Seems like small drones are the best weapon against big drones. Kind of curious that they seem to assume that the drone needs an operator. If I were defending against a drone swarm I’d want my drones to be piloted by AI.
This is what I dont like about Starcraft. The strategy is, in many instances, second to microing the units. The fact that 1hp unit have the same effectivenes as a full hp one is just weird.
Piloting isn't the main bottleneck. It's easier to automate the piloting than the maintenance, and unless we're talking one-use drones (so, guided missiles really) - there's a lot of maintenance. Somebody needs to transport the drones to the front, program the goals, recharge the batteries (which takes hours often), rearm them after the mission, download the gathered data, change the encryption keys, etc.
And if you manage to automate some of that - automation make your drone swarm vulnerable to disruption. Enemies can wait near automatic refueling/recharging station and capture the drones one-by-one for example. They can put a gps tracker on the automatic drone transport system and shell the enemy base once it gets there. Or they can put a grenade on a captured drone, release it, and detonate it when the drone is recharging destroying the whole swarm cheaply.
Ultimately there's a trade-off between automation and resilience that should be familiar to web developers.
Anything far enough away to not be targeted by a ground to air missile would also probably be too far away for a drone to make a round trip. A quick Google search says even SAMs from the 1950s can hit targets over 30km away.
> and unless we're talking one-use drones (so, guided missiles really) - there's a lot of maintenance. Somebody needs to transport the drones to the front, program the goals, recharge the batteries (which takes hours often), rearm them after the mission, download the gathered data, change the encryption keys, etc.
If we're talking single use drones you can launch them like rockets, or from an unmanned vehicle. There's also no real reason for them to be propeller drones. A modern Tomahawk missile can "loiter" in the air for 2 hours before being directed at its real target.
The concern is with multiple use drones, the biggest vulnerability will be your maintenance / base station so you'll want humans defending that. But also anything that puts them within a reasonable drone range puts them in artillery or SAM range.
I saw a slide somewhere recently - there are already plans for this as an artillery shell or missile. I think it was combined with ordinary ordnance- drone is ejected before main weapon payload towards end of "flight". Drone helps pick highest value target then is used after for damage assessment. Presumably then it self destructs or/or kamikazees
Cruise missiles with submunition dispensers are not exactly a new concept. It's certainly possible in theory to stick some smart loitering munitions in a Tomahawk but that's going to be extremely expensive and not reusable.
If you want a defensive screen: minimalistic gliders, deployed to high altitudes, that dive down onto a target when needed. They'd simply use altitude as energy storage, and when that's nearly used up they take the rest to make it to some designated landing field, ready to get collected for the next launch. Multiple "shifts" at different points in the altitude cycle at any given time.
Sensors fly separately from the consumables, hitching the same ride up. The consumable ones only need their own for final approach which might even be assisted by "painting".
A bigger problem would be sensor overload from all the friendlies, you'd probably want those loitering to follow a course determined by a PRNG predictable to everyone who knows that day's key. But that's just very basic crypto put to novel use.
That depends on the flight regime. If the big drones are at high altitude and/or moving fast then a small drone will never have the performance or sensors to achieve an intercept. So we need fast missiles or directed energy weapons fired from large, expensive platforms (which could be manned or unmanned, operating on land, sea, or air).
AI piloting technology remains very primitive. We don't have anything yet that can cope well with a dynamic air combat environment involving multiple unpredictable threats, EW, countermeasures, and complex ROE. That's just total science fiction today so we can expect to have humans in the loop at some level for many years to come.
I think you can generally build a smaller drone than the attack drone, regardless of environment, if your goal is simply to trade them 1 for 1 (e.g. suicide drones).
What do you mean by drones exactly? If you're referring to small multi-rotor UAVs, those are so slow as to be almost completely useless as interceptors. Need something faster, with rocket or turbine propulsion. Probability of kill is never going to be 1.0, so the defender will usually fire multiple interceptors per target.
A couple days ago there was news that the air force is going to start taking the "Angry Kitten" sdr pods they'd used to emulate adversary craft (for training).and statt trying to use it for electronic warfare[1] (cant find original link... this is similar but has a more tentative disposition on it happening or only maybe).
At the time I was mainly thinking jamming. I figure it's probably a different class system to be able to directed-energy fry a craft. But even just throwing some EM spikes at it, having pulse emitting, might be enough to wreck elements of even a pretty capable aytonomous attack craft swarm.
>The Counter-electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP) is an air-launched directed-energy weapon capable of incapacitating or damaging electronic systems[1] by means of an EMP (electromagnetic pulse).[2]
>On 14 May 2015, the Air Force nominated the Lockheed Martin JASSM-ER as the optimal air vehicle to carry the CHAMP payload.[8] CHAMP is capable of up to 100 shots per sortie.[9]
>In May 2019, it was revealed the Air Force had deployed at least 20 CHAMP-equipped missiles.[10]
Neal Stephenson's excellent (if a little over-long) book Termination Shock suggests another option for dealing with attacking drones. Not going to leave a spoiler here though.
For me, it seemed that with Prey Chrichton had to sacrifice a lot of realism to cram the nanotech shaped pegs into the dinosaur shaped hole he was going for.
I second this, if you enjoy thinking about these topics and reading sci-fi it's excellent. Interestingly, Suarez thanks Rick Klau in his book who until recently was California's Chief Technology Innovation Officer.
Speaking of which, I've seen a couple of YouTube clips demonstrating that even tiny shaped charges are incredibly powerful and have a surprising range. Suicide drones don't have to touch you, even a tiny one could kill from meters away.
I doubt it. Shrapnel and bullet kills will decline because of the energy cost of carrying the weight restricting range. I expect them to use needles fired precisely by a mini railgun at exposed areas of skin. Coated with a chemical agent. I also expect them to be able to recharge via solar or perching on power lines. They can then sit on rooftops and wait for a facial recognition match on the streets below. They could sit there for years. And what about the use of a nuclear battery? Now you can’t shoot them down for fear of contamination. Nightmare
> I expect them to use needles fired precisely by a mini railgun at exposed areas of skin.
How in the world could a railgun compete with chemical explosives? The energy density of batteries is nowhere even close to the energy density of chemical explosives; throw away the sci-fi railgun thing and put a small EFP on the UAV instead. That would be a thousand times more lethal with a fraction of the weight.
If you really want to use poison needles, then turn the UAV into a pincushion and crash it into people. If you're dead set on throwing needles, give it a compressed air blowgun. Small scale railguns make no sense.
>>How in the world could a railgun compete with chemical explosives?
It can selectively kill in a crowd. And no recoil, better accuracy during rapid fire.
Compressed air requires a canister of fluid that requires weight. With a rail gun, much of the weight is in the needles, which could be very thin indeed. When it's out of ammunition, it can do the suicide run perhaps. But the key is the unit doesn't need to carry all the energy required to dispense the projectiles on launch. Can feed off solar or power lines half way through its lot and therefore extend range or needle load.
