Drones have been around for awhile, but it was Azerbaijan’s use of economical Turkish drones in defeating Armenia in 2020 that made clear that they were revolutionizing the battlefield.
Video reportedly of a Russian Tor-M1 shooting down a Ukrainian UAV. https://t.co/K7J9JQg37R pic.twitter.com/eKlTVZXul4
— Rob Lee (@RALee85) March 30, 2022
The Tor-M1 is a lot of missile to use to shoot down what is more or less a model airplane.
What are the economics of using Surface to Air missiles against drones?
Can use anti-tank weapons against drones? Or can they just fly too high be endangered?
Would cheap dummy drones be used to flood the zone and waste expensive missiles?
Maybe what militaries need are fighter drones to shoot down reconnaissance drones? For example, in 1914 warplanes were just used for reconnaissance. It wasn’t until the fall of 1914 or 1915 that the first machine gun-armed plane took off to shoot down other aircraft. If this war goes on for a few years (although it has been so ridiculously expensive so far that it’s hard to see how it could, but never say never about war), maybe we will see drone dogfights …
Here’s somebody’s commercial for their drone-on-drone kamikaze interceptors:
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
English
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
Kamikaze swarms of small cheap drones are the next big thing with UAVs. They will be calibrated to seek high-value targets, such as the fuel tanks of lead vehicles in a convoy. Your readers might speculate on ways to defend against them, but so far it seems that the only defense would be to send up counter-drones, calibrated to seek out enemy drones and explode in their vicinity.
The Achilles's Heel of drones is their communications link. (There are autonomous drones that can operate semi-independently, but as with everything that depends on so-called "artificial intelligence", the hype exceeds the reality.) Advances in radio and cryptographic signal analysis, manipulation, and jamming could reverse the fortunes of a side overmatched by enemy drone superiority.
The winner of the drone tournament will dominate the battlefield below, be it land or sea. The disproportionate advantage granted by air (drone) superiority will increasingly drive conflict into urban or other areas of dense cover, but then that has already been a trend since the last century.
Fun fact: most drones and drone components are made in China. This situation will continue to pertains so long as China remains the master of small, cheap and plentiful production.Replies: @International Jew, @Peter Lund, @The Wild Geese Howard
This is the Anduril Lattice Counter Drone System, for anti-drone operations. It disrupts communication and provides a kinetic option:
Tor M1 system costs $25 million/ unit. The Ukrainians have destroyed or captured at least 5 that are documented:
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html
(search for Tor-M1)
https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/277402557906163
So that’s $125 million worth lost or 10,094,178,593 Russian Rubles. Gotta sell a lot of oil at the cut rate price the Indians and Chinese are willing to pay.
But the individual rockets must cost much less, though I haven’t seen any prices quoted.
Question to those who understand the defense industry better than I do. Why aren’t we seeing the land equivalent of drones yet? Unmanned gun platforms would seem to be a better option than a tank. No risk to soldiers, and without all the heavy armor needed to protect the tank crew, they would be a lot lighter, more mobile and cheaper.
I assume there would be a loss in performance because of remote operations, but if you could build 10 drone tanks for the price of 1 manned tank, as they say, quantity has a quality all its own.
• weight is much more crucial for air vehicles than for surface vehicles, so replacing a human with a chip doesn't buy so much of a performance advantage for surface vehicles as for air vehicles,
• algorithms for autonomous control are much easier to make for systems in largely empty airspace than for systems on cluttered ground,
• the drone advantage (miniaturization) is greatest on the small end of the size spectrum (sensor and detection devices, "suicide" drones, "slaughterbots"). Surface vehicles (land or sea) generally exist to carry something heavy already (e.g., large gun, many troops, much ordnance, freight), so adding a human operator doesn't change so much.
That said, there are still some advantages. Tanks are notoriously difficult to see out of, but if no one is inside, constrained vision is not the same issue. A remote operator could have many electronic views, including from an affiliated local drone swarm. And it is much easier to charge bravely into an enemy pillbox when it is only your drone avatar at risk.
Changes in elevation: hills, gullies, depressions.
Changes in conditions: wet, muddy, rocky, sandy, debris, obscurants.
It’s hard to get from point A to point B. Add in the complexities of using the terrain to conceal your movements, target acquisition and destruction or suppression, flank and rear security, air defense.
My personal opinion, it’s more likely mechanized units will field disposable drones, giving them recon and limited attack capabilities.
Look at this. Imagine somewhat larger drones armed with guns and/or explosives. Then imagine AI subroutines that allow the drones to evade projectiles shot at them.
Now, imagine a Russian platoon, getting to sleep at 1am, expecting to rise at 5am to prepare for an attack. Imagine at 3am, they hear a buzzing noise, and this drone swarm emerges from over a hill, heading their way at 100 miles an hour. Imagine them attempting to defend themselves against it, as another swarm twice as numerous emerges from a hilltop behind you.
You think at the end of that hell swarm, chock full of bullets and thousands of exploding drones from every direction, tailor programmed to confuse their leadership, that experience in not going to fuck with the morale of those still alive and not wounded? You think they’re gonna go back to sleep? And how about the exact same rain of programmed fire and shitshow the following night, after they haven’t slept for 48 hours because they’re too paranoid?
The times they are a-changin’. And fast. I wouldn’t want to be a soldier on the ground in any war going forward. The new battlefield will be a haunted house of speed drones.
Again, imagine this when it’s fully militarized…
Perhaps we could learn how to make stuff like that from the Chinese. Perhaps establish a meritocracy similar to the one they have.
