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Killer drones pioneered in Ukraine are the weapons of the future
(www.economist.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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Drones currently outpace their countermeasurs. This will definitely not be a thing forever. I think the effectiveness of cheap drones will go down as be countermeasures are invented.
We already see new very effective military drone jammers starting to come out
Onboard AI guidance is not difficult.
Yes it is.
Both of you are right.
It's difficult, but how difficult depends on the task you set. If the task is "maintain manually initiated target lock on a clearly defined object on an empty field, despite the communications link breaking for 10 seconds" -> it is "give a team of coders half a year" difficult. It's been solved before, the solution just needs re-inventing and porting to a different platform.
If it's "identify whether an object is military, whether it is frienly or hostile, consider if it's worth attacking, and attack a camouflaged target in a dense forest", then it's currently not worth trying.
That was a good guess but unfortunately it is just difficult even in the scenario you proposed
Realtime person detection and following it with a drone? Difficult for me, certainly, but there are enough people out there who have done it.
You can't be serious.
Tracking a moving object in realtime with video is a standard task for a machine learning engineer. You can do it on an embedded platform with ML hardware support. I don't know what hardware newer Lancets use but they can already do it according from developer reports from Telegram channels like e.g Разработчик БПЛА.
Honestly, I was just objecting to the use of "AI". We've had both fire and forget and loitering munitions for decades now, neither of which use ML. Will it happen? Sure. For now, ML/AI is too unreliable to be trusted in a deployed direct attack platform, and we dont have computing hardware powerful enough to run ML models that we can jam in a missile.
(Though yeah we run tons of models against drone data feeds, none of those are done onboard...)
And probably can't ever be trusted. That "hallucinations can't ever be ruled out" result is for language models but should probably apply to vision, too. In any case researchers made cars see things and AFAIU they didn't even have to attack the model they simply confused the radar. Militaries are probably way better at that than anything that's out in the open, they've been doing ECM for ages and of course never tell anyone how any of it works.
That doesn't mean that ML can't be used, though, you can have additional non-ML mission parameters such as the drone only acquiring targets over enemy territory. Or that the AI is merely the gunner, there's still a human commander.
The point of modern deep learning approaches is that they're extremely easy on the developer skill. Decades ago realtime machine vision needed a machine vision expert, these days you throw the hardware at the problem at learning stage, and embedded devices to run the results are stupidly powerful (doesn't even take a Jetson board), if you compare to what has been available even a decade ago.
A combination of GPS, or even inertial based guidance to get them to the target area and then some simple vehicle / object identification, I'd think those are possible.
GPS is usually the first thing to be jammed in the battlefield.
GPS is useful, but not required for operation. Inertial guidance, and ground tracking cameras can easily maintain a good position sense, while completely RF passive. This is also already normal on many toy drones.
You would also want to jam it over a large area. That jamming is akin to a "kick me" sign, in neon lights.
Inertial guidance sucks balls for any meaningful amount of time. Combining it with ground tracking gets it a lot better, if you have good time of flight sensors to measure the distance from the ground. But this also falls flat on its face when the ground is too uniform (grassland, wetland, snow etc).
Edit, apparently I'm an idiot and my ability to tell truth from fiction is a lot worse than I thought.
In my defence however, all the parts are completely viable. I also saw it mixed in with Boston dynamics videos.
I'll leave the original comment for context of my folly.
The US already has them.
There are single shot drones, designed to be deployed into a building, or cave system. They then use cameras etc to navigate, while running face recognition. When they find their target, they fly just in front of it. The shaped C4 charge is designed to reduce their head to red mist, while not risking those close by.
AI + cheap drones will completely change warfare. Probably on the same level as the tank, or machine gun.
Do you have a source for this? These sound uncannily close to the Slaughterbots short film...
I'll try and remember to dig it out later. It was a sales demo from a weapon's company. I can't remember exactly which one it was, but the implications scared the shit out of me.
Are you certain you're not thinking of the Sci-Fi Short Film "Slaughterbots"? The plot is almost exactly what you describe.
Apparently I'm an idiot. I saw a modified version, mixed in amongst other legit videos.
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Sci-Fi Short Film "Slaughterbots"
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You can't be very knowledgeable on the topic.
I am, in fact, fairly well versed in the topic. You're 30+ years away from being able to fit hardware powerful enough to run a ML model into a missle, though I cant see a single reason you'd ever want to. Look into the declassified, 40+ year old design paradigms for missiles or other self-guided munitions and it'll start to give you an idea of why the idea of "AI" guidance is so laughably stupid. There's so very many reasons we use FPGAs, none of which are compatible with AI.
