Comment by CuriousCosmic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CuriousCosmic | Hacker News Reader

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I'd argue it's still the same, there's just a tech accessibility difference between defense and offense. When they are equal, defense still tends to win out but it'll take a bit for the access to catch up.

The counter for drones will be the proliferation of CRAM/CIWS and APS. Currently there exists cheap, publicly available (and commonly heavily open sourced) tech stacks for drones but the same is not the case for CRAM/CIWS and APS. But fundamentally the systems that can effectively kill artillery shells, mortars shells, rockets, and missiles in flight will be able to kill drones as well. There are some differences (such as that drones tend to fly lower/slower) but fundamentally the tech applies the same.

And to be entirely honest this proliferation is almost entirely a software problem. Of course the existence of public hardware designs is important as well but getting effective sensor integration, detection, targeting, tracking, and response at a low enough latency will be bottlenecked by access to high quality domain specific software.

I don't think we've even seen the real potential of drone warfare on the battlefield, yet. Right now their guidance is very crude, little more than the adaptation of consumer FPV technology. Once US/RU/CN have had time to develop the technology, build up the manufacturing and logistics, and give them AI automated target selection, it's going to completely change the nature of warfare IMO.

Instead of dropping tons of expensive guided bombs and shells, attackers will drop tens of thousands of cheaper small anti-personnel hunter-seeker drones that can not only seek out human targets but wait in low power mode for a target to appear if it can't identify one at first. It'll make most kinds of static installations and defenses untenable. Units will have to constantly be on the move and camouflaged, and avoid giving up all kinds of life signs like sound/gunshots, thermal, RF comms, etc. The smaller drones will be able to help larger drones with targeting any armor they can't handle themselves while acting like free flying land mines.

I agree that it's a software problem. The Slaughterbots video [1] is already six years old and all of the pieces to make killer drone swarms were already there (just not as miniaturized as the video). Now there's data in Ukraine about how well individual drones work; AI is getting better and better; the compute is getting cheap enough to just slap on a drone; SOTA single use aluminum air batteries can already enable drones with much longer flight times than consumer batteries. All the pieces are there to make a nightmarish weapon that changes warfare as much as the machine gun, land mine, or air support.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecClODh4zYk

And thus begins the serious electromagnetic weapons age

I think/hope civilian organizations get access to this technology or the defensive counterparts before it is banned.

Having guns and food and ammo is good, but if civilians want to have a chance against NYPD or (insert dystopian boot) then night vision, drones for surveillance and offense, as well as drone defense are needed.

Having offensive drone tech in the hands of domestic law enforcement scares the shit out of me. I think we are one human generation away from the Matrix "Sentinels" being a reality. Swarms of autonomous disposable killer drones.

I agree and am a huge advocate for the idea that self defense is a human right.

Civilians should have a right to access to the exact same technology that a government employs with its infantry. I'm not talking Nuclear Weapons or Stealth Bombers, if a 17-year-old recruit can be trusted to operate a drone to kill human beings in a far off foreign country, law-abiding citizens should have access to the same technology. Or, alternatively, we can ban the technology, as long as the police are restricted from using it the same as civilians.

So rocket launchers, grenades, and all kind of explosives, anti air weapons that can destroy any flying machine from 10+km away

Yeah sure that sounds absolutely sane....

Citizens should be no less armed than domestic law enforcement.

I'm not aware of cops having rocket launchers, but maybe they shouldn't.

Yes, at least with the right guardrails. The fact that my law abiding neighbor can own a grenade launcher (You actually can legally own a Grenade Launcher with the right paperwork) wouldn’t bother me any more than an aggressive SWAT cop doing a pre-dawn raid on someone’s house.

If you want to own anti aircraft weapons sure, maybe with a license and a background check. If spending a few million $$$ to explode things in the desert is your jam you should be able to do it. Maybe you could even open source it and help develop better weapons for people in Ukraine or whatever.

> attackers will drop

From what will they be dropping them?

I assume US/RU/CN/etc will drop them from stealth and supersonic bombers. Everyone else will use basic bombers and cargo planes if they can punch a hole in AA defenses and if they cant, release them from 20ft shipping containers or box trucks as close to enemy lines as possible.

They’re also small enough to deploy with infantry.

You could probably fire them with special artillery shells, just as deploying remote minefields or cluster munitions.

CRAM and CIWS are for point-defence; it would be very expensive to cover e.g. 100 miles of international border using those systems. Because drones are steerable, they can fly between the gatling guns and on to their target. Of course, if the target has point-defence, that won't work!

In Ukraine, it seems that a lot of the defender's drones are hybrid surveillance and attack, so they don't know what their target is at launch. You can't point-defend a trenchline. I think the Russians are relying on jammers. Broadband jamming must require a lot of power (and presumably impairs their own comms); narrowband jamming requires knowledge of the attacker's frequency.

CRAM/CIWS generally consists of several weapons systems, and a command centre with the radar, communicating by radio. So those defensive systems are also exposed to jamming, which could be achieved by a high-altitude drone; these systems aren't designed to shoot things at 20,000 ft., although many of them can have a SAM system strapped on.

Anyway, I suspect that drone-antidrone warfare is going to come down to a radio arms-race; i.e. jammer vs. anti-jammer. And you can defeat a jammer using beamforming.

> 100 miles of international border using those systems

Yeah that's not really the point. You use CRAM or CIWS at installations, cities, and maybe even towns. But then you use APS for military vehicles.

You don't need to stop every attack along a border, you just need to protect important installations and population centers.

> You can't point-defend a trenchline

Sure you can't but you can point defend mobile artillery, tanks, and other mechanized infantry. This greatly reduces the actual value you get out of a drone strike. You won't be hitting high value targets without spending a lot of resources in a saturation attack.

> I think the Russians are relying on jammers

They try to and it's not particularly effective.

> So those defensive systems are also exposed to jamming

This is only the case if you communicate by radio. In an active combat environment, if you are setting up installations that may be the best you can do at the time but for regions that are currently at peace, you can absolutely run fiber-optics between the weapons systems, sensor systems, and command center(s), leaving radio comms as a fallback. It's definitely more expensive but if you are installing equipment in a city or permanent military installation, you probably already have access to fiber runs that could be procured as dedicated/dark fiber.

> Anyway, I suspect that drone-antidrone warfare is going to come down to a radio arms-race

That'll definitely be a heavy component of it but the defense side should be able to insulate themselves from the arms race as long as they invest in the infrastructure ahead of time rather than waiting until a hot war starts to protect soft targets.

Really, I was focused on the Russia-Ukraine conflict; Russia sends scores of drones over the border every night, aimed at civilian infrastructure, including power generation and distribution, medical facilities, ports and warehouses, as well as civilian housing.

Just installing point defence for all the power generation would be expensive. Point-defence for e.g. Odessa or Kharkiv is impossible, because they are cities, not "points".

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