How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
That said, I do fret we’re staring down a new age of guerrilla warfare. Drones are cheap, widely available, and increasingly autonomous. Their countermeasures are either impractical for communities (AA Cannons or automated firearms) or costly (jammers, interceptors). The programming can be set-and-forget, meaning operations can be staged months ahead of deployment and make it difficult to find or prevent. The autonomy of target termination specifically raises concerns for the immediate future of violent uprisings, coups, and civil wars.
As an engineer, I am fascinated by it all. As a human, I am horrified that we democratized violence on this scale.
How do you even defend against this in a terrorist use case? When a small drone with a grenade or homemade explosive is so accessible? Any Christmas market in central Europe these days is surrounded by car barriers to prevent mass run-overs, but what do you do when soon someone has the idea of dropping some molotov cocktails from drones in public places? Answering my own question I guess you can already throw one manually without a drone. Securing public places is weird, I'm glad it's not my job.
On the same topic it reminds me Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (from 2005!) where an AI called "Masse Kernels" was automatically creating missions sent to different PMCs, managing war assets, supervising the war effort, coms, and the like... Feels also that's coming, at least in some forms for now.
I can see this from the other perspective. I've read stories for the past 30 years now about police forces and swat teams abusing people, murdering people because someone filled out the address wrong on a warrant, etc. And I wonder, in the coming years, if those sorts of scenarios will be quite as one-sided as they are today. What will that world look like?
>Answering my own question I guess you can already throw one manually without a drone.
Sure, but can you throw one from 2 miles away, can you throw 30 simultaneously? Can you then instantly escape without much of any evidence of who you are being left behind, not even a blurry traffic cam picture? The scale of the mayhem is a quality all of its own.
Whatever fear Russians have of drones isn't in their offensive use. They're only being used defensively by Ukraine. Similarly, if you're a jackbooted goon, you might well fear their defensive use as I outlined above. But yeh, you have nothing to fear from the defensive use of drones, because you're not attacking anyone... in the coming years, however, the narrative will likely be twisted so that you do come to fear such people as might use them defensively, because the establishment needs you to despise them.
* Flak/Shrapnel/Birdshot: An excellent last-minute defense if you’re calm enough to line up an accurate shot, but data shows that equipping civilians with these sorts of weapons en masse is a bad idea for safety and well-being. That’s a no-go.
* Nets: Popular for defense, but it’s a matter of time before drones adapt by flying under the nets or changing payload to something to dissolve it. A kamikaze drone could also be enough to destroy an opening for more to swarm. In a civilian context, they’re an excellent deterrent for high-population areas, for now, albeit unsightly.
* Buildings: Safest for now, provided the structure is relatively hardened and the windows are secured. But most civilian structures aren’t guarded against explosions or external attacks, and even those that are require a human to vacate it eventually. Once inside however, there’s more options for stopping an attack - for now - like interior netting, small arms with pellets or buckshot, or even lasers to blind the optical sensors. Impractical for civilian deployment at scale, presently, and highly variable.
* Jammers: Good against piloted drones, but as the article points out, the current crop of dev work is geared towards autonomous slaughterbots instead of human decision-making. Jammers are restricted by most countries and, if left functioning after an attack, could hinder first responders. If left on constantly, would disrupt civilian work. So that’s a no-go.
* LASERS! Probably the best deterrent in the short term for civilians, I would wager. A randomized strobe of a high-powered IR laser could devastate a swarm of drones’ optics, making navigation or target acquisition difficult or impossible. Sticking a piece of protective glass on the sensor would likely nullify it long enough to finish its mission, though.
And that’s what distresses me, ultimately. The future depicted in Slaughterbots or Horizon is rapidly approaching, where autonomous drones can murder with impunity and are affordable enough that any threat actor could get their hands on it. Combined with modern databases of humans - faces, biometrics, profiles, locations, habits, schedules - we’re nearing an era where assassination or murder is a drone away.
That is what horrifies me. And if there’s one thing my time in the defense industry taught me, it’s that nobody is trustworthy with that kind of power. Companies making these absolutely will use them (or condone their use) against dissidents, opposition, regulators, and governments. Pandora’s Box is already open, and I don’t think enough folks appreciate the horrors it will bring.
Of course, other threat actors might, like a Unabomber type or groups designed to destabilize society (perhaps foreign sponsored) by doing repeated actions etc.
Worth noting here that the Ukrainian armed forces have already repeatedly deployed drones with the ability to spray pretty impressive amounts of napalm all over their targets from fairly high altitudes. Fittingly, they've been called "Dragon drones", and I wouldn't want to be under any anti-drone net if one of those arrives.
At the weekend, I was at a small town which had a half a mile long main road blocked off for a market day. They put up bollards to do so.
Chances are, there were 0 persons planning a car attack on it. So there was an element of "We don't think anything's going to happen, but if it were to happen, we're prepared.". A bit like having a fire extinguisher when there's never been a fire.
But would seeing the bollards also have the effect of discouraging the insane people of the idea of driving the car through the crowds the next time a market day is held?
Oppositely, if they didn't put up any barriers, a psychopath seeing this and the realization that cars can be weapons might give them the idea of "I know what I can do for my act of terrorism..."
