
Turkey Now Has Swarming Suicide Drones It Could Export - clouddrover
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/34204/turkey-now-has-a-swarming-quadcopter-suicide-drone-that-it-could-export
======
qmmmur
To all the talented developers and researchers who work on this kind of tech.
Please change careers and do something useful.

~~~
caddie
The nuclear bomb brought nuclear reactors, providing affordable electricity in
many places. Drone swarms also have the potential to turn into useful
applications.

~~~
jawns
Are you suggesting that nuclear reactors could have never been developed
independently, and that the nuclear bomb was a necessary precursor? It sounds
almost as if you're giving these deadly, weaponized drone swarms a pass
because it's possible to do non-deadly things with drone swarms as well.

~~~
0-_-0
> Are you suggesting that nuclear reactors could have never been developed
> independently, and that the nuclear bomb was a necessary precursor

An uncontrolled nuclear reaction is significantly simpler than a controlled
one. We still don't have fusion reactors, while fusion bombs were developed 10
years after fission bombs.

~~~
vladTheInhaler
That's a very unconventional use of the words "uncontrolled" and "simple". The
reaction inside a nuclear bomb (fission or fusion) has to be incredibly
tightly choreographed down to the microsecond in order to work as intended,
whereas a fission reactor is (egregiously oversimplifying) put some fissile
stuff next to some other fissile stuff for a while and let it get warm.

The Chicago Pile came way before Trinity. Rock formations have even been known
to come together accidentally to form natural nuclear reactors, but I think it
will be a very long while before the first natural nuclear bomb.

~~~
0-_-0
[https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-
control...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-controlled-
and-uncontrolled-nuclear-fission)

------
popotamonga
The naming is a little strange. I would call them Homicide drones

~~~
mc32
True but it’s just following the form of “suicide bomber”.

Maybe kamikaze drones would be more apt.

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throw51319
It's so obvious this is the next stage of conflict. China could have thousands
of these sleeper drones in the US. To preempt before a real conflict, it could
simultaneously take out most of the heads of state, causing chaos.

~~~
simion314
>China could have thousands of these sleeper drones

Why is China your example and not X? There are other countries that use killer
drones, do secret killing and kidnapping operations on other countries
territories etc.

I have the impression that a few years back you would have said Russia, then N
Coreea and today China, like the big bad enemy is changing each few years
depending on what politics need.

~~~
meaydinli
Or or or... Every now and then the balance of power shifts, global/regional
powers fade and rise and now it is China's turn.

~~~
simion314
How did it shift from Russia to China, the same guys are still in power, the
only guy that changed is Trump(I think he has mentioned China a lot but no
idea if he caused this shift of attention or just using it).

~~~
throw51319
It's an axis to upset the normal order. The first time they've had the
possibility of doing it in prob 50 years.

------
_bxg1
To play devil's advocate against the panic I'm watching unfold in this thread:
I don't think there's an enormous categorical difference here from weapons
that already exist.

We've had long-range (longer range than most drones) guided missiles for
decades. We've had drones that can launch them, for decades. Those
technologies already have the ability to wipe out targets anywhere, anytime,
en masse, with little to no risk. Yet we don't see people (as one commenter
suggested) wiping out entire plots of land so they can start a new country. We
don't see (most) countries turning such weapons on their own citizens. We
don't see (very many) heads of state being assassinated in this way. What this
tells me is that there are sociopolitical forces that make such things un-
advantageous or infeasible, for one reason or another.

The only true differentiator I can see with suicide-drones is a potential
increase in precision, though that's not _really_ true right now because these
in the article look to be basically flying hand-grenades. That's not really
better than a missile; in fact it's probably a lot easier to intercept or
shoot down. Now, many of us have seen that (fictional) video with the micro-
explosive assassination drones. Maybe that would change the game in some way,
but I still don't think it's a drone apocalypse we'd be looking at. Nation
states have _so many ways_ of killing people at this point. When they don't,
it's usually because it doesn't make sense to, not because they lack some key
capability.

~~~
searchableguy
You are relying on the presumption that they won't become autonomous machines
for wiping out "criminals".

A drone can be used for more than a singular purpose. There might be more
efficient ways to kill someone we already know like you said but what if we
don't know them yet?

What if they don't exist yet?

Imagine you have a crowd and there is one violent person inside it, how would
you immobilize such a person without harming the others?

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_Imagine you have a crowd and there is one violent person inside it, how would
you mobilize such a person without harming the others?_

Hmm...a gun?

~~~
searchableguy
_without harming the others_.

Humans aren't good in stressful situations and their aim isn't great. A ground
view isn't necessarily helpful in situation where the criminal might be inside
the group ring.

~~~
_bxg1
A rooftop sniper, then.