In fact if you had a rechargeable system the drone could conceivably, albeit slowly, travel halfway around the globe, assuming it can extend its solar panels and float on the ocean.
I also expect they'll be totally silent and made of transparent material.
As kaashif points out, railguns have recoil. Recoil isn't a special trait of chemical propellants, it's Newtonian. The railgun pushes the needle, so the needle pushes the railgun.
Add to that, the rails and the capacitor bank have mass, substantially more mass than the needles. The same force that sends a railgun projectile down the rails also tries to push the rails apart. The rails need to be strong enough to resist this force trying to separate them. You can't even let the rails flex, because if the rail loses electrical contact with the projectile then there's no current flow and therefore no force to push the projectile. For a railgun this small you can probably wrap the whole assembly in carbon fiber and call it a day, but there's no way any of this comes out weighing less than the needles themselves. Just one of the capacitors will weigh more than a bunch of needles.
An air canister weighs to much? A standard CO2 cartridge weighs about 50-100 grams and has ample capacity. A CO2 cartridge in an air pistol lasts for dozens of shots, that's plenty.
And silent and transparent? Now I think you might be trolling. Neither UAVs nor railguns are silent and only a few components in them could conceivably be made transparent.
Everything other than "sit on rooftops with a camera" in the post is just technically wrong.
1. Needles do not have the aerodynamic properties necessary to be effectively fired.
2. Chemical explosives and kinetic payloads are far better in terms of energy and weight than railguns. You'd see electromagnetic launchers being used for nailguns if they were at all reasonable for the relatively low amounts of power involved, and they aren't, and it's for good engineering reasons.
3. Chemical agents often have shelf-life issues, particularly when they're stored like you're proposing.
4. Solar recharging is going to have significant weight costs and result in either low duty cycles (most of the time spent sitting waiting for more energy) or other significant performance tradeoffs.
5. Perching on a power line does not give you access to electrical energy, you need a voltage difference to recharge, plus line voltages are really unsuitable for batteries and electronics, so you'd need a large (and heavy) transformer to step things down anyways.
6. Everyone with the technical capability to develop nuclear-powered aircraft has already looked at the problems and risks involved and said "oh hell no". Furthermore, if you miniaturize these things so they can be deployed en masse, the battery size and long-term contamination risk go way down anyways.
That's a total joke. We can't even make large railguns work reliably, let alone small railguns. Poisoned projectiles have long been banned by international treaty, and there's no evidence of any major military power even considering violating that ban. Nuclear batteries are far too heavy for use in any aircraft.
Stop watching so much SciFi and come back to the real world.
I can promise you it doesn’t make a shred of difference to the victim if they get their brains blown out of their ears by a sniper a mile away, burned alive by white phosphorus, ripped to pieces by high explosives, crushed under a tank, frozen solid by nerve gas or melted by neutron radiation.
It was routine what 80 years ago to gas civilians. The only reason it wasn’t employed on the battlefield was that it was as likely to kill your troops as the enemies.
Violating that ban is inevitable - as soon as one country adopts a ‘more discriminating’ method of killing and gains an edge, the rest will follow suit. They’ll sell it saying a drone would never accidentally kill a non combatant.
The naivety of suggesting the technology can’t be developed with the pace of change we’re witnessing is astounding. They certainly can make a micro railgun, probably already have secretly. And I doubt a micro drone needs much more current than a pacemaker provides, especially with an energy efficient SoC at the latest fab.
Fortunately, despite your unhinged and scientifically illiterate rant, the laws of physics still apply in the real world. It takes a significant amount of energy to get a weapons platform flying with useful range and speed. Do the math, and show your work.
As for a "micro railgun", that's just pure nonsense. You might as well claim that the military has secretly developed time machines or warp drives. Come on.
You're in no position to make promises about anything.
None of this is currently feasible not even partially.
It would have shock value if you did something half-assed with a drone swarm but then you should be very careful that your drones or deployment mechanisms aren't traceable back to you.
It would be pretty difficult to trace a silent, transparent, palm sized micro drone, hopping over the ocean for months in daily solar recharge cycles from San Francisco to Pyongyang. You could even make it out of a flammable polymer to incinerate when exhausted of ammunition. I think it's highly feasible. Imagine going back to the 1920's and discussing the technicalities of the ICBMs of the 60's. You'd be laughed out of the bar and into the asylum. But commonly accepted today. And still not feared for a fraction of its potential. But drones are an order of magnitude more dangerous, because they can be anonymous.
Normally sending armaments to a rival/enemy isn't a smart move, because they are no longer under your control, they are under the control of the other party; and should be counted under their assets for belligerent purposes. The point is, is that assumption still valid for autonomous drones?
If it hasn't been mentioned, check out The Kill Chain by Christian Brose.
Obviously Anduril is great in this arena, but also Epirus on using microwave tech to eliminate these threats.
Off-topic: I bought a drone in the US, during a recent visit. I live in Italy. I cannot use my drone here because of some BS from the drone manufacturer.
I hate how drone companies essentially dictate many things that don't make any sense, such as the above one.
I wish there were an open-source firmware, or something, to allow us to use them more freely.
Yes. There are a couple point defense systems originally designed to counter rocket and cruise missile attacks that can readily attack drones as well. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5_F4_Eod8 This specific system uses a magnetic coil to measure the muzzle velocity of the shell as it's leaving the barrel, and sets a timing delay for the shell to burst. So that combined with the radar means this thing can put flack in very precise places.
Drones, especially repurposed commercial drones are extremely fragile. Almost anything will work. It's the getting close to it that matters - with what? Another drone?
I feel like a sustained blast from screaming directed spy-1 radar ought to do the trick. Not sure why that isn't also a strategy for hypersonic missiles
Very short range. Requires many people for every km of defended line. Overwhelmed with numbers. Drones can avoid it with altitude.
Overall, an expensive solution unless you happen to have thousands of bored soldiers who have nothing else to do (which is sometimes the case for some militaries).
So Lockheed recently showed video of its laser weapon. as the technology matures I assume energy consumption will drop, and intercepting drones or anything is no longer limited by number of misses, drones, or ammo but energy. Imagine nuclear aircraft carriers pumping an indefinite amount of energy at least in the short term into multiple lasers basically creating an energy barrier around the craft.
Suppose you have five lasers on your nuclear aircraft carrier, they have 20km range, they need five seconds on target to destroy it (plus an insignificant amount of time to switch to the next target), and your radar/OpenCV/whatever is good enough to detect all the incoming drones. Suppose they go 200 km/h (56 m/s), which is a pretty leisurely clip for aircraft. If they all come into range at the same time, you have six minutes to burn them all up.
In this scenario it takes 361 drones to land one on an aircraft carrier, sinking it unless the attacker totally fucks up. If they're like these Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones the article says have destroyed 750 land vehicles (I guess in the Ukraine war alone?) that cost US$5M each, that's US$1.8 billion dollars to sink the aircraft carrier. That's not too bad; you can build a new aircraft carrier for US$9 billion or so.
But what if the drones cost US$5000 each? Or US$50? Or what if they travel at mach 2? Or are submarines, like loitering torpedoes or guided mines?