Also, the US military has been stockpiling kinetic drone countermeasures for about four years now. The idea is you get a hardened, ~11 pound autonomous drone that slams into the target at roughly 90 mph and physically destroys it before returning home. Add on 1-2 year-old US EW technology that now disables autonomous drones (yep, even autonomous drones), and you can establish a very comprehensive defense. The point I'm making here is that the tech is not only possible, but it exists.
Is it perfect? No. Though defense against firearms and explosives today isn't perfect either. Namely because of response times of the countermeasure. So in that sense, we aren't entering a uniquely dangerous situation.
Edit:
I think what will happen is that the first time a UAS is used on civilians, flying drones around population centers will be banned without permit. That way, if a drone is seen flying without a permit, it gets taken down on sight.
1. It's cheap.
2. It's anonymous.
And eventually terrorists catch up. (Probably after the Russia-Ukraine war ends and some skilled people from both sides are unemployed)
It's infeasible to blanket every inch of civilian space with kinetic or EW anti-drone systems.
They may become commonplace at mass events (concerts, parades, gatherings, etc.) but will never cover all soft targets.
And unlike the nearest analog in chemical weapons, drones are dual-use, stable, and easily assembled.
The only reason the 1995 Tokyo Subway attacks [0] weren't worse was because of ineptitude.
Someone could be a quarter as intelligent and successfully fly an FPV drone into a target.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack#Ch...
Also motivation and incentives. The reason we haven't seen many drone attacks on civilians is that it is far more lucrative to get civilians to buy your product than to kill them, and the companies that actually have the resources to mount a credible drone attack are making a lot more money doing the former.
Terrorism in general has always been far more overhyped than actually a problem - the median number of terrorist deaths per year in the U.S. from 1970-2020 is 4, making your odds of being killed in a terrorist attack significantly lower than being struck by lightning. And the reason is simply that it's deeply irrational. What do you have to gain from killing a random stranger?
non-terror life opportunity
vs
terror life opportunity
But requisite minimum skillset is also a consideration, and that's where drones are dangerous.
We're talking (play videogames and some soldering) instead of (chemistry or biology).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States
The median is more relevant than the mean simply because it's less sensitive to outliers. 9/11 was an outlier; 85% of all U.S. terrorist deaths in the last 50 years happened on that one day.
You can't, and you don't. That is why it is called terrorism. Safety and freedom are sometimes antagonistic goals. This is an example. Terrorism is defended against by not changing society despite the terrorism. It is violence with a political goal, if the politics do not change, the terrorism fails. Not every soft target can (nor should be) hardened, there will always be soft targets.
(2) "Defending" soft targets I posit is just an impossible task unless society becomes so locked down that it is unrecognizable. Lots of Sci-Fi has been written on this topic, eg: 'thought crimes', 'judge dredd'.
Sticking to the theme of point (1).. The French revolution was lead by terrorists. They terrorized the aristocracy (and arguably had no other outlet): "cede power or you'll keep getting your heads chopped off." The aristocracy then ceded power. Whether society is forced to change or voluntarily changes is almost an immaterial difference at that point.
OTOH, consider if someone started blowing up libraries in the US. If the response is to shut down libraries, then the population has been terrorized. Bombings in subways were common at a point, if the subways shut down - the population has been terrorized.
In the 1960s, (US) police used dogs against voter registration organizers. To have been terrorized would have been to stop voting, stop voter registration. That terrorism was not successful.
OTOH, lynchings in the US were a prevalent form of terrorism. IE: "this is what happens when you 'don't know your place'". It worked. I recall there is data showing a large change in regional population dynamics for _decades_ following a lynching.
Timothy McVeigh could have done stuff within the libertarian party, but instead chose a path of violence. Timothy McVeigh failed, he blew up a building and that is all that happened.
The 9/11 hijackers chose a path of violence as well. The 9/11 terrorism OTOH was arguably massively successful - a huge wedge developed between cultures & religions, US society radically changed and the US government was successfully baited and began fighting wars that drained its diplomatic, military and financial power.
So, I think for repressed societies, one persons terrorist is another's freedom fighter. In 'open' societies, the terrorist is trying to change the society in some way, through violent means (a shortcut). Changing the society in that way is achieving the aims of the terrorist.
Strictly speaking, the original, “terrorists” for whose “terrorism” in instituting “the Terror” those terms were all coined as specific terms and later genericized were Robespierre and certain other top leaders of the regime established by the Revolution; that groups overlaps with, but is not coextensive with, leaders of the Revolution; the aristocracy already had their legal power stripped before the whole head chopping thing (which was very much not limited to the aristocracy, the vast majority of the ~15k formal executions and the ~10k who died in custody without trial were commoners, and the ratio is even higher for the ~300k killed outside of judicial process during the Terror.)
A few folks on this site might know how to work around these measures. Most of us would probably fail on some subtle way. You’re average terrorist isn’t nearly as tech savvy.
Are jammers really that costly?
Also spoofers that could take over a drone - not sure how much encryption is used in most of these off-the-shelf drones, but it would seem like it wouldn't be too difficult to create a Flipper Zero-type device that could spoof the codes used between controller and drone.
Yeah if we could just all agree that from now on, all warfare is limited to drone-on-drone engagements.
That was an episode of Star Trek.
Two warring cultures simulated war. The computers told each side how many casualties there were, and people reported to the extermination chambers.
This is something I haven't considered before. What's the worst case here? Is it feasible for me to go live on a farm in <country I want to harm>, buy a fleet of DJI drones at flea markets etc, stick something harmful to them, then hide them in the woods.
