ISIS Drone Dropping Bomblet on Abrams Tank Is a Sign of What’s to Come
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
I guess this was inevitable as quadcopters and drones got cheap/mainstream, but still unsettling to see the high quality video recordings. And how does one defend against that? Suicide bombings of marketplaces or a shooting spree are bad enough, but at least the terrorists have themselves a deadly cost. Cheap 3D-printed drones dropping explosives from above are something else.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a24056/iraq...
> "The bombs have hand-painted numbers on them, and some of the components show a honeycomb structure which could mean they were 3D printed. If so, then insurgents may be able to share their designs over the internet and newcomers can print their own guided bomb without any experience."
EDIT: Full video is 38 minutes, found it here https://videos.files.wordpress.com/TneJgWZZ/isis-ninawa_hd.m...
Drone stuff seems to be towards the end.
I heard the British PM call them a "death cult" and I can't think of a better name for it.
As a kid I always found it weird going into any Catholic church (it was mandatory in my school) and always front and center you see a very life like statue of a person being crucified, always with added red blood paint. Taken out of context normal every things in human culture can be very weird. I'm happy that at least modern mainstream society has grown up away from ideas of religious martyrdom.
And Prince Charles: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35073768
With one's own drones, programmed to crash into the attacking drones kamakaze style, or maybe armed with mini gattling guns or other weapons to shoot down enemy drones in flight. Might also have the assistance of other drones flying higher in surveillance mode, like AWACS. All kinds of possibilities.
If the army can't figure out how to defend against a quadcopter, it would be an enormous opportunity for any RC hobbyist who happens to know or could learn a little machine learning.
A fishing net
Machine gun
A big fan
Camoflauge that fucks with their guidance
Fake GPS signals
bombing the facility arming them
a flock of birds
a foam gun
a flame thrower
...
Whatever happens to be handy.
One of the bigger worries was using IEDs and drones to deliver payloads to semi-secure locations, like data center power and cooling infrastructure. I know that exfiltration of information via drone was another worry, that came to light.
I don't think we will see 3D printing of drones and terrorists collaborating over the Internet on CAD files, as these platforms are manufactured cheaply, en masse in China.
I've always thought drone defense would be a massive industry. I don't think radio jamming will be a viable option to prevent an attack. Perhaps, GPS spoofing, but that has other side effects. You can't use projectiles safely, because of the potential for collateral damage.
I think we should I'll begin microwave and laser based weaponry for this. One of the most intriguing weapons is an Electrolaser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser. I believe that every US airport will need drone defense in ~10 years -- but alas, I've been saying that for the past few years.
also see: shotspotter.
I think the martyrdom aspect is as important as the actual terrorism.
"in the future, these cheap, highly available tool/toys turned into weapons will be used in greater numbers and, eventually, will feature autonomous flight coordination, also known as swarm technology."
Just picture a swarm of 50 or 100 drones suddenly emerging over a building and coming at you (or your tank) like a flock of killer bees. Note that they would NOT need conventional radio control from an observer station -- the kind of radio that currently you try to jam in order to disable a drone. All they need is to communicate between themselves, which could be done in a variety of ways, even optical (blinking IR light on the leader, etc).
This level of swarm AI could be implemented in a RPi right now.
Lastly, you know what suddenly becomes a lot more effective when you don't have to worry about getting killed by your own payload? Chemical weapons.
Main goal would be to sap morale: a few grenade-sized bombing runs and you force everybody to wear chemsuits under the desert sun.
Substitute your own favorite critical infrastructure, including freeways at rush hour.
First we see a winged glider being launched, but then we somehow switch to quadcopters dropping bombs with remarkable accuracy. I mean, they've even gone to the trouble of adding video game overlays at various points.
Please use as much skepticism with ISIS propaganda videos as you would with the next leaked video from Magic Leap.
The drones are not pinpoint accuracy they are apparently primarily being used as a diversion to attract the fire of Iraqi forces by dropping 40mm grenades near their position.
Can you cite one time ISIS has lied? They don't do that.
When they claim something, they have done it.
Unlike Magic Leap, we've seen ISIS's claims verified time after time.
Guys on the ground don't need anything fancy to take these things out. A medium machine gun would be just perfect.
Drone's also get to attack from above while typical RPG's have to attack the better armored sides.
Not just watching buildings for snipers and scouring the road ahead and beside them for IEDs, they now have to have attention aloft to see/hear drone activity as well.