Nah. That would be too detrimental to establishing equality. And probably unwoke, whatever that is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX0ji1sAXl8Replies: @Reg Cæsar
I assume there would be a loss in performance because of remote operations, but if you could build 10 drone tanks for the price of 1 manned tank, as they say, quantity has a quality all its own.Replies: @J.Ross, @Mr. Anon, @Peter Lund, @Almost Missouri, @Busby, @Mike Tre
You haven’t seen Petman or the police daleks that are already old?
Anduril Lattice = Elicit anal turd.
I assume there would be a loss in performance because of remote operations, but if you could build 10 drone tanks for the price of 1 manned tank, as they say, quantity has a quality all its own.Replies: @J.Ross, @Mr. Anon, @Peter Lund, @Almost Missouri, @Busby, @Mike Tre
I don’t know, but I’ll hazard a guess. Because the generals who run the Pentagon are old tankers or infantrymen. But they will eventually retire, and those things you talk about will be adopted. DARPA would love to make real all those gizmos you’ve seen in every dystopian science-fiction movie (is there any other kind?). The future of warfare will increasingly look like the Terminator movies, except Kyle Reese and Sarah Conner will not save the day.
To paraphrase Churchill: “When, in the field of human conflict, have so many, owed so much, to . . . well, nobody, really, but a bunch of machines that we bought.”
I assume there would be a loss in performance because of remote operations, but if you could build 10 drone tanks for the price of 1 manned tank, as they say, quantity has a quality all its own.Replies: @J.Ross, @Mr. Anon, @Peter Lund, @Almost Missouri, @Busby, @Mike Tre
There are here… or will be very soon:
https://www.rheinmetall-defence.com/en/rheinmetall_defence/systems_and_products/unbemannte_fahrzeuge/index.php
https://digit.site36.net/2019/07/24/rheinmetall-builds-armed-drone-tank/
I love the corporate Lord of the Rings references – Anduril, Palantir. I am sure there are a thousand companies with similar names, just too small to hear about.
I think the real next phase of the drone conflict will be with the advent of drone swarms. Anti-drone systems will then look like old anti-air guns, so more like machine guns than missiles, and possibly fitted on flying (hovering) platforms. The economics of lobbing missiles at cheap drones are daunting.
The drones will be used to establish pervasive surveillance with info aggregated to the troops’ maps, to run electronic warfare (like jamming), for suicide attacks. Even a swarm of loitering munitions counts as a drone swarm, only these are suicide drones.
Meanwhile, drones are the new UFOs, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/18/attack-of-the-drones-the-mystery-of-disappearing-swarms-in-the-us-midwest
https://www.rheinmetall-defence.com/en/rheinmetall_defence/systems_and_products/air_defence_systems/vernetzte_flugabwehr/index.php
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5_F4_Eod8
The video is a demo of the system shooting down a swarm of eight drones in a few seconds. No missiles. There's also a laser version that overheats the drones instead. Still no missiles.Replies: @The Wild Geese Howard, @Esso, @Romanian, @Jim Christian
A single .30 cal bullet will take down most small drones. A 30mm “Minengeschoss” will wreck havoc on the larger ones. No doubt, all kinds of fancy autonomous defense systems against drones – not based on expensive missiles – are in the making.
Aren't there mobile laser vehicles that automatically down drones?
Sure. But I am having in mind swarms (100 million mini-drones, size of a bee) attacking any target, coordinated by hyper-computers.
I think the real next phase of the drone conflict will be with the advent of drone swarms. Anti-drone systems will then look like old anti-air guns, so more like machine guns than missiles, and possibly fitted on flying (hovering) platforms. The economics of lobbing missiles at cheap drones are daunting.
The drones will be used to establish pervasive surveillance with info aggregated to the troops' maps, to run electronic warfare (like jamming), for suicide attacks. Even a swarm of loitering munitions counts as a drone swarm, only these are suicide drones.
Meanwhile, drones are the new UFOs, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/18/attack-of-the-drones-the-mystery-of-disappearing-swarms-in-the-us-midwestReplies: @Peter Lund
Rheinmetall Oerlikon Skynex Air Defense System:
https://www.rheinmetall-defence.com/en/rheinmetall_defence/systems_and_products/air_defence_systems/vernetzte_flugabwehr/index.php
The video is a demo of the system shooting down a swarm of eight drones in a few seconds. No missiles. There’s also a laser version that overheats the drones instead. Still no missiles.
I bet you could EMP the drones as well. They can only put so much shielding on them before the weight becomes excessive.Replies: @Almost Missouri, @Joe Stalin, @Kratoklastes
Just stay fit, then the robots won't render you into diesel fuel and may leave you be.
They look delicate.
Depends on the Electronic Warfare conditions. If there’s heavy jamming, defense drones might not work.
Yeah, as was beginning to be evident a couple of decades ago, but should have been obvious since Nagorno-Karabakh, the future battlefield will be dominated by drone swarms. They will be of all shapes, sizes, and missions, with varying arrays of sensors and weapons, but in general, the closer to the enemy, the smaller and less detectable will be the devices. Back at the home core, there may even still be manned aircraft.
The Achilles’s Heel of drones is their communications link. (There are autonomous drones that can operate semi-independently, but as with everything that depends on so-called “artificial intelligence”, the hype exceeds the reality.) Advances in radio and cryptographic signal analysis, manipulation, and jamming could reverse the fortunes of a side overmatched by enemy drone superiority.
The winner of the drone tournament will dominate the battlefield below, be it land or sea. The disproportionate advantage granted by air (drone) superiority will increasingly drive conflict into urban or other areas of dense cover, but then that has already been a trend since the last century.
Fun fact: most drones and drone components are made in China. This situation will continue to pertains so long as China remains the master of small, cheap and plentiful production.