I can move away, wait a year or two, and then have them fly to the nearest metro area and wreak havoc. This seems to be cheap and relatively straightforward, and hard to detect. What am I missing?
For long running conflicts (Israel vs Iran for example) I expect we'll see some fascinating and horrifying attacks in the near to medium term. Of course anti-drone tech is also evolving quickly and I expect that to continue so the shelf life of any specific attack will probably continue to be rather short.
Things you can't help: they will discover the remains of the drones, and also their origin. This evidence will eventually lead back to you (unless you have the aid of a enemy nation-state). Not a big deal if you're dying in a suicide attack, but maybe you don't want the extended vacation in the CIA's worst black ops rendition site.
Yes, that approach is inferior to the drone version. You have to hide them inconspicuously, and a bomb sniffing dog could find them. But you can visit a lot of places in a single European country or US state within one day, and unless the country is already on high alert you can hide something for that time span in public. Yet this doesn't happen. Even regular bombings are rare.
The reasons are manifold: In most places getting explosives isn't actually all that easy (unless you go the homemade route) and is a good method to get attention from authorities. But another factor is that there just doesn't seem to be a large interest in doing that kind of complex attack unless there is already an ongoing civil war. Actual terrorism is fairly rare, and the terrorists tend to be not all that sophisticated.
Are these kinds of drone attacks a scary new possibility? Yes, absolutely! Are they likely to happen? Not really. We might see it as a method to assassinate officials (imagine staging drones at a place where you know the US President will hold a speech in a couple months), but I doubt it will play a major role against the general population
Back in the day, if you forgot a bag on a British bus the driver would get it and run after you, so that it wouldn't be a bomb issue taking the whole day.
Battery degradation, a year or two's worth of leaves and debris accumulating on and around the drones, literally all of the elements affecting them, animals, etc.
Violence has always been pretty democratic - you've always been able to punch someone or hit them with a rock and the US seems to have more guns than people.
This is something that I think escapes engineers in this line of work - that something they invented will eventually end up (legally or not) in the hands of people with no scruples.
[0] - https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/other/drones-in-africa-are-a-...
It may motivate actual reform in policing because law enforcement will realize that police officers who kill innocent people with no regard for the law are safer in prison than out on the streets with a paid vacation / desk job punishment.
As it is vigilante action against law enforcement in the west is a sure death sentence and probably life long reprisal against your family once you're dead which is what keeps people in line.
If the development of drone technology significantly reduces the risk of that then you're likely to see many more people respond to violent abuses of authority by law enforcement with vigilante action.
Dutch soldier lives have been ruined because they had to be sent to places like Lebanon and Bosnia. Nobody decent deserves that.
State formation tends to track the relative military effectiveness of large highly-trained standing armies vs. small distributed arms making. The Roman Empire collapsed when they ran out of money to pay their legions. The smaller tribes and kingdoms of the Early Middle Ages unified into the larger kingdoms of the High Middle Ages as the longbow and mounted knight gave the advantage again to large, highly trained standing armies. These collapsed into the city-states of the Rennaissance because the gunpowder musket rendered all the armor of the knights useless. Then the nation-state took over as mechanized arms and airplanes became military weapons, and needed the resources of a large territory to produce them.
It's likely that the drone, being both cheap to produce, easy to use, and extremely lethal to existing weapon systems, will produce a similar political revolution. And it seems tailor-made for smaller political units: drones can lay waste to an invading army, but they suck at power projection because their range is only ~10-20 miles. Might we see a return to city-states as the primary form of political organization? Maybe all the arguments about whether Russia vs. the U.S. vs. China will come out on top are moot, because the very concept of a nation-state will disintegrate, and instead we'll have Beijing vs. Shanghai vs. Shenzhen vs. Moscow vs. Kiev vs. the Bay Area vs. NYC vs. Washington DC? Drones are also ideal for defending shipping lanes, so perhaps we'll see a loose confederation of economically-bound city-states, but each having their own culture and social laws.
If you can buy the parts, then yes, but producing a complete drone all on your own is not that easy I think.
Still easier than a stealth air plane or a cruise missile, though. So your predictions might come true, because I also see most state armies being really slow to adopt to this new reality.
Guerilla use of drones need off the shelf microcontrollers from somewhere, they aren't fabbing them in their backyard.
It's all about China. They have the ability to cut off drone production for the rest of the world.
There are countries (including Ukraine) that produce on-board flight controllers, but the controllers themselves often rely on components from China. I actually do think it is feasible to create a passable quadrotor using non-Chinese components only but I do not know of a rigorous study or a manufacturer that does this.
I've heard that the most difficult to replace is the camera sensor. Drone cameras are produced now in Ukraine as well, however non-Chinese sensors as far as I know are very expensive.
