I can already imagine ships being outfitted with hundreds of anti aircraft autocannons just for shooting down drone swarms, kind of like the USN ships of WWII. An old solution for a new problem
If you really wanted to, I'd recommend a microwave 'cannon'. You can build one yourself for cheap-ish based off a directional antenna and some recycled microwave-link components.
Then you just need to target it. Probably need some sort of weather proof retractable cover so that the neighbors don't freak out. Gimbal under the cover to aim the thing, and then a means of target acquisition. People have tried to use audible input to pick up the propellers, but I don't really know how well that would work in practice and what kind of / how many microphones you would need to get a fix.
The generally idea would be, system detects and gets a fix on probable drone, notifies you and allows you to do a visual check and give the fire signal. Microwave directional targets and roasts the target microelectronics.
Yes it is, but most consumer drone hardware doesn't do a very good job of it. Also, most drones require a a couple of RF/EM sensors for position and heading which can't exactly be Faraday caged.
I was being somewhat facetious about mounting a microwave auto-turret on your house, but the technology has been toyed with for years as a man-portable solution to consumer drone intrusion.
Yeah, it would need to be customized for sure. Antennas can be filtered pretty effectively even in high rf environments, but they might be jammed. The Magnetometer will work in a box.
Straight consumer drones should be easy to disable though.
Does not really work that well, as far as I've seen. One is probably best off using an SDR to pick up the communications between the drone and the remote. It's a rather inexpensive solution, as well.
Microdoppler is promising for this as well, but that is likely astronomically out of the range of purchasing power for the average person.
Actually this isn't a big problem. Quads or RC planes at a reasonable height aren't audible. Add in night and lack of running lights and no one is going to notice.
If you are using a wing, then you just program your robot to come in high, cut it's engine and continue on a glide trajectory to the target. The flap servos make nearly no noise.
If you've got a quad, come in fast and basically huck the vehicle at the target.
Ardupilot + ROS make this all relatively straightforward to implement and provide an easy way to interface with necessary sub-systems.
Ardupilot will not hit a human size target. People can barely do it. You're not going to lob a tumbling quad at a target with any accuracy that's a joke.
To do this with any reliability you need custom software and probably hardware. It'll look more like a smart munition. But it'll also be more difficult than strapping a knife to a RC plane.
Second, who said the quad was tumbling? Significantly cutting engine speed and removing significant lift forces on a quad in order to kill the buzz doesn't mean it will start wildly gyrating.
Third, Ardupilot will get you within a few feet of a specified point with a good enough vector and speed. Luckily you can use a subroutine (secondary control program) to handle the final approach from the 'point' to the target.
We literally are talking knives on RC planes; see the comment I originally replied to. You are moving the goal posts.
A quad will tumble with the motors off, the whole thing is a significant lift force. It was a big problem in early controller software where throttle dead zone would turn off the props. A problem I personally experienced. Maintaining any semblance of stability requires active adjustment.
And no, Ardupilot will not get anything going at high speed to within a few feet in 3d space.
Off the shelf RC airplanes have terrible unpowered terminal velocity. You'd have to custom build to get anything decent. Which is more difficult than strapping a knife to a RC plane.
Lol, yes! But the Stuka (Sturzkampfbomber) wasn't what I had in mind. In reality they were (retro)fitted with gadgets that made them whine/screech loudly when doin' the dive...
> if you can make a unabomber type of device you can construct a weaponized quadrocopter
It’s trivial, cheap, and simple to do massive harm to massive numbers of people.
Fortunately, humans don’t usually do this unless part of the government/military.
In a country of 300 million, the only non-state mass death events are a handful of terrorist attacks and deranged teenagers determined to shoot up their schools. The annual deaths caused by these non-state actors is, on average, less than the annual fatalities on a given stretch of a run-of-the-mill interstate.
They don't even need guns. Drones can just lift a rock or metal sphere up a few hundred feet and drop it over the target. Imagine a fleet of 50 drones dropping dense objects onto a house or car: would be more destructive than an automatic weapon, and harder to avoid.
I wonder if standard BBs or ball bearings could achieve sufficient terminal velocity to pierce skin - would mitigate accuracy requirements if you could dump them by the dozens or hundreds.
Drones are the new aircraft carriers. That is, pre-WWII, the dominant naval ship was the battleship. Heavily armored, with enormous guns, military planners expected that the battle for the Atlantic and Pacific would be carried out by these monsters slugging it out. Though there were hints that planes could be quite effective against ships, few admirals realized that the longer range of an aircraft carrier would make the battleships effectively obsolete in ship-ship battles. And after all, they'd spent a ton of money producing those battleships, and developing doctrine. Would you really want to throw that all away on some newfangled novelty?
After Pearl Harbor, it became clear that the answer should have been Yes.
Drones offer overwhelming advantages -- they're cheap and disposable. A drone generally costs less than the US missile used to shoot it down. You can lose 100 of them, and there will be no lives lost on your side.
During WWII, by 1943 the European theater was essentially decided, except for a lot of killing. The US was producing tanks and planes so quickly that it was simply mathematically impossible for the Germans to counter them. Will the same thing happen when China decides to throw its manufacturing capacity into war drones?
A drone with the same range as a missile would be indistinguishable from a missile. A drone without the same range as a missile would likely have its carrier detected and destroyed before it can get in range to release it's drones. Drones are great for irregular forces that can hide among civilian populations or in dense terrain to have short ranged air strike capabilities cheaply, but they are not substitute for long range naval strikes.
A missile blows up in all directions, whereas a small drone can focus fire and concentrate energy on individuals. A swarm of tiny drones in a concentrated population area can potentially end up with a similar kill to mass ratio as early nuclear bombs. It is similar to the difference between a large conventional bomb and a cluster bomb but taken to another level.
When battleships and tanks are the weapon, manufacturing capacity powers the war machine. Perhaps drones usher in a new dynamic in that regard too. Maybe it's not how many drones you produce but how well programmed they are, what sensor or communication technology they use, etc.
Fit-for-purpose quality(including design, construction, tech) vs efficiency of production(cost) has always been a factor for the battlefield since forever. Iron vs bronze vs wood.
In modern times, software already runs a lot of tanks/missiles/planes/ships/communications etc.
As I see it the single biggest new factor is that "drone enabling software" significantly reworks hardware design parameters and thus affects manufacturing capacity.
For example, in a plane, the drone technology allows removal of a lot of weight along with "human onboard" red tape safety factors while enlarging G force parameters. It has added other factors for control and operation. But on the whole it is deemed a quite significant win it seems.
Drone on drone warfare leads to thinking about "software exploits" but on the battlefield it is always about exploits. Historically see spitfires and their limited ability to dive being exploited by the opposition but then being hardware "patched".
Drones are the new infantry and land mines. For sea battles missiles still dominate, since all you need to do is destroy the ship with the drones.
Drones fly around and autonomously eliminate targets while maintaining perimeters, which replaces infantry doing the same thing. Drones are easy to launch from land-based bases and due to their limited range are best suited to land-based operations.
Aerial drones are easily countered by autonomous weapons systems that fire on drones quickly and accurately. Drones are able to be disabled with a single large bullet, which makes their cost exceptional once countered. I expect that land based drones will become a pretty big thing, since they can take advantage of cover and camouflage.
The line between drone and missile is fuzzy at best. Most of the distinguishing characteristics often cited in these conversations are wrong. For instance, missiles are usually powered by rockets, but many missiles are powered by jet engines instead. Drones are usually meant to be reusable, but the first drones ever made were specifically expendable (which is why they are named after drone bees, which fly once before dying.) Loiter munitions are sometimes considered drones instead of missiles, but nobody doubts that a tomahawk cruise missile is a missile, and yet, a modern tomahawk is also a loiter munition that can cruise in a circle for hours.
Sometimes autonomy is cited as a key characteristic of drones. But the first drones were pure-RC with no autonomy at all, while there are a myriad of autonomous missiles and non-autonomous human-guided missiles. So autonomy is not a distinguishing characteristic either.
It feels like most of the recent fascination with drones is due to overlap with civilian off-the-shelf technology and the fantasy of being able to buy something that could potentially go toe to toe with advanced militaries. When in fact, militaries have always had "aerial munitions with varying degrees of intelligence and maneuverability and propulsion methods selected based on speed/maneuverability/range tradeoffs." An off the shelf quadcoptor is as far from military weaponry as a hand calculator is from a supercomputer even if they're both calculating machines.
It's weird seeing this fascination with drones yet not seeing an analogous fascination for Toyota trucks.
>It feels like most of the recent fascination with drones is due to overlap with civilian off-the-shelf technology and the fantasy of being able to buy something that could potentially go toe to toe with advanced militaries.
Yes, it's because it's a harmless toy that can turn dystopian. That's why people's imagination is running wild. It's like that Furby horror game (tattletail). It's the "your nightmares are becoming real" kind of stuff.
One thing that makes China today different to the US of WW2 is that China's export oriented economy would collapse in a war with the West and their industrial production capabilities would be hurt significantly along with that.
Doubtful. The CCP runs a command economy. It doesn't need to sell its goods to finance a war when the state can simply force the economy to produce the means of war.
Want to stop China from waging war? Knock out its means of production -- target its imports.
My point is that the analogy of US in WW2 doesn't really hold up because the US had an excellent economy throughout WW2 relative to others which fueled their excess industrial production. China would be in the opposite situation - economic collapse.