I will be very suprised if this isn't already happening.
I know it already does, at least in newer Lancets. Expect this in fpv type devices soon.
The only reliable counter to a drone is likely another drone.
I suspect Peter F Hamilton got it close, in the Confederation series, with WASPs. They are space based weapon platforms. They carry a mix of offensive and defensive subsystems, and operate with swarm logic.
I could easily see a larger drone carrying a swarm of 1 shot micro drones. When close, some would be sacrificed to get better sensor data, others would go on the attack. Conversely, a defensive target would launch their own swarm. It's goal would be to stop the attackers getting a good shot on a high value target. It might also counterattack, either against the mother ship drone, or backtracking to find the launch site.
Jamming would also be part of this. A jammer could easily cut off the swarm from external data sources. Live satellite or remote surveillance systems would be cut. Point to point lasers are far harder, as are burst transmissions. Local sensor drones could easily punch short range data back, or paint targets, until they are destroyed by defensive systems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr7ym1zkda8
Anti-air guns are the countermeasure. RADAR good enough to detect drones + an aimbot and programmable air-burst round to "shotgun" your pellets to damage those soft plastic bits.
We're going back to WW2 tech. AA guns were considered obsolete because Helicopters + Missiles had more range. But now we need to build cheaper AA Guns for the anti-drone role.
AA Guns are also useful vs infantry, so in an infantry vs infantry fight, having an AA Gun platform will be useful even without any drones around. Airburst and rapid fire is always useful, and I expect the computers that make RADAR possible will be far cheaper today than decades past.
They may both have a role.
If you know that a given point is at risk of attack, using a static defense like AA guns is practical. Say you have some sort of specific, high-value target that you can put AA guns around. That may be a very sensible thing to do.
But the problem, if you intend to rely only on those, is that there is then a concentration of force issue. The attacker can choose which point to attack; they get the initiative.
Say you're trying to defend against something like a Shahed-136. It can hit pretty much anywhere in Ukraine. You can't stick an AA gun on everything that Russia might consider trading a Shahed-136 for.
But, okay, say you try to go big with static defenses. Let's say that you can obtain and pony up the resources to hypothetically stick an AA gun at every single point along the front line and border, and that your AA gun has the altitude to hit a drone. You have an unbroken line of engagement envelope all around a country. That'd be an extraordinary expenditure, but it could hypothetically be done. So a drone has to fly through defended airspace. The problem is that if the other guy expends an equivalent amount of resources, he can buy a shit-ton of drones and fly them all through a single gun's engagement envelope. Even if he doesn't even bother to try to attack the antiaircraft gun, your gun defenses are just going to get overwhelmed, because all of the attacker's resources are engaged, whereas the vast bulk of the defender's resources are not in the fight. Maybe you hit a tiny percentage of drones, but the rest are going to be able to simply fly through.
The problem is that the cost of static defenses in that scenario grows at something like the square of the scale of the air conflict -- you have to have enough static defenses to counter all of the attacker's aircraft, and pre-place those defenses at all points that might be attacked, whereas the cost of the attack grows only linearly. It's cost-effective to use static defenses only if the attacker is compelled to attack a limited number of points.
If that's not the case, then using some form of mobile defense is more important -- say, I don't know, you have a fleet of gun-armed, jet-powered counter-UAS UASes. Dollar-for-dollar, they might not be as effective as a static gun. But...you can route most or all of them in to meet any given attack.
-- Sun Tzu, The Art of War, ~400 BC
Did you see the Youtube link?
This is a lightweight AA Gun that can be mounted on a cheap pickup truck. This isn't a "Static" defense, this system is more mobile than infantry. It will move with the infantry, it will protect the infantry, and the infantry will protect it.
But you can have an AA Gun on a Pickup truck follow your infantry around, protecting that company. If you have 100 men out on the field, it makes sense to give them at least one AA Gun to protect themselves against a wide variety of drone threats. Or if one AA gun per 100-men is too expensive, then maybe per battalion (~500 men). Etc. etc.
If the enemy drone is moving less than 200mph, the cheaper AA Gun will reliably protect the troops, as long as the person watching the RADAR doesn't fall asleep. And at 115mph, even a Shahed is slow enough that AA Guns reliably work. Most drones are far slower than that.
That's called an F22 Air Superiority Fighter.
Yeah, that'd be nice, but I'm assuming those are off the table for obvious reasons.
Lets start with basic problems first. How can a battalion survive a typical onslaught of Russian drones?
Well, anti-air guns. Bam. We work our way up as the more important, lower-level problems get solved. I know people are talking F16s now, so maybe we're at the point where fighter jets are the next step forward.