You can source camera sensor from Japan and microcontrollers from France (made at ST Crolles). Your $1 camera becomes $10, $1 micros (s because basic ESC uses 4-5) become $10, $1 Chinese clone IMU becomes $10 TDK IMU, ESC mosfets go from $0.4 to $1.5 (you need 24 of those). Even magnets in the motor are easily doable https://www.kumarmagnet.com/ukraine/neodymium-magnet.html
All the parts are still manufactured in the West/Japan/Korea/Taiwan. Made in China 2025 just means Chinese clones/substitutes are 2-10 times cheaper. In 2015 people laughed and dismissed MIC 2025 as unrealistic, but here we are in 2025 and Chinese products do in fact come with up to 100% domestic electronic components! One stupid example from today, hackaday article https://hackaday.com/2025/06/08/simple-triggering-for-saleae... comment mentions Kingst LA2016. Sigrok wiki https://sigrok.org/wiki/Kingst_LA2016 has pictured of same product at v1.3 and v3.2. v3.2 uses COREBAI clone of Cypress FX2LP and Pango Micro FPGA (https://www.pangomicro.com/en/about/index/) instead of "Intel" Cyclone IV.
EEVBlog did a Deye SUN-5K-SG04LP1 5kW hybrid solar inverter teardown some time ago, almost every semi component made in China https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0_cTg36A2Q
Jammers don't work against optical cable or AI vision controlled drones. That's a big problem today in Ukraine for both sides.
As for defense, first of all it's detection and tracking. Copters and long range gas powered drones are very loud and easily detectable. Ukraine uses a net of cell phones. Several devices with microphones can accurately pinpoint all drone like sources in real time. That's cheap to install miles around important targets. Then we need just fast AI interceptors 'on hold', in the air if can afford. The last part is missing today, but we'll get there soon.
As for danger, etc. Small remote controlled firearms were easily available for decades. Drones _are_ trackable. When one takes off in big city Russians know immediately where. By using radio scanners. All DJI drones, and most others, communicate and simply broadcast their coordinates. This is used in Ukraine to find their operators.
[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/06/uk...
[3]: https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot
[4]: https://www.404media.co/ukraines-massive-drone-attack-was-po...
You can also see the careful departure of drones from containers in the videos, without extra panning or yaw. Not quite how a human operator would fly them.
"ArduPilot can handle tasks like stabilizing a drone in the air while the pilot focuses on moving to their next objective. Pilots can switch them into loitering mode, for example, if they need to step away or perform another task, and it has failsafe modes that keep a drone aloft if signal is lost."
So it is not fully autonomous.
I've had that happen to the company I work at and we literally have zero AI stuff.
AI gets so much boost from this nonsense. Because now it's about saving our lives.
"A military operation involves deception."
He could be telling the truth, he could be lying... A drone programmed to automatically boot up , check its location, and if it's at the right coordinates, take off and crash at some other coordinates (the airfield) is more satisfying to "fans" of automated warfare.
For extra fun, add some other code to "look for plane-like objects to crash into", but now you're approaching dangerous territory of "What if a civilian 737 happens to be boarding at this airfield"...
The reports also mention the truck roof opening remotely, one could also use GPS coordinates to trigger this. But doing it manually from a distance, after checking the surveillance cameras that the coast is clear, is more reliable.
I guess they used smartphones and SIM cards with mobile data for the remote communication...
A static target only needs to be seen once.
…but if GPS is jammed, and there’s only one camera per fleet, how exactly are the other drones supposed to navigate towards the spotted targets unless they’re all equipped with cameras?
Camera drone hovers above target and kamakazi drone intersects the line between camera and target, and drops.
We've had two years of footage of drones being flown over tanks, and bombs dropped directly down into them.
We have two years of footage from Ukraine, where camera-equipped drones are launched from a several miles away at most, and where there are networks of pilots and support specialists to assemble and launch more drones in case of (frequent) failure.
I don’t think it’s wise to wager the success of a 6-month mission deep in enemy territory on a plan with a single point of failure, especially when the alternative is equipping each drone with < $100 cameras.
But sure, you’re clearly the better thinker.
Your first response was disrespectful. Probably because you are young and immature. Grow up.
That being said, having all drones equipped with cameras could enable a more robust version of what they’re talking about:
If uplink with human operators is lost, but short-range comms between drones exist, they could use their video feeds to autonomously coordinate amongst themselves.
How? Without GPS, it's navigation capabilities lower than V-2 rocket.
The startup attempting this would need Actual Indians for the first few special ops attempts before getting the true AI experience.
Civilian 737 boarding airfield where Russia keeps strategic nuclear bombings? Russians would shoot them down faster than any drone could get them.
I'm not sure if the Tu-95 is hosted at any joint-use airports, but joint-use themselves airports are not uncommon. Pskov is joint-use, Ukraine launched a smaller-scale attack on some Il-76s there a couple years back. The scenario that an attack on legitimate target aircraft could be happening metres away from civilian aircraft is realistic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
Good old non-AI radar-guided missile launched by human crew of Russians.
If the attack was coordinated this way, I assume whoever sold the colo to Ukrainian intelligence thought they were simply setting up yet another server for a shady Russian scam company. Foreign intelligence services often avoid scrutiny by using the same methods as domestic criminals in the target country.
Anyway, the drones used mobile internet between the launch point outside the base and the pilots in Ukraine. The connection between the launch point and the drones was point-to-point drone control frequencies which does not use the mobile phone network.
Stick the GPS coord, fly there, and once in a geofence look for a shape to crash into doesn't seem impossible given what was possible 10 years ago.
To me the more interesting question is how they managed sending the real-time video feeds and control data. Since the trucks were mobile, I assume it had to be via a bunch of mobile phones signed up to Russian service providers since Starlink doesn't work inside Russia. To reduce latency, I wonder if the phones were connecting to a covert site in Russia which had a high-bandwidth wired link, maybe a front company established for the operation with servers and broadband internet connections.