Would China be able to maintain industrial production by forcing workers and firms to produce equipment despite economic collapse? Perhaps. But the US in WW2 shouldn't be considered historical precedent, due to the above distinction.
Agreed - in this awful scenario where the US is fighting China, their economy would absolutely crater as the US shoots any ship heading towards Chinese ports after the embargo was declared.
China can't feed itself.
China only produces a third of the oil it consumes.
If your people begin to starve as soon as war starts and you all of a sudden have 1/3rd the oil you used to.... well, that's not exactly a recipe for success.
They have a gigantic strategic oil reserve (it has its own Wiki page!), and I would assume the same for food as well. I'm sure that Pakistan and especially Russia would be happy to help with them as imports as well, maybe not as much as they use in a given year, but enough to help out.
Most of the simulations for a naval war around Taiwan predict that it would be over in a few days, maybe weeks, but not long enough to really draw down those reserves.
Most importantly, it's really not realistic that the US Navy could prevent the rest of planet Earth from providing goods to the world's largest trading nation. Our navy isn't big enough, for one thing, but the economic damage to every other country that imports into China makes this blockade idea pretty unrealistic. I can't even imagine how much inflation would spike when the world's factory can't export for a few weeks
The US Navy is big enough to impose a fairly effective blockade on China for an extended period. All they have to do is drop a few mines near Chinese ports and shipping labels. Marine insurers will then decline coverage for all merchant vessels in those waters, making it impossible for neutrals to operate. The Chinese could still accept the risk and run their own flagged ships through but overall trade would be greatly reduced.
This is incorrect. China is self sufficient in calories. Chinese citizens would have to eat less meat and less fish, but they would be very far from starving.
China has a border with Russia, and gigantic strategic oil reserves. They are not going to run out of oil. Maybe ration it initially, until enough can be delivered from Russia.
This is old thinking. Same battlefield with different technology.
The war that changed everything was the 1st Gulf War.
20 years ago they could see how stupid it was to use weapons to blow things up that cost more than what you were blowing up.
Our military has already been lapped. We only don't think so because we waste so much money on outdated expensive weapon systems and then use the amount spent as proof we have the better military.
The battleship vs carrier debate, as we understand it today, is incomplete.
Carriers won over battleships in the 1930s, because of strike distance.
Carriers won in the 1950s+ because they were the more upgradeable platform.
If you built a battleship in 1945, and then developed a better cannon or missile in 1955, what were your options?
If you built a carrier in 1945, and then developed better aircraft and armaments for them in 1955, you retooled your carrier air groups. The 4 Ohio class SSBN -> SSGN conversions are the same lesson.
It's expensive to build a new boat. It's cheaper to put new things on a boat (of the right size / shape).
Following that logic, the conclusion is to invest in robust, large drone delivery vehicles (aircraft or missiles), that allow for simpler, iterable micro-drone development.
In 2018, an unidentified nonstate actor used two explosive-bearing commercial drones in the attempted assassination of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro.
It's funny to see the phrase "nonstate actor" here, when we're assured that ransomware script kiddies who use Coinbase are all "state actors". Maduro knows who sent the drones. [0] Why is even IEEE Spectrum in ideological thrall to the military-industrial complex?
> For computer scientists, the role federal funding plays in shaping research in their field presents both good news and bad news, according to the preliminary report on a study by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Science Policy Committee of the Special Interest Group on Automata and Compatability Theory. The good news is the fact that no abatement is in sight for the dramatic rise in federal support of computer science research
> The potential of consumer or commercial drones harming world leaders became immediately evident when a protester hovered one close to German chancellor Angela Merkel at a campaign rally in 2013
Pretty arbitrary incident to choose, but I suppose the writer would have felt silly mentioning the flying dildos that buzzed Gary Kasparov at a political event in 2008.
I have no idea who was responsible for the flying dildos, but Kasparov was an outspoken critic of Putin, so I imagine the incident made him even more conscious of how easily Putin could reach him if he wanted. He continued his political activities, but he left Russia a few years later and announced that he couldn't go back in the near future because if he did he wouldn't be allowed to leave again. He has still not been back, to my knowledge.
Someone literally did that the other day (flying a drone with a dildo attached) to a person running for mayor in New Mexico, and then punched the candidate when an event staffer was able to grab the drone.
Wouldn't the solution be jamming or EMP related? Of course, because the technological system must propagate itself at any cost this idea is counter-intuitive. Technological progress is seen as bending towards an inherent good. People never stop to think if it will be bad. Now people are to live in fear of drone swarms because nobody has autonomy in the technological system. People think they control technology, but it is really technology that controls us.
At least in the US we're already surrounded by people with firearms. The situation isn't really very new IMO. People have already started committing crimes using quadcoptors and everyone knows about them now. You don't hear about them shooting people because that's already illegal and we have social structures in place to deal with it.
TL;DR if anything this is an improvement because it makes the 2A thing make more sense (almost no one is building guided missiles in their backyard except that one youtuber who's trying to make his model rockets land on their own.)
I suspect that jamming would push people to make drones fully autonomous, so that they're capable of carrying out their mission even is comms are down.
Jamming would address inter-swarm communications, but then they'd revert to solo operations. EMP isn't realistic, but microwave systems have already been tested:
Jamming wouldn't break line-of-sight or optical communication. Imagine drones that can simply see one another, and communicate by changing color (e.g. with LEDs).
Lasers are already used for inter-satellite communications, so there's no need to just use gross color shifting (though perhaps the BOM impact would be less).
Related side story: my resume had something about PKI in it so I kept getting calls from Boeing recruiters trying to fit me into a job doing said satellite laser comms (presumably using PKI). I kept telling them I knew nothing optics-related aside from basic Newtonian stuff, and they kept calling me back. I hope they finally found someone.
Birds and insects are able to swarm without telepathy, and the dynamics of this are fairly well understood. I don't think this is going to be such a big issue for drones; if anything, you'll get swarms of ultra-cheap tiny drones whose job is to swoop around chirping to each other until they get jammed, then take note of where the jamming signal seems to originate, GTFO, and convey that geographical information back to base at the earliest opportunity. The more enthusiastically you jam, the sooner you become the target of a ballistic mortar or guided missile that's fatally attracted to your jamming device.
There is no practical way to use EMP as a defense against small drones. That's something that only works in movies, not real life. Generating enough power to disrupt electronics at a useful range requires a powerful explosion.
The military uses a mix of jammers, small missiles, guns, and (soon) lasers.
There are some jammers, but they're not too useful if the drone is programmed to head out of jammer range if jammed. Currently, the most useful weapons against small drones are compressed air guns that fire nets.[1]
If we're talking a commercial quadcopter drone, is it feasible to auto-target it via microphones and then shoot some CIWS at it? Something like this https://youtu.be/LThD0FMvTFU?t=42 but drones and bullets instead of mortars and lasers.
It's be nice if you could slap an anti-drone turret onto your vehicle to protect the airspace for a hundred meters.
Maybe jamming exceeds commercial drones' flight ceiling, but if not, dropping stuff from high up always does damage.
There are a number of bulky systems intended for larger targets which will work against drones, but most are not very portable. Ship-mounted systems such as CWIS do work.[1] But all those shells that don't hit the target land someplace.
C-RAM shells are supposed to self-destruct, but EOD guys will tell you that fuzes do not have a 100% operational rate. Another problem is cost and magazine size:
>The Block 1A and newer (pneumatic driven) CIWS mounts fire at a rate of 4,500 rounds per minute with a 1,550-round magazine.
>Shells fired by the Phalanx cost around $30 each and the gun typically fires 100 or more when engaging a target.[14]
So it's about three grand to zap one drone, and you get 15 shootdowns before a human needs to shovel more ammo into the turret. That would make it vulnerable to a saturation attack. A hundred drones carrying grenades that home in on the CIWS radar would be tough to counter.
The land based CIWS uses self destructing shells so any that didn't hit the target explode into small, relatively safe fragments. But it's still risky to use in populated areas
I'd back up and say it might be even more simple from a cybersec perspective, holding off the military drone capabilities and related hardening.
Embedded consumer electronics/IoT generally have awful security configs and an internet connection. Consumer-grade, and I bet a fair bit of the more high powered drones, are vulnerable to this same risk.
I'd love an educated opinion on this, but to the extent I've thought about this as well - many of these drones must be vuln to some form of remote code exploitation and shutdowns, if you can get a targeted signal to hit their admin "beacon" or w/e.
As consumer drones do show up in warfare a fair bit, this feels like a possible counter-drone route to explore.
>People have already started committing crimes using quadcoptors
I'm interesting to know what kinds of crimes people are commiting with quadcopters. Is it more of a spying/industrial espionage thing? Or stealing Amazon packages off of people's doorsteps? Arsonists?
Counter-drone fight in Iraq/Syria includes consumer drones dropping what are basically grenades.
Another recent example was a souped up quadcopter that scouted out a mil base in AZ and then outran a few LEO rotary wings recently. But, if it was that modified of a drone, it's possible other aspects of the connection/remote access were hardened as well.
Are we entering an age kind of like the 18th century when most people could own a musket and the government didn't have better weapons or effective defenses from these weapons?
Military drones also remove part of the political calculation otherwise involved in attacking somewhere.
When soldiers are put in situations where they are being killed, in a fairly free society someone is generally going to ask the question of why they are there and whether they should continue to be.
Loss of military drones is only reported in specialised press if at all.