It may be more economical to just send drones to the country where the aircraft carrier is from to kill the family members of its military officers, or at least the ones who don't cooperate.
Although I have no particular love for US foreign policy and military adventurism, I fear we are passing out of a period of relative peace and entering a period of extreme unpredictability. There is no guarantee that the new stable equilibrium will have states or civilization in it.
So, in your described scenario, drones are functionally no different than a missile barrage, except slower, cheaper and maybe easier to deploy. So:
- Effective countermeasures already exists against this kind of threats, like CIWS.
- Carriers don't exists in a vacuum, there are a lot of other systems in a modern carrier group.
- Just like launching a missile barrage, deploying the tens/hundreds of thousands of drones is going to be quite the logistical achievement, especially bringing it in range of a modern carrier group, designed to project force against threats hundreds of kilometers away.
- Drones have significant range/projection issues. The Bayraktar, at $2M a piece, has ~300km of range and can only bear a very small payload designed to engage armored ground targets, nothing that would threaten carriers or destroyers, even deployed en masse.
- The bigger the range, the bigger the payload, the bigger the size/costs. The effectiveness of your drone swarm is always limited by this equation. Millions of small aliexpress drones bearing the equivalent of a hand grenade are not going to do anything against a carrier provided it can be deployed at all. You would need to be <10km away due to their range limitation and at this stage, there are already fighter jets and destroyers sitting on top of you.
- No single munition under the kiloton order of magnitude will sink an aircraft carrier. For a drone or anything under the scale of cruise missiles/MOAB, this means nuclear. Hand-grenade sized nuclear explosives in drone swarms? I wish! But to quote the fantastic game Highfleet, once you get the genie out, you cannot put it back in the bottle. If you plan to bring nuclear weapons to a war, everybody already has ICBMs.
tl;dr: Drones swarms don't disrupt the current status quo: Nothing except nuclear attacks or another modern carrier group will defeat a modern carrier group in a single engagement. The usefullness of drone swarms is not against modern carrier groups but small-scale asymmetrical engagements, such as the guerilla operations currently carried in Ukraine or in Syria, in which small drones are incredibly effective weapons. This is still a big deal, as it is the most likely form of conflict we're going to see in the rest of this century, not full-on peer-to-peer conflicts between superpowers.
Yes, a drone is the same thing as a cruise missile, so a drone swarm is precisely a missile barrage. But I think you're missing two key points.
First, you're underestimating the importance of things being cheaper. Consider that an iPhone is basically a Cray Y-MP with packet radio, just cheaper. But in the 01980s could you have looked at a Cray and KA9Q and predicted Uber, sexting, revenge porn, Instagram influencers, Russian trolls on Twitter working to influence US elections, and Bitcoin?
In the same way, reducing the cost of a cruise missile from US$2M (Block V Tomahawks) to US$1000 will change the military situation not just in degree but in kind. Current CIWS are designed for gunboats and conventional cruise missiles appearing in groups of 1-16. Current carrier group defense in depth is designed for fighter-bombers that appear in groups of 16-128. They will not be useful against drone swarms that appear in groups of even 256, let alone 1024 or 8192.
Second, you're thinking of brute-force payloads like hand grenades, and that leads you to drastically underestimate the importance of small drones penetrating. But hand grenades are the epitome of dumb weapons: they have a timer, no guidance, and just a fragmentation charge. A US$1000 drone that manages to make it to a carrier deck does not have to be as dumb as a hand grenade. Instead, think of it as being like a frogman who has successfully boarded an enemy ship on a suicide mission, but lost almost all his equipment in the process. How much damage could he do before he gets killed? What if, instead of one frogman, it's 1024 frogmen? What if they're almost invisible?
Frogmen can short out wires, gather intelligence, plant bugs, pierce jet engines, set fires, cut throats, plant claymores, poison food, distract sentries, jam signals, booby-trap small arms, breach reactor containment, disable reactor coolant circuits, release potent poison gases deep below deck, falsify sensor readings, extinguish indoor lighting, frag sleeping sailors, and interchange fuels with solvents. And so can drones: if not today, 20 years from now.
> Nothing except nuclear attacks or another modern carrier group will defeat a modern carrier group in a single engagement.
I have little interest in discussing drone swarms (so does the article to be fair - a good two thirds are strictly about drones which could as well be by themselves) but this statement is simply untrue.
It’s highly likely that a large number of sea skimming missiles would defeat a carrier group. So would a submarine intelligently positioned. The ability of a group to counter a strike from high altitude is also very questionable and let’s not mention the very real anti-ship ballistic missiles.
Carriers really are a technology of the past for symmetric conflicts.
>It’s highly likely that a large number of sea skimming missiles would defeat a carrier group.
I agree. But the only platform able to consistently engage a carrier group with this kind of firepower is another carrier group. Land-based artillery can be kept out of range or engaged using the force projection of the carrier.
>So would a submarine intelligently positioned.
Submarine capabilities are some of the most well-kept military secrets of the world. There is no way to assert that. In modern doctrines, they are mostly used for intel and as a platform for launching ICBMs, so I would really not bet on that.
>The ability of a group to counter a strike from high altitude is also very questionable and let’s not mention the very real anti-ship ballistic missiles.
That is true. Spamming ICBMs could work, and they don't need to be nuclear to defeat a modern carrier group :)
>Carriers really are a technology of the past for symmetric conflicts.
This is absolutely and provably false. No systems allows for the force projection that a carrier group afford. France was able to deploy & support an incredible amount of power from the Charles de Gaulle against the Islamic State. No other system could have achieved that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_aircraft_carrier_Charle...
There is no question that a modern offensive submarine could sink a carrier. Theoretically a carrier group should be able to detect it but it’s a very real threat.
The exemple you give for the relevance of carrier is not a symmetric conflict. Thankfully the equipment available to the Islamic State was garbage compared to what a modern army can do.
In a conflict between for exemple the US and China, carriers would be useless. They would probably be amongst the first things to be targeted.
>Effective countermeasures already exists against this kind of threats, like CIWS.
Phalanx has a magazine of 1,550 rounds, and each burst fires 100 rounds. Firing continuously, it would expend its magazine in 20.6 seconds. Firing perfectly, (with no hostile ECM) it could splash fifteen incoming targets.
As the threat had evolved, the US Navy has started phasing out the Phalanx CIWS and replacing it with various RIM-116 (RAM) launchers. These are much more capable against high-speed maneuvering targets.
But realistically the limiting factors for point defense are more likely to be detection and engagement range rather than magazine depth. Hence the focus on layered air defense including longer range missiles, countermeasures, and decoys.
A carrier move with a large screen of ships, each bringing their own missiles defenses, plus pans with their own missiles that are likely to pick up and shoot stuff large enough not to be launched in range of the carrier group suppression zone
An actual attack intended to overwhelm point defenses would be a single wave, obviously. There wouldn't be any chance to reload anything. Whatever you have in the magazines and VLS cells at that moment would be all you get.