Compensating for wind drift is a fairly straightforward software problem when you've got a fast processor, a bunch of high-resolution cameras and a laser rangefinder.
https://www.autelrobotics.com/productdetail/evo-lite-enterpr...
The context (together with the features extracted) was the killer (forgive the pun) feature though - everything else reduced noise, but context increased signal.
My gast remains flabbered that the sort of thing I was working on back then hasn't become commonplace in the interim. The computing power available today, compared to then, and the accuracy we had (I know for a fact at least one of the designs was made into real hardware, it was called RH7, and "RH" stood for "Red Herring" - oh how we laughed) ... It beggars belief that it was just left to digitally rot.
> ...each of the 117 drones launched had its own pilot.
From Zelenskyy, a previous comedic actor refusing to flee, "I need ammunition, not a ride," to the defense of Snake Island "Russian warship, go fuck yourself," to all the brave women who volunteered, the farmers towing abandoned Russian tanks, the constant drone attacks on residential and commercial areas, the 40,000 stolen Ukrainian children, this most recent attack on Russian air bases...
If this was a movie, I would probably think it was a bit much myself, but this all happened. We witnessed it.
"Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!"
https://gist.github.com/andrew/2f81952f4867d1b200bb
The big difference is they can now run this on the copter instead of being remotely controlled; a 100$ raspberry pi has enough processing power for this, and so does several other off-the-shelf mini computers powered by lithium batteries.
Crazy times.
Now in its third generation, the Ghost Dragon has come a long way since 2022. Its original command-and-control-band radio was quickly replaced with a smart frequency-hopping system that constantly scans the available spectrum, looking for bands that aren’t jammed. It allows operators to switch among six radio-frequency bands to maintain control and also send back video even in the face of hostile jamming.
Come Back Alive ex. These guys delivered first deep-strike drones https://savelife.in.ua/en/donate-en/
Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation ex. Bought a famous spy satellite https://prytulafoundation.org/en
KOLO Charity Foundation managed by UA tech community https://www.koloua.com/en/
Razom Ukraine (US based) https://www.razomforukraine.org/
That's the problem in a nutshell. A few years back, few would argue against keeping a human in the kill/no-kill decision chain. It just took one war to get pop tech authors writing on it without even a mention of the ethical considerations or autonomous killing machines.
I suppose it highlights axiomatically the terribleness of ethics when they must be defined in a might-makes-right manner. All very high minded and complex questions which leave the awkward question unanswered: what are we supposed to do?
That kind of operation seems extremely different from a stationary turret or patrol robot with standing orders to shoot upon arbitrary targets at any time it decides to.
So being stealthy in the radar spectrum is pretty difficult, and I often wonder if stealth planes are mostly a means to transfer money from the state to defense companies.
A lot of the key AA tech that has suddenly become important in the era of drone swarms began proliferating to mid-tier forces around the 1980s (or earlier), and was retired by well-funded armies between then and the 2000s, because compared to SAM systems, it was suitable only for lower, slower, less capable targets.
Turns out, suddenly large numbers of lower, slower, less capable targets are being fielded, and its really expensive to take them on with SAM systems optimized for dealing with modern manned aircraft, cruise missiles, and/or ballistic missiles.
Immediate post-WW2 vintage. The classic design of AA gun.
As far as I understand it from talking about Turkish drones, you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayraktar_TB2 style, aircraft size drones, rather than the quadcopter size ones? The latter can more easily hide in terrain.
Inside-out SLAM strategies and on-device ML are much more interesting and are starting to trickle into COTS drones. For example, the latest DJI drones all use SLAM for return-to-home even when GPS denied: https://www.facebook.com/reel/440875398703491 , and the latest Matrice 4 enterprise drones also have end-user ML model runtimes that can fine-tune flight plans using user-provided logic.
Inside-out last-second targeting is also very popular in Ukraine, with off-the-shelf "find the nearest car/person in analog video, lock to it on signal lost, and send Betaflight MSP stick commands to hit it" modules readily accessible on Aliexpress.
China has no intention of attacking a distant country besides taking control of Taiwan in 2027.
https://youtu.be/5xN__ozrbpk?si=vuBtFEcOlgerrVwa
I specially apretiate the small mine clearing drones.
Looke at the fields, now covered in optic fiber. I cant even imagine the cleaning efforts that will be needed after the war. to get rid of that.
However, the decision-making based on image recognition mentioned in the article is undoubtedly more effective in more changing fields, when the target is moving
Note that his laser burns through various reflective materials, including mirrors, copper, aluminium, and steel.
Or miss by a long shot and hit a civilian instead.
(1) if prop based, launch something to snare the props (2) if reflective, pre-launch something to spray black non-reflective paint at it, and followup with laser (3) if evasive, approach with random manouvers (4) if unknown, launch everything and see what works, and feed it back to the training data ... etc, etc.
So the cartoons lied to me?
I’ve read about a bunch of these systems even if they aren’t in widespread deployment some are still being tested in real world conditions.
What about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hunter_(laser_weapon)
“The Silent Hunter has been used by Saudi Arabia to guard against Houthi drones and missiles.”
“During the World Defense Show in Riyadh the February 05, 2024, Poly Technologies announced the first hard-kill engagement of a one-way attack drone.[6]”
The targets, whether it's plumbing pipe rockets or lipo drones, come in at 100-1000 yards/sec, so you don't really have that many seconds per target.