I still remember the Iraq war in 2003 and later. IF they had had weaponized drones available back then I am 100% convinced the Bush Administration would have invaded more countries. The only thing that stopped them was the loss of life of US soldiers. Same for the Vietnam war. The only thing that stopped the war was loss of life.
The article has a good intro, and then never goes on to discuss the "key strengths". It's just clickbait. They're also late to the party on this. The US professional military has been discussing this for over a decade.
There have already been more than a half dozen articles on drones in Parameters, the U.S. Army War College's journal. "The coercive logic of militant drone use" [1] is worth reading. This covers how non-state groups have used drones, what worked and what didn't. The US Army is unused to fighting under a hostile sky, and now, a few times, they've had to. "In 2017, then commander of US Special Operations Command General Raymond A. Thomas noted, “[the] most daunting problem [of 2016] was an adaptive
enemy who, for a time, enjoyed tactical superiority in the airspace under
our conventional air superiority in the form of commercially available
drones and fuel-expedient (?) weapons systems, and our only available
response was small arms fire.” They also mention a drone disabling an Israeli naval vessel in 2006.
There's been a lot more military use of drones than is generally realized. Much of it is for recon. Commercial hobbyist drones are more than good enough for finding out what the enemy is up to, and most drone use by militant groups is for that.
So far, that article indicates, drones have been unable to yield a decisive advantage in any conflict. At least to militant groups.
Not many people read Parameters. That paper has only 65 downloads. More should.
Only once. Everyone has paid attention, and the next drone attacks will be suitably defended against. The fact is the "killer bot" scenario is just a one time thing. After it happens, all cities or armies or whatever, will have very solid defences installed against swarming or even just loitering bots. Flying drones are incredibly fragile and exposed. They are slow and easy to kill.
Slow and easy to kill? Seen a drone race? At what range and with what weapon would they be easy to kill? How long would the kill take? At what range could the drone be killed at?
Sure often drones fly in straight lines or hover. But in an adversarial environment they could easily move pseudo randomly and be quite difficult to kill.
Modern CIWS are designed to be effective against substantially faster and more agile rockets. Drones really are slow and easy to take down compared to guided rockets and especially kinetic ones, and the military has been working on means of defending against those for decades. The Phalanx is being modified to serve as an anti-UAS system, for example. The challenge is more to do with detection than firing.
Deploying point defense technologies over a city/civilian targets has some obvious problems, though.
Lasers, electronic countermeasures, tangly stuff, etc, are much more attractive than systems that fire thousands of cannon rounds per minute or that launch explosive missiles.
Whereas naval Phalanx systems fire tungsten armor-piercing rounds, the C-RAM uses the 20–mm HEIT-SD (High-Explosive Incendiary Tracer, Self-Destruct) ammunition, originally developed for the M163 Vulcan Air Defense System.[26][34] These rounds explode on impact with the target, or on tracer burnout, thereby greatly reducing the risk of collateral damage from rounds that fail to hit their target.
Not that the risk is zero, but at least it's "greatly reduced".
You wouldn't generally let a C-RAM fire at a low angle over a city. And even if you did, the problem of how many of these you need for decent coverage becomes large, because there's no ideal placement that doesn't involve shooting straight at friendly things from some approach vectors.
A CIWS is not a reasonable way to stop drone attacks on civilian targets.
And one of tue whole advantages of a drone army is that it can fly between zero and ten feet off the ground - thereby undercutting lots of defenses that are designed to point in the air.
Dunno, do agile rockets dodge? Or just follow a simple preprogrammed patterns (like low, then pop up to attack from above)?
Not sure a CIWS system that can hit a mach 2 missile that doesn't dodge would necessarily handle the same $$$ spent on a N cheaper drones. How many minutes of firing do modern CIWS systems typically have?
Loitering at max engagement range and dodging might well end up using ammo at a rate that the CIWS can not sustain.
Also I suspect any CIWS can get a kill on just about any part of a missile, where drones often have very small kill zones (often battery or gas, payload, motor(s), and control) that might well be just a few % of the size of the drone.
I googled the phalanx, looks like it typically has a drum of ammo that lasts for about 3 seconds. Is that 3 drones worth? 10? 100?
> Also I suspect any CIWS can get a kill on just about any part of a missile, where drones often have very small kill zones (often battery or gas, payload, motor(s), and control) that might well be just a few % of the size of the drone.
I guarantee you that just grazing a drone with a 20mm round will still kill it, even if you don't "hit" anything critical. :P
Really? Say you blow a 1" hole in a wing that's got some balsa struts and some thin fabric? Or a wing just made out of a sheet of foam? Both are common on cheap drones.
Sure the 20mm round represents an amazing amount of kinetic energy, but the drone doesn't offer any resistance, and I wouldn't expect the round to even notice. Sure the disturbance in the air might throw the drone for a few loops, but any decent software will recover.
Sure hitting more substantial targets the target itself becomes of the shrapnel that causes an ever increasing zone of damage. Not clear to me that a piece of paper or thin fabric would exhibit the same behavior.
> Dunno, do agile rockets dodge? Or just follow a simple preprogrammed patterns (like low, then pop up to attack from above)?
Modern antiship missiles have complex programs. Some are capable of flying in formation with each other, with one missile flying high for visibility and communicating with the other missiles in the formation that are flying very low. If/when the missile on top is destroyed, another missile in the formation can be automatically selected to take its place.
This seems to aim by calculating the trajectory of the target. How will it fare if the target is flown in first person perspective by a human in an unpredictable way?
It’s airburst ammunition which can be fired faster and travels faster than a human can react. The airburst is timed to trigger at the calculated intersection of trajectories (or somewhere in that neighbourhood), significantly improving your chances of scoring a hit even with a high circular error probable.
> Modern CIWS are designed to be effective against substantially faster and more agile rockets.
The thing is exactly that those drones are so slow, and low.
Phalanx performance against sea skimming missiles is know to be poor.
And that on dielectric, flat sea surface.
Even military drones weighting few tons can fly autonomously under 100m.
Ironically, it's now depressions in the terrain which will provide more air defence since they will force terrain following drones, and cruise missiles to move at oblique angles.
Basically the problem is the same as with low, and slow cruise missiles, except worse.
Flying nape-of-the-earth is a hard counter to CIWS-style defense systems. For antiship missiles this tactic doesn't help a whole lot, but for drones over land? C-RAM can't see through a hill, let alone shoot through one.
Most of those systems are designed to target dozens of incoming targets. It’s entirely reasonable and plausible for drone swarms to number in the thousands of targets.
That ciws will likely exhaust its magazine before it can take out all the drones unless I’m missing something.
Lasers. You just have to put "laser defense drones" into Google to get a whole slew of completed or in development solutions. Also EMPS, counter defensive swarms of drones. The list goes on...
That's why Israel is begging the US for another billion dollars for reloads for their Iron Dome system. They're using expensive guided missiles to shoot down cheap unguided rockets.
And even drone races are slow and predictable compared to what is possible with an applied military mind and decent tools. I suspect (or hope) we already have some decent options in the top secret space.
Nothing we have now (publicly) is going to do a damn against a shipping container full of 2-5 lb drones each carrying 1 lb of C4 in a swarm with cheap off the shelf sensors going 100 mph nap of the earth in a distributed pattern. And that is currently entirely doable with off the shelf drones using existing software and published techniques for peanuts. Add in some decent programming and logistics talent, and that is a huge problem.
"tool assisted speedrun" is a term in video game speedruns referring to the use of software/external tools to help with speedrunning games. So imagine a drone race where everything is programmed rather than remote controlled by a pilot
Tool-assisted speedruns. People use emulators and record inputs frame-by-frame, allowing nearly perfect performance and even reliable exploitation of game vulnerabilities. I remember one where the author exploited a bug in such a way that it completely reprogrammed the game:
If you mass produce these things you are going to leave traces of your logistics supply chain. Even if you brought them into a staging are one at a time your frequent trips would lead back to where they were made or by whom.
Which wouldn’t stop someone using it in a declared war - which we haven’t had yet by an actor likely to want it. Doesn’t mean it isn’t sitting in a military port somewhere though.
And since China makes like 99% of the parts used in drones, they very well could already have a couple hundred of those lying around and we’d never know.
The chips, PCB, and all electronics have their embedded serial number in them. It's very likely many of these will survive a direct explosion, and once these identifiers are extracted from them, the supplier/manufacturer/vendor/customer will be identified using standard investigation methods. So while there's little possibility of some unknown Unabomber-style decade long rampage using this tech, they could be very destructive in the short-term.
My nightmare scenario is someone flying hundreds of these in formation on a stadium full of people. They could be launched from a parking lot from a single van or pickup truck. If you sacrifice the ability to hover by giving them wings, you might get very high range and not have to risk yourself at all while launching a devastating attack.
>Nothing we have now (publicly) is going to do a damn against a shipping container full of 2-5 lb drones each carrying 1 lb of C4 in a swarm with cheap off the shelf sensors going 100 mph nap of the earth in a distributed pattern. And that is currently entirely doable with off the shelf drones using existing software and published techniques for peanuts. Add in some decent programming and logistics talent, and that is a huge problem.
Existing technology can take down conventional drones through Electronic Warfare and EW scales to an infinite number of drones assuming each drone is vulnerable.
That is not true. Existing technology can take out remote controlled conventional drones with EW.
I know of no existing (human proximity safe) EW that can handle optical based or internal (IMU) inertial autonomous flight, and both of those are more than good enough in this scenario (though optical may limit the upper speed bounds depending on the onboard processing capabilities). IMU based (pre programmed) could easily allow no active sensor mode, though would require pre-scouting the route.