I agree with most everything you say here about the limitations of drones, but there's a high likelihood that current aircraft carriers are quite vulnerable to anti-ship missiles. A DF-26 costs ~$10M, so launching several at a carrier, though expensive, would still be massively cost-effective in a real war. This article on WotR discusses the threat a bit more (I don't have an opinion on the solution/approach it advocates for the US military): https://warontherocks.com/2020/06/when-it-comes-to-missiles-....
My comment wasn’t this serious but I don’t think any munition that can damage an aircraft carrier will be that cheap. Also im no expert but with more energy isnt the distance at which the heat from the laser remains effective becomes longer right? So if the tech is truly mature isn’t 20km a bit naïve also what if each laser system is an array of lasers with independent movement maybe 10-20 laser per system this configuration will definitely out power drones at the scale you speak of. The future is hard to predict.
> any munition that can damage an aircraft carrier will be that cheap
It's all about targeting smarts and precision! This has been well demonstrated in Ukraine, where GPS-guided missile artillery can simply "reach out and touch someone" 50 miles away.
Even tiny drones could do fantastic damage if precisely targetted using on-board AI. They could target personnel, fuel, electrical equipment, optics.
Don't think about a 50kg bomb dropped on the deck. Think of a swarm of 500g drones with 100g shaped charges making a beeline for the control tower, and the engine intake of every parked plane.
There is probably a place for hydrogen filled (electrolysis[1]?) blimp drones[0], although needs height since blimps are slow and large targets, so perhaps fixed wing always more useful. Deploy when wind is favourable?
Think of them as smart cluster bombs. A ballistic missile warhead could release a cloud of these things kilometers above a ship. They could drop passively and power up just a few tens of meters above the target.
If you don't think drones of the future will be the most horrifyingly effective weapons of war, you lack imagination.
Surely you are joking. If a hostile can get a torpedo that close to the target without being detected, they would just use a ordinary torpedo and warhead instead.
Maybe the ordinary torpedo with a warhead is too large and visible on radar. The drone torpedo could be much smaller, maybe the size of a common fish in the area. Maybe you have a bunch of them herded together traveling under water in the same manner as a school of fish might appear on radar.
Torpedoes aren't visible on radar, you mean sonar.
You're not going to sink a ship with 500g explosive fish-shaped torpedo-launched drone things. This plan boils down to a really weird and elaborate method of throwing hand grenades at a super-carrier until it sinks. This whole line of discussion is absurd.
I think that beyond 20km the horizon is between the laser and the drone. Maybe aircraft-mounted lasers could defend the carrier over a wider area.
If each drone costs US$50 then you can launch 180 million drones for the cost of an aircraft carrier. I don't think increasing the number of lasers from my 5 to 10-20 is going to help much.
I don't know what is needed for a munition to damage an aircraft carrier, but I feel like once it's on the deck it's already past the strong defenses and into the soft targets. It could be as simple as a wheeled robot that runs around stabbing random people, or a poison gas canister that fills the interior of the ship with mustard gas, or hundreds of hand-grenade-sized mini-claymores that deploy to random parts of the ship and conceal themselves quietly until a sailor happens to walk by.
> If each drone costs US$50 then you can launch 180 million drones for the cost of an aircraft carrier.
In a world of frictionless pulleys and spherical cows yes, in the real world, no. In the real world aircraft carriers and their attendant battle groups do not just park within visible range of a coast. Your drone swarm needs to find the carrier's battle group, get within launch range for your $50 drones (without being shot down), maintain some sort of identification of the carrier (or whatever ship), and then make a terminal approach.
A carrier's air group maintains a perimeter hundreds of miles away from the carrier group. Not just fighters flying CAP but AWACS planes keeping track of the airspace. No one is going to hide a million drones launching towards a carrier group. It would be unlikely hide even a hundred drones. A drone carrier large enough to launch a non-trivial number of suicide drones is also unlikely to go undetected.
Even if everything went right and someone managed to damage an aircraft carrier with a drone swarm, the carrier group alone has enough land attack weaponry to seriously hurt the source in retaliation. A nuclear response to an attack of a US carrier would not be outside the realm of possibility either.
Attacking a US carrier group is a really dumb idea even if you've got a really clever weapon.
You don't have to hide the million drones if the carrier group doesn't have enough firepower to destroy them all before they reach the carrier.
But you might be able to, if they're small enough. Or underwater.
If you can provoke nuclear retaliation, you win twice, at least to the extent that anyone can "win" a battle nowadays: first, you sink Enemy A's carrier (or, more realistically, permanently incapacitate it), and second, you draw Enemy A's nukes onto Enemy B's territory where you launched the drones from.
Shaped charges can blast a sizable hole through any material, likely big enough to fly the next drone through. Only so many hits to get through a hull.
Yeah, in a realistic scenario, if the carrier can take out 360 drones before the drone wave reaches it, the adversary would launch 700 drones, not 361. I hadn't even thought about hitting the carrier in the same place over and over again. But supposedly carriers aren't even designed with thick armor?
Nope, ain't that thick (< 1 inch). Probably built with multiple expendable flood chambers though, so swarm would likely need to make its way through the first hole. Plausible a single shaped charge does enough damage, but more likely some single-digit of hits needed.
At (wild overestimate) $1k per drone an attacker can wield 13 million drones for the equivalent cost of an aircraft carrier, not including ongoing expenses.
The sort of shaped charge you could put on a thousand dollar missile could probably pierce small holes in the hull of a ship (too small to fly anything through, that is fantasy. Shaped charges are bigger than the holes they make.) But even hundreds of holes like that that wouldn't sink a ship. Not least because the ship is filled with sailors trained in damage control, and that sort of damage wouldn't be particularly hard to patch up.
Clearing the flight deck with antipersonnel warheads would probably work better, but I wouldn't count on that to keep a carrier out of action for very long. If you really want to sink a ship, either use proper anti-ship warheads or don't bother trying.
If drones are so magically cheap, the carrier deploys its own magically cheap defensive drone swarm to protect itself when attacked by drones and remains unscathed.
Yeah, that's the future I'm pointing to: the aircraft carrier itself is no longer militarily relevant, because what counts are the drone swarms.
But there's no particular reason to expect that this future will be a Mohist one in which peace is ensured because magically cheap defensive drone swarms make every fortress impregnable and thus combatants' home territories always remain unscathed; at least as likely is a Second Variety future in which drone swarms are more effective for attack than for defense, perhaps even after all the human combatants are dead.
Would expect this to be the dominant countermeasure in the case where drones are a significant threat, yeah.
Though actually I'm coming around to the idea that a bunch of AI-targeted flak guns are sufficient, and that carriers are probably fine either way due to how close a series of missiles containing the swarm would have to get anyway.
Imagine you had a drone that could dive to the ocean floor, pick up a chunk of rock, fly up one foot above the deck and drop the rock, then fly back down and repeat. Imagine you had 10 thousand of these swarming a single aircraft carrier. You'd be able to sink it before long, and the poor sailors aboard will have no defence against 10 thousand tiny machines that only appear for a second and are all around the ship. Anything you fire at them is liable to damage the ship itself.