A lot of that could perhaps be countered with electronically steered directional antennas (phased arrays, in other words). Perhaps combined with small relay units, possibly dropped on the ground, possibly dropped from small parachutes (10-30 cm diameter), possibly inside drones.
Making signals jump like that from relay to relay could maybe also help counter signals intelligence.
I assume spread spectrum techniques are already used. I don't know if state of the art drones already use fountain codes, which should help a lot with getting a signal through.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_codeReplies: @Almost Missouri, @Kratoklastes
GoPro's failure is surprising because their cameras are impressively engineered little devices.
You are right I think. The technology is there to make small AI drones that are disposable. They can be programmed to look for targets in a geofenced area all on their own and destroy them.
The Achilles's Heel of drones is their communications link. (There are autonomous drones that can operate semi-independently, but as with everything that depends on so-called "artificial intelligence", the hype exceeds the reality.) Advances in radio and cryptographic signal analysis, manipulation, and jamming could reverse the fortunes of a side overmatched by enemy drone superiority.
The winner of the drone tournament will dominate the battlefield below, be it land or sea. The disproportionate advantage granted by air (drone) superiority will increasingly drive conflict into urban or other areas of dense cover, but then that has already been a trend since the last century.
Fun fact: most drones and drone components are made in China. This situation will continue to pertains so long as China remains the master of small, cheap and plentiful production.Replies: @International Jew, @Peter Lund, @The Wild Geese Howard
There’s an effective low-tech solution to drone swarms: destroy the base that launched them.
The Pentagon's and Military-Industrial-Complex's obsession with expensive, high-end solutions obscures drones' real power: they are increasingly cheap and plentiful. In other words, drones are the low-tech solution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqgReplies: @International Jew
Depending on the design and size of the drone, much simpler systems can be used to defeat them. For example, small drones tend to be of very lightweight construction in order to give them maximum flight duration and/or payload capacity. Even a small caliber bullet or shotgun pellet fired from an automated ground system would probably cause immediate failure. If they’re not autonomous (i.e. controlled remotely by radio) then a powerful jamming signal could probably overwhelm their communications link.
For larger, hardened drones (likely too heavy to be battery powered, at least with current technology) smaller, cheaper versions of anti-aircraft missiles could be used.
Rail guns and directed energy weapons have been in development for some time and may be ideal for countering “swarms”.
Dogfighting (in the strict sense of attempting to follow the flight path of the target and fire a projectile to destroy it) would seem to be the least effective way to attack a drone, although loitering airborne drones with standoff weapons might be useful.
I assume there would be a loss in performance because of remote operations, but if you could build 10 drone tanks for the price of 1 manned tank, as they say, quantity has a quality all its own.Replies: @J.Ross, @Mr. Anon, @Peter Lund, @Almost Missouri, @Busby, @Mike Tre
They exist, but they are less significant than air drones because:
• weight is much more crucial for air vehicles than for surface vehicles, so replacing a human with a chip doesn’t buy so much of a performance advantage for surface vehicles as for air vehicles,
• algorithms for autonomous control are much easier to make for systems in largely empty airspace than for systems on cluttered ground,
• the drone advantage (miniaturization) is greatest on the small end of the size spectrum (sensor and detection devices, “suicide” drones, “slaughterbots“). Surface vehicles (land or sea) generally exist to carry something heavy already (e.g., large gun, many troops, much ordnance, freight), so adding a human operator doesn’t change so much.
That said, there are still some advantages. Tanks are notoriously difficult to see out of, but if no one is inside, constrained vision is not the same issue. A remote operator could have many electronic views, including from an affiliated local drone swarm. And it is much easier to charge bravely into an enemy pillbox when it is only your drone avatar at risk.
… if your enemy’s drone swarm doesn’t destroy you first.
The Pentagon’s and Military-Industrial-Complex’s obsession with expensive, high-end solutions obscures drones’ real power: they are increasingly cheap and plentiful. In other words, drones are the low-tech solution.
Lasers?
Aren’t there mobile laser vehicles that automatically down drones?
Turkey is making some money out of this ambiguous status of being Western aligned and not Western aligned at the same time, somewhat like France. Being an acceptable supplier of weapons no matter the client.
I assume there would be a loss in performance because of remote operations, but if you could build 10 drone tanks for the price of 1 manned tank, as they say, quantity has a quality all its own.Replies: @J.Ross, @Mr. Anon, @Peter Lund, @Almost Missouri, @Busby, @Mike Tre
In a word, terrain.
Changes in elevation: hills, gullies, depressions.
Changes in conditions: wet, muddy, rocky, sandy, debris, obscurants.
It’s hard to get from point A to point B. Add in the complexities of using the terrain to conceal your movements, target acquisition and destruction or suppression, flank and rear security, air defense.
My personal opinion, it’s more likely mechanized units will field disposable drones, giving them recon and limited attack capabilities.
William Gibson’s last two novels, The Peripheral and Agency, have a couple characters who are retired Haptic Recon Marines, essentially first-in operators of combat drones who, through haptic inplants in their bodies, who are also basically drones, too.
First, though, I think we’ll see the military equivalent of Boston Dynamics’ Spot with HE strapped to its back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Dynamics#Spot
Back in the nineties an Aussie inventor developed “metal storm.” A wall of 36 barrels that can fire a theoretical million rounds a minute, electrically activated. When triggered, you basically have a wall of projectiles travelling towards the target. I think the barrels are preloaded with projectiles. The reason it’s been shelved could be that there’s no answer to it. But maybe with the prevalence of drones, metal storm may make a resurgence.
At any half-decent firing rate, a whole bunch of the 'wall of 36 barrels' would need replacing far too regularly for the entire contraption to be useful.
