes clueless.
You'd think that they'd be a little more in-tune to this sort of thing given the fact that Russia is a far more controlled society than the US or UK, and that they're at war with a country on their borders.
Oh well. Nothing that vodka and a window can't solve.
"Display" being the operative word. Good for PR, and maybe good for NATO in some small way in the future, but it won't change the war or how many Ukrainians are getting killed. A lot of the Ukrainian "wins" in this war have been of that nature, which probably isn't surprising considering they're being planned by outsiders with other motives.
How does the ocean protect America from swarms of short range drones being launched from normal looking shipping containers on trucks being controlled from thousands of miles away?
I'm not sure what that does for whoever initiates the attack. They still eventually get found out and unless they've managed to conquer the US, everyone is now bankrupt.
How far off are palm sized drones that have light weight solar panels on them that can flit about here and there and sit and wait and recharge in unobtrusive locations until they make their way to their target?
Don’t we receive millions of containers of cargo annually, not to mention having fewer internal movement restrictions? It certainly doesn’t seem implausible that someone could ship some drones around - the hardest part is avoiding explosives detector, but that’s a hard problem and the defense has the unenviable task of having to get it right millions of times.
I’d certainly plan for that if my job was physical security. It’s cheap by military standards and it’s not like we don’t have precedent with things like Russian deep-cover operatives. The commodification of the tech could make an adversary more confident in their ability to deny it if found, too, if everyone is using parts from China and open source software.
I think the key deterrent is that the U.S. has production capacity for the important systems and overwhelming capacity to strike back, so a rational foreign state isn’t going to think there’s a way they win by trying it. Terrorist groups might be a different story, so I’m really glad this wasn’t an option during Bush’s big adventure in Iraq and Afghanistan because however bad drone strikes are for military defense, they’re even worse for civilians.
I've long-wondered about the use of global container logistics for moving something like a small nuclear or chemical/biological weapon and just having it wait in-situ, until it needs to be activated.
I never considered drones, which is even more obvious, in hindsight.
Yeah, it’s frankly a big terrifying. Nukes are at least plausibly hard to shield from detection but drones don’t have a unique signature and there’s so much dual-use stuff that it seems too plausible that someone could get stuff through customs by claiming it’s civilian and then arming it right before use.
While not a land border, the Bering Strait does include two small islands, Big Diomede (Russian) and Little Diomede (US), which are only 3.8 kilometers apart.
The US contains, at a minimum, 10s of thousands of nationals from every middle power in the US. Sometime adversaries, like Iran and China, have more than a million nationals in the US. Every one of them has perfectly legal access to the technology which was used in this attack.
I think Ukraine could only have gotten away with this in the current situation where the US is detaching itself from supporting them, because if Russia genuinely thought that the US was behind taking out a large percentage of it's strategic nuclear fleet, the consequences of that are nightmarish to think about.
Those airplanes are one of the things that give Russia a second strike capability, and if they lose that capability, then they are going to be on a hair trigger in a nuclear crisis.
Supposedly they had to be outside to comply with START provisions. But US keeps B-52s (and pretty much all fighters) outside. They might be under tin roofs in desert locations to keep cool. Not in bunkers.
Yeah, you can find plenty of examples of them sitting right out in the open. They're protected by two oceans, not by bunkers. A similar attack with trucks full of drones would make short work of them just as well.
Well, Belgium stores their airplanes in hangars. It's great to protect them against the weather. You know what we don't do? Put tires on the wings.
You know what else is great about hangars? It's a super cheap defense against drone attacks that you saw from Ukraine.
Sure, you can give some examples of planes stored outside, and I can give examples of planes stored in bunkers (there are plenty of pictures from Russian airplane bunkers).
I have the feeling your comment is made in bad faith (=Russian propaganda). If not, please explain why Russians put tires on the wings.
Is anyone familiar how does EW work? I keep hearing they send common shutdown codes, but what does it mean? Obviously thats an easy target but commercial drones (probably built in), but how does it work for custom ones? Can't the code be random?
It's a bit off topic but the answer would be Friend or Foe systems that are used today in aircraft to help the pilot know if there are friendlies, unknowns and known baddies on the ground. No idea if there are plans to implement this in drones as the systems would likely require retrofit and drones would need more battery draining gear. That gear would have to get a lot smaller.
Maybe it would be nice if "the troops" stopped invading Ukraine and just went home to their families, maybe via Moscow for a visit to their beloved commander to let him know it's over?
Or, perhaps, he's just tired of these bombers chucking missiles at apartment blocs and children's hospitals and power plants. If Russia weren't using these bombers against Ukraine 3+ times a week they wouldn't be attractive targets.
The thing you're missing is that the decision isn't actually made by a machine. It's made by a person much much higher up across a much broader effective surface area.
That is, historically to wage war you had to ultimately convince/coerce millions of people to wage that war for you -- continuously for years -- along with millions more to support the effort politically and economically. In the highly automated world, you literally only need a lot of money (which also tends to concentrate outside of any semblance of democratic control).
Yeah a single rich person might soon have the ability to, without coercing a soldier, decide who gets to die. He might just need to coerce someone to deliver the drones and put them on an (automated) truck.
The smart-ass answer is 'a single person already does, and he doesn't need to be rich, just able to build a time-bomb and send a package'. The Unabomber approach has its limits of course, including being hard to reach those who do not open their own mail.
The amount of autonomy and decision complexity matters a lot. Autonomously making its way into a known area, recognizing the target and self-correcting to it is basically how every modern cruise missile works.
So the interesting question is to what extent the Iranian derived Hezbollah "garage rockets" (very poor guidance, CEP is basically "somewhere in Israel", but extremely cheap and require only smugglable parts) can be combined by some power with Ukrainian style precision guidance.
Well, this week proves that range and velocity limitation can be overcome if you ship them near to their destination in small boxes ahead of time. This wasn't really an option with cruise missiles.
This issue is too complex for me to really have a good thought at the moment, but I will say that this reminds me of that classic story of the Soviet who didn't launch the nukes during a threat came in from the US.
The threat ended up being a false alarm, and that human judgement saved a lot of lives. A machine, assuming it would have launched when seeing that signal, would've ended differently.
Imagine an AI system is programmed to poison the well incase of losing scenario. So it takes advantage of Kessler System to make sure no one else has advantage if it doesn't too poisoning the whole of earth orbits for centuries to come in which satellites could reside.
The issue is that software making these decisions can't possibly have the full context when making the decision because it was coded long before the decision point occurred.
What does that mean in practice? Have you ever saw a flash in the corner of your eye, looked for a second, then realised it was just a reflection? For that split second, your brain identified a potential threat and was trying to quickly decide whether to hide, fight or run. But underneath that was a nagging of "it's probably nothing," that caused you to delay pulling out your gun and opening fire on a passing car.
A computer programme may or may not have this coded in. A machine designed for an active war-zone, or a car assuming it'll only ever auto-pilot on a motorway, is used in a suburban area. That same programme that's fine in its original intended location suddenly opens fire on a grandma with a shiny stroller, or swerves into a pedestrian because "pedestrians don't walk on motorways."
> Have you ever saw a flash in the corner of your eye, looked for a second, then realised it was just a reflection? For that split second, your brain identified a potential threat and was trying to quickly decide whether to hide, fight or run. But underneath that was a nagging of "it's probably nothing," that caused you to delay pulling out your gun and opening fire on a passing car.
.. or vice-versa. The average war has plenty of stressed people firing semi blindly at half-identified shapes. And if we want to be literal, there's the case of Lee Clegg and the exact circumstances in which it is legal or not to open fire on a passing car and kill a teenage girl.
I’m not denying that awful shit like this happens with humans. I’m pointing out the moral hazard in turning it into a preprogrammed system. We’ve seen software bugs empty bank accounts simply because running that faulty system for 5 minutes iterates 100,000 times. Now give the power to decide who lives and dies and it’s only limited by the ammo it holds.
The stressed private might still have a bit of empathy and humanity. Meanwhile millions of drones can be programmed (or hacked) to kill millions of people without excluding civilians or anyone
We have had weapons which are autonomous for decades. You launch them consciously then you know that it will find and destroy weapons based on some "intelligence" (A homing missile with a radar you know is likely to hit the thing that reflects the radar waves, whatever that is. There are artillery shells which home in on vehicles and so on). The launch decision by the human means "I'm responsible for this thing hitting and the thing that it finds". The kill/no-kill decision is made at launch time. An AA missile might hit a civilan jet, but there is no way the operator will make a new kill/no-kill decision once it reaches the jet. You made the decision at launch.
That's the same with these drones. The smarter they get, the further away the human goes. Today it might be simple to create autonomous weapons who are instructed to kill vehicles matching various known appearances. That too already exists. The strike on the Russian bombers was reportedly carried out manually, but it would have been pretty easy to have that autonomous, since the targets are huge, stationary, easily recognizable and easy to navigate to in the geography.
If you launch a quadcopter and instruct it to kill any adult human it finds, then that's the same thing. You wouldn't launch it into an area where there is a remote possibility of being any civilians. No difference from firing an artillery shell. If there is a civilian, or a soldier waving a white flag or whatever - there is no cancel button for your artillery shell. The decision to kill whatever is in the other end was made when you fired it. There is literally no difference between firing a million drones and firing a million artillery shells down range. It's your human responsibility and your human consciousness when you make the decision.
I don't think we have had widespread use of autonomous human-targeting drones yet, but it's by no means science fiction today. Just a matter of time. We'll see their use in this conflict.
Don't forget there's a war on right now in which precision munitions are being used to specifically target hospitals full of civilians on the pretext that the enemy is allegedly underneath.
Human soldiers kill civilians pretty much all the time. Then they brag to their friends how cool they are. Drones do not rape, soldiers rape (and yes they rape men too in case someone wants to make it about gender).
All the bombs Russia thrown onto Ukrainian civilians were thrown by human soldiers.
I didn't know that I was on Reddit, I thought I was with a more educated crowd than that.
Your name calling - 'Petrov', 'tovarisch' - demonstrates that you are not making your case with logic and reason. You have a made up mind, driven by emotion, so there is no room for intellectual discussion here.
From the Russian perspective the SMO is the SMO. War has not been declared, it is an SMO. If my dog attacks my neighbour's dog then you could call it war, equally, tariffs on imports could be called war. However, in 'war', it has to be declared as such. Since it has not been declared, the option of calling the SMO the SMO is appropriate.
There is no 'whataboutism' in my comment, I am not denying any historical war crimes, just stating that a defending army is not going to be killing those they are defending, and this also applies with military adventures outside national boundaries, citing the Falklands example.
Whether or not you are Russophobic, you must acknowledge that Russians identify with the Russian speaking, Russian Orthodox Church going people in the east of the former Ukraine. Whether you like it or not, Russians see these people as their own and are therefore not there to kill the men, rape the women and sell their children into slavery.
As for the Bandera supporting, blue and yellow fanatical nationalists of Galicia in the West of what remains of the Ukraine, it is no secret that Russians don't imagine having any fraternal ties with them.
My understanding is that a drone will make decisions that are reproducible (same data - same decision), so if anything goes wrong then it should be possible to investigate (to some extent) and fix.
A stressed private is in this sense ”undebuggable” because much more not-easily-reproducible factors influence decisions. Also I’m afraid that stressed and tired privates at war tend to err towards ”just kill them all” because it looks much more like a videogame.
When a stressed person mistakenly does something they shouldn't have, they typically stop doing it after only a small handful of mistakes. We get tired, or bored, or we wise up to our mistake.
When a misconfigured computer does something wrong, it frequently does it over and over and over again until it is prevented from doing so by an external intervention.
No tired private is going to mistakenly rampage through a populated area mowing down civilians. But a confused drone swarm might.
Very good principle but horrifyingly a drugged soldier might. Look up Larium, an anti-malaria drug potentially implicated in wartime rampages. Morally and ethically it raises some weird questions. Sure you can balance the probabilities of death from taking a drug vs not. All drugs have a lethal dose. But most drugs don't kill people who haven't taken them.
At a micro level, sure, you could argue that kill/no-kill decisions are being made by frontline enlisted soldiers, but the stress, the exhaustion, and being able to see your enemy downrange add a degree of humanization and discretion.
Wars are brutal. Some warring factions are incredibly brutal. But taking a human life can't be reduced to a `KILL? [Y/N]` decision made by some MAJ somewhere. Killing enemy soldiers is a last resort (formally, this is the concept of _military necessity_), and normalization of it as anything else is a mistake.
I also think it's a fallacy to compare this to the self-driving car trolley problem; the timeline of decisions, length of the decision chain, and ultimate goal of the decision-making process are _aggressively_ different.
My overarching points are, I guess:
War is a tragedy, obviously, but I don't think there's a way to avoid it right now. In absence of some way to stop war forever (hah), we can't trivialize taking human lives. It's not lost on me that this has been happening for a while at this point, and that it's getting worse. I still oppose it, and I think we all have a responsibility to be more critical of this regime of warfare.
I don't know how to counter the argument of "well, if we don't do it, _someone else_ will, eventually." This is some really fucked up, self-justifying inductive reasoning that can't easily be countered by calling out the moral bankruptcy of the premise. In the past, mutual disarmament treaties have been a down-the-line bandaid for this kind of thought process, but the nuclear rearmament we're seeing in the world right now shows it's not a panacea.
You could start by not inventing vague hypotheticals to argue against, and instead engaging with observable, measurable strategic and tactical reality?
War is studied. There are journals, papers and research on war fighting at all possible levels.
In the most recent action by Ukraine you can observe actual reality: what did they attack? Military equipment of the enemy. Why did they attack it? To degrade the enemy's ability to sustain and rotate their forces attacking them. What was it for? Well for one thing it will hopefully considerably reduce their ability to bomb civilian targets.
In this specific case, I agree that it was fine -- using drones with limited decision-making ability to strike targets like parked aircraft is okay, as long as there's an overwhelming likelihood of the drones not getting false positives from invalid targets.
My response was more aimed at the parent comment to my previous one, which seemed to paint delegating kill/no-kill decisions with a brush of "I don't know why this is such a big deal."