No one is going to shoot at a cheap AA Gun (like the "MACE" system) with hundreds of drones: the hundreds of drones will mostly get shot down and ultimately the price wouldn't be worth it. Bullets are far cheaper than drones after-all. Now whether a particular MACE will try to shoot down high-flying drones like Shahed is another question, but its also just another problem all together.
MACE's job is to protect the infantry inside of its shield. And its highly effective at that.
It's static from the standpoint of being required to meet an incoming Shahed-136, which can move more quickly than it; you cannot substantially reposition vehicles on ground-based vehicles to meet incoming attacks from the air. The critical factor is whether you can concentrate your defenses in time to meet an attack, once you have detected that incoming attack.
Force concentration is a job for fighter jets. Most jets can fly at Mach 1, or even Mach2 (700mph to 1500mph). At which point, a 120mph Shahed-136 is basically standing still.
Different weapons for different tasks. The AA Gun is cheap and meant to be widely deployed across the whole frontline. Infantry could use them against other infantry (30mm airbursts will still wreck enemy infantry), and also rely upon those guns to protect themselves vs enemy drones.
I think that we may be violently agreeing. What I had in my original comment:
I guess I read it differently earlier.
As far as I know, the routine in the current war is - the AA gun is on a truck that moves 80 km/h, the drone comes in slower than 300 km/h, one or multiple truck crews position themselves on likely vantage points for intercepting, and the rest is luck.
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There are in fact a huge number of reliable counters to drones, including but not limited to anti-aircraft gun systems, anti-aircraft lasers, RF jamming devices (especially effective against cheap/makeshift drones), and several more. Drones are currently an emergent threat without a robust countermeasure scheme, but given their massive role in the Ukraine war that is not going to go unaddressed for long. From a purely mechanical standpoint, small drone munitions are also physically very vulnerable, making them readily destroyed by anti-air autocannon fire or even laser weapons if you assume RF jamming will not solve the problem.
Between GPS (jammable but likely gets you into the target area), dead reckoning, optical flow sensors and increasingly impressive onboard camera processing, RF jamming will soon be irrelevant.
Almost a decade ago I was flying agricultural mapping missions that were 99% autonomous, and the parts that weren't were problems a military drone doesn't have (soft launch and landing)
The clear counter is autocannons, likely fully automated themselves to manage large swarms. The other would be cheap anti-drone missiles that either are basically a drone themselves or a glorified model rocket. Possibly tiny, cheap and fast interceptors launched from fixed-wing drones. The weak point of drones is literally their physical weakness.
It's worth noting we are at the start of an arms race. It will iterate all over the place.
For example, smoke and chaff deploying drones would make defensive fire harder. Anti air can be either baited (and so depleted) or rushed. Lasers can be shielded against, at least for a time. Jamming can be countered with line of site communications.
In turn, each of these can be countered.
A key thing of note is that your solutions are heavy. Fine for defending a static target, but problematic when dealing with defending a mobile unit etc infantry of transports. In those situations an extremely rapid, focused highly dynamic response would be required. The obvious way to deploy those fast enough is to have them automated and airborne, aka a drone swarm.
I might be completely wrong, current drone warfare is akin to the invention of the smoothbore musket. How it will develop remains to be seen (for better or for worse).
It's going up be interesting and scary when we see the first mega swarm of drones, a river of them just pouring through the sky and hammering from every direction at the defenses.
Constant evolution of drone and antidrone, a production race with frontlines being slowly shifting walls of drone combat, them pouring out of factories as fast as they can be made with the front moving based on who can make more per hour
I suspect it will be more subtle even if it's only battery life limited. Huge swarms will also struggle against fixed defences. More likely it will be used in ambush. E.g. air deployed near an enemy convoy, or swarming from rooftops and windows onto an infantry unit. Counter deployment will have to be seconds to stop the lead elements. Potentially with heavier reinforcements flying in.
I've personally got visions of a Boston dynamics dogbot with a harness full of drones. 1 button press and a few dozen micro drones swarm out, with larger ones launching as needed.
I could also see facial recognition drones being deployed from a predator drone, like cluster bombs. A little akin to the bots used in the film minority report. They swarm a building or block, and try and identify all the faces they can find.
The key thing however will be battery life. Multicopters are power hogs. You need around 40% battery to get maybe 5-20 minutes flight times (depending on how the manoeuvre). Longer times can be achieved , but requires larger systems with higher costs. Is 1 system with a 2 hour flight time worth 20 smaller systems only good for 10 minutes?
I saw a YouTube clip explaining that they use a secondary drone to boost the signal to get around some of the jamming.
The game of cat and mouse continues.