Maybe you wouldn't even need to have them come above the water line. Maybe the drone is just a weight and a magnet that can clamp onto the ships haul below the water line. Again, you can't combat that without having thousands of divers below your ship scraping the hull.
If someone had the technology to make a drone able to dive 3.7km to the bottom of the ocean, had enough strength to bring back a rock and then propel itself 40m above the surface and keep that small, your scenario would be the least of my worry.
Anyway, if you are in position to bring something close to a carrier from underwater, an heavy torpedo will do the job for a lot less money that your swarm.
Imagine you had a drone that could dive to the ocean floor, pick up a chunk of rock, fly up one foot above the deck and drop the rock, then fly back down and repeat
If we suppose we have to stack 100'000 more tonnes of rock on top of a 100'000 tonne displacement aircraft carrier to sink it, and the ocean is 2 km deep at that point, it takes about 1.96 terajoules at 100% efficiency. At 46 MJ/kg that's 43 tonnes of gasoline. That is a ridiculously small amount of energy to sink a carrier; it's maybe a large gas station.
Of course the question is open: how efficient would the rock-stacking drones be? If they're 50% efficient the scale of the operation is different than if they're 0.05% efficient.
Seems that energy will need to be expended in both directions, given that you're working in the opposite direction of the usual diving practice where a weighted diver sinks to the bottom and releases ballast to come back up. Is that being accounted for?
Also, I imagine somebody will notice this rock-stacking activity at some point over the (days? weeks?) it will to swamp the aircraft carrier, and take care of the problem with plain old birdshot. Or just a bunch of sailors with brooms or fire hoses.
Failing that, just cruise away from the drone swarm. They'll run out of gas long before the carrier runs out of U235.
It's easier to change your buoyancy by releasing ballast, but that's not the only option, or the best option in this context. You can instead adiabatically expand a vacuum space (for example, in a cylinder with a piston) against water pressure to go from negative to positive buoyancy.
100'000 tonnes is 100 million kg, so for a million drones it would be 100 dives.
I agree that stacking rocks on the deck of a carrier, or even gluing or magnet-clamping them to its hull, is probably not the most effective way for drones to damage it. Firing birdshot at sailors, for example, would be more effective; blinding them with lasers more effective still. The point is that even ridiculously primitive attacks become effective when you multiply them by enough orders of magnitude.
Payload size and speed are major consideration for unit price. Besides there already are standoff autonomous munitions, we have had missiles carrying their own guidance hardware for more than fifty years now, and if you want speed, rocket will definitely beat propellers
Tldr you've built an argument on top of a triad of features that actually are more of a 'pick two' deal.
Small imperfections on a reflective surface will absorb energy, heat up, and cause damage, causing more imperfections which absorb even more energy and heat even more rapidly. Positive feedback loop. The emitter gets around it by keeping the beam diffuse and focusing it onto the target downrange; you can very reasonably field a laser with a half-meter aperture and a one-centimeter spot size.
Dispersal requires consumables. You leave consumables behind when you move and you have to move because the laser can keep going indefinitely, so it's a losing proposition. Consumables are heavy and limited.
You can't just have a drone deploy a reasonable enough mirror that tracks the beam wherever it goes? So what if there is an imperfection if the drone is cheap and you can have a replacement come online instantly behind it with a fresh mirror. If it costs less energy to make the drone than it does to fire this high powered laser downrange, you win the war over time.
I'm not an expert in laser systems but just from my layman's understanding:
A polished mirror surface might slow the heat build up a little bit but the best mirrors on the planet will still heat up if you're throwing enough energy at it; no mirror has a 0% absorption rate.
What's more, any imperfection on the surface will act as an focal point for the heat to build up; a spec of dust, a dew drop, a little oil from your fingertip, anything that can absorb the heat from the laser basically turns it into a hot spot that the laser will burn through rather quickly.
A mirror is like a trampoline, there is a limit to how much it can reflect before it breaks. Or an electric circuit if you want a closer comparison, at low loads you wont notice any problems but as you turn up the voltage it will start to absorb energy and at high enough levels it will break.
China recently launched an autonomous drone "carrier" that can deploy and recharge air and sea drone swarms .. 60+ flying and speedboating idependant objects that can criss cross, confound, change course, and shepard the one or several bombs to target.
Yes. And generally speaking, the term 'drone' is dumb and should be avoided because everybody gets weird ideas about what it means. It started as a pun, applied to a radio controlled aircraft rigged as a gunnery target, designed to fly once before dying like a drone bee. In just about any case where you might say "drone", there is a more precise and self-explanatory term you could use instead. For instance
“Drone” is a perfect name for these wee, buzzy, soulless, robotic horrors…
Thanks to its big eyes, a drone spots a queen in the melee. It zeroes in and grabs her. Mating is completed in less than 5 seconds, during which the drone’s endophallus is turned inside out into the queen and inflated by haemolymph under high pressure. As haemolymph rushes into his endophallus, the drone loses control of his body and falls back, unable to move. Ejaculation happens at such speed and force that it can be heard by people as a ‘popping’ sound.
Alas, these amorous moves will not end well for the lucky suitor. His endophallus breaks off, leaving its extremity inside the queen. The drone dies shortly after.
the one distinguishing difference is loitering capability of a drone.
most missiles are not capable of loitering today. But i guess if missiles of tomorrow start getting such capabilities, then the line between a drone and a missile might blur even more.
Relative stealth, cost plus response time? Imagine a soldier designating a target and one drone of the loitering swarm automatically locks on and suicides into it, no human interaction required.
Also would be a lot cheaper than maintaining a ship or AC130 on station.
Can't you already send a missile from thousands of miles away in mere minutes though? That way, your "loitering" swarm in this case (really just a missile silo) can be maintained in an area that is more secure than overhead of the enemy at all times where it could potentially be engaged before you use it to designate targets.
Sure, but sometimes the bad guys move within minutes, and missiles are terribly expensive. I'm thinking more on a tactical level, like a swarm of super long range, relatively cheap on-demand precision hand grenades that the soldiers wouldn't have to carry, could strike targets at a distance in seconds due to locality, and could fly around corners and through windows if necessary. And the unused drones can potentially be retrieved when the engagement is complete.
Of course if the enemy has technological countermeasures to such a thing then it becomes a different issue, but you can say that about any technology.
Drones normally have wings, or quad (or more) rotors. Powered by batteries or gas, fly rather slowly, can loiter, can collect intelligence, and have a human in the loop for target selection.
Missiles typically have zero or minimal wings, powered by a rocket or at least a turbine, fly quickly (500 mph and up), can't loiter, can't collect intelligence, and generally don't have a human in the loop after being fired.
Rocket engine, turbojet, pulsejet, ramjet, scramjet.. I don't think missile implies a form of propulsion. Before WW2, both America and the UK experimented with propeller powered cruise missiles too.
Don't take it the wrong way, but I just have to laugh. This is how children think.