I was once talking to an F35 pilot about what its like and during the conversation he said something, "If its red, its dead" referring to how the computer classifies things as friend/foe for you. I realised it doesnt mean much to have a human in the loop when theyre making their decisions based completely on info the computer serves up anyway.
Targeting a stationary Tu-95 bomber with no protective measures in place is probably the easiest possible identification task for a drone.
A lot of kill/no-kill decisions are more subtle, or involve unknowns, possible nearby civilians, etc.
Or look at this crazy FPV piloting job. You think AI could do this? Pilot maneuvers through an absolute maze of anti-drone nets to hit a moving truck. (essentially SFW; video terminates slightly before impact)
Drone operators are generally not on the front lines, and sometimes they are literally on the other side of the world sitting in a cubicle. They are usually specialists of some sort, not untrained privates.
You could certainly train AI to navigate that particular maze of netting, but I'm far from convinced you could train an AI to navigate a near-infinite variety of novel, hostile measures not present in the training corpus.
It seems trivial to confuse a Tesla's AI. I'm assuming they're fairly near the top of the game when it comes to that, yes?
It doesn't take much imagination to see what's so disturbing about it, they're swarms of autonomous killing machines. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead
To be fair, that's a relatively buried and brief aspect in the article. Which is otherwise heavy on real-world military realities.
Personally, I see anyone fretting about imperfect drones making those decisions as either (1) one of today's 10K, or (2) a performer covering a trending topic. Land mines were deployed at giga-scale over a century ago (WWI). Spring-guns were enough of a problem in England to be outlawed two centuries ago.
A) land mines are banned in most countries for that reason
B) mines don't move by themself, but stay where you deployed them
A moving autonomous killer drone has a potentially bigger effect if unleashed on the wrong area. Besides, war is usually fought in civilian areas. If you send the drone to the frontline, but its GPS is jammed, it might move somewhere close by.
A) Most countries also have laws/treaties banning invasions. But when those happen to them anyway, most countries start ignoring the bans on landmines. Which are quick/cheap/easy to produce, even with century-old tech.
B) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_mine Not that anybody's doing Environmental Assessments on land, to determine whether the mines might be washed downstream after a heavy rain, or moved downslope by a landslide, or ...
The problem you describe sounds very much like poorly-directed mortar/artillery fire & strategic bombing - which have been killing civilians at scale since at least WWI.
It's hard to imagine there is a military in the world that would put something so important in the hands of a private. Yes the drones in this war are relatively low cost but they are also so vital to both sides' war effort that there is inevitably more command and control over their use.
Machines have been making kill-or-no-kill decisions for decades, and they were a lot more indeterminant. Heat-seeking missiles largely kill whatever is hot. Proximity fuses in WW2 detonated whenever they got near something. Anti-personal mines kill whenever pressure is applied. A CIWS will target things that get too close to it that don't identify IFF. Naval mines kill if something magnetic is near them.
At the end of the day, it's still humans deploying these weapon systems and accepting the risk that they might cause unintended casualties.
The thing that gets me about this autonomous car thing is that it shouldn't really happen. When a car has to swerve to avoid an accident it is typically because the driver was speeding and/or not paying attention.
Autonomous cars wouldn't speed and they are always paying attention. Maybe you could argue that it happened because the other driver was drunk or for some other reason swerved into your lane but this is still an incredibly niche situation and if it does happen just sue that guy. The vast majority of car-to-car accidents happen when both drivers are irresponsible. Autonomous cars will significantly reduce accident rates just by following the rules of traffic and being constantly aware.
The whole who should be sued thing is asinine, just have a national insurance fund for it or whatever. Cheaper than all the accidents it prevents.
I’ve read that self driving cars almost always try to slow down /brake opposed to swerving for the simple reason of removing energy from any potential collision.
There was an article here serveral weeks ago about how in some self driving cars the brakes can be pre-loaded and can be used much quicker than a human could, reaction times aside.
Is the person who presses a button that releases an autonomous kill-no-kill drone into a country going to jail when that drone razes an entire town of civilians? I doubt it. “Mistakes happen” etc.
The visceral reaction is not there that would motivate the legal system to send the group that started a cascade of autonomous decisions by a robot to kill a bunch of civilians.
That depends on those two imaginary countries. Also, are you unaware of the many instances where people faced no accountability even when it wasn't a mistake, but deliberate?
The person who devised this was most likely one Illia Vitiuk, head of the SBU cyber-sec department. Before that position, he was an MMA fighter. In a 2023 interview he says he was inspired by "James Bond films and a life of adventure..." Also apparently stood down then reinstated recently over some unexplained transactions, family finance situation.
Drone warfare has always been equal parts distressing (it’s impersonal, it’s too easy to leverage, and therefore too easy to abuse) and incredible (ultra-thin fiber as a kite line? Brilliant!) to me. These advances are no different.
That said, I do fret we’re staring down a new age of guerrilla warfare. Drones are cheap, widely available, and increasingly autonomous. Their countermeasures are either impractical for communities (AA Cannons or automated firearms) or costly (jammers, interceptors). The programming can be set-and-forget, meaning operations can be staged months ahead of deployment and make it difficult to find or prevent. The autonomy of target termination specifically raises concerns for the immediate future of violent uprisings, coups, and civil wars.
As an engineer, I am fascinated by it all. As a human, I am horrified that we democratized violence on this scale.
I'm also fascinated by the political implications on state formation, state size, and form of government.
State formation tends to track the relative military effectiveness of large highly-trained standing armies vs. small distributed arms making. The Roman Empire collapsed when they ran out of money to pay their legions. The smaller tribes and kingdoms of the Early Middle Ages unified into the larger kingdoms of the High Middle Ages as the longbow and mounted knight gave the advantage again to large, highly trained standing armies. These collapsed into the city-states of the Rennaissance because the gunpowder musket rendered all the armor of the knights useless. Then the nation-state took over as mechanized arms and airplanes became military weapons, and needed the resources of a large territory to produce them.
It's likely that the drone, being both cheap to produce, easy to use, and extremely lethal to existing weapon systems, will produce a similar political revolution. And it seems tailor-made for smaller political units: drones can lay waste to an invading army, but they suck at power projection because their range is only ~10-20 miles. Might we see a return to city-states as the primary form of political organization? Maybe all the arguments about whether Russia vs. the U.S. vs. China will come out on top are moot, because the very concept of a nation-state will disintegrate, and instead we'll have Beijing vs. Shanghai vs. Shenzhen vs. Moscow vs. Kiev vs. the Bay Area vs. NYC vs. Washington DC? Drones are also ideal for defending shipping lanes, so perhaps we'll see a loose confederation of economically-bound city-states, but each having their own culture and social laws.
IMO the supply chain for drones requires the stability and resource extraction on the scale of a state. SoCs, radios, optics, batteries etc all require high tech manufacturing.
Guerilla use of drones need off the shelf microcontrollers from somewhere, they aren't fabbing them in their backyard.
> supply chain for drones requires the stability and resource extraction on the scale of a state
It's all about China. They have the ability to cut off drone production for the rest of the world.
Not really. All parts are produced in other countries as well, although with slightly higher prices.
I would like to see evidence behind this claim on two fronts: 1. all parts are produced in other countries 2. slightly higher prices
There are countries (including Ukraine) that produce on-board flight controllers, but the controllers themselves often rely on components from China. I actually do think it is feasible to create a passable quadrotor using non-Chinese components only but I do not know of a rigorous study or a manufacturer that does this.
I would not provide you with links, sorry. I follow different drone manufactures and over the last years they all had periodic issues sourcing components from China including chips for flight controllers so they found alternatives (i.e. not manufactured in China) for all major components AFAIK .
I've heard that the most difficult to replace is the camera sensor. Drone cameras are produced now in Ukraine as well, however non-Chinese sensors as far as I know are very expensive.
"It's likely that the drone, being both cheap to produce"
If you can buy the parts, then yes, but producing a complete drone all on your own is not that easy I think.
Still easier than a stealth air plane or a cruise missile, though. So your predictions might come true, because I also see most state armies being really slow to adopt to this new reality.
> As an engineer, I am fascinated by it all. As a human, I am horrified that we democratized violence on this scale.
How do you even defend against this in a terrorist use case? When a small drone with a grenade or homemade explosive is so accessible? Any Christmas market in central Europe these days is surrounded by car barriers to prevent mass run-overs, but what do you do when soon someone has the idea of dropping some molotov cocktails from drones in public places? Answering my own question I guess you can already throw one manually without a drone. Securing public places is weird, I'm glad it's not my job.
It's going to be an analogue of the situation with firearms today where the assailant has an asymmetrical advantage over civilians but not the countermeasure (police).
Also, the US military has been stockpiling kinetic drone countermeasures for about four years now. The idea is you get a hardened, ~11 pound autonomous drone that slams into the target at roughly 90 mph and physically destroys it before returning home. Add on 1-2 year-old US EW technology that now disables autonomous drones (yep, even autonomous drones), and you can establish a very comprehensive defense. The point I'm making here is that the tech is not only possible, but it exists.
Is it perfect? No. Though defense against firearms and explosives today isn't perfect either. Namely because of response times of the countermeasure. So in that sense, we aren't entering a uniquely dangerous situation.
Edit:
I think what will happen is that the first time a UAS is used on civilians, flying drones around population centers will be banned without permit. That way, if a drone is seen flying without a permit, it gets taken down on sight.
The "unique" part is two-fold.
The fact that we haven't had more drone terror attacks says more about the technological slowness of terrorists than its infeasibility.And eventually terrorists catch up. (Probably after the Russia-Ukraine war ends and some skilled people from both sides are unemployed)
It's infeasible to blanket every inch of civilian space with kinetic or EW anti-drone systems.
They may become commonplace at mass events (concerts, parades, gatherings, etc.) but will never cover all soft targets.
And unlike the nearest analog in chemical weapons, drones are dual-use, stable, and easily assembled.
The only reason the 1995 Tokyo Subway attacks [0] weren't worse was because of ineptitude.
Someone could be a quarter as intelligent and successfully fly an FPV drone into a target.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack#Ch...
> The fact that we haven't had more drone terror attacks says more about the technological slowness of terrorists than its infeasibility.
Also motivation and incentives. The reason we haven't seen many drone attacks on civilians is that it is far more lucrative to get civilians to buy your product than to kill them, and the companies that actually have the resources to mount a credible drone attack are making a lot more money doing the former.
Terrorism in general has always been far more overhyped than actually a problem - the median number of terrorist deaths per year in the U.S. from 1970-2020 is 4, making your odds of being killed in a terrorist attack significantly lower than being struck by lightning. And the reason is simply that it's deeply irrational. What do you have to gain from killing a random stranger?
The calculus to make a terrorist is simple
Why you tend to have domestic terror in places with bad economies (and high economic equality). And why beliefs often drive it (religious, political, etc.), by adding righteousness to the terror side of the equation.But requisite minimum skillset is also a consideration, and that's where drones are dangerous.
We're talking (play videogames and some soldering) instead of (chemistry or biology).
3000 people died on 9/11 alone. Spreading it over 50 years, makes it 60/year. Where did you get the 4 from?
It's the median, not the mean. Here's the raw data:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States
The median is more relevant than the mean simply because it's less sensitive to outliers. 9/11 was an outlier; 85% of all U.S. terrorist deaths in the last 50 years happened on that one day.
> How do you even defend against this in a terrorist use case?
You can't, and you don't. That is why it is called terrorism. Safety and freedom are sometimes antagonistic goals. This is an example. Terrorism is defended against by not changing society despite the terrorism. It is violence with a political goal, if the politics do not change, the terrorism fails. Not every soft target can (nor should be) hardened, there will always be soft targets.
Interesting, my take is completely the opposite - you defend against terrorism precisely by changing the society as the material circumstances change, so that the disenfranchised can have their interests represented and achieve a political goal without having to blow stuff up.
(1) Depends on the society. We perhaps agree based on which society we are discussing, and who the terrorists are.
(2) "Defending" soft targets I posit is just an impossible task unless society becomes so locked down that it is unrecognizable. Lots of Sci-Fi has been written on this topic, eg: 'thought crimes', 'judge dredd'.
Sticking to the theme of point (1).. The French revolution was lead by terrorists. They terrorized the aristocracy (and arguably had no other outlet): "cede power or you'll keep getting your heads chopped off." The aristocracy then ceded power. Whether society is forced to change or voluntarily changes is almost an immaterial difference at that point.
OTOH, consider if someone started blowing up libraries in the US. If the response is to shut down libraries, then the population has been terrorized. Bombings in subways were common at a point, if the subways shut down - the population has been terrorized.
In the 1960s, (US) police used dogs against voter registration organizers. To have been terrorized would have been to stop voting, stop voter registration. That terrorism was not successful.
OTOH, lynchings in the US were a prevalent form of terrorism. IE: "this is what happens when you 'don't know your place'". It worked. I recall there is data showing a large change in regional population dynamics for _decades_ following a lynching.
Timothy McVeigh could have done stuff within the libertarian party, but instead chose a path of violence. Timothy McVeigh failed, he blew up a building and that is all that happened.
The 9/11 hijackers chose a path of violence as well. The 9/11 terrorism OTOH was arguably massively successful - a huge wedge developed between cultures & religions, US society radically changed and the US government was successfully baited and began fighting wars that drained its diplomatic, military and financial power.
So, I think for repressed societies, one persons terrorist is another's freedom fighter. In 'open' societies, the terrorist is trying to change the society in some way, through violent means (a shortcut). Changing the society in that way is achieving the aims of the terrorist.
> The French revolution was lead by terrorists.
Strictly speaking, the original, “terrorists” for whose “terrorism” in instituting “the Terror” those terms were all coined as specific terms and later genericized were Robespierre and certain other top leaders of the regime established by the Revolution; that groups overlaps with, but is not coextensive with, leaders of the Revolution; the aristocracy already had their legal power stripped before the whole head chopping thing (which was very much not limited to the aristocracy, the vast majority of the ~15k formal executions and the ~10k who died in custody without trial were commoners, and the ratio is even higher for the ~300k killed outside of judicial process during the Terror.)
well, in another case of individual resorted to act thru political violence in New Zealand's Christchurch mass murder... the PM changed the State-wise gun-law but one can also argue that deterrance against 'spreading of terrorism belieaf system' can also be enhanced if the State was to re-enact death sentence for home-grown mass-murderer, no? Soft-targets will always be there and so is mass hysteria, yes?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw
Thank you for the video! This is so much coming. Plus with thermal cameras too which is even more scary.
