Major Saudi Arabia oil facilities hit by Houthi drone strikes
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It seems that we may be seeing a similar transformation with weaponized robots. Not just planes, but ships, tanks, trucks, and even submarines.
The US is leading the way here, with its ongoing, active drone warfare program:
https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/
But unlike nuclear weapons, the barrier to entering the drone club is much lower. Poor countries and even non-state entities can play.
The strike against Saudi Arabia also hints at the enormous leverage possible when automated warriors are used with the goal of economic strangulation.
As such, this attack may be a preview of a world in which automated killing machines rework power relationships between countries rather suddenly.
I think drones are the future of warfare, which means you are limited not by the number of soldiers you can field, but by your manufacturing and resource base ( and how well you can protect it.) To be fair, that's been at least partially true since the second World War, but now it will be the dominating factor.
However, it shouldn't change the balance between major powers, because conflict with major powers will almost certainly end in nuclear annihilation.
Even if it starts without nukes, the loser may soon see it as their only option. So I hope this means war between major powers is no longer possible. You wouldn't know it the way China and the US posture though. Or more ominously India and Pakistan.
I doubt that those existing Yemeni drones use any radionavigation or remote control to begin with, as it looks to be a certain overkill for the task.
All their targets so far were big stationary targets, and there are all signs that they all use simple time (and not position) programmed maneuvers.
I don’t know much about drones but I have a pilots license and in my opinion it would be extremely hard to have forecast winds aloft accurate enough to reach a target hundreds of miles away with only time and vector information as the inputs.
They aren’t ballistic missles, going thousands of miles an hour, they’re going to be affected by wind.
They’ve got to be using GPS positioning too I would think. Why wouldn’t they?
And unlike with early ICBMs, precise accelerometer and airspeed inputs can provide quite good measure of lateral forces.
Were they had a satellite, or used HF comms, somebody would've either timed the satellite, or spotted the HF signal long ago. And there were no sign of a huge satellite dish one needs to communicate to satellites in high orbit in found drone remainings.
On some podcast (Malicious Life?) I heard an interesting take on this. Short version: cyber war is not yet real war because attribution is too difficult to justify irl bombs.
So, if the barrier to entry in drone attacks is sufficiently low, could not a nation outsource some tactical operations to controllable private entities in order to obfuscate the origin of the attack? This, I would think, is plausible if the goal is to cause damage, rather than to demonstrate national prowess.
In this scenario, nukes would not be a sure deterrent.
The drones as I understand are similar to what is described here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Ababil
How can the Houti rebels fly 10 drones hundreds of kilometers into Saudi territory? How do they pilot them? It must be a very expensive attack to undertake compared to forms of "asymmetric" warfare (say a car bomb).
They started on their drone journey buying cool consumer drones on aliexpress for $100 or so and modifying. They have access to the internet and enthusiast blogs and have rapidly grown their industry. Obviously unlike quadcopters they don't rely on wifi but rather use other RF bands. These people have lived there in the desert for tens of thousands of years. They are smart people and able to understand and improve on designs.
It's not particularly sophisticated, liek on the Manhattan Project level requiring state backing. There are kids doing this stuff for fun without their parents even realizing.
How many people in a 1000 mile diameter from a sensitive target could be motivated enough to build such a device and launch them simultaneously? Depending upon the fanaticism, I could imagine 10,000 of these drone, all swarming in from every direction, from every altitude, overwhelming any defense. How does a society defend themselves from such an attack? With such a swarm, the final 500 yards from a target is covered in 30 seconds. I don’t know of anything that can stop 10,000 RF shielded drones in 30 seconds. That dystopia is our future.
When groups felt wronged, they “voted from the rooftops”. Now they will be able to anonymously vote from their basements.
Currently that number is extremely low. It will remain low until 3D printing is a complete zero-effort solution - which is going to take a very long time.
The reality is that this kind of open source terrorism is an incredibly unlikely threat. Numerically there are almost no terrorists, and the terrorists that do exist have almost no engineering skills.