M60s had the 'hot barrel' problem - which leads to barrel-bulge if ignored - and their fire-rate is about 600rpm at best (so ~22000rpm for 36 of them). Put 2 belts through a well-maintained 60, and your AG better be on hand with that spare barrel.
So a 2-man '60 team can give maybe 2500-3000 rounds of constant-fire, and then the gun's basically a very hot paperweight, but at least then they can chuck it away (and the fucking gloves) so the team's ~25kg lighter.
Disclosure: I was one of the guys on the team who 'ran the ruler' over a pre-IPO offer on MST on behalf of an investment research firm (with ~100k clients - a big deal in Oz at the time), when it was tarting itself up for ASX listing. It was a rare 'AVOID' (back then almost every IPO listed at a premium to the offer price).
It was always a hollow log - worse than half of the shit that did backdoor listings through old (but still listed) mining shells - but was very find of making announcements, secondary offerings, and (more recently) rights issues and private equity placements.
Sometimes even gullible defence procurement bureaucrats figure out when a thing is worthless. (They might eventually do so for the F35, the LCS, and so forth).Replies: @Jiminy
The Achilles's Heel of drones is their communications link. (There are autonomous drones that can operate semi-independently, but as with everything that depends on so-called "artificial intelligence", the hype exceeds the reality.) Advances in radio and cryptographic signal analysis, manipulation, and jamming could reverse the fortunes of a side overmatched by enemy drone superiority.
The winner of the drone tournament will dominate the battlefield below, be it land or sea. The disproportionate advantage granted by air (drone) superiority will increasingly drive conflict into urban or other areas of dense cover, but then that has already been a trend since the last century.
Fun fact: most drones and drone components are made in China. This situation will continue to pertains so long as China remains the master of small, cheap and plentiful production.Replies: @International Jew, @Peter Lund, @The Wild Geese Howard
It should be possible to make the crypto secure. The hard part is to prevent zero day exploits and jamming.
A lot of that could perhaps be countered with electronically steered directional antennas (phased arrays, in other words). Perhaps combined with small relay units, possibly dropped on the ground, possibly dropped from small parachutes (10-30 cm diameter), possibly inside drones.
Making signals jump like that from relay to relay could maybe also help counter signals intelligence.
I assume spread spectrum techniques are already used. I don’t know if state of the art drones already use fountain codes, which should help a lot with getting a signal through.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_code
Another aspect so far undiscussed here is that the larger American drones all over the world rely heavily on their satellite links back to their controllers in the Nevada desert. Thus if you can't beat them or hack them, you can try cutting the satellite comm links.
In other words, space war is back on the menu.
That virtually guarantees that the resultant code will be trash.
Cryptography is reasonably easy to do well, but only a fool tries to do it in a proprietary way.
There are FOSS libraries for pretty much all encryption mechanisms - which have had hundreds of thousands of pairs of eyes on them, and have been tested by some smart folks.
That doesn't mean that any FOSS library can be implemented without issue. Everyone recalls how the primary OpenSSL library was compromised by the Heartbleed bug (CVE-2014-0160) in 2014. That took weeksto be identified and fixed... but that's still a fuckton less drama than vulns in MSFT's code-dreck that have persisted for over a decade.
Dan Boneh (from Stanford) is a non-numptie - and he will tell anyone who listens, that people who say that they 'roll their own' encryption are showing the world that they're amateurs, and will wind up missing something really really obvious. That includes the US Department of Killing Brown Foreigners.Replies: @Peter Lund
Indeed. Indeed. The Ukrainians, much more sensibly and economicalky, are throwing pickled tomatoes at Russian drones… or was that at drones of Ukrainian looters? Hard to say. Anyway, Russians are doubleplusungood!!!!
The Pentagon's and Military-Industrial-Complex's obsession with expensive, high-end solutions obscures drones' real power: they are increasingly cheap and plentiful. In other words, drones are the low-tech solution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqgReplies: @International Jew
Sure, but if these things rise above the typical threats to an army, they’ll come to be regarded the way chemical weapons or battlefield nukes are regarded — as a valid excuse to respond with devastating force. And then they won’t be used, same way chemical weapons haven’t been used (between first-world armies) since WW1.
Or if they’re used against civilians (say, Hamas in Gaza unleashing them on an Israeli city or the Israeli parliament as in your video), the response will be likewise extreme. So Hamas won’t use them. Hamas wants to harass Israel and attract international attention, but it will have failed if Israel just chases the population of Gaza into the Sinai Desert (or beyond).
There’s an effective low-tech solution to drone swarms: destroy the base that launched them.
Won’t be needed.
You can’t jam out every encrypted frequency.
That video is a joke. They are just trying to sell it to naive politicians.
https://www.rheinmetall-defence.com/en/rheinmetall_defence/systems_and_products/air_defence_systems/vernetzte_flugabwehr/index.php
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5_F4_Eod8
The video is a demo of the system shooting down a swarm of eight drones in a few seconds. No missiles. There's also a laser version that overheats the drones instead. Still no missiles.Replies: @The Wild Geese Howard, @Esso, @Romanian, @Jim Christian
Looks like some kind of fragmentation rounds with programmed detonation criteria prior to firing.
I bet you could EMP the drones as well. They can only put so much shielding on them before the weight becomes excessive.
You could also EMP a lot more than that, up to and including your opponent's cities.
EMP ("The Green WMD!"™) might have the highest effect-to-cost ratio of all weapons. Besides avoiding all those unpleasant weapon-y things like putting bloody holes in bodies or reducing buildings to rubble, it just instantly sends the target back to the 19th century where most 21st century people cannot survive, so they do the bloody rubble-making stuff themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2Uulnrlffk
There's been a couple of EMP Commissions, for fuck's sake - tax-funded gravy trains, where grifters queue to get their snouts in some free tax cash by inventing a scare story for the proles... encouraged by other grifters.
