The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots.
What’s that from? The Simpsons?
Yes. I’m a man of few words.
I think they are perfectly cromulent words.
robots, satellites, or for that matter fighter jets or artillery can’t hold ground, all these units work in support of infantry. the future belongs to what we already have: combined arms warfare
robots…can’t hold ground
Maybe not yet. Maybe not even soon. But it will happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ
At some point, you’re going to have legged robots out there, and that’ll start cutting into human advantages in mobility over rugged terrain.
BigDog got rejected by the Marines because it was too loud. But that’s not really a fundamental limitation of robotics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigDog
At the end of December 2015, the BigDog project was discontinued. Despite hopes that it would one day work like a pack mule for US soldiers in the field, the gas-powered engine was deemed too noisy for use in combat. A similar project for an all-electric robot named Spot was much quieter, but could only carry 40 pounds (18 kg). Both projects are no longer in progress, but the Spot Mini was released in 2019.[2][11]
That’s just a load-bearer. But once you have a platform that’s mobile and can go most places a human can, it’s gonna get armed pretty quickly.
And it won’t happen all at once – you’ll have some humans, some robots. Maybe they just have load-bearers, like what DARPA was interested in BigDog doing. Maybe a robot gets put on point when a squad is patrolling.
But the cost of a human life is pretty high, so there’s a pretty potent incentive to consume a robot than a human life if possible.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
robots can’t hold ground
Tell that to an auto turret that shoots anyone that approaches it.
States don’t concede wars because of equipment losses—they concede when the cost in lives becomes an existential threat to the ruling regimes. Drones fighting drones means nothing to governments unless there are human lives at stake when the drones break through.
most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots.
Drones aren’t being used to kill other drones, they are being used to drop bombs on people
Anyone have a non paywalled or more info on the subject? All signs point towards an impending global war and I’d like to be as prepared as possible.
This is similar but not paywalled either.
Drone advances in Ukraine have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world’s first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare.
Fully-autonomous robots that kill without a human in the loop have been around for quite a while. They just aren’t as pervasive or visible as they could be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS
The Phalanx CIWS (SEE-wiz) is an automated gun-based close-in weapon system to defend military watercraft automatically against incoming threats such as aircraft, missiles, and small boats.
The only inputs required for operation are 440 V AC three-phase electric power at 60 Hz and water (for electronics cooling).
That’s 1980.
I think that the Soviet analog also can operate without a human in the loop:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-630
The gun mount is fully automated, and can also be remotely controlled by an operator from either the control console or via a remotely mounted gunsight.
If so, that’s 1976.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot
Patriot was one of the first tactical systems in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to employ lethal autonomy in combat.
That’s 1981.
All signs point towards an impending global war
Like what?
PRECISION-GUIDED weapons first appeared in their modern form on the battlefield in Vietnam a little over 50 years ago. As armed forces have strived ever since for accuracy and destructiveness, the cost of such weapons has soared. America’s gps-guided artillery shells cost $100,000 a time. Because smart weapons are expensive, they are scarce. That is why European countries ran out of them in Libya in 2011. Israel, more eager to conserve its stockpiles than avoid collateral damage, has rained dumb bombs on Gaza. What, though, if you could combine precision and abundance?
For the first time in the history of warfare that question is being answered on the battlefields of Ukraine. Our report this week shows how first-person view (FPV) drones are mushrooming along the front lines. They are small, cheap, explosives-laden aircraft adapted from consumer models, and they are making a soldier’s life even more dangerous. These drones slip into tank turrets or dugouts. They loiter and pursue their quarry before going for the kill. They are inflicting a heavy toll on infantry and armour.
The war is also making FPV drones and their maritime cousins ubiquitous. January saw 3,000 verified FPV drone strikes. This week Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, created the Unmanned Systems Force, dedicated to drone warfare. In 2024 Ukraine is on track to build 1m-2m drones. Astonishingly, that will match Ukraine’s reduced consumption of shells (which is down because Republicans in Congress are shamefully denying Ukraine the supplies it needs).