Here's a line of cops shooting at race drones. They would've had plenty of time to escape if they weren't sticking around to find out how long it takes to get shot down. These were race drones from 5 years ago and modern ones can be around twice as fast. Not to mention you don't want to dump a magazine upwards in your own territory.
> Not to mention you don't want to dump a magazine upwards in your own territory.
That is what birdshot is for. Birdshot, e.g. "No. 9 or 10" shot, are tiny lead BBs about 2mm diameter. Because they are small, they have a large surface area to mass ratio, and consequently, they fall back down to earth at a low, safe speed. When they land on dry leaves, they bounce off and sound a bit like rain. When it is shot into the air and falls back down onto you, it won't even bruise you, let alone injure you. (However it can kill if fired directly at somebody.)
Current point defense systems are already capable of placing a 20mm round with a muzzle velocity of 1000m/s onto a falling mortar shell in the last three seconds of its flight time. How hard do you think drones are by comparison?
Why the hell would you dodge at tree top height? That makes absolutely no sense. Just fly a few centimeters off the ground without dodging and no air defense is going to hit you in a civilian area.
A target with a 300mm frontal diameter, capable of evading at 10g, is expected to require 6 rounds to achieve a P_hit of 0.5 at 200m range, based on the parameters of your typical Phalanx CIWS. Said Phalanx weapon system might fire a burst of 1s duration in such an engagement, which is 75 rounds.
For a missile engagement, that's a problematic number, but for a drone that's probably only moving a few dozen m/s and carrying a small payload, it's an entirely satisfactory engagement.
Phalanx is an early 1980s weapon system. The Army is going to be fielding directed-energy SHORAD systems next year, equipped with 50kW lasers.
Phalanx usually has about 1500 rounds ready, so 20 drones at 75 rounds each will run it out. Phalanx is large, heavy, and costly, and can't be readily be used in built up areas at low angles.
A few dozen m/s is probably a good estimate for quadcopter style drones, but low hundreds m/s should be easy for fixed wing drones, so at 200 meter engagement range (that paper makes it pretty clear that maneuvering targets are hard beyond that) there is only time to hit a few drones before they arrive.
So maybe drone swarms will work even against current CIWS.
Very. The calculation made for each round could be irrelevant before they travel 500m. Drones also have no obligation to approach at the same convenient high angle mortars do. 2-3 drones weaving between buildings faster than a human can aim? Sounds terrifying.
So what you're suggesting is instead flying in a giant predictable parabolic flight pattern, just dropping the drone in front of the actual targets and let the big cannon do the work? Friendly-fire/own-goal for the win.
It depends on how long it takes the weapon to lock on and align. If it takes 1s to work out the trajectory and fire, the drone just needs to change its trajectory every second.
But I guess taking down a drone is not like taking out a mortar shell. It is probably much easier with some sort of flak or even launching a net.
My university has been working with the army to engineer drone vs human engagements. They originally set out to increase the drones' efficacy against humans wielding small arms (shotguns/etc), but apparently found out that was trivial. The drones very, very quickly overwhelmingly surpass the ability of humans to engage and defeat the drones.
The research pivoted very early to "training humans to more successfully defend against small drone attacks". I'm not sure how much success they've had or what success is defined as for something like this.
Not all drones are AI, there are remote drones that are very fast and very hard to kill, pulling Gforces that would make normal pilots pass out. With the US declaration that drones are "munitions", we have effectively stated that we can launch them into the airspace of countries that we aren't technically at war with, and claim it was "border fire", like we did with Afghanistan.
>Only once. Everyone has paid attention, and the next drone attacks will be suitably defended against.
no. Azerbajan/Turkey went into it only after verifying that it works, to the devastating effect, against the Russian made air-defenses in Syria and Libya. Now Ukraine has bought these drones and is starting their production. In the next year or two we'll see them being used to the same great effect in Donbass. So far Russia hasn't managed to come up with any meaningful defense. If anything the recognition of the issue has only started to dawn on them, and by the time they manage something the Turkish/Ukranian (they discuss collaborative development) drones will improve another level up - drone capabilities at the current stage (beginning of the hockey stick) are much faster to improve - add speed, a bit of stealth, [partial] autonomy, coordinated swarming. It is a new paradigm shifting generation of warfare like iron navy ships, machine guns, planes, missiles, etc. were in their respective times.
I don't think there were any real military drones. While an RC model/quad with a grenade does qualify as a weapon, the purposely built military drones have orders of magnitude better communication over longer range, incl. remote high precision targeting, loitering times, and carry a high precision stand-off missiles (that is an important point because the defense has to shoot the small fast incoming missile while the drone itself carries several missiles and loiters outside of the CIWS/SHORAD range waiting for the window of opportunity, and thus shooting the drone itself requires much more expensive/heavy air-defense system).
They don't even claim it works on bigger military drones, but smaller drones or drone swarms. It uses a microwave beam to disable or a high energy laser to shoot down the drones. I think the bigger ones like Predator could be shot down by other drones armed with low payload missiles. Repurposed Iron Dome style defenses could also be used at shorter range.
The iron dome defends against saturation attacks. You see the average HN poster come up with swarm buzzwords and then talk about how defense against saturation attacks is impossible meanwhile the iron dome intercepts 90%+ of hamas rockets even though they are sending thousands of them.
The primary defense for the time being is 'hide.' US Marine tacticians, for example, are shifting priority from hardening an impromptu position (ie a foxhole) to concealing it.
Check out some of the Azerbaijani drone strike footage with IR on Youtube. They'll need to go deep and avoid any above ground movement and it better not look like a bunker. Unless effective drone defense (other drones?) is employed using cheap drones are a game changer.
> Everyone has paid attention, and the next drone attacks will be suitably defended against
How? They fly just few hundred meters above the ground, launch from field runways, and for the price of a single B-2, a country can buy 2000 of them.
Jamming? Even a country like Turkey was able to devise a passable inertial navigation, and and programming for autonomous operation way exceeding an easy to trick "attack anything that moves" mode.
To counter them, you will need a very sizeable air force fitted with best radars possible to track them down individually, and strafe with a cannon (since no missile currently can lock onto something so small, slow, cold, and low flying.)
What about their speed and range? If they fly fast they're not going far. If they go far they're slow moving targets. And if they go fast and far they have expensive rockets attached and you're being hit with missiles instead.
They are very small, and high up. As the AI gets better they will also become better at evading fire, just as mosquitoes are really hard to get. Try catching a cat that doesn't want to be caught. Equip the cat with an explosive warhead and make it a thousand cat swarm.
> commercially available drones and fuel-expedient (?)
A transcription error that has been carried forward over several sources, apparently. The general undoubtedly said "field-expedient", meaning devices that can be cobbled together in the field. Take a commercial drone from ToysRUs and tape a hand grenade to it, and you have a field-expedient war drone.
The key strength of drones is that they kill who you want to kill, or destroy the materiel you want to destroy, without any collateral damage at all. Coupled with adequate intelligence, which they also help obtain, drones make nuclear weapons obsolete; they are a dramatically more effective means of coercion. There are a lot of fantasies in this thread about how they're easy to defend against, and that would be true if we were talking about drones that cost the same as a fighter jet or a Tomahawk or even a Toyota, but you can mass-produce drones that are capable of delivering sub-kilogram munitions with centimeter precision for under ten dollars.
So the relevant comparison isn't a slow cheap drone versus a Tomahawk or a Toyota; it's a hundred thousand slow cheap drones versus a Tomahawk, or two thousand slow cheap drones versus a Toyota. A hundred thousand slow cheap drones is enough to coerce all the officers of any army into resigning; all you need is the realtime whereabouts of their parents, siblings, children, and spouses, and effective ransomware that reliably spares the children of officers who have already resigned, or who haven't yet been contacted. And no CIWS is going to help with that, even if it doesn't run out of ammo after the first fifteen drones, because the children aren't on an aircraft carrier or an army base.
Jef Raskin pointed most of this out in 02001 in an underrated essay, 'next time it can be worse'. At least so far, it hasn't been.
possibly because the officers in the nuclear silo want some of their family members to still be alive when they go home. or possibly because the nuclear dudes don't know who to nuke. or possibly at the point where your answer to a military threat is 'well if they try that we could just nuke them' you are kind of admitting that it is a very serious threat indeed; note that nobody got nuked in response to 9/11
This is a tech power fantasy. Its not at all representative of the state of the art and disregards a lot of difficulties.
Massed drones absolutely can wreck terrible destruction, death by a thousand cuts to any facility or base or airfield. But the kind of amassed yet precise strike against a hundred targeted individuals, with smart targeting and somehow knowledge of their career status?! Come on.
I wouldn't even finish that movie, let alone fund that proposal.
smart targeting is clearly crucial, yes. but the objective of warfare is not to wreak (or wreck, heh) terrible destruction; it is to break the enemy's will to resist. by themselves, drones don't tell you who to target or where they are; they just gather surveillance data and deliver munitions, very precisely and in a way that is very difficult to stop. in combination with things like facebook data and cellphone subscriber data, that's an extremely powerful capability
keep in mind that what is happening today is not what will happen tomorrow or what can happen in five years
you are rejecting the possibility because of its unfamiliarity, much as the navy rejected the possibility of a surprise attack on pearl harbor
I'm challenging the supporting assumptions you described. Real time career knowledge, real time non visual person tracking, real time coordinated search across cities, real time IFF, lethal payloads on them all, real time localization. There's a lot of requirements there. An alien invasion would probably use clouds of drones in this way. The US could. Russia, China. After some testing. But not the next ISIS. And those states that can already have better options for targeting at range on a battlefield. And I'm challenging the use case. Are they within US borders? How? Flew in? Launched from within? How did they get close enough? A ship? Infiltration?