Yet when they claimed to expose 37 vehicles to 'EMP', only 3 of the vehicles were affected; all of those 3 restarted... and only 1 truck needed a tow.
The media loves this sort of gizmology - whether as a sci-fi device to stop nanobot swarms in Stargate - Atlantis, or as part of a bullshit "ZOMFG We killed our rental car with EMP at TRESTLE" segment on "Future Weapons" in 2007 (which was subsequently admitted to be a Smollett - i.e., a staged hoax).
EMPs are real things, but the claim that outside of a nuclear detonation they can affect P-N junctions to extents that matter, is mostly bullshit (the claimed mechanism of action for EMP is to cause the weird behavior at P-N junctions to stop happening).
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zggrrvw1lcebajz/NopeBullshit.jpg?dl=1
A single .30 cal bullet will take down most small drones. A 30mm “Minengeschoss” will wreck havoc on the larger ones. No doubt, all kinds of fancy autonomous defense systems against drones – not based on expensive missiles – are in the making.
Ok I’ll give you a 30 cal rifle and you go sit in the woods while I send a switchblade drone after you.
There will be no beating the drones.
That Turkish drone can fly at 30k feet and it was designed with off the shelf parts by a single engineer.
Future models will launch out of trucks and carry deadlier munitions.
Quantity and variability will overwhelm any defense system. You bring out some fancy AA system to take out a high altitude drone and I send a smaller suicide drone against it. Maybe you shoot that down with a fancy mini drone defense system. Cool now do it 500 times and guess what a dozen more high altitude drones are on their way.
Tanks are just going to exist as targets on a modern battlefield. Interestingly the general of the marines made this prediction and was given flak for wanting to move away from tanks.
Battles will be extremely mobile consisting of small forces trying to take objectives quickly. This will really just drive up the cost of war which is probably a good thing.
Destroying the drone base won’t matter if they have an internal program for their mission profile or some kind of onboard AI.
The Achilles's Heel of drones is their communications link. (There are autonomous drones that can operate semi-independently, but as with everything that depends on so-called "artificial intelligence", the hype exceeds the reality.) Advances in radio and cryptographic signal analysis, manipulation, and jamming could reverse the fortunes of a side overmatched by enemy drone superiority.
The winner of the drone tournament will dominate the battlefield below, be it land or sea. The disproportionate advantage granted by air (drone) superiority will increasingly drive conflict into urban or other areas of dense cover, but then that has already been a trend since the last century.
Fun fact: most drones and drone components are made in China. This situation will continue to pertains so long as China remains the master of small, cheap and plentiful production.Replies: @International Jew, @Peter Lund, @The Wild Geese Howard
IIRC, GoPro and a few other US firms tried to get into drones and failed miserably.
GoPro’s failure is surprising because their cameras are impressively engineered little devices.
We’ve neglected short-range air defense over the past several decades because we haven’t needed it, but dealing with the small-drone threat isn’t that big a challenge. Plus, the C2 networks necessary to use small drones effectively are vulnerable to both electronic and kinetic countermeasures.
Not an expert on the topic, but I think an good solution would be a proximity fuses used in a man-portable rifle shooting a round that is large enough to accommodate a proximity fuse — and with a reasonably sophisticated infrared optics that also have a rang finder.
Usually proximity fuses are in 30mm+ AA rounds. They can get them down to 20mm-25mm rounds. But 20mm rounds are too powerful large for a real man-portable AA rifle.
My solution would be something in-between a .50 in (12.7 mm) and a 20mm with a proximity fuse — lets call it 17mm. If they had proximity fuses in 30mm rounds nearly 100 years ago, I’d imagine they can get them in 17mm rounds now a days.
The round would be designed to target drones within perhaps 500m and so it could be a relatively underpowered and slow round. This tradeoff would be worth it to let it be fired from a rifle with minimal support. (Obviously wouldn’t be fired standing, from the shoulder — but needs to be fully man-portable). So, you should be able to neck up a .50 cal round to 17mm (similar to the 300 blackout round being necked up from a .556 round). Then you could use existing 50 BMG platforms.
So, in short, picture a short barreled Barrett 50BMG using a .50 cal round that has been necked up to ~17mm . Use an infrared optic with a range finder. As long as the shooter can get the rounds within a few meters of the drone, they should be able to take it out. I’d imagine it could be doable with a few rounds.
Also, the rifle could be used by the operator for anti-equipment purposed or to target enemy that are behind cover using normal / AP / incendiary rounds.
I was told years ago some people were testing out a proximity fuze jammer against artillery projectiles in the US and they were detonating the rounds a short distance away from the cannons.
A 17mm round is going to have very little explosives and can't imagine it doing much in the way of damage. That's why missiles have continuous rod designs to try to take out aircraft structures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTM-QROeNNE
A lot of that could perhaps be countered with electronically steered directional antennas (phased arrays, in other words). Perhaps combined with small relay units, possibly dropped on the ground, possibly dropped from small parachutes (10-30 cm diameter), possibly inside drones.
Making signals jump like that from relay to relay could maybe also help counter signals intelligence.
I assume spread spectrum techniques are already used. I don't know if state of the art drones already use fountain codes, which should help a lot with getting a signal through.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_codeReplies: @Almost Missouri, @Kratoklastes
Agree.
Another aspect so far undiscussed here is that the larger American drones all over the world rely heavily on their satellite links back to their controllers in the Nevada desert. Thus if you can’t beat them or hack them, you can try cutting the satellite comm links.