Weaponised engineer terrorists would be a scary thing, but they don't exist in non-trivial numbers. And unless something very bad happens, that's unlikely to change.
As for the drone scenario - it's not exactly stealthy. At 50mph there's roughly 20 hours of warning - plenty of time to put up drone catcher nets, or even launch a suicide drone swarm.
It's not that drone attacks aren't a threat, but they're going to need to be more robust than anything a DIY off-the-server design can produce for some time to come.
How hard is it to build a Qassam rocket? Over 2000 were launched in 2008. I expect this type of drone would take the same level of engineering skills once the kinks were worked out.
As for the stealth factor. Let’s assume the drones are launched evenly throughout the 1000 mile diameter range, all at the same time. That’s a search area of 3M sq miles, or one drone every 3000 sq miles. Half way through the journey, with T-10 hours, all drones in the swarm could be evenly distributed in 785k sq miles, with one drone every 785 sq miles. An hour away, they’re all in a 7850 sq mile search area, or one drone every 7.8 sq miles. 5 minutes out, still a search area of 54 sq miles, and the drones are spaced out by over 1000 feet. 1 minute out, they’re all a bit less than a mile from the target, but up to 6000 feet up. An army of 10,000 soldiers armed with AR-15s couldn’t hit the drones at this point. 30 seconds out, the drones are 3000 feet up and still out of range. 10 seconds out and the drones are 1000 feet up, barely within range, but it doesn’t matter because they’re all on a terminal trajectory. Now you’re trying to shoot 10000 armed hand grenades falling from the sky. Good luck.
As for drone catcher nets? Let’s say half the drones are each armed with 1 pound of thermite, and ignite during a terminal trajectory from 1000 feet. What’s going to stop 5000 lbs of thermite followed by 5000 lbs of tnt?
These drones can climb to a few thousand feet, and weigh around 10 pounds. Can you visually identify such a drone versus an eagle? At night? When they’re 1000 feet away - 10 seconds from impact?
Can you hear them at 5000ft? 10,000ft? The same RC hobbiest who flew 1888 miles also set an altitude record of 26k feet.
Or they could fly at 50 feet above the ground, obscured by trees. Dismissed as your neighbor flying his RC plane, too low to be seen by radar, and looking like a cell phone in a car for all RF purposes.
Such a swarm goes from almost invisible to the explosive power of an F/A18 in seconds.
Besides the radar signature of a half pound engine, how else can they be detected? They have the same RF signature of a common cell phone.
I can 3D print amazing RC planes in 24 hours. Are they capable of 1888 mile range? No. That took an expert thousands of hours to perfect. But you can probably get an electric powered 3D printed plane capable of flying 50mph for an hour - today. Tomorrow maybe for two hours. In a decade, maybe 4.
Iron Curtain currently has 10-15 batteries at four launchers per battery with 20 interceptors per launcher. So, 800-1200 interceptors.
With only 1200 interceptors, they can be overwhelmed by distributed terrorists launching simultaneously over a 1000 mile diameter.
Each interceptor is $40k. I expect a drone would be under $500, so you’ve got an 80:1 cost differential. $400M to stop 10,000 drones.
As for machine guns, let’s say the effective range is 2000 yards. You have roughly 60 seconds to engage all targets. Assume 100 rounds fired to successfully terminate a single drone, with 10,000 drones inbound, you need to fire 1M bullets in 60 seconds. Assuming a machine gun firing at 1000rds/min, that’s 1000 machine guns with perfectly coordinated fire. At $10k/machine gun (a very conservative estimate) how many buildings can you protect for $10M each? Maybe you can protect your capital building with such a lead shield. Your oil refineries.. should probably do that. And now you’ve just sprayed 1M bullets into the air above an oil refinery. Sounds like a bad idea.
And then the terrorist just need to attack with 20,000 drone swarm, and all your facilities are exposed until you double your defenses at all locations.