Pearl harbor was easy, required no new tech, just will. And Pearl Harbor was well known before the attack, had been demonstrated years before. This isn't that.
> Real time career knowledge, real time non visual person tracking, real time coordinated search across cities, real time IFF, lethal payloads on them all, real time localization. There's a lot of requirements there. ... Are they within US borders? How? Flew in? Launched from within? How did they get close enough? A ship? Infiltration?
Rather than go through and carefully solve the fascinating puzzle of how to destroy civilization step by step, I'm just going to point out that these things are not actually very difficult. Instead of hoping that the next Daesh can't recruit anyone who knows how to build an IMSI catcher, write a Facebook app, or use LinkedIn (or VKontakte if their adversary is Russia), think about what happens when there's a conflict between two adversaries that can.
> The US could. Russia, China. After some testing. But not the next ISIS.
Certainly the three states you mention could develop that capability, yes, although they don't currently have Slaughterbots fleets ready to launch. And Daesh certainly wasn't able to develop it, although they did drop a bunch of unguided hand grenades on people from remotely-piloted quadcopters. But what about Turkey? France? Rebels in the West Bank less incompetent than Hamas? The Zetas, who as I understand it have been running their own cellphone networks for 10 years? The Sinaloa cartel, which has thousands of drones carrying contraband across the US border? The Jalisco cartel, which is already targeting the families of police officers? The US-backed Guaidó faction in Venezuela? The US-backed military dictatorship currently running Egypt?
This isn't something that requires the budget of an aircraft carrier, and it's not something you can see from a satellite before it happens.
Sure. 'Think of the possibilities' is a fun exercise. I'm more in the 'will it scale' camp, that's all.
I've actually worked in this area before. There's more attention on this than you might imagine, and less than it deserves. There's also better ways to use drones to cause terror and disrupt operations that I obv won't get into. Maybe its not tech fantasy as I originally said, but it is much further out than you originally said as well, and it's a bit overkill. If you wanted to have the effect of causing fear in soldiers using drones, I think (but don't know) there are easier ways that don't require the same limiting assumptuons about technology, logistics and scaling.
Heh! Actually, although I'm in Argentina, I thoroughly endorse 墨子's defensive program: if every country is safe against attacks, then all the people will be safe, while if every country is vulnerable to attacks, then life will be bitter and filled with grief. So, just as 墨子's followers worked to improve the fortifications of the various states of China so that none could gain by attacking another, I think we should figure out how to reduce our collective vulnerability to this kind of drone-swarm attack.
Except that I think it's kind of impossible and we are basically doomed.
Minus the emotional wording, this has been the justification for large standing militaries in every nation state ever. I mean, it's the Dept of Defense here in the US.
Right, and the US isn't even a nation-state, despite the persistent efforts of certain reactionary groups to change that. But it's a backwards justification, because thousands of years of history show us that large standing militaries increase the risk of war, while fortifications diminish it.
$10 will get you a palm sized drone with a flight time measured in minutes. Stop dreaming. The type of drone that people are scared of costs at least $1000.
Hamas sends thousands of rockets in that budget range and nobody is scared that rocket swarms are going to kill thousands of Israelis. IDF retaliation killed more innocent people in a single bombing than all Hamas rockets combined.
> $10 will get you a palm sized drone with a flight time measured in minutes.
retail, and battery-powered. what will a $10 bom get you with a nitromethane-powered engine or a glider dropped from a helium balloon
> The type of drone that people are scared of costs at least $1000.
they need to rethink that. stop fighting the last war
> Hamas sends thousands of rockets in that budget range and nobody is scared that rocket swarms are going to kill thousands of Israelis
that's because hamas is too dumb to put glider wings and ardupilot on each rocket and possibly too deprived of facebook and imei-logger data to know where to find the specific thousands of israelis who are family members of the invading officers
'our enemy might be as incompetent as the hamas model rocketry club' is not a great way to think out how to provide security
this is not a dream. this is a nightmare
listen, i know this scenario isn't happening today. but it's going to happen within the next few years, and the fact that it isn't happening today isn't much of an argument against that
The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan is interesting in a couple of ways. Most have focused on how it was possible to win a conflict that has historically been extremely difficult, but also interesting is what happened afterward. As soon as the aggressive drone campaign was dialed back irregular asymmetric warfare flared back up. So it seems that it is possible to accomplish amazing things with drones, but those victories are only as robust as ongoing drone mobilization allows.
Daniel Suarez has a 2012 near-future novel that features this kind of thing [0]. In the book there are drones swarms armed with single-use tube guns, essentially, Saturday Night Specials [1].
I shill for his books regularly on HN. They're a guilty pleasure for me: snappy, easy to blow through in a single sitting, and are each begging for a movie adaptation (think "The Martian"). Start with Daemon.
Is there a comprehensive analysis of the use of drones in policing. Further, are there analyses of the way in which private security companies (G4S) are employing drones in their operations?
It's meaningless and is introduced to conflate the fact what is talked about is not currently possible or stupid. These words are used a lot in tech.
> using autonomous drone swarms against a soft target like a stadium full of people
This can be done with a signal crop dusting drone, but if you say that it's easier to understand it's just the Black Sunday movie - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075765/ or a normal crop dusting plane or one automatic weapon where every bullet is a mini suicide drone.
"six drones engaged in complex maneuvers in low visibility conditions, buzzing the destroyer" is not possible. If it was 'one' drone it's obvious there's no way it can get to that location.
It is true Slaughterbots has scared the unwashed masses. Currently a glass window stops a drone, they are currently not far off the Dalek's inability to go up stairs.
Is it good to keep the public scared about drones? Drones greatest ability in war and terrorism atm is the fear. (Excluding multi-million $ plane sized drones which are strategic)
The critical aspect of drones is as cheap as you can get while being effective.
The US Military from a true large-conflict conventional war is currently most vulnerable to an economic conflict. We blew so much money on basically minor military maneuvers relative to a real big war, and it show that our defense industry is parasitic and corrupt.
Drones are the perfect counter: if cheap enough, plentiful enough, and effective enough, they don't need to be superior to their american counterparts. They just need to win the cost ratio by a sufficient margin.
My guess is that defences against those size and larger drones will improve to the point where they're null without total air supremacy.
You can't safely fly a Jet these days without enormous support, interference and then at great risk until the skies are very well cleared.
I think possibly the same thing will apply to drones in that 'just as cheap' technology will render them null.
Maybe not for the 'very smallest' type drones but certainly anything approaching the size of a car that sticks out on radar - a slow, lumbering, easy target for a range of weapons.
It's one thing for Azerbeijan or Libyans to face these things, much like American air power over Iraq, it's not a 'balanced situation'.
The moment someone tries to use these against a capable adversary we'll see what toys are hidden away and/or things will change very quickly.
Drones may very well be revolutionary turn in warfare: giving battlefield commanders are near omnipresent sensor view of a contested space or battlefield which could shift the balance of power back from offense to defense. As a result, we'll see warfare go underground and generally become more fortified in an attempt to evade networked and autonomous small attack vectors.
Kind of like WW1, but much more high tech. Just a guess, but we already have the ability to destroy anything, the problem is just knowing "what/when/where".
This article doesn't seem to actually list key strengths.
Drones are high on my list of "scared to see what they can do when it is unveiled".
With little imagination you can put together:
- standard consumer quadcopter
- standard consumer camera face detection
- standard consumer pistol
and tie it all together with software. Even without smart projectile prediction for improved aiming.
While the software bit is hard-but-not-stupidly-so, the hardware components for all this is relatively cheap. Also, the software can be developed anywhere and anytime. You don't need unobtanium to do it.
I have only applied very limited imagination to provide a basic scare scenario.
If you take military budget and effort, multiple layers of battlefield coverage and variations of drones the capability is astounding.
One day the internet will abound with memes regarding "Carrier has arrived." over real world images.
I’ve unfortunately been waiting for the mass shooter types to discover this as well. Even something as simple as quad, light load of explosives/hand grenade, a simple hobby hardware release mechanism, all combined with public gathering/open air stadium. It’s pretty terrifying.
213 comments
[ 52.2 ms ] story [ 5363 ms ] threadThen you just need to target it. Probably need some sort of weather proof retractable cover so that the neighbors don't freak out. Gimbal under the cover to aim the thing, and then a means of target acquisition. People have tried to use audible input to pick up the propellers, but I don't really know how well that would work in practice and what kind of / how many microphones you would need to get a fix.
The generally idea would be, system detects and gets a fix on probable drone, notifies you and allows you to do a visual check and give the fire signal. Microwave directional targets and roasts the target microelectronics.
I was being somewhat facetious about mounting a microwave auto-turret on your house, but the technology has been toyed with for years as a man-portable solution to consumer drone intrusion.
Straight consumer drones should be easy to disable though.
Does not really work that well, as far as I've seen. One is probably best off using an SDR to pick up the communications between the drone and the remote. It's a rather inexpensive solution, as well.
Microdoppler is promising for this as well, but that is likely astronomically out of the range of purchasing power for the average person.
I'm not sure if I would recommend jammers or kinetic weapons, haha.