In other words, space war is back on the menu.
… if you have devastating force, or at least force more devastating than a drone swarm.
This partly depends on whether one believes everything is/isn’t [choose one] an on-ramp to nuclear war.
Basically all improvements in military technology since WWI have been used. Chemical weapons were the exception rather than the rule, and an exception that may or may not persist.
Ah, so that’s your concern!
Yes, no one doubts this.
Perhaps, but 99.9% of the world is not Israel versus Palestine.
I guess I’m the only one who remembers the 1995 sci-fi schlockfest Screamers starring Peter “Robocop” Weller:
It was not a bad adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s novelette, Second Variety.
The autonomous robots are sort of like drones.
Also, if one has a decent arm and aim, they can take down a good-sized drone with a roll of toilet paper:
Note how at least one of the rotor has completely broken blades in the follow up shot.
I bet you could EMP the drones as well. They can only put so much shielding on them before the weight becomes excessive.Replies: @Almost Missouri, @Joe Stalin, @Kratoklastes
Good point: skips all that complicated frequency-finding, cryptography-breaking and zero-day exploits stuff. Just beam the drones out of the digital age.
You could also EMP a lot more than that, up to and including your opponent’s cities.
EMP (“The Green WMD!”™) might have the highest effect-to-cost ratio of all weapons. Besides avoiding all those unpleasant weapon-y things like putting bloody holes in bodies or reducing buildings to rubble, it just instantly sends the target back to the 19th century where most 21st century people cannot survive, so they do the bloody rubble-making stuff themselves.
I assume there would be a loss in performance because of remote operations, but if you could build 10 drone tanks for the price of 1 manned tank, as they say, quantity has a quality all its own.Replies: @J.Ross, @Mr. Anon, @Peter Lund, @Almost Missouri, @Busby, @Mike Tre
Cost
I needed an example of a non-state actor deliberately attacking civilians. If you have another example…
Usually proximity fuses are in 30mm+ AA rounds. They can get them down to 20mm-25mm rounds. But 20mm rounds are too powerful large for a real man-portable AA rifle.
My solution would be something in-between a .50 in (12.7 mm) and a 20mm with a proximity fuse -- lets call it 17mm. If they had proximity fuses in 30mm rounds nearly 100 years ago, I'd imagine they can get them in 17mm rounds now a days.
The round would be designed to target drones within perhaps 500m and so it could be a relatively underpowered and slow round. This tradeoff would be worth it to let it be fired from a rifle with minimal support. (Obviously wouldn't be fired standing, from the shoulder -- but needs to be fully man-portable). So, you should be able to neck up a .50 cal round to 17mm (similar to the 300 blackout round being necked up from a .556 round). Then you could use existing 50 BMG platforms.
So, in short, picture a short barreled Barrett 50BMG using a .50 cal round that has been necked up to ~17mm . Use an infrared optic with a range finder. As long as the shooter can get the rounds within a few meters of the drone, they should be able to take it out. I'd imagine it could be doable with a few rounds.
Also, the rifle could be used by the operator for anti-equipment purposed or to target enemy that are behind cover using normal / AP / incendiary rounds.Replies: @Joe Stalin, @Jim Christian
I was told years ago some people were testing out a proximity fuze jammer against artillery projectiles in the US and they were detonating the rounds a short distance away from the cannons.
A 17mm round is going to have very little explosives and can’t imagine it doing much in the way of damage. That’s why missiles have continuous rod designs to try to take out aircraft structures.
There will be no beating the drones.
That’s a pretty bold statement. Steve ask: “Will we se drone dogfights?” the answer is no doubt, yes.
No matter how fancy the secret weapons, countermeasures has always been sure to follow.
The current craze for hypersonic missiles are not just a quest for shorter delivery time and high kinetic energy, but also a way to make interception more difficult. I find it hard to believe, but apparently it will be possible for a tank to spot and intercept a kinetic penetrator coming towards you at 5000 fps.
I bet you could EMP the drones as well. They can only put so much shielding on them before the weight becomes excessive.Replies: @Almost Missouri, @Joe Stalin, @Kratoklastes
You can get spray paint for EMI protection; heck, I even recall old radio tubes that had a painted electrostatic shields. Nuclear attack bombers are designed for EMP events.
https://www.rheinmetall-defence.com/en/rheinmetall_defence/systems_and_products/air_defence_systems/vernetzte_flugabwehr/index.php
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5_F4_Eod8
The video is a demo of the system shooting down a swarm of eight drones in a few seconds. No missiles. There's also a laser version that overheats the drones instead. Still no missiles.Replies: @The Wild Geese Howard, @Esso, @Romanian, @Jim Christian
The ammunition might be cheap, but the system is not. If it shoots supersonic projectiles, it will give off it’s location if the drones have microphones.
Just stay fit, then the robots won’t render you into diesel fuel and may leave you be.
Anduril is more than ‘somebody’. It’s a Peter Thiel joint. The kinetic counterpart to Palantir.
The idea of destroying the base isn’t to stop the last attack but to prevent the next one.
https://www.rheinmetall-defence.com/en/rheinmetall_defence/systems_and_products/air_defence_systems/vernetzte_flugabwehr/index.php
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5_F4_Eod8
The video is a demo of the system shooting down a swarm of eight drones in a few seconds. No missiles. There's also a laser version that overheats the drones instead. Still no missiles.Replies: @The Wild Geese Howard, @Esso, @Romanian, @Jim Christian
That looks cool, but all around expensive and non-standard. I think cheapo guns with expensive targeting systems are the way to go.
I remember that movie scaring me when I was young. I even watched the crappy sequels.