~~~
searchableguy
You can only do that for specific situations. What if the criminal runs inside
the building or grabs a person to shield himself from the sniper? Are you
going to surround the person with snipers from every direction?

Also sounds like the cost for those snipers would be pretty high than
manufacturing few drones to lock in a target and swarm under their head.

Cost of drones is only going to decrease while the cost of sustaining human
life remains more or less the same if not increase.

------
lmilcin
Pretty sure all major powers either have or will soon have the capability but
don't feel the need to blab around about it.

The issue I have is when this gets actually exported to countries that may
want to use against civilians (to squash opposition) though it was know for a
long time this must happen.

~~~
jobu
The issue I have is non-state bad actors acquiring or building them on their
own to create flying IEDs. It would be pretty easy to fly a drone into a
crowded stadium or protest and kill hundreds if not thousands of people with a
weaponized drone. Getting the explosives is the hard part and many groups have
already shown they can do that.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Why aren't they doing this now? Why haven't all flights been grounded
worldwide because they keep getting brought down by flying IEDs?

~~~
meaydinli
Because that is an escalation that nobody wants, for now. Even piracy was
tolerated for a while until it became economically too disturbing. I don't
think it all disappeared but it is not that bothersome.

If anybody started threatening commercial civilian flight, countries would
fall on them like bricks. Quarantine for a few months was devastating on many
fronts. Now, think if all flights were grounded for months...

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I agree, which is why I don't think this hypothetical future threat is really
any different.

~~~
meaydinli
yep, it all fits in with M.A.D.

------
narrator
These weapons are so cheap that the cost of starting a country just fell by an
order of magnitude. I could see a hacker warlord of the future giving everyone
who is a citizen some sort of transponder to prevent drone attacks and have
the drones kill everyone else in a given area.

~~~
mahesh_rm
This might be one of the most ethically controversial comments I've ever read
on the internet.

------
blackrock
Well, that was a chilling and terrifying look into the future.

But, to be honest, I’m not really worried. It doesn’t really change the
tactical situation of today. It just makes the attack vector cheaper.

The USA already uses drones that loiter from 30 miles away, and has a high
resolution camera that can see you. Then you’re targeted and a Hellfire
missile is locked on, and shot at the target.

Same effect. The target is killed.

However, this technology increases the critical retaliation magnitude.

If the attacker chooses to assassinate the political leadership of the enemy
country by suicide drone, then the victim country can retaliate with an all
out nuclear assault.

So, we are now basically at the same situation we were at before. MAD
principles still apply. Nothing has changed.

------
bawana
Dean Ing wrote a SF novel 'Butcher Bird' exploring this. Why is humanity stuck
in the same story? We make something cool. We then commoditize it. We then
militarize it. I think every tool/discovery/thing we invent/produce should
also be introduced with its own antidote/kill switch. Clearly a malevolent
state would be able to excise the the suicide switch in the chip, but at least
this is a start. Deploying an EMP device at scale is a lot harder than
activating a paralysis/suicide switch.

After all, not everyone can deploy their own custom cpu. And the REAL worry is
when a script kiddy gets one of these and deploys them at the next protest. I
dont want to say the 'T' word. By making commodity hardware fragile and
defeatable, we protect ourselves against our dark side. And no matter how good
an AI gets at face recognition/inference/etc, we will still be able to turn it
off. Did we not learn the lesson of 'Colossus: The Forbin Project'

------
tartoran
Can't drones be jammed? If so what does it take to jam their signals, fry
their circuits with some sort of electrical guns? Having these war flying
tools advanced so much in the last decade, isn't there an incentive to develop
some good defense against them? Or maybe it is happening but it's not made
public.

~~~
ColanR
> jam their signals

Only if they're remote controlled. Nothing to jam if they're autonomous and
using the right navigation sensors.

> fry their circuits with some sort of electrical guns

EMPs are painful for everyone involved, not just the target.

> incentive to develop some good defense against them

Far as I can tell, autonomous drone swarms are the Nash Equilibrium.

~~~
tartoran
They don't have full autonomy yet, there appears to be a human operator who
takes key decision remotely.