On the same topic it reminds me Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (from 2005!) where an AI called "Masse Kernels" was automatically creating missions sent to different PMCs, managing war assets, supervising the war effort, coms, and the like... Feels also that's coming, at least in some forms for now.
And that video links to several petitions here: https://autonomousweapons.org/take-action/
In Ukraine one way that they partially secure bunkers or buildings is by putting up nets around them.
Well you can’t just throw a Molotov because in that case you’re going to get caught. You can place a drone, go home and have it drop the Molotov the next day and no one would know who did it.
fwiw, I think the car barriers never had the purpose to stop cars, but to show people that at least on some level someone cares about their perceived safety.
Those barriers do serve their purpose but it's rarely a terrorist threat. Just do a web search for "drunk driver bollard".
Feels chicken-and-eggy.
At the weekend, I was at a small town which had a half a mile long main road blocked off for a market day. They put up bollards to do so.
Chances are, there were 0 persons planning a car attack on it. So there was an element of "We don't think anything's going to happen, but if it were to happen, we're prepared.". A bit like having a fire extinguisher when there's never been a fire.
But would seeing the bollards also have the effect of discouraging the insane people of the idea of driving the car through the crowds the next time a market day is held?
Oppositely, if they didn't put up any barriers, a psychopath seeing this and the realization that cars can be weapons might give them the idea of "I know what I can do for my act of terrorism..."
I mean…you can’t, at least not right now, not for civvies. Let’s consider some of the current countermeasures:
* Flak/Shrapnel/Birdshot: An excellent last-minute defense if you’re calm enough to line up an accurate shot, but data shows that equipping civilians with these sorts of weapons en masse is a bad idea for safety and well-being. That’s a no-go.
* Nets: Popular for defense, but it’s a matter of time before drones adapt by flying under the nets or changing payload to something to dissolve it. A kamikaze drone could also be enough to destroy an opening for more to swarm. In a civilian context, they’re an excellent deterrent for high-population areas, for now, albeit unsightly.
* Buildings: Safest for now, provided the structure is relatively hardened and the windows are secured. But most civilian structures aren’t guarded against explosions or external attacks, and even those that are require a human to vacate it eventually. Once inside however, there’s more options for stopping an attack - for now - like interior netting, small arms with pellets or buckshot, or even lasers to blind the optical sensors. Impractical for civilian deployment at scale, presently, and highly variable.
* Jammers: Good against piloted drones, but as the article points out, the current crop of dev work is geared towards autonomous slaughterbots instead of human decision-making. Jammers are restricted by most countries and, if left functioning after an attack, could hinder first responders. If left on constantly, would disrupt civilian work. So that’s a no-go.
* LASERS! Probably the best deterrent in the short term for civilians, I would wager. A randomized strobe of a high-powered IR laser could devastate a swarm of drones’ optics, making navigation or target acquisition difficult or impossible. Sticking a piece of protective glass on the sensor would likely nullify it long enough to finish its mission, though.
And that’s what distresses me, ultimately. The future depicted in Slaughterbots or Horizon is rapidly approaching, where autonomous drones can murder with impunity and are affordable enough that any threat actor could get their hands on it. Combined with modern databases of humans - faces, biometrics, profiles, locations, habits, schedules - we’re nearing an era where assassination or murder is a drone away.
That is what horrifies me. And if there’s one thing my time in the defense industry taught me, it’s that nobody is trustworthy with that kind of power. Companies making these absolutely will use them (or condone their use) against dissidents, opposition, regulators, and governments. Pandora’s Box is already open, and I don’t think enough folks appreciate the horrors it will bring.
>Nets: Popular for defense, but it’s a matter of time before drones adapt by flying under the nets or changing payload to something to dissolve it.
Worth noting here that the Ukrainian armed forces have already repeatedly deployed drones with the ability to spray pretty impressive amounts of napalm all over their targets from fairly high altitudes. Fittingly, they've been called "Dragon drones", and I wouldn't want to be under any anti-drone net if one of those arrives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkiCWiDs2kQ
The "Dragon Drones" also drop thermite [0], a material with massively exothermic high temperature 2000°C+ redox reaction, which can melt through most metals. Thermite is often used to weld rail tracks [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XttJet5WkTk
For civvies the protection is the same as stopping someone shooting you with a rifle - have the cops jail the perpetrator.
The perp can be a thousand miles away tho.
Shooting people with a rifle is not scalable and there is a high risk of getting caught. Imagine if school shooters could kill thousands instead of dozens, and at zero risk.
The school shooter type seems to want to be present locally, to go out with a bang, and to do it somewhere they are connected to. They are not aiming for maximal scalability nor chance to get away.
Of course, other threat actors might, like a Unabomber type or groups designed to destabilize society (perhaps foreign sponsored) by doing repeated actions etc.
Oof. Bad news for people like me who cops might not like
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Wtf? You can't post like this to Hacker News and we ban accounts that do.
Worse, you've been posting similar things elsewhere too (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43848538).
I don't want to ban you because you've also posted good things, but if you keep posting ideological and/or political flamebait, and especially religious or nationalistic slurs, we will. Therefore, if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Fair enough, is there a way to report these?
I looked but tbh I am on mobile and I have a hard time with this media in this medium.
You can flag the comment and/or email hn@ycombinator.com
Thank you!
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That would be one approach, though I think it is unlikely to be a successful one.
The topic is autonomous drones. Presumably these drones don't stop to go through customs on the way to their targets, and have no reason to respect borders. They're too small for existing radar to track, so enforcement would be difficult.
For that matter, since they can be left in a quiescent state for relatively long periods, there's no requirement that anyone involved be inside the country. They could be shipped internationally through existing shipping services to arbitrary addresses near a target, unpack themselves by cutting through their packaging, and attack a preplanned target.
Literal enemies don't need an invitation. Ukraine was able to smuggle several literal trucks loaded with weapons, deep into literal enemy territory, and put them near airbases where cruise missiles were launched from.
Of we could use the opposite of isolationism, something being cut by governments at this time: soft power.
Aid programmes and helping some of the more impoverished countries grow.
Bombing Middle Eastern countries has been tried for about a century. It doesn’t seem to have helped.
15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. When exactly did we bomb them?
Good point. The stated motivations were less direct for sure, but do relate to US foreign policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_a...
And the Saudis are still our bestest buddies. International relations are weird.
Let's not be naive. Aid programs are a great idea when practical, and I'm certainly not in favor of indiscriminate bombing. But unfortunately in many countries, including Middle East conflict zones, any foreign aid is just stolen by local armed groups and used to fund terrorist activities. How do you think the leaders of Hamas accumulated billions in foreign bank accounts?
Leaders of Hamas has no bank accounts, AFAIK. Did you mean cryptocurrencies? If so, it's unlikely that these funds are personal savings.
Usually, locals doesn't steal from locals in conflict zones, because their throats, or throats of their families, will be cut by other armed locals in no time.
Invaders and mercenaries often rob or kill locals in many, many cases.
Don't be naive. Leaders of Hamas have control of foreign bank accounts. Probably cryptocurrencies as well now. Those funds are the personal proceeds of theft and embezzlement. They steal aid money directly, or steal supplies and sell them for cash. The locals can't do anything to stop them because Hamas has all of the weapons: there are no other armed locals. Hamas violently suppresses the locals who even try to protest against theft of foreign aid.
https://nypost.com/2023/11/07/news/hamas-leaders-worth-11bn-...
https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/palestine-hamas-mu...
Not sure how that would even work in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Ukraine has lots of ethnic Russians and Russia has lots of ethnic Ukrainians.
I don't think any country welcomes extremists like ISIS combatants willingly. So you would need a way to weed them out. It's not just difficult, it's practically impossible.
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>How do you even defend against this in a terrorist use case? When a small drone with a grenade or homemade explosive is so accessible?
I can see this from the other perspective. I've read stories for the past 30 years now about police forces and swat teams abusing people, murdering people because someone filled out the address wrong on a warrant, etc. And I wonder, in the coming years, if those sorts of scenarios will be quite as one-sided as they are today. What will that world look like?
>Answering my own question I guess you can already throw one manually without a drone.
Sure, but can you throw one from 2 miles away, can you throw 30 simultaneously? Can you then instantly escape without much of any evidence of who you are being left behind, not even a blurry traffic cam picture? The scale of the mayhem is a quality all of its own.
Speaking just for myself, I am not currently stockpiling explosive-carrying drones in preparation for an encounter with over-zealous police. Yes, such incidents happen. They could even happen to me. Still, I don't worry about them enough to go to that length. (Nor do I see things ending well for me if I did.)
Give it a go and you might be surprised! Stockpiling explosive-carrying drones in preparation for an encounter with over-zealous police can be an educational and absorbing hobby. Many people are sceptical of how things will end for them, but once they start they are drawn in by the friendly and supportive community and doubts like this are quickly forgotten.
Also, the fear of drones is their offensive use. I'm not sure a cop intending to officer-involved-shooting you for looking vaguely like a shoplifter is going to clearly announce his intentions, then wait for you to dig your weaponized drone out of the trunk of your car, boot it up, and get him with it.
>Also, the fear of drones is their offensive use.
Whatever fear Russians have of drones isn't in their offensive use. They're only being used defensively by Ukraine. Similarly, if you're a jackbooted goon, you might well fear their defensive use as I outlined above. But yeh, you have nothing to fear from the defensive use of drones, because you're not attacking anyone... in the coming years, however, the narrative will likely be twisted so that you do come to fear such people as might use them defensively, because the establishment needs you to despise them.
>Still, I don't worry about them enough
This article did not even cover some of the weird solutions being deployed against drones. For example, Russia has surrounded many of their critical infrastructure sites with huge nets (similar to golf course barrier netting). They have also developed anti-drone drones that drop nets from above, catching and tangling target drones in a bunch of netting that simply snags the blades.
In my opinion, AA guns will become again popular to counter drone swarms. None of the modern weapons are that effective like old AA Guns.India proved this with Pakisthan massive drone attacks recently.
> They have also developed anti-drone drones that drop nets from above, catching and tangling target drones in a bunch of netting that simply snags the blades.
Yeah if we could just all agree that from now on, all warfare is limited to drone-on-drone engagements.
If we could agree on that we'd agree on simply simulating war, no need to actually send drones. But it's unlikely to happen for the same reason hero fights instead of army fights didn't happen like in the movies. Ultimately war is about a difference of opinion strong enough to not care about loss of life, so after a country would lose the simulation they'd just go onto the real war part anyway.
If we could agree on that we'd agree on simply simulating war, no need to actually send drones.
That was an episode of Star Trek.
Two warring cultures simulated war. The computers told each side how many casualties there were, and people reported to the extermination chambers.
Actually simulated war does happen. Most of the Western world agreed to fight economic and culture wars since WW2 instead of actual killing.
That's not a simulated war. Trade war is just the first step of real war. People still die from a trade war, it's just from indirect causes.
> The programming can be set-and-forget, meaning operations can be staged months ahead of deployment and make it difficult to find or prevent.
This is something I haven't considered before. What's the worst case here? Is it feasible for me to go live on a farm in <country I want to harm>, buy a fleet of DJI drones at flea markets etc, stick something harmful to them, then hide them in the woods.
I can move away, wait a year or two, and then have them fly to the nearest metro area and wreak havoc. This seems to be cheap and relatively straightforward, and hard to detect. What am I missing?
In a pre-drone world you can get explosives, divide them into X equal sized packages, add a timer set to the same point in time to each, then travel around the country hiding them in high-traffic areas.
Yes, that approach is inferior to the drone version. You have to hide them inconspicuously, and a bomb sniffing dog could find them. But you can visit a lot of places in a single European country or US state within one day, and unless the country is already on high alert you can hide something for that time span in public. Yet this doesn't happen. Even regular bombings are rare.
The reasons are manifold: In most places getting explosives isn't actually all that easy (unless you go the homemade route) and is a good method to get attention from authorities. But another factor is that there just doesn't seem to be a large interest in doing that kind of complex attack unless there is already an ongoing civil war. Actual terrorism is fairly rare, and the terrorists tend to be not all that sophisticated.
Are these kinds of drone attacks a scary new possibility? Yes, absolutely! Are they likely to happen? Not really. We might see it as a method to assassinate officials (imagine staging drones at a place where you know the US President will hold a speech in a couple months), but I doubt it will play a major role against the general population
The drone scenario is very different, all you have to do is get close-ish to your target. This is very different than having a stick of c4 sit on your target for months. You have to get them to drone-range, say in the back of a lorry, on a roof somewhere, in a box. Then the programming and or AI can kick in and do the last mile for you, whenever you need. Case in point is the Ukrainian attack on the air fields, they parked a lorry nearby.
Attentive people would find the bombs. Especially if they're on alert, which everyone who knows about terrorism will be at least to some degree.
Back in the day, if you forgot a bag on a British bus the driver would get it and run after you, so that it wouldn't be a bomb issue taking the whole day.
Not much. Autonomous targeting and control are quite new and currently take a fair bit of knowledge and skill to get right, but I expect those barriers to lower dramatically in the coming years. There might be power issues with such a long delay, but I'm not sure. I think the main drawback once this tech gets slightly more widespread is that most people who want to terrorize cities don't want to wait a year or two to do it.
For long running conflicts (Israel vs Iran for example) I expect we'll see some fascinating and horrifying attacks in the near to medium term. Of course anti-drone tech is also evolving quickly and I expect that to continue so the shelf life of any specific attack will probably continue to be rather short.
It doesn't really take much knowledge to set up an autonomous drone mission. It's not DJI-levels of consumer friendliness, but I know multiple people that made and fly their own drones, and it's not something you can't do with a few YouTube tutorials.