It doesn't seem like we are prepared to deal with something like this.
If you are using a wing, then you just program your robot to come in high, cut it's engine and continue on a glide trajectory to the target. The flap servos make nearly no noise.
If you've got a quad, come in fast and basically huck the vehicle at the target.
Ardupilot + ROS make this all relatively straightforward to implement and provide an easy way to interface with necessary sub-systems.
To do this with any reliability you need custom software and probably hardware. It'll look more like a smart munition. But it'll also be more difficult than strapping a knife to a RC plane.
Second, who said the quad was tumbling? Significantly cutting engine speed and removing significant lift forces on a quad in order to kill the buzz doesn't mean it will start wildly gyrating.
Third, Ardupilot will get you within a few feet of a specified point with a good enough vector and speed. Luckily you can use a subroutine (secondary control program) to handle the final approach from the 'point' to the target.
A quad will tumble with the motors off, the whole thing is a significant lift force. It was a big problem in early controller software where throttle dead zone would turn off the props. A problem I personally experienced. Maintaining any semblance of stability requires active adjustment.
And no, Ardupilot will not get anything going at high speed to within a few feet in 3d space.
thinking further, even just the manner, or tactics used when flying could be weapon like, such as chaff drones
It’s trivial, cheap, and simple to do massive harm to massive numbers of people.
Fortunately, humans don’t usually do this unless part of the government/military.
In a country of 300 million, the only non-state mass death events are a handful of terrorist attacks and deranged teenagers determined to shoot up their schools. The annual deaths caused by these non-state actors is, on average, less than the annual fatalities on a given stretch of a run-of-the-mill interstate.
In 2020, 446 people died in mass shootings in the US. [2]
1. https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-traffic-deaths-remai...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
In any event >40k people died from traffic fatalities in the United States in 2020[0], so a few orders of magnitude larger than mass shooting deaths,
[0] https://www.npr.org/2021/03/05/974006735/tragic-driving-was-...
Common criminals are using commodity drones for reconnaissance [1].
[1] https://www.techradar.com/news/criminal-intent-fbi-details-h...
I wonder if standard BBs or ball bearings could achieve sufficient terminal velocity to pierce skin - would mitigate accuracy requirements if you could dump them by the dozens or hundreds.
After Pearl Harbor, it became clear that the answer should have been Yes.
Drones offer overwhelming advantages -- they're cheap and disposable. A drone generally costs less than the US missile used to shoot it down. You can lose 100 of them, and there will be no lives lost on your side.
During WWII, by 1943 the European theater was essentially decided, except for a lot of killing. The US was producing tanks and planes so quickly that it was simply mathematically impossible for the Germans to counter them. Will the same thing happen when China decides to throw its manufacturing capacity into war drones?
Funny that we see this in various computer games, ships with drone bays. What you mention would be a drone missile perhaps?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBU-97_Sensor_Fuzed_Weapon
https://youtu.be/hXNJhB41L-M
https://youtu.be/H_O85m6VXn8
Most of these Turkish style drones will be null in any real fight because there is (or will be soon) tech to instantly neutralize them.
The 'smaller' drones in civilian areas - yes - that's a different story, but thankfully they have more limited range.
In modern times, software already runs a lot of tanks/missiles/planes/ships/communications etc.
As I see it the single biggest new factor is that "drone enabling software" significantly reworks hardware design parameters and thus affects manufacturing capacity.
For example, in a plane, the drone technology allows removal of a lot of weight along with "human onboard" red tape safety factors while enlarging G force parameters. It has added other factors for control and operation. But on the whole it is deemed a quite significant win it seems.
Drone on drone warfare leads to thinking about "software exploits" but on the battlefield it is always about exploits. Historically see spitfires and their limited ability to dive being exploited by the opposition but then being hardware "patched".
edit: conciseness
Drones fly around and autonomously eliminate targets while maintaining perimeters, which replaces infantry doing the same thing. Drones are easy to launch from land-based bases and due to their limited range are best suited to land-based operations.
Aerial drones are easily countered by autonomous weapons systems that fire on drones quickly and accurately. Drones are able to be disabled with a single large bullet, which makes their cost exceptional once countered. I expect that land based drones will become a pretty big thing, since they can take advantage of cover and camouflage.
Sometimes autonomy is cited as a key characteristic of drones. But the first drones were pure-RC with no autonomy at all, while there are a myriad of autonomous missiles and non-autonomous human-guided missiles. So autonomy is not a distinguishing characteristic either.
It's weird seeing this fascination with drones yet not seeing an analogous fascination for Toyota trucks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_War
Yes, it's because it's a harmless toy that can turn dystopian. That's why people's imagination is running wild. It's like that Furby horror game (tattletail). It's the "your nightmares are becoming real" kind of stuff.
If its military vs military then the drones wake up the counter defense which is then targeted by more expensive missiles.
One thing that makes China today different to the US of WW2 is that China's export oriented economy would collapse in a war with the West and their industrial production capabilities would be hurt significantly along with that.
Want to stop China from waging war? Knock out its means of production -- target its imports.
My point is that the analogy of US in WW2 doesn't really hold up because the US had an excellent economy throughout WW2 relative to others which fueled their excess industrial production. China would be in the opposite situation - economic collapse.
Would China be able to maintain industrial production by forcing workers and firms to produce equipment despite economic collapse? Perhaps. But the US in WW2 shouldn't be considered historical precedent, due to the above distinction.
China can't feed itself.
China only produces a third of the oil it consumes.
If your people begin to starve as soon as war starts and you all of a sudden have 1/3rd the oil you used to.... well, that's not exactly a recipe for success.
Most of the simulations for a naval war around Taiwan predict that it would be over in a few days, maybe weeks, but not long enough to really draw down those reserves.
Most importantly, it's really not realistic that the US Navy could prevent the rest of planet Earth from providing goods to the world's largest trading nation. Our navy isn't big enough, for one thing, but the economic damage to every other country that imports into China makes this blockade idea pretty unrealistic. I can't even imagine how much inflation would spike when the world's factory can't export for a few weeks
China has a border with Russia, and gigantic strategic oil reserves. They are not going to run out of oil. Maybe ration it initially, until enough can be delivered from Russia.
This is old thinking. Same battlefield with different technology.
The war that changed everything was the 1st Gulf War.
20 years ago they could see how stupid it was to use weapons to blow things up that cost more than what you were blowing up.
Our military has already been lapped. We only don't think so because we waste so much money on outdated expensive weapon systems and then use the amount spent as proof we have the better military.
Carriers won over battleships in the 1930s, because of strike distance.
Carriers won in the 1950s+ because they were the more upgradeable platform.
If you built a battleship in 1945, and then developed a better cannon or missile in 1955, what were your options?
If you built a carrier in 1945, and then developed better aircraft and armaments for them in 1955, you retooled your carrier air groups. The 4 Ohio class SSBN -> SSGN conversions are the same lesson.
It's expensive to build a new boat. It's cheaper to put new things on a boat (of the right size / shape).
Following that logic, the conclusion is to invest in robust, large drone delivery vehicles (aircraft or missiles), that allow for simpler, iterable micro-drone development.
It's funny to see the phrase "nonstate actor" here, when we're assured that ransomware script kiddies who use Coinbase are all "state actors". Maduro knows who sent the drones. [0] Why is even IEEE Spectrum in ideological thrall to the military-industrial complex?
[0] https://thegrayzone.com/2019/08/06/interview-venezuelan-pres...
> For computer scientists, the role federal funding plays in shaping research in their field presents both good news and bad news, according to the preliminary report on a study by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Science Policy Committee of the Special Interest Group on Automata and Compatability Theory. The good news is the fact that no abatement is in sight for the dramatic rise in federal support of computer science research
https://www.the-scientist.com/profession/does-dod-funding-sk...
Pretty arbitrary incident to choose, but I suppose the writer would have felt silly mentioning the flying dildos that buzzed Gary Kasparov at a political event in 2008.
https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/new-mexico-sheriff-running...
-sent from my iPhone
TL;DR if anything this is an improvement because it makes the 2A thing make more sense (almost no one is building guided missiles in their backyard except that one youtuber who's trying to make his model rockets land on their own.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlmf032NmHU
Related side story: my resume had something about PKI in it so I kept getting calls from Boeing recruiters trying to fit me into a job doing said satellite laser comms (presumably using PKI). I kept telling them I knew nothing optics-related aside from basic Newtonian stuff, and they kept calling me back. I hope they finally found someone.
The military uses a mix of jammers, small missiles, guns, and (soon) lasers.
[1] https://youtu.be/M6tT1GapCe4
It's be nice if you could slap an anti-drone turret onto your vehicle to protect the airspace for a hundred meters.
Maybe jamming exceeds commercial drones' flight ceiling, but if not, dropping stuff from high up always does damage.
[1] https://youtu.be/3UVuV5WvraQ
Just don't miss! It's only a few hundred meters out.
Oh CWIS are only ship-mounted? I thought it was a general term. I like PDC better anyway. #TheExpanse
Nice video—are those all tracers though?
Well, it's video game footage (ARMA 3, according to the title).
C-RAM shells are supposed to self-destruct, but EOD guys will tell you that fuzes do not have a 100% operational rate. Another problem is cost and magazine size:
>The Block 1A and newer (pneumatic driven) CIWS mounts fire at a rate of 4,500 rounds per minute with a 1,550-round magazine.