They work in the demo in which you just shoot down the sole target as it fly perpendicular to the machine for both physical and career safety, but when it comes to deploying the thing around your bed, guns make a lot more sense.
Also, your objection doesn’t really fit how drones have been used. Massive highly coordinated drone swarms are extremely unusual, the threat is mostly individual drones or small clusters.
Many very dangerous drones are well under 100y/s aka 200mph.
1000 yards/second aka Mach 2.7 is well beyond the ‘drones’ people are concerned with and into expensive missile territory. Which is where anti missile systems get used.
full blown deployment by end of this year
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hunter_(laser_weapon)
[1] https://www.rtx.com/raytheon/what-we-do/integrated-air-and-m...
https://eos-aus.com/defence/high-energy-laser-weapon/
What they are good at is target tracking, having started out in satellite communication.
Their tracking system paired with a 30mm Bushmaster cannon and proximity ammo is another solution, and there are apparently 160 of them heading for Ukraine to be mounted on M113 and Kozak vehicles.
The problem with any point defense system is radiating any energy makes you a big target. So you would want a passive (EO/IR?) or triggered active/passive system.
For those uses, there's a fairly decent approach ["missile"] or hover ["bomber"] stage that is probably plenty vulnerable to autonomous PDS via 12 guage medicine.
Tracking / detection could even be passive, partly acoustic, partly EO/IR, with only a small fire control radar if you really want it.
I don't think western common folks grok how depraved that country is in terms of doing good work, reward systems for such and corruption on every single level. puttin' built a mafia state and pushed this behavior from top->bottom, and these are side effects. Not some soviet competence and discipline, which wasn't stellar either but light years ahead of current state.
1) Russia suspended the treaty 2023, so it is not relevant here.
2) The use of hangars is not prohibited, as can be seen by the climatized hangars that the US keeps their B1 in.
3) Russia has announced plans for such reinforced hangars years ago, but very likely some dacha or yacht had higher priority.
When I said "triggered" I meant you would enable it when under attack, at which point it doesn't matter if they know you're there anymore.
Bigger picture - if knocking the laser defense off-line slashes the unit cost of destroying bombers, then it may be the obvious first move in any competent attack.
I can imagine this protecting some future US bases in same way C-RAM is used. But from what I read from ie Iraq veterans they had it turned off most of the time for the fear of shooting down its own planes. So much for trust in high tech if its too powerful and automated.
Chinese have some systems, but from demo I've seen the laser beam took some serious time to shoot a single missile. Drones are smaller and way more fragile (so also harder to hit) but this ain't Star trek or Star wars.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/israelimod_israel-mod-complet...
>In a historic breakthrough, the IDF on Wednesday announced that an unnamed laser defense system similar to the much celebrated Iron Beam laser system has shot down dozens of aerial threats during the war.
>Already in fall 2024, The Jerusalem Post had learned that the IDF had used laser defense systems in operational situations but was barred from reporting on that at the time.
It was all over Israeli news together with videos of operational intercepts.
it has nothing to do with "february cookoff" of different systems and orders for iron beam were placed in january with deployment by the end of the year
Do you have a credible source from the IDF attesting to this?
And do you believe the IDF would conduct a demonsttation after it has already committed to a system?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/laser-intercept...
it been all over Israeli news. not exactly "news"
>And do you believe the IDF would conduct a demonsttation after it has already committed to a system?
what demonstration are you talking about ? if you are talking about whatever was published in february, it's mostly for more tactical/mobile use i believe.
there is an issue that north of israel is very hilly, so it's possible to fly drones from lebanon below radar visibility range and then just to get them pop-up 50km away from border. it was major problem last year and the publicized trials a believe concentrated on sourcing systems to solve this issue.
Having a laser that spreads out to e.g. 30cm radius at 500m is not hard to do if you need an area of effect weapon & can push enough power (ie. your laser is powerful enough, but not so intense that it ionizes the air & blocks itself). Reflections seem like a bigger problem: If the most effective defense includes guys with shotguns &/or there are a lot of unprotected personnel in the area, how do you make sure stray reflections don't end up blinding them?
Remember, this is about asymmetric warfare. If the number of rounds or amount of energy required costs more than the drone it shoots down, then it's not an effective deterrent. Militaries are looking for single-shot weapons to take down drones. Fire once and move on. It's the only way to deal with a swarm. Think about it for a bit and it will become very obvious.
It punches through titanium sheet in seconds.
The Ukrainians pulled off an absolute coup on Sunday. A third of a nuclear-armed country's strategic bomber fleet inoperable for the foreseeable future. Someone at NORAD probably said "they should have sent a poet" while looking at the satellite imagery.
If middle powers like Ukraine can do that to Russia, they can do that to countries like the US. We need to be on their good side.
You know what else is great about hangars? It's a super cheap defense against drone attacks that you saw from Ukraine.
Sure, you can give some examples of planes stored outside, and I can give examples of planes stored in bunkers (there are plenty of pictures from Russian airplane bunkers).
I have the feeling your comment is made in bad faith (=Russian propaganda). If not, please explain why Russians put tires on the wings.
The first casualty of war is the truth.