They're battery operated, so I think there's a time limit of a few months. Then, you want to be very careful with the infrastructure you leave behind (little pop-open doors/roofs for them to fly out of) to avoid future investigation. You're going to need some practice, your first try will just go to shit perhaps. Opsec while you're setting all this up is still a big deal that amateurs will have trouble getting right. But none of these are particularly insurmountable. With the correct software and careful planning, this will succeed at its goals.
Things you can't help: they will discover the remains of the drones, and also their origin. This evidence will eventually lead back to you (unless you have the aid of a enemy nation-state). Not a big deal if you're dying in a suicide attack, but maybe you don't want the extended vacation in the CIA's worst black ops rendition site.
What you're missing is the will to go through with it. Even state actors would get spooked spending months or years setting this up. One slip-up and you're in prison for life. When your country's existence is at stake, the process is easier.
> What am I missing?
Battery degradation, a year or two's worth of leaves and debris accumulating on and around the drones, literally all of the elements affecting them, animals, etc.
If I've gone to the hassle of setting up a high tech bombing attack, wouldn't I have also gone to the trouble of putting the drone in a self-opening container?
Everything mentioned affects the operation of a self-opening container as well.
A self-opening container has a much easier problem to solve than flight.
You can probably get unsuspecting couriers to deliver last mile. Build a drone dock with cutter to open top of boxes. Mail a weaponized drone to an address within range of target.
> jammers
Jammers don't work against optical cable or AI vision controlled drones. That's a big problem today in Ukraine for both sides.
As for defense, first of all it's detection and tracking. Copters and long range gas powered drones are very loud and easily detectable. Ukraine uses a net of cell phones. Several devices with microphones can accurately pinpoint all drone like sources in real time. That's cheap to install miles around important targets. Then we need just fast AI interceptors 'on hold', in the air if can afford. The last part is missing today, but we'll get there soon.
As for danger, etc. Small remote controlled firearms were easily available for decades. Drones _are_ trackable. When one takes off in big city Russians know immediately where. By using radio scanners. All DJI drones, and most others, communicate and simply broadcast their coordinates. This is used in Ukraine to find their operators.
I think watch out for Mexico. The cartels are swimming in cash and are already using drones to attack security forces and assassinate people.
Yeah, it’s much cheaper for China and Mexico to destroy the US from the inside with a slow poison of drugs over decades than any done attack.
This how you look at the world?
What is also distressing is that drones make false flag attacks even easier. Add to that the fact of AI generated media/propaganda means no war will be factually comprehensible to anybody.
I think the idea of a false flag will also be completely destroyed by ai video tech. Once everyone knows everything is fake, how will they know that the false flag was real?
>horrified that we democratized violence on this scale
Violence has always been pretty democratic - you've always been able to punch someone or hit them with a rock and the US seems to have more guns than people.
I think drones are fantastic. Why throw good money after bad?
Dutch soldier lives have been ruined because they had to be sent to places like Lebanon and Bosnia. Nobody decent deserves that.
Professional soldiers are rather low on the list of people deserving sympathy in a war.
Pandora's box is now open and multiple groups have access to drones[0].
This is something that I think escapes engineers in this line of work - that something they invented will eventually end up (legally or not) in the hands of people with no scruples.
[0] - https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/other/drones-in-africa-are-a-...
I'm very interested in the consequences of vigilante applications of this kind of technologies. Imagine a scenario where people start taking out corrupt police officers who have until now been able to terrorize small communities with impunity.
It may motivate actual reform in policing because law enforcement will realize that police officers who kill innocent people with no regard for the law are safer in prison than out on the streets with a paid vacation / desk job punishment.
You don't need drones to do that.
You need drones to do it in a way that significantly reduces the risk of getting caught.
As it is vigilante action against law enforcement in the west is a sure death sentence and probably life long reprisal against your family once you're dead which is what keeps people in line.
If the development of drone technology significantly reduces the risk of that then you're likely to see many more people respond to violent abuses of authority by law enforcement with vigilante action.
When you blend mosquitos and terminators..
I mean if war has existed since the dawn of man. Maybe we are trying to fix the problem incorrectly.
War has (probably) existed since before the dawn of man. Even chimpanzees engage in something like tribal warfare so that behavior probably goes back to a common ancestor species at least 6M years ago.
Chimpanzees haven’t even invented x86 yet though, so they clearly have no chance to stop from fighting.
are jammers really that expensive? They shouldn't be particularly sophisticated
Doesn't work on fiberoptic drones. Doesn't work on drones that use laser/optical comms.
> or costly (jammers,
Are jammers really that costly?
Also spoofers that could take over a drone - not sure how much encryption is used in most of these off-the-shelf drones, but it would seem like it wouldn't be too difficult to create a Flipper Zero-type device that could spoof the codes used between controller and drone.
The latest attack deep inside Russian borders were apparently using ArduPilot [1], it is mentioned in the Atlantic article [2]. ArduPilot also has C++ source code in Github [3], also adding an article specifically about ArduPilot and Ukraine [4]
[1]: https://ardupilot.org/
[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/06/uk...
[3]: https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot
[4]: https://www.404media.co/ukraines-massive-drone-attack-was-po...
To be clear, that's because Ardupilot is a really pretty routine UAV navigation project with obvious civilian/industrial/enthusiast application. People hack on Ardupilot because it's fun to see your drone fly around on its own. That you can also put a grenade on it is sort of an obvious extension, but the payload is very much a separate feature.
I remember NodeCopter and running OpenCV to control them years ago.
https://gist.github.com/andrew/2f81952f4867d1b200bb
The big difference is they can now run this on the copter instead of being remotely controlled; a 100$ raspberry pi has enough processing power for this, and so does several other off-the-shelf mini computers powered by lithium batteries.
Crazy times.
So what did they do, just stick GPS coordinates and the drones were that successful autonomously (talking of the Russian fighter base attack from the last 48 hours)? I'd be shocked if they didn't manually pilot these things.
You are correct:
> ...each of the 117 drones launched had its own pilot.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1ld7ppre9vo
They need to make a movie behind this one, that just looks like such a cyberpunk operation.
There are so many possible scripts that could be based on what has happened since 2022 in Ukraine. There would be no need for exaggeration of the heroism, bravery, and loss. The only issue might be that people would not believe it actually happened.
From Zelenskyy, a previous comedic actor refusing to flee, "I need ammunition, not a ride," to the defense of Snake Island "Russian warship, go fuck yourself," to all the brave women who volunteered, the farmers towing abandoned Russian tanks, the constant drone attacks on residential and commercial areas, the 40,000 stolen Ukrainian children, this most recent attack on Russian air bases...
If this was a movie, I would probably think it was a bit much myself, but this all happened. We witnessed it.
"Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!"
An actor who's last role was the lead in a sitcom about an ordinary citizen who becomes the unlikely president of Ukraine.
... is not particularly more surprising than the US president who starred in "Bedtime for Bonzo"
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/bedtime_for_bonzo
OpenCV and other onboard computer softwares can be trained to recognize shapes, 10+ years ago there was a demo of a NodeCopter controlled small drone following red flags.
Stick the GPS coord, fly there, and once in a geofence look for a shape to crash into doesn't seem impossible given what was possible 10 years ago.
Hell, 30 years ago I was working for the MOD (they sponsored my PhD and turned it into an RA) in the UK creating context-aware neural network inference engines for FLIR (Forward-looking infra-red) data. We had all sorts of "fun" stuff running on a Meiko computing surface, with parallelised network training and implementations, temporal and spatial averaging, and relaxation labelling all thrown into the mix to aid the recognition engine, done with a voting system of various architectures sharing to a "blackboard" where information could be posted to and read from. Visualisation was all on high-end (for the time) Silicon Graphics workstations.
The context (together with the features extracted) was the killer (forgive the pun) feature though - everything else reduced noise, but context increased signal.
My gast remains flabbered that the sort of thing I was working on back then hasn't become commonplace in the interim. The computing power available today, compared to then, and the accuracy we had (I know for a fact at least one of the designs was made into real hardware, it was called RH7, and "RH" stood for "Red Herring" - oh how we laughed) ... It beggars belief that it was just left to digitally rot.
There is often quite heavy GPS jamming or spoofing. Also in some of the published videos I think you can see a "no GPS lock" status message - but maybe they just did not bother with GPS if all the drones were manually piloted anyway.
Yes, I assumed they didn't need GPS because they knew exactly where the trucks that were the launch sites were to be placed and they knew approximately their targets would be sitting on a certain section of airport tarmac. The pilots would have had a detailed satellite photo map of their entire route until visual target ID was possible. While GPS was probably partially jammed, that deep in Russia I doubt it would have been as severe as near the front lines. Plus there wouldn't have been heavy jamming of the local drone control frequencies because they weren't expecting a drone attack there.
To me the more interesting question is how they managed sending the real-time video feeds and control data. Since the trucks were mobile, I assume it had to be via a bunch of mobile phones signed up to Russian service providers since Starlink doesn't work inside Russia. To reduce latency, I wonder if the phones were connecting to a covert site in Russia which had a high-bandwidth wired link, maybe a front company established for the operation with servers and broadband internet connections.
I assume drone guidance builds on missile guidance. Old cruise missiles were loaded with mission-specific terrain maps to follow to their targets
GPS is heavily jammed throughout Russia, and the ArduPilot overlays shown on the videos released directly show there was no GPS lock (might not have been equipped as I'm sure they'd be expecting this).
Given these are static targets, it might be possible to relay precise GPS information from that morning’s satellite data. No real time intelligence required. Just dead reckoning to the target coordinates.
Dead reckoning in a drone would be a nearly impossible feat considering how variable wind can be.
Operation in GNSS-denied areas is already a stock feature on many relatively inexpensive commercial drones. The manufacturers talk about it euphemistically for obvious reasons, but they're designing drones specifically for the Ukraine war. There's a huge amount of engineering effort going into building drones that can remain operational in an extremely hostile RF environment.
Compensating for wind drift is a fairly straightforward software problem when you've got a fast processor, a bunch of high-resolution cameras and a laser rangefinder.
https://www.autelrobotics.com/productdetail/evo-lite-enterpr...
If you have a downward facing camera you can track your movement like an optical mouse by just watching the terrain. Error will creep in, but you only need to fly a few kilometers till you find something that looks like a strategic bomber.
I'm dumb. I don't know why I didn't think about the cameras being used to maintain location.
Dead reckoning with error correction using known landmarks like highways, maybe
The wrong term, but I know there has been extensive research in maintaining accuracy without GPS.
Apparently, there were hundred+ drone pilots available who were spread across several timezones should the AI not be able to find their way visually. If you see some of the streaming video snippets, it says GPS fix unavailable likely due to jamming of GNSS systems and disabling of civilian GLONASS near bases. As such, Russian domestic cell carriers were reportedly used to stream video and for manual terminal guidance following visual cues, hence the daylight timing of the raid.
One report said the drone attack was sequential, not swarming. So perhaps only one remote operator per truck, with about 2-3 minutes between each drone launch, depending on how far the previous one had to go to reach its target.
Source on the 100+ drone pilots an cell carriers? I've been hoping to find an article on how they staged the pilots for manual guidance. I imagined they would have had to tunnelled all that traffic to each operator from the truck, but the cell towers is clever
"He said that each of the 117 drones launched had its own pilot."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1ld7ppre9vo
Sun Tzu says it better:
"A military operation involves deception."
He could be telling the truth, he could be lying... A drone programmed to automatically boot up , check its location, and if it's at the right coordinates, take off and crash at some other coordinates (the airfield) is more satisfying to "fans" of automated warfare.
For extra fun, add some other code to "look for plane-like objects to crash into", but now you're approaching dangerous territory of "What if a civilian 737 happens to be boarding at this airfield"...
The reports also mention the truck roof opening remotely, one could also use GPS coordinates to trigger this. But doing it manually from a distance, after checking the surveillance cameras that the coast is clear, is more reliable.
I guess they used smartphones and SIM cards with mobile data for the remote communication...
> For extra fun, add some other code to "look for plane-like objects to crash into", but now you're approaching dangerous territory of "What if a civilian 737 happens to be boarding at this airfield"...
Civilian 737 boarding airfield where Russia keeps strategic nuclear bombings? Russians would shoot them down faster than any drone could get them.
>Civilian 737 boarding airfield where Russia keeps strategic nuclear bombings?
I'm not sure if the Tu-95 is hosted at any joint-use airports, but joint-use themselves airports are not uncommon. Pskov is joint-use, Ukraine launched a smaller-scale attack on some Il-76s there a couple years back. The scenario that an attack on legitimate target aircraft could be happening metres away from civilian aircraft is realistic.
It's not a problem when Russia, Israel, USA, or other nations attacks civilians, because of a military reason. Why it will be a problem in this case?
There has never been a way where civilians are not attacked.
Because whether or not they're justified in doing so, Ukraine has made it clear that they have no interest in targeting civilians. They've been incredibly surgical and precise in their attacks. Unbelievably so, honestly.
Whichever way this war ends you can be sure there will be lone Ukrainian terror attacks on Russia for next 50 years. People will not forgive.
Because the makeup men don’t like Ukraine
It's a military airfield, so no civilian 737 there. There seems to be a video from the drone, meaning some kind of connectivity was present with or without autopilot.
Reportedly it was just running over local mobile internet connectivity. The attack was over so quickly they would likely not even have time to shut it down.
They did more than crash at coordinates, they targeted specific parts of the different aircraft.
> What if a civilian 737 happens to be boarding at this airfield
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
Good old non-AI radar-guided missile launched by human crew of Russians.
It's strange - blocking GPS is typical around military sites. So, assume the drones were hard-coded to zero a location - they couldn't do it, as GPS would be blocked. They had to be piloted. Interesting.
Inertial navigation is a thing though. Your smart phone has a very capable accelerometer for a short flight.
Error propagation makes inertial navigation only useful over short distances.
In addition to the other reply, it might have been done with CV. Identify landmarks to get bearings, drop bomb on thing that looks like airplane.