How are you going to fix this with a law? The whole problem arises because drones are easily hackable and the technology stack involved is cheap and open. Countries make them, what are you gonna do, sanction them? You could build a drone swarm in your garage and it will be harmless right up to the moment you choose to weaponize it.
Chemical weapons are a terrible parallel because while you don't necessarily need big industrial facilities, it's not that easy to conceal. But there is so much you can do with autonomous systems that's completely innocuous, in much the same way that you can't do a whole lot about cyberwarfare just by declaring it illegal.
I mean look the guy who assassinated Shinzo Abe; Japan is about the most law-abiding country going, guns are rare, and as an island it's super-easy to control imports and exports, so the guy just built one out of parts from the hardware store/garden center. Weapons are just not that hard to make, and if you're inclined toward lateral thinking the possibilities for drones are near endless.
To be frank I think a lot of military drone people are missing a trick because they have unrealistically large budgets to play with so demand these impressive but very expensive models that are designed to be part of an infantry loadout and deliver guaranteed kills from around the corner or through the hole of a pillbox.
It is "adult" thinking, I guess, to impugn the very idea of trying to steer the world away from obvious disaster through diplomacy and international cooperation. The thesis of drone warfare is that quantity has a quality all of its own. Bans and controls are effective at limiting quantity. Not 100% effective, but nobody asks this. All of everyday life holds the small chance of disaster. Being much less likely to die via drone attack is valuable even if the odd rogue attack succeeds.
> It is "adult" thinking, I guess, to impugn the very idea of trying to steer the world away from obvious disaster through diplomacy and international cooperation.
Unfortunately good intentions don't make bad ideas any better. Otherwise, let me propose that we solve world hunger by mailing everybody a free hotdog. A terribly dumb idea, but motivated by the best of intentions trying to solve the worst sort of problem.
What about the nation state actors that don't sign on to the pledge? Ukraine would be at a significant disadvantage if they were playing by these hypothetical rules but Russia didn't.
Same thing that happens when nation state actors decide to refine uranium to weapons grade: sanctions that kill the economy. These actually work pretty well when they are targeted at the oligarchy of a given nation state. This puts pressure on the state leaders who exist to serve the oligarchy to work to lift sanctions. The oligarch doesn't care about anything unless it makes them money, and by forcing them to lose money you shift incentives accordingly.
> Same thing that happens when nation state actors decide to refine uranium to weapons grade: sanctions that kill the economy.
You can't disarm America, Russia or China's nuclear weapons like that. The example of nuclear weapons only shows that cat like this won't go back in bags. The only way you'll get countries like this to disarm and renounce a class of weapons is if those weapons were never very good in the first place (e.g. chemical weapons) or were rendered obsolete by new sorts of weapons (battleships.)
It's very difficult, but still much easier to inspect processing facilities for illegal enrichment than it would be to prevent manufacturing of military drones.
Drones are increasingly used by civilians, and we see in Ukraine that consumer drones are being employed in military operations with little more than a software upgrade.
Arms control diplomacy has never managed to get everyone on board with full ratification all at once. Doesn't mean it doesn't make a difference, especially as the years go on. Using widely-banned weapons in a conflict has more-severe diplomatic repercussions than invasion by conventional means.
Up to a point. As far as nukes go, the main reason for having one is as a deterrent to conventional attacks. Sure, you can try to starve people out, but sanctions regimes often run out of moral legitimacy before their targets do. And countries like Iran or North Korea that are near to or in possession of a nuclear capability are not going to cast it away. Gaddafi did that and look how poorly it turned out for him.
I was tired when I wrote that last night and it doesn't explain my point of view well, so let me give you a more considered reply.
Firstly, the inevitability of the disaster is not at all obvious. Drone attacks don't scale in anything like the same way nukes do. Nor do kinetic attacks have the same long-term environmental hangover that nukes and chemical weapons do. Drone swarms are a potentially deadly problem for military elements and potentially political organs, but they excel at narrowly targeted objectives. They're not on the same level of existential risk to entire cities, unless we get into skynet territory with wholly autonomous factories and logistic chains.
What I'm saying is naive is the belief in technical (legal) methods. You write: Bans and controls are effective at limiting quantity but this is clearly not the case. Small arms trafficking is actually widespread despite all the hand-wringing, and efforts at gun control in the US are token at best.
They're ineffective partly because they are asinine and pursued in a childish fashion. Gun control as a policy objective is wholly reasonable, and I can give numerous arguments on its behalf. But in the US, the legal environment is ruled by the 2nd Amendment, whose language about how 'the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed' is so plain as to be inarguable. Gun control proponents really won't make any serious headway for the foreseeable future unless they try to repeal or rewrite this. None of them want to do that because it's a political non-starter. (Incidentally, this is not an argument for just giving up on the problem; a small tax on the sale of ammunition, with all revenue reserved for the medical or funeral expenses of shooting victims, is both politically and legally feasible imho).
My argument is not only about quantity, but versatility. I mentioned how easy it is to manufacture weapons. The sad reality is that if you could wave a magic wand and make all guns in the USA vanish immediately (or just privately held guns if you enjoy being pushed around by people in uniform), in a month's time you would have a gun problem again. It would be on a smaller scale - at first. But it wouldn't stay that way. It's costly to manufacture a really well-engineered gun, of course, but it's very very easy to manufacture a crappy gun that's Good Enough. You don't need a fancy workshop or a degree in mechanical engineering, as the Abe assassination showed. If you have some mechanical aptitude or admit the use of cheap and easily available tools, the emerging insurgency in Myanmar is making extensive use of 3d printed guns.
A less spectacular but increasingly widespread use of 3d printing is the manufacture of auto sears, a mechanical part that swapped into the trigger mechanism of a semi-automatic gun to allow fully automatic fire. It's really simple, just a lever with a particular shape about the size of your index finger. They're trivially easy to make and very easy to apply. The ATF charges people for selling them quite frequently, but let's be realistic: they are only finding the suckers who are so stupid/greedy that they advertise more or less openly. This is not such a huge problem in my view because most people who want to use one of these are into the novelty factor of shooting a high powered weapon for kicks. But you'd be foolish to assume that they're not proliferating wildly in certain circles just because of a few prosecutions.
Just as very basic hardware can be repurposed toward weapon manufacture, any computer with a network connection is theoretically a cyberattack vector. It doesn't have to be a super-clever or advanced cyberattack; you can trade off quality against quantity if you are just basically competent in python or shell scripting, and you can even get results with crude readymade tools like Low Orbit Ion Cannon.
So it is with drones. Weaponizing them is trivial; payloads don't need to be huge and the same technology that can save a life by dropping medical supplies can end one by dropping a hand grenade (both of these techniques are being used in Ukraine on a daily basis). Computer vision, maneuver, obstacle avoidance, communications etc. etc. can all enhance the capability of a drone swarm, but all those things have valid purposes too. Like a piece of steel tubing or a Raspberry Pi with Linux installed, it's not the device itself that's the problem but the purpose for which it is configured.