But, even if that was so, is there no way to have some defense against such
attacks, having that they're electric and rather slow? Tesla ray guns come to
mind but I am not very knowledgeable in this field.

~~~
dafoex
While its true that they have human operators currently, they don't
necessarily need a lot of autonomy to attack someone jamming their signal.
Most of the drone signal jammers I've seen take the form of a handheld
directional radio "gun", so it would be pretty easy to just have your
bombdrone just direction find the jamming signal and bomb the operator,
freeing the field for the n other drones.

------
EGreg
Swarming drones and AI is the scariest tech and we are going to see the
consequences. Because it will be so cheap and ubiquitous. This isn’t even the
atomic bomb — where the work was just _too sweet_ to stop. This is basic
technology with small incremental improvements tons of people can do.

Drones are the first robots that are among us (overhead). Self-driving cars
are at least very expensive to produce. But drones can be mass-produced and
deployed anonymously.

Drones with live munitions is terrifying. Imagine an anonymous swarm
descending on Union Square in SF.

Even under normal operation, drones can fall and hit someone by accident. Let
alone a swarm.

This is one technology I should not want to be in anyone’s hands, but if it
is, it should be in the hands of the State and not everyone. Just like bombs.

PS: With cheap cameras being ubiquitous and people can be identified by their
gait, heartbeat etc. consumer level tech can also include an AI that can cross
correlate everywhere you’ve been. Businesses would use it to fine you when you
park your car for too long and don’t go into the store.

But governments and police departments can concoct tons of believable stories
with parallel construction and put anyone they want away. In fact AI can also
be adopted in other places in the policing and judicial process (as with
Palantir) leading to a Kafkaesque experience for sentencing.

And with deepfakes it’s worse than that. Anyone could create a believable
video of a rape-caught-on-video or a damaging “speech at a private event” or
whatever. Reputational attacks were cheap already (see CIA handbook) but with
a swarm of sleeper twitter bot accounts and other bots you could introduce
anything.

In short I am worried we are going to be entering a dystopia soon. This video
nails the drones issue:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA)

------
A4ET8a8uTh0
Turkey is slowly becoming a regional power. It is interesting how well they
seem to be playing the political game with EU, US, Russia and Israel. I am not
a fan, but I can't help but to admire that level of skill to balance competing
interests.

~~~
sprash
Turkey has a unique geographic location of immense strategic value. There is a
reason NATO bends over backwards to include a country that is culturally
completely incompatible with the rest of the mostly European members and even
openly attacking other NATO members like Greece. What you see now is heavy
influence of China that wants to take complete control over Europe under the
guise of something called the "Belt and Road" initiative with the heavy
support of some European industrial leaders.

Assume that the leadership in Turkey is nothing more than a puppet regime
fullfilling those interests.

~~~
meaydinli
Konstantinoble: [https://youtu.be/Wcze7EGorOk](https://youtu.be/Wcze7EGorOk)

------
remote_phone
500 isn’t a lot but I imagine having 10,000 flying suicide drones could be
very effective in battle. Probably an EMP would bring them down. I wonder if
something as simple as smoke bomb would render them useless if they couldn’t
see properly.

~~~
maxwell
EMPs are too expensive to fight drone swarms:

[https://www.quora.com/How-much-would-it-cost-to-build-an-
EMP...](https://www.quora.com/How-much-would-it-cost-to-build-an-EMP-that-can-
damage-a-part-of-country?share=1)

Similar to tanks vs. machine guns, but the machine guns needed human
operators.

I'd think IR (e.g.
[https://www.sparkfun.com/categories/139](https://www.sparkfun.com/categories/139))
could see through smoke, otherwise lidar keeps getting cheaper
([https://www.sparkfun.com/categories/tags/lidar](https://www.sparkfun.com/categories/tags/lidar)).

We'll need defensive drone swarms.

------
ryanwaggoner
Most of the hand-wringing about this strikes me as pretty far-fetched. While I
have no doubt that attack drones will be used extensively on the battlefield,
I think their use beyond that will be isolated. There are few advantages to
using drones as a weapon that aren't already available to both terrorists and
states. If you want to hunt specific people down and kill them, you don't need
a drone. And if you want to cause mass casualties, there are much better
options _today_ than a swarm of hundreds of fragile one-time-use drones. Why
don't we have more terrorist attacks using guns or truck bombs? Why don't we
have drone IEDs right now? Why aren't drones taking down airplanes and
helicopters all over the world? Why don't we have SAM attacks at every airport
in the world?

The nightmare scenario most people seem to be worried about is the
"slaughterbots" one from that video, but it doesn't make any sense to me. In
some mythical future, we'll have the ability to use a tiny explosive charge to
blow a hole in a specific person's head? I guess the person who came up with
this missed the memo about the 300 million devices we have in this country
that can use a shaped explosive charge to put a hole in someone's head.

And _who_ is the entity that's releasing these drones to kill half a city? If
it's our government, they could clearly do this now if they wanted to. Why
don't they? If it's another government, that's no different than any other act
of war they could currently carry out. What advantage does this offer? If it's
a terrorist organization, again, they have better and cheaper options
available _today_. And it's not like we couldn't stop them: who was flying
that giant plane? Who were those guys releasing these swarms from the van?
Where did they buy these drones? Where did they get the explosives? Just like
many other threats, we'd track them down.