Saw something saying they trained them on old Soviet planes at a military museum
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/53784
Only need one camera drone capable of identifying targets. And just tells another drone to bomb it.
Cameras are incredibly cheap though. There's basically no reason not to put them on everything.
Or can “paint it” with an infrared laser point and then the drone can use simple sensors to guide itself to the target.
“Don’t attack this plane that already has a hole in it”
The startup attempting this would need Actual Indians for the first few special ops attempts before getting the true AI experience.
..in theory. In practice, building such a complex system in a fail safe way is not that easy.
"in a fail safe way" goes out the window in wartime.
I meant safe for the mission, not for any innocent souls around..
Still only need one camera drone if a human is spotting targets.
In theory. In practice you would not allow a single camera drone to be the single point of failure of a mission with such lengthy and risky planning, and dire consequences.
They had a limited amount of drones in those containers they needed to make them count. My money is on operators.
Still only need one flying drone to identify all targets. There maybe more camera drones available to pilot, but still only need one flying to spot.
A static target only needs to be seen once.
I understand that you’re probably just gonna reply with “still only need one camera”
…but if GPS is jammed, and there’s only one camera per fleet, how exactly are the other drones supposed to navigate towards the spotted targets unless they’re all equipped with cameras?
One camera drone can see if another drone is on target.
So the old “use a single unreliable 2D instrument to coordinate multiple fast-moving projectiles in three dimensional space” approach.
You are just continuing to spout nonsense.
Camera drone hovers above target and kamakazi drone intersects the line between camera and target, and drops.
You are just continuing to spout nonsense. All of the drones have cameras. Using a single designated camera drone is a stupid idea, overly complex and completely unnecessary.
I think the problem is an assumption that people are too stupid to grasp their brilliant idea.
That being said, having all drones equipped with cameras could enable a more robust version of what they’re talking about:
If uplink with human operators is lost, but short-range comms between drones exist, they could use their video feeds to autonomously coordinate amongst themselves.
So now the camera is pointed at the target? How is it checking that the other drones are headed in the right direction? And the personnel on the ground? They're just chillin' waiting for those other drones to come intersect with the stationary spotter drone's line of sight?
You are raging, and your thinking has ceased.
We've had two years of footage of drones being flown over tanks, and bombs dropped directly down into them.
No one is arguing the merits of drone warfare.
We have two years of footage from Ukraine, where camera-equipped drones are launched from a several miles away at most, and where there are networks of pilots and support specialists to assemble and launch more drones in case of (frequent) failure.
I don’t think it’s wise to wager the success of a 6-month mission deep in enemy territory on a plan with a single point of failure, especially when the alternative is equipping each drone with < $100 cameras.
But sure, you’re clearly the better thinker.
`I understand that you’re probably just gonna reply with “still only need one camera”`
Your first response was disrespectful. Probably because you are young and immature. Grow up.
Fair. Sorry about that.
lmao what? You want to loiter with a camera drone to guide other drones to target? How would that work if neither drone knows where it is (drones had no GPS lock, it's a fact, not a speculation)?
They knew where they started from. Know where the target is relative to the start point.
> Know where the target is relative to the start point.
How? Without GPS, it's navigation capabilities lower than V-2 rocket.
You need to read a bit more on autonomous systems and navigation, it will surely tame your hubris. Everything is simple if you don't understand it.
You have never written autonomous navigation systems.
I have in fact. For space applications. An now I will stop replying to what is seemingly a stubborn, clueless 16 year old.
The drones reportedly flew from their containers to the staging area autonomously, where they were taken over by the pilots for the attack approach.
So what about the AI part that has been mentioned by several outlets?
I would assume someone speculated and then the hype brain took over and everyone reported it as AI.
I've had that happen to the company I work at and we literally have zero AI stuff.
Hype Brain :) And the language changed just a little bit..
From my understanding that was to be used as a last resort.
there was this German talking head "Nico Lange" who made this claim first without providing evidence for it. He is an ex politician and a regular in the Munich Security Conference and I assume this is who was (mainly) responsible for spreading it.
AI gets so much boost from this nonsense. Because now it's about saving our lives.
Source?
Also this: https://www.404media.co/ukraines-massive-drone-attack-was-po...
"ArduPilot can handle tasks like stabilizing a drone in the air while the pilot focuses on moving to their next objective. Pilots can switch them into loitering mode, for example, if they need to step away or perform another task, and it has failsafe modes that keep a drone aloft if signal is lost."
So it is not fully autonomous.
Not for this task, but could be used autonomously. If they trusted that these planes were still in the same spot, and their GPS coordinates were accurate to 10 cm, then what they could do is just program the drones to fly a preset route at preset heights, stop over the plane's wing and then descend all the way to 0 meters.
Even with that level of target knowledge (I suspect the US has the investment in the sensor-targeting links to be able to use satellites to know within cm where planes were within a five minute window, but am not sure about other nations) you'd want to have some that were available for later re-targeting to handle misses. Nuclear weapons war plans solve this by relentlessly re-targeting again and again (declassified 1960's USAF war plans called for over 70 different missiles to hit Moscow alone) but with the smaller damage radius of conventional weapons you either end up with a second strike to make sure you get all the survivors of the first strike- or have a trained human who knows the targeting priority in the loop available to update targeting on the fly.
GPS can't be relied on in that heavily denied area. And indeed the screenshots show drones in failsafe mode.
https://x.com/lemonodor/status/1929269307189469624
You can also see the careful departure of drones from containers in the videos, without extra panning or yaw. Not quite how a human operator would fly them.
Thread without log-in
https://xcancel.com/lemonodor/status/1929269307189469624
The question was more about the human taking over near the end, no?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJcjt_W8iCo
When you watch some of the footage I feel like it’s clear that there were at least some human controlled drones there.
How could they be navigated from such a long distance? Satellite communication? Wouldn't the lag be too high?
Via the regular mobile network according to one article I read. The Ukrainians said that all operators where safely out of Russia when the news broke, so I doubt they where at the airfields several hundreds of kilometers from Ukraine.
To reduce latency, I wonder if the phones were connecting to a covert site in Russia which had a high-bandwidth, lower-latency wired link, maybe a front company established in Russia for the operation with servers and broadband internet connections. Or maybe just a colocated server at a major backbone site in Russia was rented by a Russian front company. Seems like the kind of thing intelligence services do. While I'm sure Russia has more restrictions on renting colocated servers than the U.S., it's still something that needs to happen every day. Russia also has a fairly robust underground economy of less-than-legitimate companies doing illicit things, so there have to be ways for those companies to avoid restrictions (probably involving bribing certain people).
If the attack was coordinated this way, I assume whoever sold the colo to Ukrainian intelligence thought they were simply setting up yet another server for a shady Russian scam company. Foreign intelligence services often avoid scrutiny by using the same methods as domestic criminals in the target country.
Okay, and GPS is restricted near military installations, but mobile internet remains accessible?
Yes, I assume it probably does except maybe during periods of elevated alert. A large military airbase capable of being home base to bombers is like a small city, with thousands of civilian workers.
Anyway, the drones used mobile internet between the launch point outside the base and the pilots in Ukraine. The connection between the launch point and the drones was point-to-point drone control frequencies which does not use the mobile phone network.
Yes, Ukrainian military leadership has admitted that Starlink has been so vital that they would have had no chance without it. Starlink latency can be faster than cable in some parts of the us. Remember light travels faster in air than through metal wire as radio.
Everyone was right next to the bases in Russia
Andrew Tridgell, from rsync/samba to drone ....
What goes on in a person's mind when they pivot to making killing machines?
I would rather the enemy die than myself and my family.
[dead]
Assuming they were remotely operated - at least partially during the final few minutes of the attack - I wonder if the pilots remained in Ukraine or were hidden somewhere close by. I'm assuming they remained in Ukraine, thousands of kilometers away. If so, how did they pull off the remote connection over enemy territory? The only option somewhere as remote as Irkutsk seems to be Starlink, unless the trucks carried custom transceivers (which seems like it would be easily discovered during transit).
Over cellular modems in the drones with Russian SIM cards. The operation was prepared for months in advance. Getting a bunch of pre-paid SIM cards from the Russian equivalent to 7-11 (which might just be 7-11) was probably the easiest part of the operation.
Stores won't sell a SIM card without the buyer providing valid state ID, and SIM cards are disabled by carriers if they suspect you are using someone else's card and you can't provide an ID for it. This is one of the recent laws. Getting a phone number/data plan that isn't associated with your real identity (and instead registered to someone else, usually a homeless guy somewhere) isn't impossible, but those wouldn't come from a grocery store.
They've been planning this for over a year and this is the SBU we're talking about. I'm pretty sure they could figure out a way to light up a data plan on a cell phone in Russia when needed.
Stores might not sell a sim card without state ID, but you can buy eSims without ID from $1.20 with 1GB of data: https://www.esim4travel.com/russia-esim
I wonder if identity documents were taken from POW's captured at the front lines.
Or just their civilian phones. Suddenly occurs to me how effective that would be as a source of SIMs. Won't last forever but can be produced in the month preceding the op.
Maybe just tourist SIMs that let you roam into other countries? Buy a load of SIMs in Kazakhstan or somewhere like that, roam into Russia, now you have internet?
This would almost make roaming charges the costliest part of the entire operation.
Isn't GSM super easy to jam? Also, there's civilian cellular coverage in Siberia? And right next to military bases?? Wow..
Jamming only works when there's equipment in place and activated. Prior to this attack there was no reason for Russia to even have jamming equipment located at a base deep inside their borders let alone active.
Regarding jamming:
Now in its third generation, the Ghost Dragon has come a long way since 2022. Its original command-and-control-band radio was quickly replaced with a smart frequency-hopping system that constantly scans the available spectrum, looking for bands that aren’t jammed. It allows operators to switch among six radio-frequency bands to maintain control and also send back video even in the face of hostile jamming.
Here is a list of largest volunteer funds at your disposal (military and non-military help):
Come Back Alive ex. These guys delivered first deep-strike drones https://savelife.in.ua/en/donate-en/
Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation ex. Bought a famous spy satellite https://prytulafoundation.org/en
KOLO Charity Foundation managed by UA tech community https://www.koloua.com/en/
Razom Ukraine (US based) https://www.razomforukraine.org/
“In the perfect world, the drone should take off, fly, find the target, strike it, and report back on the task,” Burukin says. “That’s where the development is heading.”
That's the problem in a nutshell. A few years back, few would argue against keeping a human in the kill/no-kill decision chain. It just took one war to get pop tech authors writing on it without even a mention of the ethical considerations or autonomous killing machines.
It highlights an awkward apparent fact that 'ethics' and 'honor' are luxuries to maintain when one is on top and they will be thrown out the door as soon as they face an actual threat. Not saying that it is right but that it appears to be the predictable response.
I suppose it highlights axiomatically the terribleness of ethics when they must be defined in a might-makes-right manner. All very high minded and complex questions which leave the awkward question unanswered: what are we supposed to do?
I don’t really want to argue this side, but is it that different from a smart bomb or guided missile? A human is in the loop; the human issued the coordinates of the target to the delivery vehicle.
That kind of operation seems extremely different from a stationary turret or patrol robot with standing orders to shoot upon arbitrary targets at any time it decides to.
I mean I think it's relevant that these machines weren't actually used to kill.
India used oldschool L70 Guns, zu 23 and ZSU-23-4 Shilka against pakisthan's drone swarm attacks. They are modernized to track, lock, and fire automatically. But they are cheap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bofors_40_mm_Automatic_Gun_L/7...
Immediate post-WW2 vintage. The classic design of AA gun.
As far as I understand it from talking about Turkish drones, you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayraktar_TB2 style, aircraft size drones, rather than the quadcopter size ones? The latter can more easily hide in terrain.
Asisguard Songar drones.
Ah, thanks for the detail.
What kinda targeting system do they use? Probably no significant IR signature and radar one's pretty small aswell?
We have multi-layered low signature and passive drone detection system, including radar, radio frequency (RF)-based systems, electro-optical sensors, IR, and video tracking. We also have Thermal imaging for all weather use. And all are integrated into a single command and control system. These upgraded Old school system proved to be worthy to shot down more than 500 turkish drones sent by Pak.
Ah so more like traditional, larger drones with gas engines/turbines, as opposed to the quadcopters?
What was the kill rate of this system ?
None of them caused any casualities or any damage to infrastructure. As we have multi layered defense system with L70 and Zu23 for very short range Defense agains drones and UAV, Spyder for Short Range, Akash for Medium range, s400 for Long range and high value target, exact kill rate of Guns are unknown. In press briefing, officials said that these were so effective against drones.
That's very impressive, especially at low cost.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/in-operati...
Yes, Cost is the main factor, one cannot use expensive air defense to shot down drones that are relatively cheap.
The strength of a reflected radar signal generally decreases with the fourth power of distance: r-squared to the reflector, and r-squared back from the reflector (assuming more-or-less uniform backscattering). Which means that a low radar signature is usually still detectable, the object just needs to get moderately closer.
So being stealthy in the radar spectrum is pretty difficult, and I often wonder if stealth planes are mostly a means to transfer money from the state to defense companies.
There hasn't been much coverage because it's not as sexy as drones but the degree to which AA tech that was formerly the domain of well funded armies has proliferated down the economic spectrum in recent years is really hard to overstate.
> There hasn't been much coverage because it's not as sexy as drones but the degree to which AA tech that was formerly the domain of well funded armies has proliferated down the economic spectrum in recent years is really hard to overstate.
A lot of the key AA tech that has suddenly become important in the era of drone swarms began proliferating to mid-tier forces around the 1980s (or earlier), and was retired by well-funded armies between then and the 2000s, because compared to SAM systems, it was suitable only for lower, slower, less capable targets.
Turns out, suddenly large numbers of lower, slower, less capable targets are being fielded, and its really expensive to take them on with SAM systems optimized for dealing with modern manned aircraft, cruise missiles, and/or ballistic missiles.
Exactly, one cannot use patriot or s400 to dhot down drones, they are way expensive compared to a cheaper UAV.
If your country is an adversary of China, I would be scared. I've seen videos on YouTube of how the drones from Chinese drone light shows take off and return to their launch areas. They have remarkable accuracy.