That being said, any sort of materiel loss on weaponry as important as strategic nuclear bombers is a massive problem for Russia. The logistics of repairing them, if possible, is going to be complex.
This was a massive damage, not directly interfering with war against Ukraine that much, but overall power projection. Plus a pretty good insult to russian's FSB and GRU services who had no clue, just like today's Crimea bridge blow.
I do not want to give any credit to russian secret service but as we have seen in 9/11 and 7th October - secret services in any country are sometimes clueless.
Oh well. Nothing that vodka and a window can't solve.
Ukraine borders on Russia, but the US is separated by ocean from serious threats. Attack by UAVs of this sort seems nearly impossible.
I think the key deterrent is that the U.S. has production capacity for the important systems and overwhelming capacity to strike back, so a rational foreign state isn’t going to think there’s a way they win by trying it. Terrorist groups might be a different story, so I’m really glad this wasn’t an option during Bush’s big adventure in Iraq and Afghanistan because however bad drone strikes are for military defense, they’re even worse for civilians.
I never considered drones, which is even more obvious, in hindsight.
Plus imagine if those attackers realize they can ship those containers from Mexico or Canada.
Could take a while to figure that out. It took days/weeks to figure out the 9/11 attacks with some certainty.
A good reason enough for a lot of people, no?
That's how Trumpism can gain any traction at all. The amount of international engagement Russia had as Putin made himself tsar was embarrassing, and to a person with no scruples if the money is right - like Trump - it just illustrates that the guardrails aren't really there.
“The revolution eats its partisans” is the most accurate description of it. People on “the good side” turn against their peers for not being on the good side enough. To wit, people who turn away don’t generally first notice that the good side isn’t so good; they first notice being bullied by that side, then they reflect on what it means to support the good side’s points of view (spoiler: A crime against humanity).
In US.
There's also an argument to be made that Europe more or less sold themselves out for cheap natural gas. Nordstream 2 was constructed after the Russians (at that point, under Putin's puppet Medvedev) had invaded Georgia.
Those airplanes are one of the things that give Russia a second strike capability, and if they lose that capability, then they are going to be on a hair trigger in a nuclear crisis.
I have some vague notion of jamming is blast a stronger signal & countering might be hopping to a different frequency but that's about it
EDIT: Apparently the reference wasn't clear.
You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private?
Reminds me of the debate about a self driving car that might need to mount the curb to avoid hitting a car - and therefore endangering a pedestrian.
It’s not an easy decision but I’d rather a machine made it than a stressed person!
The threat ended up being a false alarm, and that human judgement saved a lot of lives. A machine, assuming it would have launched when seeing that signal, would've ended differently.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/former-us-airman-tells-un-an... ("Former US Airman Tells UN an Accidental Nuclear War Was Narrowly Avoided in 1962")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10452983 ("The Okinawa missiles of October 1962 (thebulletin.org)", 71 comments)
That's the same with these drones. The smarter they get, the further away the human goes. Today it might be simple to create autonomous weapons who are instructed to kill vehicles matching various known appearances. That too already exists. The strike on the Russian bombers was reportedly carried out manually, but it would have been pretty easy to have that autonomous, since the targets are huge, stationary, easily recognizable and easy to navigate to in the geography.
If you launch a quadcopter and instruct it to kill any adult human it finds, then that's the same thing. You wouldn't launch it into an area where there is a remote possibility of being any civilians. No difference from firing an artillery shell. If there is a civilian, or a soldier waving a white flag or whatever - there is no cancel button for your artillery shell. The decision to kill whatever is in the other end was made when you fired it. There is literally no difference between firing a million drones and firing a million artillery shells down range. It's your human responsibility and your human consciousness when you make the decision.
I don't think we have had widespread use of autonomous human-targeting drones yet, but it's by no means science fiction today. Just a matter of time. We'll see their use in this conflict.
All the bombs Russia thrown onto Ukrainian civilians were thrown by human soldiers.
Yet. Drones also don't get tired.
That is, historically to wage war you had to ultimately convince/coerce millions of people to wage that war for you -- continuously for years -- along with millions more to support the effort politically and economically. In the highly automated world, you literally only need a lot of money (which also tends to concentrate outside of any semblance of democratic control).
Personally, I see anyone fretting about imperfect drones making those decisions as either (1) one of today's 10K, or (2) a performer covering a trending topic. Land mines were deployed at giga-scale over a century ago (WWI). Spring-guns were enough of a problem in England to be outlawed two centuries ago.
B) mines don't move by themself, but stay where you deployed them
A moving autonomous killer drone has a potentially bigger effect if unleashed on the wrong area. Besides, war is usually fought in civilian areas. If you send the drone to the frontline, but its GPS is jammed, it might move somewhere close by.
B) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_mine Not that anybody's doing Environmental Assessments on land, to determine whether the mines might be washed downstream after a heavy rain, or moved downslope by a landslide, or ...
The problem you describe sounds very much like poorly-directed mortar/artillery fire & strategic bombing - which have been killing civilians at scale since at least WWI.
>> You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private?
I want somebody that can be held accountable when it goes wrong. With automated systems we don't have that.
The visceral reaction is not there that would motivate the legal system to send the group that started a cascade of autonomous decisions by a robot to kill a bunch of civilians.
Targeting a stationary Tu-95 bomber with no protective measures in place is probably the easiest possible identification task for a drone.
A lot of kill/no-kill decisions are more subtle, or involve unknowns, possible nearby civilians, etc.