Anduril is run by Palmer Luckey, probably the most openly conservative guy in the tech world. I’d put him even ahead of Thiel given that Thiel is libertarianish.
https://www.rheinmetall-defence.com/en/rheinmetall_defence/systems_and_products/air_defence_systems/vernetzte_flugabwehr/index.php
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5_F4_Eod8
The video is a demo of the system shooting down a swarm of eight drones in a few seconds. No missiles. There's also a laser version that overheats the drones instead. Still no missiles.Replies: @The Wild Geese Howard, @Esso, @Romanian, @Jim Christian
Cool vid, Peter! Reminds me of the Basic Point Defense guns at the corners of my old ship Nimitz, and all carriers. They simply throw up a wall of lead and if successful, the missles are hit. In that case then it was spray and pray. Your depiction is more focused and slow drones are not missiles. But the rate of fire sounds the same. THANKS!
They are. Seems to me they could go with a smaller caliber round than 20 or 30 MM.
Usually proximity fuses are in 30mm+ AA rounds. They can get them down to 20mm-25mm rounds. But 20mm rounds are too powerful large for a real man-portable AA rifle.
My solution would be something in-between a .50 in (12.7 mm) and a 20mm with a proximity fuse -- lets call it 17mm. If they had proximity fuses in 30mm rounds nearly 100 years ago, I'd imagine they can get them in 17mm rounds now a days.
The round would be designed to target drones within perhaps 500m and so it could be a relatively underpowered and slow round. This tradeoff would be worth it to let it be fired from a rifle with minimal support. (Obviously wouldn't be fired standing, from the shoulder -- but needs to be fully man-portable). So, you should be able to neck up a .50 cal round to 17mm (similar to the 300 blackout round being necked up from a .556 round). Then you could use existing 50 BMG platforms.
So, in short, picture a short barreled Barrett 50BMG using a .50 cal round that has been necked up to ~17mm . Use an infrared optic with a range finder. As long as the shooter can get the rounds within a few meters of the drone, they should be able to take it out. I'd imagine it could be doable with a few rounds.
Also, the rifle could be used by the operator for anti-equipment purposed or to target enemy that are behind cover using normal / AP / incendiary rounds.Replies: @Joe Stalin, @Jim Christian
Cool scenarios, Seax! But my concealed carry tactical training leads me to ask, what is the backstop for all the rounds that miss? In an urban environment you could have a lot of casualties from the rounds that miss.
Such pretty displays. And over China. A country that is friends and neighbors with the Russians. A country hated by all Americans, everywhere (at least today). A country that produces most of the electronic hardware (and software) that makes such display possible.
Perhaps we could learn how to make stuff like that from the Chinese. Perhaps establish a meritocracy similar to the one they have.
Nah. That would be too detrimental to establishing equality. And probably unwoke, whatever that is.
⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑THIS⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑.
Theoretical’s all you need if you’re pitching bullshit to a defence contractor (or better, a Defence procurement bureaucrat). MST’s big claim was based on a single 180-round burst lasting 0.01sec – fine as a ‘proof of concept’, but outright stupid as a thing on which to base a business.
At any half-decent firing rate, a whole bunch of the ‘wall of 36 barrels’ would need replacing far too regularly for the entire contraption to be useful.
M60s had the ‘hot barrel’ problem – which leads to barrel-bulge if ignored – and their fire-rate is about 600rpm at best (so ~22000rpm for 36 of them). Put 2 belts through a well-maintained 60, and your AG better be on hand with that spare barrel.
So a 2-man ’60 team can give maybe 2500-3000 rounds of constant-fire, and then the gun’s basically a very hot paperweight, but at least then they can chuck it away (and the fucking gloves) so the team’s ~25kg lighter.
Disclosure: I was one of the guys on the team who ‘ran the ruler’ over a pre-IPO offer on MST on behalf of an investment research firm (with ~100k clients – a big deal in Oz at the time), when it was tarting itself up for ASX listing. It was a rare ‘AVOID’ (back then almost every IPO listed at a premium to the offer price).
It was always a hollow log – worse than half of the shit that did backdoor listings through old (but still listed) mining shells – but was very find of making announcements, secondary offerings, and (more recently) rights issues and private equity placements.
Sometimes even gullible defence procurement bureaucrats figure out when a thing is worthless. (They might eventually do so for the F35, the LCS, and so forth).
A lot of that could perhaps be countered with electronically steered directional antennas (phased arrays, in other words). Perhaps combined with small relay units, possibly dropped on the ground, possibly dropped from small parachutes (10-30 cm diameter), possibly inside drones.
Making signals jump like that from relay to relay could maybe also help counter signals intelligence.
I assume spread spectrum techniques are already used. I don't know if state of the art drones already use fountain codes, which should help a lot with getting a signal through.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_codeReplies: @Almost Missouri, @Kratoklastes
If the drone stuff is the result of .gov procurement, the comms encryption will be done on the cheap, with a close-source code library so that it can be claimed as part of the firm’s IP (and the cost of development can be claimed as R&D).
That virtually guarantees that the resultant code will be trash.
Cryptography is reasonably easy to do well, but only a fool tries to do it in a proprietary way.
There are FOSS libraries for pretty much all encryption mechanisms – which have had hundreds of thousands of pairs of eyes on them, and have been tested by some smart folks.
That doesn’t mean that any FOSS library can be implemented without issue. Everyone recalls how the primary OpenSSL library was compromised by the Heartbleed bug (CVE-2014-0160) in 2014. That took weeksto be identified and fixed… but that’s still a fuckton less drama than vulns in MSFT’s code-dreck that have persisted for over a decade.