So I think it's childish to think you can legislate away drone swarming, the same way it's childish to think you can just legislate small arms or cyberattacks or drugs or protests out of existence. In the end, legislative solutions are just about making a really nasty example out of the few people you catch doing a Bad Thing and then hoping it scares everyone else into compliance. Once you lose legitimacy or people decide they don't care that much any more, it's useless. I'm emphasizing 'people' here because drone technology is so simple and accessible that it's not limited to nation states or large industrial concerns. Any garage could be a drone lab, any pickup truck can be a launchpad.
> The sad reality is that if you could wave a magic wand and make all guns in the USA vanish immediately (or just privately held guns if you enjoy being pushed around by people in uniform), in a month's time you would have a gun problem again.
This is just completely untrue, as demonstrated by various countries that have such bans in place. The ease of acquiring firearms is the primary driver of many people having firearms. Maybe one person in a hundred here will go to the trouble of acquiring a dumpy 3d-printed gun. Japan does not have a gun problem - one person going to huge effort to create their own gun is not a problem.
In general your thesis seems to be that ease/legality of acquisition & manufacture of weapons will have no impact on the quantity of weapons available, because technical workarounds exist. This is a fairly common point of view among technologists, or at least its analogue is often seen when a new service is announced - "you can already easily do this with [technically-complicated solution], so this new service is not needed". This point of view has a long track record of failure. Of course making something easier lets more people do it! Most people are really not that motivated to do things! Conversely, making something more difficult ensures fewer people will do it.
I think you're being unreasonably optimistic. Outlawing drones won't stop them. You'd have to outlaw general-purpose computers, and that law would still only last until the next war between great powers.
We did a pretty good job with chemical weapons. I realize that autonomous weapons have a couple orders of magnitude in specificity, range, stealth, etc. We don't have to just accept defeat.
Chemical weapons are little-used because they don't work very well, even compared to soldiers with bayonets, much less compared to the Bomb. Producing chemical weapons is very dangerous and requires large industrial facilities.
By contrast, precision-guided munitions make the Bomb obsolete (it's great at killing people but it's a comparatively crude means of coercion by comparison), and they can be produced inexpensively from widely available materials.
We should be planning how to preserve what we can from defeat.
There's also disputed allegations of chemical weapon use in Syria. I'm not sure why they've not been seen in Ukraine yet; I think we're back to "not actually that effective in open warfare".
The only people disputing the claims in Syria are idiots tbh.
As for why they aren't seeing use in Ukraine? They aren't very useful on the battlefield in most circumstances. Dan Kaszeta (a well regarded expert on the matter) has had a fair bit to say about this.
Chemical weapons are rarely used only because they are not very effective. If they were effective they would not be outlawed.
When we invent a version that will be practical to use, (e.g. small hard to notice drone capable to spray highly poisonous chemical right in enemy barracks) all the "success" in outlawing we had will instantly disappear.
They will be "banned" by the major powers who can afford sufficient defenses against them (US, Russia, China, etc), with periodic "terrorist" strikes by "unknown actors" with a pattern of only mild convenience to said major powers. Meanwhile these powers will maintain strategic reserves of the drones only ever used for training.
That is assuming there remains any defense against these drones by new or conventional warfare. This might be a legitimate threat to major military forces themselves at some point.
I don’t think you can do this anymore, cats out of the bag. I mean hypothetically anyone can kill someone with a drone right now and it would be pretty hard to track down who did it. Just have a drone with a gun or knife attached and fly down at the person as they leave the house. Have you seen FPV drones? They’re extremely responsive, fast and small. You could do it from miles away, even another country.
Yeah, the autonomous weapons cat left the bag decades ago. Acoustic homing torpedoes were first used during WW2, and became very sophisticated during the Cold War. Missiles that can be fired blind and left to find their own targets were also developed during the Cold War, like the (since discontinued) anti-ship variant of the Tomahawk. "Autonomous weapon" describes a lot of systems already in use. Banning them all is DOA in America, let alone in Russia/China/etc. They're too useful to ban.
America won't even sign the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines (because the American military considers them important in Korea.)
There’s a difference here though. Someone could decide to do something and have it ready to go the next day with a prime delivery and like a hundred bucks.
Anything like that is already banned for civilians (not that it will stop somebody clever and motivated enough..)
The question is whether the American government would accept banning itself from having autonomous weapons. I think they wouldn't; they're too useful and already normalized.
Once the world sees a few wars where the drones win, every country on earth is going to get them. They are cheap, can be made by university students, can be weaponized in a myriad of ways and can be deployed from far away (UAVs with a thousand drones, can deploy them thousands of kilometers) and they are disposable.
Silent drones with autonomous instructions, will be the ultimate booby trap.
A new weapon always begets new counter-weapons. They may provide sufficiently believable protection from the drones, though not all-encompassing. Wars may become somewhat bloodier and a lot scarier. In any case, I highly doubt drones would do much to end wars. Rifles, artillery and other super-killers of the 20th century certainly didn't.
NIKE was abandoned because it cost something like 10x more to shoot down an incoming missile than it took the Soviets to launch one.
And the Israeli iron dome is in an entirely different class, its hundreds of times too slow. Like trying to use a sling to shoot down a cruise missile.
Actually this is a very good example of why counter-drone systems will likely never deter expansion of drone capabilities. The costs to provide full protection are simply too lopsided.
Why spend a billion dollars to protect against 100 million dollars worth of drones when you could simply buy a billion dollars worth of drones in the first place?
Nuclear weapons can be countered by other WMDs, by cyberwarfare, by propaganda and misinformation, by economic warfare, and many more.
Once launched, nuclear weapons are difficult, but not impossible (see ABM defense systems) to counter, but there are many ways to counter their unlaunched effects.
Not just wars. Every conflict should make a pact about RoE to not use autonomous drones. The asymmetry is too high. There is no defense. The cost is asymptotic to zero.
Sadly, drones are so cheap that they can be used by anyone for any purpose.
We're lucky people haven't discovered yet how dangerous drone swarms can be. And as commercial delivery drones are allowed to fly the skies, many nameless drones can blend in among them.
Really a very dangerous future. Then again we also have nuclear weapons and the collapse of ecosystems...
The more history of war I read, the more I realize how much it ends up looking like iterations of games -- which is to say that, it's not like this scary ever-increasing destructiveness. Certain ways of doing war just seem to go in and out of fashion.
All to say, for better or worse, this all could be just as scary RIGHT NOW, but for whatever reason it isn't. No reason to believe "uh oh, here comes potentially scary tech, better try to blanket ban it now."
Sheer quantity can hit. Targeted shots are dodgeable with high probability from 3m+ distance. Whether this is economical to the defender vs the attacker is the question.
Hmm, you're thinking that if a gun is pointed at a drone and launching grenades at it at 500 meters per second, the drone can dodge the grenades with high probability if it's 3 meters or more away from the gun? 5 meters is 10 milliseconds, and the assured kill radius of the grenades is presumably at least 200 mm; for the drone to move 200 mm in 10 ms it needs to average 20 m/s in an unpredictable direction, which means it needs to accelerate to 40 m/s in 10 ms, 4000 m/s/s, 408 gees. How do you propose for the drone to accelerate at 400 gees, other than being hit by a bullet?
