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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Looking ahead to the next 20-30 years of warfare, I've often thought that despite the fun we're currently having with aerial drones, a lot of the real drone future is going to be with autonomous ground drones, because of their ability to carry more armor, shielding, etc., without having to literally carry it into the air. Our current conception of a "drone" is really hard to bring up to military spec once this sort of countermeasure becomes militarily common.

I don't mean that air-based drones will be useless, I just think they're going to see more constrained missions than we might currently be imagining. And I do mean just the common conception of drones... things arguably properly described as "autonomous planes" will continue to be important and will probably continue to grow both in importance and in physical size.

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> Our current conception of a "drone" is really hard to bring up to military spec once this sort of countermeasure becomes militarily common.

This isn't really for drones. It's for frying ground-based electronics like cell phones. Drones are the smoke screen to hide that fact.

As for drones, motors and batteries are quite hardy against quick microwave pulses. A bit of aluminum foil makes a good, light Faraday cage. Optocouplers can isolate radio and GPS modules from the actual motor control systems.

I would expect you can fry an RC drone, but an autonomous one operating inertially or capable of switching so when radio/GPS goes away is probably pretty easy to shield.

In addition, this kind of system is always going to have a range vs width tradeoff. Can the drones get inside this thing's range where they can still be effective even if they are "ballistic"?

Dumb old bombs are really effective if you just give them a little bit of GPS to improve their accuracy. You don't have to get very close for the GPS adjustment to be devastatingly effective.

> This isn't really for drones. It's for frying ground-based electronics like cell phones. Drones are the smoke screen to hide that fact.

Or imagine a smaller system integrated on a humvee that can destroy electronics in anything along the path a few dozen meters in front and in a smaller side/side area. That'd end the IED threat from anything other than a purely mechanical IED (not sure if many of those are around anymore, as everything assumes electronics will work nowadays).

Nope, insurgents found a way around that a long time ago when convoys started including jammers. Hybrid detonation systems: radio arm the device outside of jamming range, mechanical switch detonated the IED once the vehicle triggers it.

Or they simply use long wire buried in sand.

I only saw that a couple of times, in one case we caught the guy - he still had the 9v in his pocket (why he'd keep it I don't know). If you watch their videos you see that they prefer to be much further back than what is practical with a wire commanded detonation. There were rumors of laser commanded detonators, but I doubt it happened enough to warrant any sort of countermeasures.

When my brother was doing Op-For at camp Irwin he used one of the sensors from a garage door for simulated IEDs. Pressure plates, lasers, motion sensors, you name it and it'll make something go boom.

This is why IEDs are so effective in asymmetric warfare. They are cheap and anyone can get parts =(

I assume you're talking about the safety beams that prevent the door from closing on obstacles. Have you ever had the door go down on command and then halt, without any obstacle in the way? They're very noisy sensors - lots of false positives, not the sort of thing you want to wire up a massive bomb. They also actively emit light, so not very stealthy.

The first time I saw the results of an IED blast was a day after I arrived in Iraq. I had to shake a tree in order to retrieve the trousers of the guy who blew himself up planting the thing. That happened a lot. Making IEDs isn't very hard, but making a lot of them without eventually blowing yourself up is.

Imagine - a mobile drone factory, digging itself in in the hinterlands, harvesting solar energy and water, producing mobile hydrogen-IEDs - the minefields of the future will be hard to undo.

This is pretty much the premise of Philip Dick's Second Variety, made into the movie Screamers.

Thanks for the tip. I didn't know that one had any kind of movie adaptation.

Screamers is surprisingly underrated. It's one of the best pop-sci-fi movies from nineties imho.

The ending to that story was particularly delightful.

Does that sound like a paperclip optimizer? Because it certainly looks like a paperclip optimizer. Think of it: eventually humanity goes extinct because the whole world is land mines...

arms race has it all taken care of - in response to autonomous IED making drones there will be autonomous drones clearing up the minefields and hunting down those IED making and installing drones. Of course to deal with the hunter drones the IED making/installing drones will have special protector drones ... Humans just need to relax in the deep soft chair and enjoy the popcorn.

Well if it's solar powered, we can easily take it out with an inexpensive sticky black paint bomb. Second, while you won't run out of water, you will run out of other stuff for your hydrogen IED drones.

Now a much better thing to do instead of making IED drones would be to melt sand or rock into appropriately formed projectiles so that one has an autonomous artillery piece that does not require reloading.

There are much better explosives to use than hydrogen. One could use the haber process to make ammonia and use some biological carbon sources to make pretty much any explosive worth using.

Landmines are probably cheaper though.

>>I've often thought that despite the fun we're currently having with aerial drones, a lot of the real drone future is going to be with autonomous ground drones, because of their ability to carry more armor, shielding, etc., without having to literally carry it into the air.

While I agree with the idea that there will be more fun ahead with ground-based drones, wouldn't an air-dominance doctrine still hold in drone-drone warfare as it exists today in conventional wars?

I imagine both ground and air drone warfare evolving at similarly terrifying rates over our lifetimes.

For someone who has been out for a hike and been startled by a rattlesnake a step away, I can imagine a terrifying world of small, ground-based area denial robots that spring to action faster than our reaction time can avoid them.

Like a mine with a brain.

As scary as that sounds, I feel it is better than the mindless landmines laying around from past wars. In theory, when the war is done you could hit the disarm or recall button unlike conventional mines.

Unless the drone mine gets hacked. It might even have a protocol to shield itself from a fuel-air bomb, which is a common form of mass-mine detonation.

I've never heard of a fuel-air bomb used for demining... APOBS is used a lot, and no matter how clever the mine is - it can't ignore a chain of explosives going off on top of it.

It's not objectively the best Sci-Fi I've seen, but I have a soft spot for Crichton's film "Runaway" which has some of that in it.

The Russians are focusing on ground based combat drones almost exclusively. Their air drones seem to be geared toward surveillance.

Because Russia's war will be next door and on the ground.

The US relies on air power tho if you look at BDA imagery released not a small percentage of the so called drone strikes are more likely than not to have been conducted by mannned strike fighters as drones can't carry things that would leave that big of a crater.

I think you're right. Once you factor in high efficiency solar panels (like the germanium ones in satellites) land based drones can infiltrate enemy territory and sleep for months or years until they're needed.

Sleeper photovoltaic cells?

For the next 20-30 years, drones will be built to fly above the range of such weapons and remain extremely effective.

No they won't there is an upper limit to flight and if by some means these drones would be closer to space than to the ground you put those weapons in space or on high altitude tethered platforms.

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