Dan Boneh (from Stanford) is a non-numptie – and he will tell anyone who listens, that people who say that they ‘roll their own‘ encryption are showing the world that they’re amateurs, and will wind up missing something really really obvious. That includes the US Department of Killing Brown Foreigners.
I bet you could EMP the drones as well. They can only put so much shielding on them before the weight becomes excessive.Replies: @Almost Missouri, @Joe Stalin, @Kratoklastes
At the risk of being called a ‘Conspiracy Feerist‘ (say it with a Russell Brand accent)… EMP is almost certainly bullshit concocted by the threat-inflators in the Death Merchant grift.
There’s been a couple of EMP Commissions, for fuck’s sake – tax-funded gravy trains, where grifters queue to get their snouts in some free tax cash by inventing a scare story for the proles… encouraged by other grifters.
Yet when they claimed to expose 37 vehicles to ‘EMP’, only 3 of the vehicles were affected; all of those 3 restarted… and only 1 truck needed a tow.
The media loves this sort of gizmology – whether as a sci-fi device to stop nanobot swarms in Stargate – Atlantis, or as part of a bullshit “ZOMFG We killed our rental car with EMP at TRESTLE” segment on “Future Weapons” in 2007 (which was subsequently admitted to be a Smollett – i.e., a staged hoax).
EMPs are real things, but the claim that outside of a nuclear detonation they can affect P-N junctions to extents that matter, is mostly bullshit (the claimed mechanism of action for EMP is to cause the weird behavior at P-N junctions to stop happening).
When it occurreed to me that huge swarms of drones, including kamikaze drones were an obvious way of assisting Ukraine a friend sent me a video showing Russian and Ukrainian drones use. The smallest was lightweight and easily carried and fired by one person. Of course that sort couldn’t be controlled by mercenaries sitting offshore but the general idea would be for the UScand EU to provide thousands of drones of all sorts (including expendable dummies) with the huge advantage that they could afford it and not be mayltched by Russia unless with Chinese assistance. Another measure that should not trigger more dangerous war would be to lay thousand so anti ship mines to at least prevent Russian ships shelling Ukrainian cities
Most, if not all, explosive rounds are made to self-destruct after a number of seconds, as seen in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbEo-P9iJUE&ab_channel=GyanvaniTube-%E0%A4%9C%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%9E%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A3%E0%A5%80
That virtually guarantees that the resultant code will be trash.
Cryptography is reasonably easy to do well, but only a fool tries to do it in a proprietary way.
There are FOSS libraries for pretty much all encryption mechanisms - which have had hundreds of thousands of pairs of eyes on them, and have been tested by some smart folks.
That doesn't mean that any FOSS library can be implemented without issue. Everyone recalls how the primary OpenSSL library was compromised by the Heartbleed bug (CVE-2014-0160) in 2014. That took weeksto be identified and fixed... but that's still a fuckton less drama than vulns in MSFT's code-dreck that have persisted for over a decade.
Dan Boneh (from Stanford) is a non-numptie - and he will tell anyone who listens, that people who say that they 'roll their own' encryption are showing the world that they're amateurs, and will wind up missing something really really obvious. That includes the US Department of Killing Brown Foreigners.Replies: @Peter Lund
The vulnerable parts of crypto are usually negotiation (and the often complicated message parsing involved) and random number generation. The rest is usually only a problem if timing or voltage/energy measurements can be used to recover info about the keys.
OpenSSL’s source code (and everything related to TLS) has always frightened me.
(Last minute edit: key distribution is also a hard problem but public key systems help a lot.)
At any half-decent firing rate, a whole bunch of the 'wall of 36 barrels' would need replacing far too regularly for the entire contraption to be useful.
M60s had the 'hot barrel' problem - which leads to barrel-bulge if ignored - and their fire-rate is about 600rpm at best (so ~22000rpm for 36 of them). Put 2 belts through a well-maintained 60, and your AG better be on hand with that spare barrel.
So a 2-man '60 team can give maybe 2500-3000 rounds of constant-fire, and then the gun's basically a very hot paperweight, but at least then they can chuck it away (and the fucking gloves) so the team's ~25kg lighter.
Disclosure: I was one of the guys on the team who 'ran the ruler' over a pre-IPO offer on MST on behalf of an investment research firm (with ~100k clients - a big deal in Oz at the time), when it was tarting itself up for ASX listing. It was a rare 'AVOID' (back then almost every IPO listed at a premium to the offer price).
It was always a hollow log - worse than half of the shit that did backdoor listings through old (but still listed) mining shells - but was very find of making announcements, secondary offerings, and (more recently) rights issues and private equity placements.
Sometimes even gullible defence procurement bureaucrats figure out when a thing is worthless. (They might eventually do so for the F35, the LCS, and so forth).Replies: @Jiminy
Well that explains why it died a quiet death then. Another crazy one is the plastic Steyr. I wonder if it still melts if you shoot off too many rounds.
I think I read somewhere that Turkey has had to disable a mine floating in the Turkish Straits. Apparently there are several floating freely there.
High value targets such as the heads of human beings leading the opposing forces.
Imagine the military value of killing—without warning by a drone through the eye socket—any president, senator, oligarch, general from the opposition who ever shows his face in public. Plus their wives and kids. Even a 5% success rate should put an end to the social organization of your enemies.
I found the comments on this thread very interesting — so many people had had the same dark thoughts that swarm in my own mind, and many had thought these thoughts more thoroughly than I. I agree with you: if we could have simply taken out Sadaam Hussein and his evil sons in the manner you suggested, others would have stepped in, with the knowledge that they had better behave if they were not to receive the same treatment. No invasion, no anarchy, just the desired results.