These generally just use RTK and a base station; nothing interesting and extremely easily rejected by EW (since they need both accurate global positioning signal _and_ RTK signal).
Inside-out SLAM strategies and on-device ML are much more interesting and are starting to trickle into COTS drones. For example, the latest DJI drones all use SLAM for return-to-home even when GPS denied: https://www.facebook.com/reel/440875398703491 , and the latest Matrice 4 enterprise drones also have end-user ML model runtimes that can fine-tune flight plans using user-provided logic.
Inside-out last-second targeting is also very popular in Ukraine, with off-the-shelf "find the nearest car/person in analog video, lock to it on signal lost, and send Betaflight MSP stick commands to hit it" modules readily accessible on Aliexpress.
We do that in the US as well, it’s just more regulated (for some reason)
But the US can't manufacture them at the scale china can.
Why would you? A glide kit for a Mk84 has twice the range, 100x the payload and the same price tag. The warfighting America does isn't rooted in that domain (even if you can argue drones are smarter).
Drones will be fine for defending territory that you already control.
China has no intention of attacking a distant country besides taking control of Taiwan in 2027.
If GPS geolocation makes you scared then don't look up what America did when we invented the JDAM...
Boards don't hit back.
Eh that's easy enough with inertial or ground navigation and some kind of beacon on the charging bay, the hard part is in enemy territory under the fog of war, jamming, and spotting targets on the fly.
If the drones are self-guided there's nothing to jam[1], and what can you do after spotting a swarm of drones? Shoot $5m missiles at each one of them?
Not to mention DJI has AESA radars on $8000 agricultural drones. COTS drones withsensors + sensor fusion on par with best smart munitions.
Awesome technology! Nice to see Dead Reckoning being used with computer vision and offline maps! Something college students have been doing in robotics competitions here in the USA ;)
TO know more, here is a brief presentation about drones in Ukrain War.
https://youtu.be/5xN__ozrbpk?si=vuBtFEcOlgerrVwa
I specially apretiate the small mine clearing drones.
Damn, 70% of casualties on both sides caused by drones? That really puts things into perspective.
yeah, In a conventional war, it would be artilary, but Ukrain dont have enough of it, so it started using drones in its place.
Looke at the fields, now covered in optic fiber. I cant even imagine the cleaning efforts that will be needed after the war. to get rid of that.
Shaheds and Ukrainian long-range drones are based on inertial navigation, the drone knows its coordinates and the coordinates of the target it is to hit, and the entire route between them is covered based on data from accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers.
However, the decision-making based on image recognition mentioned in the article is undoubtedly more effective in more changing fields, when the target is moving
Beyond jamming, I imagine some kind of autonomous laser system could also be pretty effective at downing large numbers of drones within a given radius.
There's a few, but they're large, expensive, require a lot of electricity and have limited range; there's the Silent Hunter [0] which is 30-100 kilowatts max power but which has a range of up to 4 kilometers. Raytheon has a 10 kilowatt palletized version that can go on a truck bed [1]; I can't find any numbers but it's listed as short-range, so I presume it's only effective at distances of less than 1 km, probably only tens or hundreds of meters. Plus they need to detect the drones first, but there's multiple ways to do that. It likely needs a network of detectors though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hunter_(laser_weapon)
[1] https://www.rtx.com/raytheon/what-we-do/integrated-air-and-m...
EOS (Aust) have a 50-100kW system, 4 km range.
https://eos-aus.com/defence/high-energy-laser-weapon/
What they are good at is target tracking, having started out in satellite communication.
Their tracking system paired with a 30mm Bushmaster cannon and proximity ammo is another solution, and there are apparently 160 of them heading for Ukraine to be mounted on M113 and Kozak vehicles.
https://eos-aus.com/defence/counter-drone-systems/slinger/
Israel published last week that it made a trial run of the iron beam (10km range or so) during conflict with hezbollai. It had 40 intercepts and full operational deployment is scheduled for this year
Lasers aren't effective. Most of the drone is just an empty frame. The control board is pretty tiny, as is the ordnance. Targeting those or the propulsion systems is quite difficult. Sure, you can punch holes in the chassis but it takes a lot of guesswork to hit something vital. It's the wrong weapon. Something with an area of effect, like a shotgun or a net is much better suited to stopping drones.
Are you sure about that? AFAIK effective laser drone defenses are not yet widely deployed proven technology, but I don't think small beam size is a limiting factor. Getting enough power onto the target to disable it is a big challenge, but part of that is fighting the natural tendency of the beam to spread out & be attenuated by the atmosphere - not that the beam affects too small of a spot on the drone.
Having a laser that spreads out to e.g. 30cm radius at 500m is not hard to do if you need an area of effect weapon & can push enough power (ie. your laser is powerful enough, but not so intense that it ionizes the air & blocks itself). Reflections seem like a bigger problem: If the most effective defense includes guys with shotguns &/or there are a lot of unprotected personnel in the area, how do you make sure stray reflections don't end up blinding them?
The point is that a focused laser will put a hole through the drone, much like an armor piercing round, but that is often insufficient to disable the drone. A larger ballistic projectile (think a solid shell or a rock) is much more effective. Alternative energy weapons based on microwaves and SPL also work well.
Presumably hitting any rotor, even a small amount, could be enough to bring it down? They're finely balanced things
Already tested. Success rate is too low. A great deal of aenergy gets wasted.
Remember, this is about asymmetric warfare. If the number of rounds or amount of energy required costs more than the drone it shoots down, then it's not an effective deterrent. Militaries are looking for single-shot weapons to take down drones. Fire once and move on. It's the only way to deal with a swarm. Think about it for a bit and it will become very obvious.
Israel published last week that it (trialed) deployed laser system to shoot down drones year ago at North. It had 40 intercepts or so. Full operational deployment scheduled for the end of this year
You mean the demo done recently? The article might be misleading. The IDF tested 20 different systems produced by their military OEMs. It wasn't just lasers, and lasers are far from being the clear winner. Here's the official post, it contains a demonstration video:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/israelimod_israel-mod-complet...
no
https://www.yahoo.com/news/historic-breakthrough-idf-reveals...
Did you read your own article? It was developed last year and one of the weapons tested in February of this year as per the IDF post. The rest is Rafael marketing speak.
Did you read the article ? It starts with
>In a historic breakthrough, the IDF on Wednesday announced that an unnamed laser defense system similar to the much celebrated Iron Beam laser system has shot down dozens of aerial threats during the war.
>Already in fall 2024, The Jerusalem Post had learned that the IDF had used laser defense systems in operational situations but was barred from reporting on that at the time.
It was all over Israeli news together with videos of operational intercepts.
it has nothing to do with "february cookoff" of different systems and orders for iron beam were placed in january with deployment by the end of the year
> orders for iron beam were placed in january with deployment by the end of the year
Do you have a credible source from the IDF attesting to this?
And do you believe the IDF would conduct a demonsttation after it has already committed to a system?
>Do you have a credible source from the IDF attesting to this?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/laser-intercept...
it been all over Israeli news. not exactly "news"
>And do you believe the IDF would conduct a demonsttation after it has already committed to a system?
what demonstration are you talking about ? if you are talking about whatever was published in february, it's mostly for more tactical/mobile use i believe.
there is an issue that north of israel is very hilly, so it's possible to fly drones from lebanon below radar visibility range and then just to get them pop-up 50km away from border. it was major problem last year and the publicized trials a believe concentrated on sourcing systems to solve this issue.
This is what a guy can do in his garage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBVlL0FNbSE
It punches through titanium sheet in seconds.
The main defence drones have against both lasers and Bofors-type guns is staying low, such that they are below the horizon or behind ground clutter until as late as possible.
Now imagine that but with a shotgun shooting bird/buck shot at decent ROF. Way better.
The problem with any point defense system is radiating any energy makes you a big target. So you would want a passive (EO/IR?) or triggered active/passive system.
Why nobody us building automated shotgun based solutions for anti-air defenses... maybe they need more than 100-150m reliable reach? Having 300 of those covering one airfield may not be ideal, nor cost effective, nor easy to manufacture and deploy and maintain in such numbers... we talk about russia after all, they let most of their strategic bombers arrogantly unprotected on runways with full gas tanks.
I don't think western common folks grok how depraved that country is in terms of doing good work, reward systems for such and corruption on every single level. puttin' built a mafia state and pushed this behavior from top->bottom, and these are side effects. Not some soviet competence and discipline, which wasn't stellar either but light years ahead of current state.
India had successfully used its age old L70, Zu23 guns to track and shot down 500+ turkish drones sent by pak. All these legacy weapons are modernised with passive drone tracking, locking, targetting and automated firing system. https://theprint.in/defence/how-upgraded-l-70-guns-or-origin...
I really don't care what Russia does, but in a future war USA is more likely to be attacked by asymmetric exploding drones than to be attacking with them. That I _do_ care about. And for that, a PDS system on a few trucks seems kind of useful. If they can be made cheaply and the expensive bits centralized, then a few $1k every 100 yards is kind of reasonable, don't you think?
That's basically what ammo such as AHEAD is. It bursts before reaching the target and sends out shrapnel in a shotgun-like pattern.
They’re parked in the open because of the treaty requiring those type of assets be observable by spy satellites. The USA in turn does the same.
Nope. You are talking about the New Start treaty.
1) Russia suspended the treaty 2023, so it is not relevant here.
2) The use of hangars is not prohibited, as can be seen by the climatized hangars that the US keeps their B1 in.
3) Russia has announced plans for such reinforced hangars years ago, but very likely some dacha or yacht had higher priority.
My mistake! I missed the news about the suspension, thanks for clarifying.
12 gauge would be fairly strong medicine, but it has to be close in. If the drone is a stabilized gun platform with the ability to aim decently well (<4 MoA @ 100 yards) that's not going to be a winning battle.
Taking the discussion back to reality, almost all uses of drones at the moment are via suicide ("wire guided COTS missiles", you might call them), or just plain old recon. There are probably still plenty of grenades dropped from hover as well.
For those uses, there's a fairly decent approach ["missile"] or hover ["bomber"] stage that is probably plenty vulnerable to autonomous PDS via 12 guage medicine.
Tracking / detection could even be passive, partly acoustic, partly EO/IR, with only a small fire control radar if you really want it.
That’s assuming there’s a single drone and not an intelligent swarm that will circle around you.
Yes, I'm assuming reality.
We've had acoustic gunshot detection for years at this point though. It's not like a shotgun firing is a quiet event.
There's a huge difference between firing back at an enemy that is attacking, and spraying radio signals all over the horizon even though nobody is attacking yet. The former won't tell them anything new, but the latter (which I'm talking about), is (was?) considered somewhat dangerous.
When I said "triggered" I meant you would enable it when under attack, at which point it doesn't matter if they know you're there anymore.
Are shotgun pellets supersonic?
Best-case scenario: The expensive laser system just became the most obvious and highest-value target in the area.
Take 5 drones, sneak from other directions and simply overwhelm the system. If in pair, multiply the attackers via some decoys, it becomes just a statistics game.
I can imagine this protecting some future US bases in same way C-RAM is used. But from what I read from ie Iraq veterans they had it turned off most of the time for the fear of shooting down its own planes. So much for trust in high tech if its too powerful and automated.
Chinese have some systems, but from demo I've seen the laser beam took some serious time to shoot a single missile. Drones are smaller and way more fragile (so also harder to hit) but this ain't Star trek or Star wars.
Depends, in this case the strategic bombers are worth more.
Micro-scale, very likely true.
Bigger picture - if knocking the laser defense off-line slashes the unit cost of destroying bombers, then it may be the obvious first move in any competent attack.
One thing I haven't seen explored is using autonomous drones as defense. Like hand sized drones optimized for speed and maneuverability intercepting larger drones. They should be super cheap. They would also be small enough for troops and vehicles to carry one.
Anduril Anvil does drone-drone intercepts from a few years ago.
I'm thinking the same thing. You don't even need to fully destroy the drone, if you manage to damage the camera sensors or the exposed lithium cell it's game over for the drone.
How close are we to making a system that can have multiple counter measures autonomously deployed?
(1) if prop based, launch something to snare the props (2) if reflective, pre-launch something to spray black non-reflective paint at it, and followup with laser (3) if evasive, approach with random manouvers (4) if unknown, launch everything and see what works, and feed it back to the training data ... etc, etc.
Mirrors are not an effective defense against military lasers. The power levels are too high and dielectric mirrors only work over narrow wavelengths. In the specific case of US military tech, some of the platforms use white lasers such that even dielectric mirrors are pointless.
>Mirrors are not an effective defense against military lasers
So the cartoons lied to me?
I would try a shotgun style subsonic load with an adjustable fin/spoiler system that can be calibrated relative to the range of the target. The projectiles fin would flare out to reduce speed as it approached the target. Then an explosive charge would release a spray of super glue or pancake syrup, or something to gunk up the mechanism or disrupt the airflow on the propeller.
Maybe not completely, at least not for the camera sensors. If it has good enough initial targeting data - or a good enough last image from the camera - it may be able to find the target by inertial navigation from there (depending on laser range, of course).
> it may be able to find the target by inertial navigation from there
Or miss by a long shot and hit a civilian instead.
It still takes few seconds per target with technologies available right now. That's likely the reason why an operational anti drone laser turret is not a thing yet.
> operational anti drone turret is not a thing yet.
I’ve read about a bunch of these systems even if they aren’t in widespread deployment some are still being tested in real world conditions.
What about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hunter_(laser_weapon)
“The Silent Hunter has been used by Saudi Arabia to guard against Houthi drones and missiles.”
“During the World Defense Show in Riyadh the February 05, 2024, Poly Technologies announced the first hard-kill engagement of a one-way attack drone.[6]”
Again, it takes few seconds per target with current laser tech. Which means they don't have important simultaneous multi target engagement capability.
The targets, whether it's plumbing pipe rockets or lipo drones, come in at 100-1000 yards/sec, so you don't really have that many seconds per target.