The drone is not a wonder weapon—no such thing exists. It matters because it embodies big trends in war: a shift towards small, cheap and disposable weapons; the increasing use of consumer technology; and the drift towards autonomy in battle. Because of these trends, drone technology will spread rapidly from armies to militias, terrorists and criminals. And it will improve not at the budget-cycle pace of the military-industrial complex, but with the break-things urgency of consumer electronics.
Basic FPV drones are revolutionarily simple. The descendants of racing quadcopters, built from off-the-shelf components, they can cost as little as several hundred dollars. FPV drones tend to have short ranges, carry small payloads and struggle in bad weather. For those reasons they will not (yet) replace artillery. But they can still do a lot of damage. In one week last autumn Ukrainian drones helped destroy 75 Russian tanks and 101 big guns, among much else. Russia has its own fpv drones, though they tend to target dugouts, trenches and soldiers. Drones help explain why both sides find it so hard to mount offensives.
The exponential growth in the number of Russian and Ukrainian drones points to a second trend. They are inspired by and adapted from widely available consumer technology. Not only in Ukraine but also in Myanmar, where rebels have routed government forces in recent days, volunteers can use 3D printers to make key components and assemble airframes in small workshops. Unfortunately, criminal groups and terrorists are unlikely to be far behind the militias.
This reflects a broad democratisation of precision weapons. In Yemen the Houthi rebel group has used cheap Iranian guidance kits to build anti-ship missiles that are posing a deadly threat to commercial vessels in the Red Sea. Iran itself has shown how an assortment of long-range strike drones and ballistic missiles can have a geopolitical effect that far outweighs their cost. Even if the kit needed to overcome anti-drone jamming greatly raises the cost of the weapons, as some predict, they will still count as transformationally cheap.
The reason goes back to consumer electronics, which propel innovation at a blistering pace as capabilities accumulate in every product cycle. That poses problems of ethics as well as obsolescence. There will not always be time to subject novel weapons to the testing that Western countries aim for in peacetime and that is required by the Geneva Conventions.
Innovation also leads to the last trend, autonomy. Today, fpv drone use is limited by the supply of skilled pilots and by the effects of jamming, which can sever the connection between a drone and its operator. To overcome these problems, Russia and Ukraine are experimenting with autonomous navigation and target recognition. Artificial intelligence has been available in consumer drones for years and is improving rapidly.
A degree of autonomy has existed on high-end munitions for years and on cruise missiles for decades. The novelty is that cheap microchips and software will let intelligence sit inside millions of low-end munitions that are saturating the battlefield. The side that masters autonomy at scale in Ukraine first could enjoy a temporary but decisive advantage in firepower—a necessary condition for any breakthrough.
Western countries have been slow to absorb these lessons. Simple and cheap weapons will not replace big, high-end platforms, but they will complement them. The Pentagon is belatedly embarking on Replicator, an initiative to build thousands of low-cost drones and munitions able to take on China’s enormous forces. Europe is even further behind. Its ministers and generals increasingly believe that they could face another major European war by the end of the decade. If so, investment in low-end drones needs to grow urgently. Moreover, ubiquitous drones will require ubiquitous defences—not just on battlefields but also in cities at peace. Kalashnikovs in the skies
Intelligent drones will also raise questions about how armies wage war and whether humans can control the battlefield. As drones multiply, self-co-ordinating swarms will become possible. Humans will struggle to monitor and understand their engagements, let alone authorise them.
America and its allies must prepare for a world in which rapidly improving military capabilities spread more quickly and more widely. As the skies over Ukraine fill with expendable weapons that marry precision and firepower, they serve as a warning. Mass-produced hunter-killer aircraft are already reshaping the balance between humans and technology in war. ■
Western countries have been slow to absorb these lessons. Simple and cheap weapons will not replace big, high-end platforms, but they will complement them. The Pentagon is belatedly embarking on Replicator, an initiative to build thousands of low-cost drones and munitions able to take on China’s enormous forces. Europe is even further behind. Its ministers and generals increasingly believe that they could face another major European war by the end of the decade. If so, investment in low-end drones needs to grow urgently. Moreover, ubiquitous drones will require ubiquitous defences—not just on battlefields but also in cities at peace.
I think that any war determined by who can churn out more low-end drones is going to be dominated by China, given their overwhelming share of the consumer market. Consumer drones are made there because China has comparative advantage.