>Shells fired by the Phalanx cost around $30 each and the gun typically fires 100 or more when engaging a target.[14]
So it's about three grand to zap one drone, and you get 15 shootdowns before a human needs to shovel more ammo into the turret. That would make it vulnerable to a saturation attack. A hundred drones carrying grenades that home in on the CIWS radar would be tough to counter.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36412/centurions-roari...
Embedded consumer electronics/IoT generally have awful security configs and an internet connection. Consumer-grade, and I bet a fair bit of the more high powered drones, are vulnerable to this same risk.
I'd love an educated opinion on this, but to the extent I've thought about this as well - many of these drones must be vuln to some form of remote code exploitation and shutdowns, if you can get a targeted signal to hit their admin "beacon" or w/e.
As consumer drones do show up in warfare a fair bit, this feels like a possible counter-drone route to explore.
I'm interesting to know what kinds of crimes people are commiting with quadcopters. Is it more of a spying/industrial espionage thing? Or stealing Amazon packages off of people's doorsteps? Arsonists?
Counter-drone fight in Iraq/Syria includes consumer drones dropping what are basically grenades.
Another recent example was a souped up quadcopter that scouted out a mil base in AZ and then outran a few LEO rotary wings recently. But, if it was that modified of a drone, it's possible other aspects of the connection/remote access were hardened as well.
When soldiers are put in situations where they are being killed, in a fairly free society someone is generally going to ask the question of why they are there and whether they should continue to be.
Loss of military drones is only reported in specialised press if at all.
With drones, it's just some robots that were broken by the enemy.
There have already been more than a half dozen articles on drones in Parameters, the U.S. Army War College's journal. "The coercive logic of militant drone use" [1] is worth reading. This covers how non-state groups have used drones, what worked and what didn't. The US Army is unused to fighting under a hostile sky, and now, a few times, they've had to. "In 2017, then commander of US Special Operations Command General Raymond A. Thomas noted, “[the] most daunting problem [of 2016] was an adaptive enemy who, for a time, enjoyed tactical superiority in the airspace under our conventional air superiority in the form of commercially available drones and fuel-expedient (?) weapons systems, and our only available response was small arms fire.” They also mention a drone disabling an Israeli naval vessel in 2006.
There's been a lot more military use of drones than is generally realized. Much of it is for recon. Commercial hobbyist drones are more than good enough for finding out what the enemy is up to, and most drone use by militant groups is for that.
So far, that article indicates, drones have been unable to yield a decisive advantage in any conflict. At least to militant groups.
Not many people read Parameters. That paper has only 65 downloads. More should.
[1] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
Drones gave Azerbaijan a decisive advantage in the recent conflict with Armenia: https://www.csis.org/analysis/air-and-missile-war-nagorno-ka...
Sure often drones fly in straight lines or hover. But in an adversarial environment they could easily move pseudo randomly and be quite difficult to kill.
Lasers, electronic countermeasures, tangly stuff, etc, are much more attractive than systems that fire thousands of cannon rounds per minute or that launch explosive missiles.
Whereas naval Phalanx systems fire tungsten armor-piercing rounds, the C-RAM uses the 20–mm HEIT-SD (High-Explosive Incendiary Tracer, Self-Destruct) ammunition, originally developed for the M163 Vulcan Air Defense System.[26][34] These rounds explode on impact with the target, or on tracer burnout, thereby greatly reducing the risk of collateral damage from rounds that fail to hit their target.
Not that the risk is zero, but at least it's "greatly reduced".
A CIWS is not a reasonable way to stop drone attacks on civilian targets.
Not sure a CIWS system that can hit a mach 2 missile that doesn't dodge would necessarily handle the same $$$ spent on a N cheaper drones. How many minutes of firing do modern CIWS systems typically have?
Loitering at max engagement range and dodging might well end up using ammo at a rate that the CIWS can not sustain.
Also I suspect any CIWS can get a kill on just about any part of a missile, where drones often have very small kill zones (often battery or gas, payload, motor(s), and control) that might well be just a few % of the size of the drone.
I googled the phalanx, looks like it typically has a drum of ammo that lasts for about 3 seconds. Is that 3 drones worth? 10? 100?
I guarantee you that just grazing a drone with a 20mm round will still kill it, even if you don't "hit" anything critical. :P
Sure the 20mm round represents an amazing amount of kinetic energy, but the drone doesn't offer any resistance, and I wouldn't expect the round to even notice. Sure the disturbance in the air might throw the drone for a few loops, but any decent software will recover.
Sure hitting more substantial targets the target itself becomes of the shrapnel that causes an ever increasing zone of damage. Not clear to me that a piece of paper or thin fabric would exhibit the same behavior.
1. I think you're conflating "cheap agile drone" with "foam or balsa+durakote fixed wing aircraft".
2. Probable engagement aspect for a drone is not "straight up", as would be necessary for your scenario.
3. A little itty bitty hole in a wing does a whole lot more than you'd think.
4. Expecting a high velocity cannon round to just punch a clean hole in the wing is a little much.
Foam's a bit more robust, but a small pebble at a few miles per hour has wrecked my whole durakote day before.
And yes, there's degenerate cases, like you could have a whole sheet of dollar tree foam board maybe take a hit or two.
Explosive (self-destructing) and incendiary
https://www.gd-ots.com/munitions/medium-caliber-ammunition/2...
Modern antiship missiles have complex programs. Some are capable of flying in formation with each other, with one missile flying high for visibility and communicating with the other missiles in the formation that are flying very low. If/when the missile on top is destroyed, another missile in the formation can be automatically selected to take its place.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdwjcayPuag
Edit: Look they even made a smaller system! https://youtu.be/Drm3kdDYBI4
The thing is exactly that those drones are so slow, and low.
Phalanx performance against sea skimming missiles is know to be poor.
And that on dielectric, flat sea surface.
Even military drones weighting few tons can fly autonomously under 100m.
Ironically, it's now depressions in the terrain which will provide more air defence since they will force terrain following drones, and cruise missiles to move at oblique angles.
Basically the problem is the same as with low, and slow cruise missiles, except worse.
That ciws will likely exhaust its magazine before it can take out all the drones unless I’m missing something.
https://youtu.be/1DXpPmpmcak?t=365 (watch this entire video for air defense against saturation attacks)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV3jfR-FUFc
Nothing we have now (publicly) is going to do a damn against a shipping container full of 2-5 lb drones each carrying 1 lb of C4 in a swarm with cheap off the shelf sensors going 100 mph nap of the earth in a distributed pattern. And that is currently entirely doable with off the shelf drones using existing software and published techniques for peanuts. Add in some decent programming and logistics talent, and that is a huge problem.
http://tasvideos.org/5384S.html
Check it out, it's incredibly fun:
http://tasvideos.org/
There's an entire category for movies containing arbitrary code execution:
http://tasvideos.org/Movies-C3050Y.html
And since China makes like 99% of the parts used in drones, they very well could already have a couple hundred of those lying around and we’d never know.
My nightmare scenario is someone flying hundreds of these in formation on a stadium full of people. They could be launched from a parking lot from a single van or pickup truck. If you sacrifice the ability to hover by giving them wings, you might get very high range and not have to risk yourself at all while launching a devastating attack.
Existing technology can take down conventional drones through Electronic Warfare and EW scales to an infinite number of drones assuming each drone is vulnerable.
I know of no existing (human proximity safe) EW that can handle optical based or internal (IMU) inertial autonomous flight, and both of those are more than good enough in this scenario (though optical may limit the upper speed bounds depending on the onboard processing capabilities). IMU based (pre programmed) could easily allow no active sensor mode, though would require pre-scouting the route.
The US Army is looking to field a demonstrator by 2022 & deploy by 2024.
They're exploring both laser and microwave / EM for the counter-UAS role. In complement to existing SAMs for higher-value/capability targets.
https://asc.army.mil/web/portfolio-item/ms-ifpc_inc_2-i/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq0oCM37oZA
That is what birdshot is for. Birdshot, e.g. "No. 9 or 10" shot, are tiny lead BBs about 2mm diameter. Because they are small, they have a large surface area to mass ratio, and consequently, they fall back down to earth at a low, safe speed. When they land on dry leaves, they bounce off and sound a bit like rain. When it is shot into the air and falls back down onto you, it won't even bruise you, let alone injure you. (However it can kill if fired directly at somebody.)
If you can hit it with a pistol it’s easy to hit.
A drone optimally randomly dodging at treetop height is a much more difficult target.
A target with a 300mm frontal diameter, capable of evading at 10g, is expected to require 6 rounds to achieve a P_hit of 0.5 at 200m range, based on the parameters of your typical Phalanx CIWS. Said Phalanx weapon system might fire a burst of 1s duration in such an engagement, which is 75 rounds.
For a missile engagement, that's a problematic number, but for a drone that's probably only moving a few dozen m/s and carrying a small payload, it's an entirely satisfactory engagement.
Phalanx is an early 1980s weapon system. The Army is going to be fielding directed-energy SHORAD systems next year, equipped with 50kW lasers.
A few dozen m/s is probably a good estimate for quadcopter style drones, but low hundreds m/s should be easy for fixed wing drones, so at 200 meter engagement range (that paper makes it pretty clear that maneuvering targets are hard beyond that) there is only time to hit a few drones before they arrive.
So maybe drone swarms will work even against current CIWS.
Sure, but current drone swarms wouldn't.
Very. The calculation made for each round could be irrelevant before they travel 500m. Drones also have no obligation to approach at the same convenient high angle mortars do. 2-3 drones weaving between buildings faster than a human can aim? Sounds terrifying.