Spreading (the) enemy attention is highly effective. And don't discount low power explosives. A couple of friends of mine who are in the army have said that most weaponry is designed to maim rather than kill. They explained that if you kill a soldier, you take one man out of the battle (and make his comrades angry & vengeful to boot). If you wound him badly - you take two men out - the wounded soldier, PLUS the guy who has to stop what he is doing to care for and patch him up.
But I do appreciate the irony that a weapon when wielded from one side is an effective platform for swift and immediate justice & retribution, but when eventually wielded by the opposing side, is suddenly an evil, sneaky and underhanded thing indeed.
They started flying a prototype in 2009, but I can't tell from public sources if they ever got it to work.
This was the (effective) VC strategy during the war in Vietnam.
And of course, most soldiers don't drive around in Abram's.
And definitely the danger is much higher for the less-armored trucks and the like.
And, yes, absolutely, defenses will be devised and the arms race will march on. In fact, once the US military gets really serious about this it could well swing back to advantage industrial-era military again; I'm not convinced this is a permanently-leveling sort of weapon. But at the moment it's at least a bit of a shakeup on the field.
Take, for example, the BLU-108 submunition [1] [2]. It deploys four independent "skeet" submunitions, each of which weighs 3.4 kg. The warheads themselves weigh less than 1kg.
The skeets are ejected from the BLU-108 dispenser with a high angular velocity, resulting in precession. They also deploy a retarding parachute. The precession causes them to "look" in a cone-shape of decreasing diameter as they descend (using passive infra-red and active laser sensors), and when they detect a valid target they fire.
These are designed to destroy tanks.
You couldn't just drop a skeet submunition from a drone -- you would need some way of giving it the required angular velocity. But if you're prepared to sacrifice the drone (which seems reasonable for destroying a tank), you could fix the explosively formed penetrator to the bottom of the drone along with a sensor package. Then you use the drone's own control authority to aim the weapon and detonate it when it's pointed at the target.
I'm not sure what the warhead's effective range would be, but probably somewhere between 10m and 100m. The payload for the drone would be around 3kg.
It should be noted that explosively formed penetrators don't require much technical sophistication to build and a cheap digital camera could be used for aiming.
It may seem seem surprising that such a small weapon can destroy a tank, but tank armour is optimized according to the expected threat environment, so armour is much thinner on the roof. Explosive reactive armour could probably defeat it, though.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_formed_penetrator
I doubt you could get a 3.4 kg submunition on that particular airplane. That's about twenty times what a grenade weighs, and that explosion was definitely more grenade-sized. They're going to have to scale this up quite a bit for it to be effective against armor. Not to mention a high tech submunition like that costs about eight grand in bulk and has to be spinning to work.
And they're not really designed to destroy tanks so much as render them combat ineffective by damaging the engine. You're not going to destroy a tank with something that small.
I see this as a problem, because many drones/UAVs can be configured with waypoints and "loss of connectivity" logic. You can configure drones to fly a set of waypoints and continue doing that, even if connectivity is lost.
This is really concerning, and I think the article points this out saying that countermeasures are way behind the attack vectors.
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2294-buda-s-wagon <- this book for more discussion on "poor man's air force"
Soon we will have counter drones buzzing around I'm sure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4PXou0aGiE
Above is a video of the Army's modified close in weapons system, it fires 75 rounds a second and is designed to shoot rockets and mortar shells out of the sky. Mortar shells and rockets move just a weeee bit faster than most drones.
We can't allow these savages to keep developing their capabilities, growing their numbers, and inspiring sympathizers around the world. The only option is to eradicate ISIS and similar groups from the face of the Earth. We must strike fear deep into the hearts of any who would think to do us harm.
Muslims are the primary victims of terrorists groups. They would be very happy to be rid of the likes of ISIS and Al Qaeda.
>That's more or less how we got here in the first place.
I don't agree. We got here because Western institutions and ideas were causing dramatic and rapid social change in the Muslim world, and inspired a violent counter-reaction.
How much money does Saudi Arabia etc spend on combatting these groups again?
We have our vision for what we want for the world and our nation, they have theirs. It's better for us if we win.
What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play. - WOPR (War Games)
You can kill people with violence, but an idea will only grow stronger.
Is there something specific about this happening that you think advances your point?
"Yet the hard truth is that the Department of Defense has had plenty of time and warning to do just that. In fact, they spent many millions of dollars looking at the problem, but no hard action was really taken to develop countermeasures, which makes their scramble for countermeasures now all that more frustrating. "
If they wanted a clean win, then countermeasures would have been researched already.
Instead, in 2017 we get articles about how "drone warfare is just the beginning of things to come". Instead it should have been "Opponents attempt drone warfare, subverted by 10 years of defensive research revealed today".