Forgive me, second-hand calculations with similar assumptions but which forgot the t^2 square root on d=1/2at^2. Reran them and you are correct.
Racing drones routinely do 6Gs. So ~60m/s/s acceleration. With your above assumptions that's then about a 40m distance needed for a drone to juke out of the way of the shot. Thank you very much that's an important difference.
I bet a trebuchet launching random scrap metal or rocks and debris would work just as well too. You can make one with some scrap wood capable of sending a watermellon hundreds of yards as it is.
some kind of bullshit. Terms "conflict" instead of war.
Promotion of DJI crap, while there are much better ones.
Naming aircraft without pilot inside called a drone.
Strong recommendation about switchblade, while switchblades got awful reputation in Ukraine, and instead used another weapons to kill occupants.
And the most awful thing - the topic created by served military.
Extremely vulnerable to jamming and other electrical warfare and thus not usable at the frontlines.
Ome can find out from public sources that Switchblades run their video and control 900MHz + 2.4GHz bands.
Which makes sense for a disposable product and likely worked fine in Afganistan. But against an adversary with jammers and other EW it will fare much worse. Still usable in the rear, as we have seen.
Hmm, I notice you mention LPI and resilience but not LPD (low probability of detection). Is DSSS maybe easier than FHSS for an adversary to detect on a waterfall plot and localize with phase correlation if they have a phased array? Or is it also suitable for LPD?
you probably actually can. On the hobbiest side I swapped out my 2.4ghz control radio w/ 900mhz in about 10 minutes, honestly the hardest part was zip tieing it in place. In most drones the actual radios are discrete components even many of the very tiny 'tiny woop' style drones. Snap the transmitter side into my rc controller's module slot, rebind and I'm back flying.
Now I'm not sure how a switchblade goes together, but I imagine it's even easier a field expedient way to swap frequencies seems pretty useful in a situation where jammers are in play.
suicide drone swarm is non-economical and is a pure waste of high tech electronics in an explosion.
HD surveillance drones on the other side, especially land based drones, like robotic dogs or sea drones. to execute forward observer role, provide realtime recon will be future. with precise targeting and intel - hitting high value target becomes trivial
> suicide drone swarm is non-economical and is a pure waste of high tech electronics in an explosion.
You state that very confidently, but give no reasoning at all.
A Javelin missile costs (IIRC) something like $100k. A Tomahawk cruise missile costs $2m. If you shoot more than one at a target (which I'm sure happens), you've got yourself a suicide drone swarm.
If you strap warheads to 5 COTS $1000 drones, and kill a tank with the swarm, that could be both 1) more economical than a Javelin, and 2) may even defeat some countermeasures (e.g. active ones optimized to attack a single threat, reactive armor designed to protect against a single hit).
The Carbon Cub surely can't carry nearly its own weight in payload. You'd probably have to scale it up by a linear factor of about 1.7, which would probably bring the cost to about US$1000.
Or you could launch the drone with compressed air or put a couple of solid-fueled rocket engines on it.
You probably won't sink an aircraft carrier with a Carbon Cub firing an RPG (retrofitted with guidance systems) but you should have a pretty good chance of blowing up a tank.
I disagree. Given a drone high enough that it can’t be shot down with anti aircraft cannons, it must be shot down with a missile. Make the payload powerful enough that it can create damage of much higher cost than the missile, and the defender will be forced to use the missile. Now, optimize these high altitude drones for the lowest cost, and send them in a swarm. Send them during cloud cover, and a land based laser will be ineffective. Coupled with a CRPA antenna, these GPS guided drones would be hard to stop. As long as you can produce these drones for cheaper than the defensive missile, the attacker wins.
conventional warfare is going lose to drones, no doubt about that. I am not sure about hybrid/proxy wars where line between civilian and enemy is blurred (afghanistan, gaza strip).
as powerful as it is, but you cant launch swarm of drones at civilian village which may host a couple insurgents.
the only true countermeasure against western military tech will become hybrid conflict, where entire civilian population is an adversary, where you cannot win by military means only.
Civilized countries can’t. But once this technology becomes more widely available, would Hamas hesitate to send a swarm of high altitude drone bombers into civilian populations? If ISIS had this technology, would they have hesitated to carpet bomb every city in their path?
The article doesn’t talk about suicide drone squad (I don’t blame you from not reading it. It’s obvious from reading the very poor comments that nearly no one did).
The article talks about swarm of small drones used in group for surveillance, cheap guided ammunitions and drones used as decoy and to do electronic warfare recon in advance of fighter planes.
Who the fuck cares about "drone swarms"? Americans already bomb civilians to death with their regular non swarming drones with superior range altitude, payload capacity and maximum flight time yet the classic hackernews comment revolves around some inferior plastic toy Jerry rigged with improvised explosives.
Because the regular non-swarming drones Americans use to bomb civilians to death, like the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper, cost over US$100 million each, and they can be shot down. This means that with a slaughter budget of US$10 billion you can only deploy 100 drones and you can only deploy them in areas that don't shoot SAMs at them. Maybe you can kill 10'000 people (each Hellfire missile costs US$150'000, so that's an additional US$300 million for 2000 of them).
If your inferior plastic toy jerry-rigged with improvised explosives costs US$1000 then for the same slaughter budget you can deploy 10 million drones and probably kill 100 million people, depending on how many murder missions each plastic toy survives. What's more important, though, is that your 10 million drones can kill 1000 precisely chosen people.
The article is about defense even of military assets/organizations, and concludes there is no great counter yet. The civilian threat is just a tiny cherry on top of all the other current civilian threats.
The answer to combating military armed drone swarms is simple:
Nuke the SOBs that use them.
Dead men/women/theys don't build, deploy or use armed drone swarms.
Nuking them, in the long run, will save more lives, cost less and end conflicts sooner.
Although it may not be PC to say it these days, the aim of war is to defeat the enemy as quickly as possible...and, like it or not, the most efficient way to do that is often to kill as many of them as you can as fast as you can.
Wake The Folks Up by telling them the ugly truth about war.
Good day.
Why nuke cities when you can just bomb factories with precision? We already have technology capable of sending a missile to a specific seat of a car. US military has been deploying missiles that just have big swords on them now because they are precise enough where they don't have to bank on a large explosion to ensure they hit their mark. If the enemy opted to shift manufacturing into homes or hide it otherwise, you could just have an agent on the inside who marks these targets from the ground and they are later destroyed with precision.
> Much, much more common in fiction (especially of the 'revenge fantasy' type) than in Real Life violence. To a strategist, overkill is Awesome, but Impractical because the risk of enemy survival is vastly outweighed by the certainty that you're spending a fortune in time, material, and (usually) manpower to ensure the enemy's death. The weaker and less numerous the target, the more wasteful overkill is.
I would add "or the more geographically dispersed" before "the enemy is".