Which are available to how many militaries?
But I guess taking down a drone is not like taking out a mortar shell. It is probably much easier with some sort of flak or even launching a net.
The research pivoted very early to "training humans to more successfully defend against small drone attacks". I'm not sure how much success they've had or what success is defined as for something like this.
have you seen a harop? its huge,its built to fly slow and for a long while and carry big payload and has zero evasion capability
Not all drones are AI, there are remote drones that are very fast and very hard to kill, pulling Gforces that would make normal pilots pass out. With the US declaration that drones are "munitions", we have effectively stated that we can launch them into the airspace of countries that we aren't technically at war with, and claim it was "border fire", like we did with Afghanistan.
no. Azerbajan/Turkey went into it only after verifying that it works, to the devastating effect, against the Russian made air-defenses in Syria and Libya. Now Ukraine has bought these drones and is starting their production. In the next year or two we'll see them being used to the same great effect in Donbass. So far Russia hasn't managed to come up with any meaningful defense. If anything the recognition of the issue has only started to dawn on them, and by the time they manage something the Turkish/Ukranian (they discuss collaborative development) drones will improve another level up - drone capabilities at the current stage (beginning of the hockey stick) are much faster to improve - add speed, a bit of stealth, [partial] autonomy, coordinated swarming. It is a new paradigm shifting generation of warfare like iron navy ships, machine guns, planes, missiles, etc. were in their respective times.
How? They fly just few hundred meters above the ground, launch from field runways, and for the price of a single B-2, a country can buy 2000 of them.
Jamming? Even a country like Turkey was able to devise a passable inertial navigation, and and programming for autonomous operation way exceeding an easy to trick "attack anything that moves" mode.
To counter them, you will need a very sizeable air force fitted with best radars possible to track them down individually, and strafe with a cannon (since no missile currently can lock onto something so small, slow, cold, and low flying.)
Or, you know, currently fielded SHORAD systems and CIWS?
Even if that wouldn't be a problem, you will still need really a lot of that.
Either self-radar or tied into a broader net.
That's current-gen, repurposed from something designed against cruise missiles.
Next gen will probably optimize for or supplement with lighter weight projectiles, depending on whether lighter or heavier drones proliferate.
100-300km - way outside of range of artillery. And they are all field runway launchable, so you don't really get anything from bombing the airfield.
And most of them are made to fly below heights at which any air defence is effective.
The drones flying slow, and low makes them harder to kill, not easier.
A transcription error that has been carried forward over several sources, apparently. The general undoubtedly said "field-expedient", meaning devices that can be cobbled together in the field. Take a commercial drone from ToysRUs and tape a hand grenade to it, and you have a field-expedient war drone.
So the relevant comparison isn't a slow cheap drone versus a Tomahawk or a Toyota; it's a hundred thousand slow cheap drones versus a Tomahawk, or two thousand slow cheap drones versus a Toyota. A hundred thousand slow cheap drones is enough to coerce all the officers of any army into resigning; all you need is the realtime whereabouts of their parents, siblings, children, and spouses, and effective ransomware that reliably spares the children of officers who have already resigned, or who haven't yet been contacted. And no CIWS is going to help with that, even if it doesn't run out of ammo after the first fifteen drones, because the children aren't on an aircraft carrier or an army base.
Jef Raskin pointed most of this out in 02001 in an underrated essay, 'next time it can be worse'. At least so far, it hasn't been.
Massed drones absolutely can wreck terrible destruction, death by a thousand cuts to any facility or base or airfield. But the kind of amassed yet precise strike against a hundred targeted individuals, with smart targeting and somehow knowledge of their career status?! Come on.
I wouldn't even finish that movie, let alone fund that proposal.
keep in mind that what is happening today is not what will happen tomorrow or what can happen in five years
you are rejecting the possibility because of its unfamiliarity, much as the navy rejected the possibility of a surprise attack on pearl harbor
Pearl harbor was easy, required no new tech, just will. And Pearl Harbor was well known before the attack, had been demonstrated years before. This isn't that.
Rather than go through and carefully solve the fascinating puzzle of how to destroy civilization step by step, I'm just going to point out that these things are not actually very difficult. Instead of hoping that the next Daesh can't recruit anyone who knows how to build an IMSI catcher, write a Facebook app, or use LinkedIn (or VKontakte if their adversary is Russia), think about what happens when there's a conflict between two adversaries that can.
> The US could. Russia, China. After some testing. But not the next ISIS.
Certainly the three states you mention could develop that capability, yes, although they don't currently have Slaughterbots fleets ready to launch. And Daesh certainly wasn't able to develop it, although they did drop a bunch of unguided hand grenades on people from remotely-piloted quadcopters. But what about Turkey? France? Rebels in the West Bank less incompetent than Hamas? The Zetas, who as I understand it have been running their own cellphone networks for 10 years? The Sinaloa cartel, which has thousands of drones carrying contraband across the US border? The Jalisco cartel, which is already targeting the families of police officers? The US-backed Guaidó faction in Venezuela? The US-backed military dictatorship currently running Egypt?
This isn't something that requires the budget of an aircraft carrier, and it's not something you can see from a satellite before it happens.
I've actually worked in this area before. There's more attention on this than you might imagine, and less than it deserves. There's also better ways to use drones to cause terror and disrupt operations that I obv won't get into. Maybe its not tech fantasy as I originally said, but it is much further out than you originally said as well, and it's a bit overkill. If you wanted to have the effect of causing fear in soldiers using drones, I think (but don't know) there are easier ways that don't require the same limiting assumptuons about technology, logistics and scaling.
Except that I think it's kind of impossible and we are basically doomed.
Hamas sends thousands of rockets in that budget range and nobody is scared that rocket swarms are going to kill thousands of Israelis. IDF retaliation killed more innocent people in a single bombing than all Hamas rockets combined.
retail, and battery-powered. what will a $10 bom get you with a nitromethane-powered engine or a glider dropped from a helium balloon
> The type of drone that people are scared of costs at least $1000.
they need to rethink that. stop fighting the last war
> Hamas sends thousands of rockets in that budget range and nobody is scared that rocket swarms are going to kill thousands of Israelis
that's because hamas is too dumb to put glider wings and ardupilot on each rocket and possibly too deprived of facebook and imei-logger data to know where to find the specific thousands of israelis who are family members of the invading officers
'our enemy might be as incompetent as the hamas model rocketry club' is not a great way to think out how to provide security
this is not a dream. this is a nightmare
listen, i know this scenario isn't happening today. but it's going to happen within the next few years, and the fact that it isn't happening today isn't much of an argument against that
Now. 640 downloads. Still not many, but a huge number for Parameters, a publication read by more real generals than armchair generals.
I shill for his books regularly on HN. They're a guilty pleasure for me: snappy, easy to blow through in a single sitting, and are each begging for a movie adaptation (think "The Martian"). Start with Daemon.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Decision [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_night_special
It's meaningless and is introduced to conflate the fact what is talked about is not currently possible or stupid. These words are used a lot in tech.
> using autonomous drone swarms against a soft target like a stadium full of people
This can be done with a signal crop dusting drone, but if you say that it's easier to understand it's just the Black Sunday movie - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075765/ or a normal crop dusting plane or one automatic weapon where every bullet is a mini suicide drone.
"six drones engaged in complex maneuvers in low visibility conditions, buzzing the destroyer" is not possible. If it was 'one' drone it's obvious there's no way it can get to that location.
It is true Slaughterbots has scared the unwashed masses. Currently a glass window stops a drone, they are currently not far off the Dalek's inability to go up stairs.
Is it good to keep the public scared about drones? Drones greatest ability in war and terrorism atm is the fear. (Excluding multi-million $ plane sized drones which are strategic)
The US Military from a true large-conflict conventional war is currently most vulnerable to an economic conflict. We blew so much money on basically minor military maneuvers relative to a real big war, and it show that our defense industry is parasitic and corrupt.
Drones are the perfect counter: if cheap enough, plentiful enough, and effective enough, they don't need to be superior to their american counterparts. They just need to win the cost ratio by a sufficient margin.
You can't safely fly a Jet these days without enormous support, interference and then at great risk until the skies are very well cleared.
I think possibly the same thing will apply to drones in that 'just as cheap' technology will render them null.
Maybe not for the 'very smallest' type drones but certainly anything approaching the size of a car that sticks out on radar - a slow, lumbering, easy target for a range of weapons.
It's one thing for Azerbeijan or Libyans to face these things, much like American air power over Iraq, it's not a 'balanced situation'.
The moment someone tries to use these against a capable adversary we'll see what toys are hidden away and/or things will change very quickly.
Kind of like WW1, but much more high tech. Just a guess, but we already have the ability to destroy anything, the problem is just knowing "what/when/where".
Drones are high on my list of "scared to see what they can do when it is unveiled".
With little imagination you can put together:
- standard consumer quadcopter
- standard consumer camera face detection
- standard consumer pistol
and tie it all together with software. Even without smart projectile prediction for improved aiming.
While the software bit is hard-but-not-stupidly-so, the hardware components for all this is relatively cheap. Also, the software can be developed anywhere and anytime. You don't need unobtanium to do it.
I have only applied very limited imagination to provide a basic scare scenario.
If you take military budget and effort, multiple layers of battlefield coverage and variations of drones the capability is astounding.
One day the internet will abound with memes regarding "Carrier has arrived." over real world images.
The application for "shooter event" amplification and without the easy to spot bad guy.