Military drone swarms and how to combat them
smallwarsjournal.com
smallwarsjournal.com
with capped actions-per-minute and reaction time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18992698
Maybe you can have a big "carrier" drone transport them to where they are required, like in StarCraft.
Or maybe you can make the small drones recharge directly from the grid, by landing on top of power lines and deploy the necessary connections.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
[1] https://www.c4isrnet.com/electronic-warfare/2022/08/15/air-f... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32543156
>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]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-electronics_High_Power...
What is the smallest practical size for a military swarming drone?
How many could fit in one TEU?
How many TEU are shipped to your country every day?
How many drones could be shipped to your country before anyone notices?
Load them with explosives or potent chemical weapons and it could get really scary.
This YouTube short film terrifies me:
Stop watching so much SciFi and come back to the real world.
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.
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.
You may say I'm a dreamer, But I'm not the only one.
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.
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.
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.
Good troll so far, but I think this puts it over the top.
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.
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.
How much explosive fits in a TEU?
How many guns and how much explosive is already in your country?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_High_Power_Operatio...
https://afresearchlab.com/technology/directed-energy/success...
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.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Confetti+Streamers+defense+d...
(Ps I never understood why a V Is better than a straight line?)
You can be right behind the boat or just behind the wake as it spreads out in a V
Which is better?
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).
Not a laser expert btw.
Afterall, its just a focused heat beam of electromagnetic radiation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Swimming + flying cheap drones doable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC9EJhs0pc0&ab_channel=Rutge...
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.
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.
There could be an interim period of many years where very important stuff is very vulnerable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which have laughable range and can't handle anything heavier than a stiff breeze, let alone weather conditions at sea.
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.
... and is on fire?
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hMCqXmzzWFA
[1] https://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/images/pubs/Chisholm-Chapt...
If you don't think drones of the future will be the most horrifyingly effective weapons of war, you lack imagination.
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.
That would take a ridiculous amount of energy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
What if they launch thirty?
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.
https://navalpost.com/searam-ram-vs-phalanx-goalkeeper/
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.
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.
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...
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.
You could paint the target using a laser, with the rocket-propelled drones homing on to it. Or extremely precise GPS coordinates!
Wait... It reminds me of something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision-guided_munition
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.
I do share the sentiment expressed in the last paragraph.
Tldr you've built an argument on top of a triad of features that actually are more of a 'pick two' deal.
Don't we already have a word for this: missle?
This is somewhat more than just "a missile".
[1] https://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/05/31/china-mothership-d...
( Damn, I had the youtube of their sea demo bookmarked but not archived .. and now it's taken down )
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.
Also would be a lot cheaper than maintaining a ship or AC130 on station.
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.
Quadcopters are a very good example. Blimps are another.
> unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
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.
https://scottishpollinators.wordpress.com/2020/09/21/drones-...
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.
There's a little overlap, but not that much.
No one can win this. The dollar cost per KIA is going to quickly drop below $20. And this will be for all optical hunter killer drones.
the only way to win is not to play
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.
Not always. The only counter weapon to a Nuke, is a similar sized or bigger Nuke, better delivery systems for the nuke and a large number of nukes.
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.
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?
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.
We should outlaw war.
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...
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.
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".
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.
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.)
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.
Sure, but how do you get Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-un and all of their other soul mates into the boat?
So we'll eventually outlaw them once we have a strong edge.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
An incredibly dismissive straw-man.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Operating below the noise floor shouldn't be possible at first glance, but through the power of statistics it absolutely is feasible.
Can't exactly re-engineer all the RF parts in the drone and the groundstation.
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.
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
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).
It looks like a Carbon Cub with a 15-cc engine and a 90-inch wingspan costs US$400: https://www.horizonhobby.com/product/carbon-cub-15cc-arf-90/... It has 1170 square inches of wing area and a claimed wing loading of "22.4 oz/sq in" which probably means 22.4 oz./sq ft. That would mean it weighs 5.1 kg, and the manual https://www.manua.ls/hangar-9/carbon-cub-15cc-arf/manual confirms it weighs 5.2 kg.
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.
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.
If a hellfire missile with a few civilian casualties is acceptable, I don’t see why a swarm of drones with a few civilian casualties isn’t.
Not that I think it’s acceptable in the first place, but…
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.
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.
Quoting from TVTropes[1]:-
> 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".
1. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThereIsNoKillLik...
If they were so considerate as to gather in a central location, it wouldn't require a nuke to take them out.