They work in the demo in which you just shoot down the sole target as it fly perpendicular to the machine for both physical and career safety, but when it comes to deploying the thing around your bed, guns make a lot more sense.
The quotes suggest that system has actually been deployed and used successfully in real world conditions.
Also, your objection doesn’t really fit how drones have been used. Massive highly coordinated drone swarms are extremely unusual, the threat is mostly individual drones or small clusters.
Many very dangerous drones are well under 100y/s aka 200mph.
1000 yards/second aka Mach 2.7 is well beyond the ‘drones’ people are concerned with and into expensive missile territory. Which is where anti missile systems get used.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/israels-iron-beam-laser-ai...
full blown deployment by end of this year
It's extremely easy to make surfaces partly reflective and extremely hard to make lasers outside of labs more powerful.
More powerful than what? If StyroPyro can build handheld 200W+ LED laser device in his workshop [0], why wouldn't a sufficiently funded military be able to build an anti-drone laser with the same (or higher) power output?
Note that his laser burns through various reflective materials, including mirrors, copper, aluminium, and steel.
[0] https://youtu.be/UBVlL0FNbSE
Burning stuff at 20 feet is much easier than burning stuff at thousands of feet in distance.
If a drone is 90% reflective it doesn't need a weapon besides your laser.. (If the star wars approach weren't a scam to enter an ever more expensive race as the side with more money than sense.)
Like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Nf8VLCtSw
I think you'll probably see mini flak guns, lasers, microwaves, and defensive kamikaze drones as the main defensive tools
Some bases were able to repel the attacks so I don't get what this "defeat electronic warfare" means
Hoping and praying someone in the administration is able to convince Trump to align closer to Ukraine (even if only slightly) because of this.
The Ukrainians pulled off an absolute coup on Sunday. A third of a nuclear-armed country's strategic bomber fleet inoperable for the foreseeable future. Someone at NORAD probably said "they should have sent a poet" while looking at the satellite imagery.
If middle powers like Ukraine can do that to Russia, they can do that to countries like the US. We need to be on their good side.
The US seems to have given up on the concept of being on the "good side" of anyone and retreated to the safety of bullying and threatening to invade Canada (as a "joke"?)
Most people have given up the concept of being on the "good side".
That's how Trumpism can gain any traction at all. The amount of international engagement Russia had as Putin made himself tsar was embarrassing, and to a person with no scruples if the money is right - like Trump - it just illustrates that the guardrails aren't really there.
> Most people have given up the concept of being on the "good side".
“The revolution eats its partisans” is the most accurate description of it. People on “the good side” turn against their peers for not being on the good side enough. To wit, people who turn away don’t generally first notice that the good side isn’t so good; they first notice being bullied by that side, then they reflect on what it means to support the good side’s points of view (spoiler: A crime against humanity).
> Most people have given up the concept of being on the "good side".
In US.
Oh, it's elsewhere, too. There are plenty of illiberal candidates winning elections across the West.
There's also an argument to be made that Europe more or less sold themselves out for cheap natural gas. Nordstream 2 was constructed after the Russians (at that point, under Putin's puppet Medvedev) had invaded Georgia.
Apparently the final tally was 12 planes, but still, an impressive display
Depends on whether you mean damaged or destroyed. Ukraine reports 41 damaged, 12 destroyed.
12 destroyed. Hard to tell if the others were only damaged, and of course, how badly.
The first casualty of war is the truth.
That being said, any sort of materiel loss on weaponry as important as strategic nuclear bombers is a massive problem for Russia. The logistics of repairing them, if possible, is going to be complex.
Do you know how many they still had operational? Not that many, somewhere between 50 (more realistic) and 100 (rather idealistic if the rest was fully gutted for equipment).
This was a massive damage, not directly interfering with war against Ukraine that much, but overall power projection. Plus a pretty good insult to russian's FSB and GRU services who had no clue, just like today's Crimea bridge blow.
> russian's FSB and GRU services who had no clue
I do not want to give any credit to russian secret service but as we have seen in 9/11 and 7th October - secret services in any country are sometimes clueless.
You'd think that they'd be a little more in-tune to this sort of thing given the fact that Russia is a far more controlled society than the US or UK, and that they're at war with a country on their borders.
Oh well. Nothing that vodka and a window can't solve.
"Display" being the operative word. Good for PR, and maybe good for NATO in some small way in the future, but it won't change the war or how many Ukrainians are getting killed. A lot of the Ukrainian "wins" in this war have been of that nature, which probably isn't surprising considering they're being planned by outsiders with other motives.
> If middle powers like Ukraine can do that to Russia, they can do that to countries like the US
Ukraine borders on Russia, but the US is separated by ocean from serious threats. Attack by UAVs of this sort seems nearly impossible.
How does the ocean protect America from swarms of short range drones being launched from normal looking shipping containers on trucks being controlled from thousands of miles away?
The first volley would work of course but then container ships are gonna be nuked from orbit after that
Which would utterly destroy the US economy and do more damage than any drone attack.
Plus imagine if those attackers realize they can ship those containers from Mexico or Canada.
Pretty sure it would destroy whoever is on the other side of those shipping containers too though
> whoever is on the other side of those shipping containers
Could take a while to figure that out. It took days/weeks to figure out the 9/11 attacks with some certainty.
I'm not sure what that does for whoever initiates the attack. They still eventually get found out and unless they've managed to conquer the US, everyone is now bankrupt.
> everyone is now bankrupt
A good reason enough for a lot of people, no?
How far off are palm sized drones that have light weight solar panels on them that can flit about here and there and sit and wait and recharge in unobtrusive locations until they make their way to their target?
Don’t we receive millions of containers of cargo annually, not to mention having fewer internal movement restrictions? It certainly doesn’t seem implausible that someone could ship some drones around - the hardest part is avoiding explosives detector, but that’s a hard problem and the defense has the unenviable task of having to get it right millions of times.
Countries could be forward deploying these assets covertly in deniable ways in prep for future tensions?
I’d certainly plan for that if my job was physical security. It’s cheap by military standards and it’s not like we don’t have precedent with things like Russian deep-cover operatives. The commodification of the tech could make an adversary more confident in their ability to deny it if found, too, if everyone is using parts from China and open source software.
I think the key deterrent is that the U.S. has production capacity for the important systems and overwhelming capacity to strike back, so a rational foreign state isn’t going to think there’s a way they win by trying it. Terrorist groups might be a different story, so I’m really glad this wasn’t an option during Bush’s big adventure in Iraq and Afghanistan because however bad drone strikes are for military defense, they’re even worse for civilians.
I've long-wondered about the use of global container logistics for moving something like a small nuclear or chemical/biological weapon and just having it wait in-situ, until it needs to be activated.
I never considered drones, which is even more obvious, in hindsight.
Yeah, it’s frankly a big terrifying. Nukes are at least plausibly hard to shield from detection but drones don’t have a unique signature and there’s so much dual-use stuff that it seems too plausible that someone could get stuff through customs by claiming it’s civilian and then arming it right before use.
While not a land border, the Bering Strait does include two small islands, Big Diomede (Russian) and Little Diomede (US), which are only 3.8 kilometers apart.
The US contains, at a minimum, 10s of thousands of nationals from every middle power in the US. Sometime adversaries, like Iran and China, have more than a million nationals in the US. Every one of them has perfectly legal access to the technology which was used in this attack.
I think Ukraine could only have gotten away with this in the current situation where the US is detaching itself from supporting them, because if Russia genuinely thought that the US was behind taking out a large percentage of it's strategic nuclear fleet, the consequences of that are nightmarish to think about.
Those airplanes are one of the things that give Russia a second strike capability, and if they lose that capability, then they are going to be on a hair trigger in a nuclear crisis.
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> Death by Kubernetes...
Technically that's already the case with the F16 I think.
Surely death by CP/M ?
https://www.cncf.io/blog/2020/05/07/with-kubernetes-the-u-s-...
Always wondered why defense manufacturers refer to computer controlled fighter jets as "platforms". Now I know. It's meant exactly as it sounds.
> The US intellectual class were deeply invested in this
Is this based on something or just indoctrination from young age?
Other countries have hangars or bunkers to store their planes. That Russia doesn't, is really beyond comprehension.
Supposedly they had to be outside to comply with START provisions. But US keeps B-52s (and pretty much all fighters) outside. They might be under tin roofs in desert locations to keep cool. Not in bunkers.
Yeah, you can find plenty of examples of them sitting right out in the open. They're protected by two oceans, not by bunkers. A similar attack with trucks full of drones would make short work of them just as well.
Can you explain why they have tires on the wings?
START doesn't require that. Besides Russia quit START 2 years ago. Also wherever you got that information is 100% a russian disinfo distributor.
Well, Belgium stores their airplanes in hangars. It's great to protect them against the weather. You know what we don't do? Put tires on the wings.
You know what else is great about hangars? It's a super cheap defense against drone attacks that you saw from Ukraine.
Sure, you can give some examples of planes stored outside, and I can give examples of planes stored in bunkers (there are plenty of pictures from Russian airplane bunkers).
I have the feeling your comment is made in bad faith (=Russian propaganda). If not, please explain why Russians put tires on the wings.
Where can I read up on the basics of jamming & countering it?
I have some vague notion of jamming is blast a stronger signal & countering might be hopping to a different frequency but that's about it
Is anyone familiar how does EW work? I keep hearing they send common shutdown codes, but what does it mean? Obviously thats an easy target but commercial drones (probably built in), but how does it work for custom ones? Can't the code be random?
https://archive.md/Al8ER
I'm not sure what weapons will the WW3 be fought with, but the WW4 will be fought with sticks and stones.
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It's a bit off topic but the answer would be Friend or Foe systems that are used today in aircraft to help the pilot know if there are friendlies, unknowns and known baddies on the ground. No idea if there are plans to implement this in drones as the systems would likely require retrofit and drones would need more battery draining gear. That gear would have to get a lot smaller.
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Maybe it would be nice if "the troops" stopped invading Ukraine and just went home to their families, maybe via Moscow for a visit to their beloved commander to let him know it's over?
Would be out of the question ?
Each day closer to Oblivion.
EDIT: Apparently the reference wasn't clear.
https://marvelstorybook.fandom.com/wiki/Drone_(Oblivion)
Every generation must learn that "the only winning move is not to play."
Oblivion for potentially nuclear armed bombers?
To the drones used in the movie.
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Or, perhaps, he's just tired of these bombers chucking missiles at apartment blocs and children's hospitals and power plants. If Russia weren't using these bombers against Ukraine 3+ times a week they wouldn't be attractive targets.
I really don’t get all the fretting about drones making kill-no-kill decisions.
You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private?
Reminds me of the debate about a self driving car that might need to mount the curb to avoid hitting a car - and therefore endangering a pedestrian.
It’s not an easy decision but I’d rather a machine made it than a stressed person!
The thing you're missing is that the decision isn't actually made by a machine. It's made by a person much much higher up across a much broader effective surface area.
That is, historically to wage war you had to ultimately convince/coerce millions of people to wage that war for you -- continuously for years -- along with millions more to support the effort politically and economically. In the highly automated world, you literally only need a lot of money (which also tends to concentrate outside of any semblance of democratic control).
Yeah a single rich person might soon have the ability to, without coercing a soldier, decide who gets to die. He might just need to coerce someone to deliver the drones and put them on an (automated) truck.
The smart-ass answer is 'a single person already does, and he doesn't need to be rich, just able to build a time-bomb and send a package'. The Unabomber approach has its limits of course, including being hard to reach those who do not open their own mail.
The amount of autonomy and decision complexity matters a lot. Autonomously making its way into a known area, recognizing the target and self-correcting to it is basically how every modern cruise missile works.
And now we know making an ersatz cruise missile in the garage is possible...
So the interesting question is to what extent the Iranian derived Hezbollah "garage rockets" (very poor guidance, CEP is basically "somewhere in Israel", but extremely cheap and require only smugglable parts) can be combined by some power with Ukrainian style precision guidance.
True, though (so far) range, velocity, and payload are far smaller than what we expect for a "cruise missile".
Well, this week proves that range and velocity limitation can be overcome if you ship them near to their destination in small boxes ahead of time. This wasn't really an option with cruise missiles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalibr_(missile_family)#Club-K
This issue is too complex for me to really have a good thought at the moment, but I will say that this reminds me of that classic story of the Soviet who didn't launch the nukes during a threat came in from the US.
The threat ended up being a false alarm, and that human judgement saved a lot of lives. A machine, assuming it would have launched when seeing that signal, would've ended differently.
In 1962, the US sent out a valid nuclear launch order with correct launch codes, by mistake.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/former-us-airman-tells-un-an... ("Former US Airman Tells UN an Accidental Nuclear War Was Narrowly Avoided in 1962")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10452983 ("The Okinawa missiles of October 1962 (thebulletin.org)", 71 comments)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
Imagine an AI system is programmed to poison the well incase of losing scenario. So it takes advantage of Kessler System to make sure no one else has advantage if it doesn't too poisoning the whole of earth orbits for centuries to come in which satellites could reside.
The issue is that software making these decisions can't possibly have the full context when making the decision because it was coded long before the decision point occurred.
What does that mean in practice? Have you ever saw a flash in the corner of your eye, looked for a second, then realised it was just a reflection? For that split second, your brain identified a potential threat and was trying to quickly decide whether to hide, fight or run. But underneath that was a nagging of "it's probably nothing," that caused you to delay pulling out your gun and opening fire on a passing car.
A computer programme may or may not have this coded in. A machine designed for an active war-zone, or a car assuming it'll only ever auto-pilot on a motorway, is used in a suburban area. That same programme that's fine in its original intended location suddenly opens fire on a grandma with a shiny stroller, or swerves into a pedestrian because "pedestrians don't walk on motorways."
That's what we worry about.
> Have you ever saw a flash in the corner of your eye, looked for a second, then realised it was just a reflection? For that split second, your brain identified a potential threat and was trying to quickly decide whether to hide, fight or run. But underneath that was a nagging of "it's probably nothing," that caused you to delay pulling out your gun and opening fire on a passing car.