Financially, I don’t see a solution.
RF interference is likely the best defense, as quality RF shielding is difficult, especially at extreme frequencies.
I have a question, please remember that I am a weapon noob.
Isn't this similar to the hand-held bazookas that are daily fried into Israel & well defended by Iron dome?
The Qassam rockets are basically the same as an Estes model rocket, if constructed from steel, with a TNT warhead. They have a ballistic trajectory, arcing high into the air making them visible to radar, are fired from a location limited by the rocket range (under a few dozen miles) and their exact location at each time until they explode can be calculated and fed into an Iron Dome to intercept. It’s very difficult to coordinate the launch, difficult to launch more than a few simultaneously, and very difficult to get them to land in the same location at the same time. For the defenders, it’s easy to identify where they were launched from (responding with a Hellfire from a waiting Apache), and easy to detect on radar - meter long metal pipes have a much different radar cross section than a bird.
The drones I’m suggesting are possible would have a 1000 mile range. Instead of launching a couple dozen Qassam rocket to be shot down in an evening, the same group could build hundreds of drones, and then launch them over the course of an entire night (or two), from throughout the Gaza Strip, flying not to their destination immediately, but out into the Mediterranean, where they will spread out to fly at a few meters off the ocean until they need to head back to land for their detonation. At that point, these hundreds of drones are all converging on a single location, at a single time, from many different directions. Some high, and some just 50 feet above ground level. They would be very difficult to detect due to their size, altitude (low to avoid radar, or high to avoid human perception), dispersion and speed. From a radar perspective, the metal engine components could be small enough to be outside most radar wavelengths and shaped to minimize radar cross section, while encased in basically a plastic/wooden frame. From radar, it’ll probably look like a bird.
Unlike with the Qassam, it’s not just Sderot which is in range.
This is a security nightmare. I presumed that the Saudi attack happened due to the incapabilities of Saudi forces. I did read that despite all the fancy toys from Uncle Sam, they dont know how to use the toys well.
How is it compared to the Russian s400? For the trillions that the Americans pour into their defence, do they have some way to fight this "swarm of drones"? Aren't the US leading in drone technology?
Guess in an IT lingo, I can say that distributed systems are better than a monolithic system.
The majority of the anti-aircraft defenses are targeted at standard warplanes. The S400 is one of those. Shooting an S400 missile at one of these tiny drones is like shooting a shotgun at a swarm of gnats. You’re not taking out the swarm and you just spent a ton of money to battle something insignificant. The power of these drones comes not from the individual, but the ability to coordinate together. In IT lingo, it would be like trying to battle a DDOS botnet. Further, the S400 is designed to detect a huge airplane. Yes those planes are radar absorbing and reflect radar away from the receivers, but they don’t really resemble a bird. They’re too fast, they go straight, they reflect radar strongly in other directions (to be detected by radar receivers distant from the transmitter) and at their size are capable of being detected by other techniques. These small drones could be made to look like birds from a radar perspective. Hard to justify shooting your S400 at a bird.
The justification for spending more money on defense is that the more you spend, they better you’re protected. I don’t believe that to be completely true, but our investments in laser defenses is justifiable.
Imagine facing a fleet of the drones from, for example, the movie Oblivion.
The Ababil-T can deliver up to a 45-kilogram (100-pound) warhead up to 150 kilometers (95 miles) away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Ababil
Yemen: Drone attack on base kills at least six soldiers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xba_q6Kr_fU
Archive of drones used allegedly by Houthis
https://undocs.org/en/S/2019/83
pp30,31 describe and photograph a previously unknown drone, imaginatively given codename UAV-X, which was used in attacks on UAE and KSA:
The most distinctive feature of the UAV-X is its significantly increased endurance and range. Powered by the Chinese-made DLE 170 or the German-made 3W110i B2 engine, with a top speed of between 200 km/h and 250 km/h, the unmanned aerial vehicle may have a maximum range of between 1,200 km and 1,500 km, depending on wind conditions.