I'm not saying there's no risk, just that I think it's completely overblown.
Every new technology carries a risk that a malicious actor will use it for
harm, but the same technological advancements also enable us to better defend
ourselves. So maybe there is some future dystopia where huge swarms of
anonymously-controlled "slaughterbots" roam the skies looking for targets to
murder, but if we have the ability to do that, we _also_ have the ability to
maintain defensive swarms, personal EMPs, chaff and smoke emitters, laser
sentries, broad spectrum signal jamming, automated hacker entities, or
whatever else we come up with.

~~~
tacocataco
"I could hire half the poor to kill the other half."

And in the end, even those jobs were automated.

Remember, how poorly people are treated now and in the past is how we are
treated while the 1% needs something from us (our labor).

Do you honestly expect better treatment when we are useless eaters?

------
seesawtron
USA has been operating drones since last decade in conflict zones in the
Middle. The same drones that they use to "neurtalize" terrorists and
dictators. Is there still time to oppose that or have we casually accepted
them as a necessary for the war on terrorists?

~~~
ianleeclark
The collective trauma experienced on 9/11 largely made anti war movements DOA.
Combined with the sheer volume of conflicts and proxy wars were involved in,
were probably too far gone.

~~~
thinkingemote
not only did it stop anti-war movements, it also stopped anti-capitalist and
anti-globalist movements. Seattle in 1999 to 2001 had huge protests and riots
[1,2]. After 9/11, protesting the west almost meant supporting the terrorists.
When globalisation used to mean the exploitation of the developing world by
the west - now the west was under attack and so to attack imperialism via
violent protest was to be sympathetic to the terrorist.

It's only now, 20 years later that the children of these protestors are
repeating the same things their parents did. And it also explains why certain
politicians try to associate protest with terrorism these days, that it's a
different generation protesting explains why this association falls flat.

Today's protestors were not born when the towers fell.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests)
[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Mardi_Gras_riot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Mardi_Gras_riot)

------
dafoex
Seen one reference to slaughterbots already, but even without AI on board
these are terrifying. These could be small enough to have little to no radar
return, so just dropping them one by one out of an aeroplane would be a viable
delivery method for stealth killers.

------
josefresco
Related:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK6IGG5zRU8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK6IGG5zRU8)

------
buboard
how robust are these systems to E/M interference?

~~~
virmundi
Probably not at all. However I don’t think any one has an EM defense aside
from some really odd looking guns by the French and nuclear bombs.
[https://interestingengineering.com/7-anti-drone-weapons-
used...](https://interestingengineering.com/7-anti-drone-weapons-used-by-the-
military-and-law-enforcement-around-the-world)

We’re in a new arms race. Better drones. Better anti drone systems. Hopefully
better pizza delivery.

------
caddie
funny how they cut the camera right before hitting the target. Probably cause
it's not doing much at the moment.

~~~
radu_floricica
It's anti personnel, so it fires before it hits the target to spread to a
larger area.

------
abathur
Anyone out there working on affordable, autonomous, personal, portable anti-
aircraft defense systems?

------
toyg
It will take some sort of international agreement to regulate these bad boys.

~~~
csunbird
Like the nuclear agreement, where only a small subset of countries rushed into
having nuclear weapons and restricted others from having any, and now it is
extremely unfair to other countries to not have the power but others do and
enjoy having the weapon superiority.

No international agreement will survive war, they are just used to suppress
and bully countries.

~~~
toyg
International agreements are not perfect but they are still necessary. They
are more or less holding in the chemical-weapons area, which has really
nothing to do with restricted technology.

Humans can (and must) agree to be better than frightened animals.

~~~
throwaway0a5e
>They are more or less holding in the chemical-weapons area,

Tactical inconveniences that limit utility are what's preventing chemical
weapon usage. Nobody uses chemical weapons because we have better, more
effective ways to kill each other making them not really useful except in
limited circumstances like terrorizing civilians (a static target that
probably doesn't have gas masks) in areas where you have air superiority (e.g.
Syria now, Iraq decades ago, etc.). Chemical weapons were mostly abandoned
after WW1 because they just didn't work well enough for the effort and
resources required to use them.

Edit: [https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-
ch...](https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-
weapons-anymore/)

------
eruci
The good news is, the next war will be fought by drones against drones.

~~~
josefresco
When one side's drones kill all the other drones, what happens to the people
on the losing side?

~~~
eruci
The next genocide will be committed by drones too.