.. or vice-versa. The average war has plenty of stressed people firing semi blindly at half-identified shapes. And if we want to be literal, there's the case of Lee Clegg and the exact circumstances in which it is legal or not to open fire on a passing car and kill a teenage girl.
I’m not denying that awful shit like this happens with humans. I’m pointing out the moral hazard in turning it into a preprogrammed system. We’ve seen software bugs empty bank accounts simply because running that faulty system for 5 minutes iterates 100,000 times. Now give the power to decide who lives and dies and it’s only limited by the ammo it holds.
The stressed private might still have a bit of empathy and humanity. Meanwhile millions of drones can be programmed (or hacked) to kill millions of people without excluding civilians or anyone
We have had weapons which are autonomous for decades. You launch them consciously then you know that it will find and destroy weapons based on some "intelligence" (A homing missile with a radar you know is likely to hit the thing that reflects the radar waves, whatever that is. There are artillery shells which home in on vehicles and so on). The launch decision by the human means "I'm responsible for this thing hitting and the thing that it finds". The kill/no-kill decision is made at launch time. An AA missile might hit a civilan jet, but there is no way the operator will make a new kill/no-kill decision once it reaches the jet. You made the decision at launch.
That's the same with these drones. The smarter they get, the further away the human goes. Today it might be simple to create autonomous weapons who are instructed to kill vehicles matching various known appearances. That too already exists. The strike on the Russian bombers was reportedly carried out manually, but it would have been pretty easy to have that autonomous, since the targets are huge, stationary, easily recognizable and easy to navigate to in the geography.
If you launch a quadcopter and instruct it to kill any adult human it finds, then that's the same thing. You wouldn't launch it into an area where there is a remote possibility of being any civilians. No difference from firing an artillery shell. If there is a civilian, or a soldier waving a white flag or whatever - there is no cancel button for your artillery shell. The decision to kill whatever is in the other end was made when you fired it. There is literally no difference between firing a million drones and firing a million artillery shells down range. It's your human responsibility and your human consciousness when you make the decision.
I don't think we have had widespread use of autonomous human-targeting drones yet, but it's by no means science fiction today. Just a matter of time. We'll see their use in this conflict.
Don't forget there's a war on right now in which precision munitions are being used to specifically target hospitals full of civilians on the pretext that the enemy is allegedly underneath.
I think this is such a hot topic around here because it makes sheltered nerds begin to comprehend the gritty reality of warfare.
Human soldiers kill civilians pretty much all the time. Then they brag to their friends how cool they are. Drones do not rape, soldiers rape (and yes they rape men too in case someone wants to make it about gender).
All the bombs Russia thrown onto Ukrainian civilians were thrown by human soldiers.
> Drones do not rape
Yet. Drones also don't get tired.
They are powered by batteries or gasoline.
Neither do the defensive ones.
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> imagine
Trying to use imaginary situations when there’s a clear and real one going on - check.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_violence_in_the_Russian...
> Dozens of confirmed rape cases, that don’t even include all the violence between 2014 and 2022
>> Well, akshually , tovarisch, rapes haven’t even started yet
Check.
> SMO
It’s war, “drug”, even führer junior called it already.
Calling war SMO - check.
> What about west
Check.
> Denying war crimes
Check.
Astonishing, perfect record. Straight out of metodichka, Petrov.
I didn't know that I was on Reddit, I thought I was with a more educated crowd than that.
Your name calling - 'Petrov', 'tovarisch' - demonstrates that you are not making your case with logic and reason. You have a made up mind, driven by emotion, so there is no room for intellectual discussion here.
From the Russian perspective the SMO is the SMO. War has not been declared, it is an SMO. If my dog attacks my neighbour's dog then you could call it war, equally, tariffs on imports could be called war. However, in 'war', it has to be declared as such. Since it has not been declared, the option of calling the SMO the SMO is appropriate.
There is no 'whataboutism' in my comment, I am not denying any historical war crimes, just stating that a defending army is not going to be killing those they are defending, and this also applies with military adventures outside national boundaries, citing the Falklands example.
Whether or not you are Russophobic, you must acknowledge that Russians identify with the Russian speaking, Russian Orthodox Church going people in the east of the former Ukraine. Whether you like it or not, Russians see these people as their own and are therefore not there to kill the men, rape the women and sell their children into slavery.
As for the Bandera supporting, blue and yellow fanatical nationalists of Galicia in the West of what remains of the Ukraine, it is no secret that Russians don't imagine having any fraternal ties with them.
My understanding is that a drone will make decisions that are reproducible (same data - same decision), so if anything goes wrong then it should be possible to investigate (to some extent) and fix. A stressed private is in this sense ”undebuggable” because much more not-easily-reproducible factors influence decisions. Also I’m afraid that stressed and tired privates at war tend to err towards ”just kill them all” because it looks much more like a videogame.
The data is never the same. Every situation in war (or reality in general) is unique.
When a stressed person mistakenly does something they shouldn't have, they typically stop doing it after only a small handful of mistakes. We get tired, or bored, or we wise up to our mistake.
When a misconfigured computer does something wrong, it frequently does it over and over and over again until it is prevented from doing so by an external intervention.
No tired private is going to mistakenly rampage through a populated area mowing down civilians. But a confused drone swarm might.
Very good principle but horrifyingly a drugged soldier might. Look up Larium, an anti-malaria drug potentially implicated in wartime rampages. Morally and ethically it raises some weird questions. Sure you can balance the probabilities of death from taking a drug vs not. All drugs have a lethal dose. But most drugs don't kill people who haven't taken them.
"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer."
I think this oversimplifies the matter.
At a micro level, sure, you could argue that kill/no-kill decisions are being made by frontline enlisted soldiers, but the stress, the exhaustion, and being able to see your enemy downrange add a degree of humanization and discretion.
Wars are brutal. Some warring factions are incredibly brutal. But taking a human life can't be reduced to a `KILL? [Y/N]` decision made by some MAJ somewhere. Killing enemy soldiers is a last resort (formally, this is the concept of _military necessity_), and normalization of it as anything else is a mistake.
I also think it's a fallacy to compare this to the self-driving car trolley problem; the timeline of decisions, length of the decision chain, and ultimate goal of the decision-making process are _aggressively_ different.
My overarching points are, I guess:
War is a tragedy, obviously, but I don't think there's a way to avoid it right now. In absence of some way to stop war forever (hah), we can't trivialize taking human lives. It's not lost on me that this has been happening for a while at this point, and that it's getting worse. I still oppose it, and I think we all have a responsibility to be more critical of this regime of warfare.
I don't know how to counter the argument of "well, if we don't do it, _someone else_ will, eventually." This is some really fucked up, self-justifying inductive reasoning that can't easily be countered by calling out the moral bankruptcy of the premise. In the past, mutual disarmament treaties have been a down-the-line bandaid for this kind of thought process, but the nuclear rearmament we're seeing in the world right now shows it's not a panacea.
You could start by not inventing vague hypotheticals to argue against, and instead engaging with observable, measurable strategic and tactical reality?
War is studied. There are journals, papers and research on war fighting at all possible levels.
In the most recent action by Ukraine you can observe actual reality: what did they attack? Military equipment of the enemy. Why did they attack it? To degrade the enemy's ability to sustain and rotate their forces attacking them. What was it for? Well for one thing it will hopefully considerably reduce their ability to bomb civilian targets.
In this specific case, I agree that it was fine -- using drones with limited decision-making ability to strike targets like parked aircraft is okay, as long as there's an overwhelming likelihood of the drones not getting false positives from invalid targets.
My response was more aimed at the parent comment to my previous one, which seemed to paint delegating kill/no-kill decisions with a brush of "I don't know why this is such a big deal."
If war is tragedy, where is the dramatic irony?
I was once talking to an F35 pilot about what its like and during the conversation he said something, "If its red, its dead" referring to how the computer classifies things as friend/foe for you. I realised it doesnt mean much to have a human in the loop when theyre making their decisions based completely on info the computer serves up anyway.
Indeed - in a hostile situation you're never going to get an eyeball on most hostile air targets.
Can we think slightly more broadly?
Targeting a stationary Tu-95 bomber with no protective measures in place is probably the easiest possible identification task for a drone.
A lot of kill/no-kill decisions are more subtle, or involve unknowns, possible nearby civilians, etc.
Or look at this crazy FPV piloting job. You think AI could do this? Pilot maneuvers through an absolute maze of anti-drone nets to hit a moving truck. (essentially SFW; video terminates slightly before impact)
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1l2aqxp/ukra...
Drone operators are generally not on the front lines, and sometimes they are literally on the other side of the world sitting in a cubicle. They are usually specialists of some sort, not untrained privates.Drone operators seem to become quite jaded by their safety/removal from the theater of operations.
c.f.,
https://notabugsplat.com/
and reporting of the use of this term by U.S. drone operators.
Why couldn't AI do that? It's better than any human at this stuff.
You could certainly train AI to navigate that particular maze of netting, but I'm far from convinced you could train an AI to navigate a near-infinite variety of novel, hostile measures not present in the training corpus.
It seems trivial to confuse a Tesla's AI. I'm assuming they're fairly near the top of the game when it comes to that, yes?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1MigIJXJx8
This sort of intentionally hostile pathological case is of course rare in real-world driving. It will not be rare in warfare.
And a drone has to operate fully in three dimensions, unlike a Tesla which is effectively operating in two dimensions.
An autonomous drone will also have extremely constrained computing resources relative to a Tesla due to size/weight/power constraints.
Self-driving cars are a political problem, not a technical one. We have self-driving cars on Mars.
Autonomous drones, yeah, well... https://www.tudelft.nl/en/2025/lr/autonomous-drone-from-tu-d...
Sometimes I feel like the entire AI field just never watched The Terminator.
Campy, low budget action movies are not a sound basis for forming public policy.
Whether it should is a different question. It certainly can.
It doesn't take much imagination to see what's so disturbing about it, they're swarms of autonomous killing machines. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead
To be fair, that's a relatively buried and brief aspect in the article. Which is otherwise heavy on real-world military realities.
Personally, I see anyone fretting about imperfect drones making those decisions as either (1) one of today's 10K, or (2) a performer covering a trending topic. Land mines were deployed at giga-scale over a century ago (WWI). Spring-guns were enough of a problem in England to be outlawed two centuries ago.
A) land mines are banned in most countries for that reason
B) mines don't move by themself, but stay where you deployed them
A moving autonomous killer drone has a potentially bigger effect if unleashed on the wrong area. Besides, war is usually fought in civilian areas. If you send the drone to the frontline, but its GPS is jammed, it might move somewhere close by.
A) Most countries also have laws/treaties banning invasions. But when those happen to them anyway, most countries start ignoring the bans on landmines. Which are quick/cheap/easy to produce, even with century-old tech.
B) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_mine Not that anybody's doing Environmental Assessments on land, to determine whether the mines might be washed downstream after a heavy rain, or moved downslope by a landslide, or ...
The problem you describe sounds very much like poorly-directed mortar/artillery fire & strategic bombing - which have been killing civilians at scale since at least WWI.
> tired front-line private
It's hard to imagine there is a military in the world that would put something so important in the hands of a private. Yes the drones in this war are relatively low cost but they are also so vital to both sides' war effort that there is inevitably more command and control over their use.
Machines have been making kill-or-no-kill decisions for decades, and they were a lot more indeterminant. Heat-seeking missiles largely kill whatever is hot. Proximity fuses in WW2 detonated whenever they got near something. Anti-personal mines kill whenever pressure is applied. A CIWS will target things that get too close to it that don't identify IFF. Naval mines kill if something magnetic is near them.
At the end of the day, it's still humans deploying these weapon systems and accepting the risk that they might cause unintended casualties.
>It’s not an easy decision but I’d rather a machine made it than a stressed person!
A machine also can't be held responsible.
Who do the surviving relatives of the crush pedestrian sue? No longer the driver i guess
Normally the owner of the vehicle, at least if the driver was using it with their permission. Think about this before you let someone borrow your car.
How can you old the owner responsible for the AI's errors?
It's their car, they are operating it on the public roads.
The thing that gets me about this autonomous car thing is that it shouldn't really happen. When a car has to swerve to avoid an accident it is typically because the driver was speeding and/or not paying attention.
Autonomous cars wouldn't speed and they are always paying attention. Maybe you could argue that it happened because the other driver was drunk or for some other reason swerved into your lane but this is still an incredibly niche situation and if it does happen just sue that guy. The vast majority of car-to-car accidents happen when both drivers are irresponsible. Autonomous cars will significantly reduce accident rates just by following the rules of traffic and being constantly aware.
The whole who should be sued thing is asinine, just have a national insurance fund for it or whatever. Cheaper than all the accidents it prevents.
I’ve read that self driving cars almost always try to slow down /brake opposed to swerving for the simple reason of removing energy from any potential collision.
There was an article here serveral weeks ago about how in some self driving cars the brakes can be pre-loaded and can be used much quicker than a human could, reaction times aside.
Yes. The private knows he can be punished for getting it wrong.
This is flawed thinking. Human decisions scale worse - this is a feature.
>> I really don’t get all the fretting about drones making kill-no-kill decisions.
>> You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private?
I want somebody that can be held accountable when it goes wrong. With automated systems we don't have that.
That's not an issue, you can always hold someone accountable, from those who own to those who program.
We can't even figure this out for self-driving nevermind warfare.
Is the person who presses a button that releases an autonomous kill-no-kill drone into a country going to jail when that drone razes an entire town of civilians? I doubt it. “Mistakes happen” etc.
The visceral reaction is not there that would motivate the legal system to send the group that started a cascade of autonomous decisions by a robot to kill a bunch of civilians.
That depends on those two imaginary countries. Also, are you unaware of the many instances where people faced no accountability even when it wasn't a mistake, but deliberate?
This would make the accountability situation much worse.
The person who devised this was most likely one Illia Vitiuk, head of the SBU cyber-sec department. Before that position, he was an MMA fighter. In a 2023 interview he says he was inspired by "James Bond films and a life of adventure..." Also apparently stood down then reinstated recently over some unexplained transactions, family finance situation.
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/06/1196975759/ukraine-cyber-war-...
Nobody cares. What a star.