Or look at this crazy FPV piloting job. You think AI could do this? Pilot maneuvers through an absolute maze of anti-drone nets to hit a moving truck. (essentially SFW; video terminates slightly before impact)
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1l2aqxp/ukra...
stressed, emotional, tired front-line private
It seems trivial to confuse a Tesla's AI. I'm assuming they're fairly near the top of the game when it comes to that, yes?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1MigIJXJx8
This sort of intentionally hostile pathological case is of course rare in real-world driving. It will not be rare in warfare.
And a drone has to operate fully in three dimensions, unlike a Tesla which is effectively operating in two dimensions.
An autonomous drone will also have extremely constrained computing resources relative to a Tesla due to size/weight/power constraints.
Autonomous drones, yeah, well... https://www.tudelft.nl/en/2025/lr/autonomous-drone-from-tu-d...
(Sure, it's a hostile landscape with regards to dust/temperature/radiation. And getting to Mars and landing safely is a fiendishly difficult task. But those aren't concerns of the self-driving system...)
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/how-perseverance-drives-on...
The problem space is truly not comparable to that of a drone that needs to navigate an actively hostile, evolving environment in three dimensions at two orders of magnitude greater speed.
c.f.,
and reporting of the use of this term by U.S. drone operators.
What does that mean in practice? Have you ever saw a flash in the corner of your eye, looked for a second, then realised it was just a reflection? For that split second, your brain identified a potential threat and was trying to quickly decide whether to hide, fight or run. But underneath that was a nagging of "it's probably nothing," that caused you to delay pulling out your gun and opening fire on a passing car.
A computer programme may or may not have this coded in. A machine designed for an active war-zone, or a car assuming it'll only ever auto-pilot on a motorway, is used in a suburban area. That same programme that's fine in its original intended location suddenly opens fire on a grandma with a shiny stroller, or swerves into a pedestrian because "pedestrians don't walk on motorways."
That's what we worry about.
.. or vice-versa. The average war has plenty of stressed people firing semi blindly at half-identified shapes. And if we want to be literal, there's the case of Lee Clegg and the exact circumstances in which it is legal or not to open fire on a passing car and kill a teenage girl.
At a micro level, sure, you could argue that kill/no-kill decisions are being made by frontline enlisted soldiers, but the stress, the exhaustion, and being able to see your enemy downrange add a degree of humanization and discretion.
Wars are brutal. Some warring factions are incredibly brutal. But taking a human life can't be reduced to a `KILL? [Y/N]` decision made by some MAJ somewhere. Killing enemy soldiers is a last resort (formally, this is the concept of _military necessity_), and normalization of it as anything else is a mistake.
I also think it's a fallacy to compare this to the self-driving car trolley problem; the timeline of decisions, length of the decision chain, and ultimate goal of the decision-making process are _aggressively_ different.
My overarching points are, I guess:
War is a tragedy, obviously, but I don't think there's a way to avoid it right now. In absence of some way to stop war forever (hah), we can't trivialize taking human lives. It's not lost on me that this has been happening for a while at this point, and that it's getting worse. I still oppose it, and I think we all have a responsibility to be more critical of this regime of warfare.
I don't know how to counter the argument of "well, if we don't do it, _someone else_ will, eventually." This is some really fucked up, self-justifying inductive reasoning that can't easily be countered by calling out the moral bankruptcy of the premise. In the past, mutual disarmament treaties have been a down-the-line bandaid for this kind of thought process, but the nuclear rearmament we're seeing in the world right now shows it's not a panacea.
War is studied. There are journals, papers and research on war fighting at all possible levels.
In the most recent action by Ukraine you can observe actual reality: what did they attack? Military equipment of the enemy. Why did they attack it? To degrade the enemy's ability to sustain and rotate their forces attacking them. What was it for? Well for one thing it will hopefully considerably reduce their ability to bomb civilian targets.
My response was more aimed at the parent comment to my previous one, which seemed to paint delegating kill/no-kill decisions with a brush of "I don't know why this is such a big deal."
At the end of the day, it's still humans deploying these weapon systems and accepting the risk that they might cause unintended casualties.
When a misconfigured computer does something wrong, it frequently does it over and over and over again until it is prevented from doing so by an external intervention.
No tired private is going to mistakenly rampage through a populated area mowing down civilians. But a confused drone swarm might.
A machine also can't be held responsible.
Who do the surviving relatives of the crush pedestrian sue? No longer the driver i guess
Autonomous cars wouldn't speed and they are always paying attention. Maybe you could argue that it happened because the other driver was drunk or for some other reason swerved into your lane but this is still an incredibly niche situation and if it does happen just sue that guy. The vast majority of car-to-car accidents happen when both drivers are irresponsible. Autonomous cars will significantly reduce accident rates just by following the rules of traffic and being constantly aware.
The whole who should be sued thing is asinine, just have a national insurance fund for it or whatever. Cheaper than all the accidents it prevents.
There was an article here serveral weeks ago about how in some self driving cars the brakes can be pre-loaded and can be used much quicker than a human could, reaction times aside.
It's hard to imagine there is a military in the world that would put something so important in the hands of a private. Yes the drones in this war are relatively low cost but they are also so vital to both sides' war effort that there is inevitably more command and control over their use.
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/06/1196975759/ukraine-cyber-war-...