That will only change if the basic methods of manufacture change, like, production is far more heavily automated. And even then, it’s not clear to me that China has a disadvantage in industrial automation.
I think a more-interesting technology question is who has better counters to low-end drones. There, I can imagine room for a technological advantage. As things stand today, though, we really don’t have a compelling answer, and we probably should have come up with one by now.
These flying IEDs can be defeated with some simple radio jamming. They will fall out of the sky without a remote control signal.
So, I haven’t played with them, but even commercial, off-the-shelf DJI consumer drones have the ability to return to some location if they lose link, so they’re gonna have at least GPS in there. You can jam that, but they’ve got accelerometers, and you can’t jam that. They shouldn’t drop out of the sky even if you can manage to jam things.
It looks like DJI drones have frequency-hopping spread spectrum support, too. So you have to jam all frequencies that they’re using, since you don’t know which they’re using at any given instant. For consumer hardware, it probably doesn’t matter much – nobody is jamming you, so you sit in your little assigned piece of spectrum, have a handful of channels – but in a war, you can probably expand the frequencies you use, use a huge chunk of the spectrum, if need be.
There are also some forms of jam resistance that AFAIK are not being exploited – beam-forming or directional antennas.
Both Russia and Ukraine have a pretty strong interest in using electronic warfare against drones, and the fact that both are still using a lot of them seems like a pretty good argument that they can’t currently successfully stop them via electronic warfare.
And even if you can jam signal when it gets really close to the target, if you have a second drone watching – which it looks like Ukraine and Russia often are, from the videos I see, maybe to do damage assessment – you can probably stick a laser designator on those, if they haven’t already, use it to guide the weaponized drone in.
I have accidentally seen far too many videos from !ukraine@sopuli.xyz to know that these things are fucking brutal.
Knowing full well that on a metric of pure numbers, these don’t compare to other weapons of war, but there’s something about the personal nature of these fuckers that are just so fucking soul-destroying.
Those videos are definitely NSFL (and are usually marked as such, in fairness), but most of them have zoomed-in, full-screen footage of the carnage they leave behind. They are mostly individual or 2-3 individuals hiding/cowering alone in a trench, blown to literal pieces and left dying, completely unaware that somewhere on the other end of that drone is an operator watching their final excruciating moments of life.
It is one thing to be operating a long-range artillery weapon, or a drone flying at several thousand feet firing long-range missiles, or being in a close-combat life-or-death situation, but it’s a completely different experience watching a shell drop on a defenseless, terrified and cowering human (likely coerced into war or forcibly compelled to the front-line) as if you’re 10 fucking feet above them, while yourself are completely out of immediate harm.
Fuck war, but especially fuck these drones in particular.
If I had to guess, the government has had this tech since at least the early 2000s. The CIA has been doing shady ass shit since their inception, and shit like that is probably only the tip of the iceberg of what they currently have. Though they’re probably using something closer to grenades than in that film, as 1 drone to 1 kill probably isn’t enough.
That short film is one of only a few that has stuck with me.
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
Jammers only work against remote controlled drones. Autonomous ones have no such issue. And jammers are never a problem against civilians, which tech like this will eventually be used on.
That’s only one example
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.
I will be very suprised if this isn’t already happening.
It’s one thing detecting a person with machine learning in a test and an actual soldier with camouflage in a very imperfect environment. Also good luck telling friend from foe from civilian.
This has all sorts of problems while making the whole system more complicated and prone to issues. Not the mention moral questions of autonomous weapons. I have no doubt it will happen but not yet, not here.
Why would the drone differentiate an armed person from a civilian? I mean, you’ll be asking to separate out children next, at that rate!
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.
The spot where we intend to fight must not be made known; for then the enemy will have to prepare against a possible attack at several different points; and his forces being thus distributed in many directions, the numbers we shall have to face at any given point will be proportionately few.
For should the enemy strengthen his van, he will weaken his rear; should he strengthen his rear, he will weaken his van; should he strengthen his left, he will weaken his right; should he strengthen his right, he will weaken his left. If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.
Numerical weakness comes from having to prepare against possible attacks; numerical strength, from compelling our adversary to make these preparations against us.
Knowing the place and the time of the coming battle, we may concentrate from the greatest distances in order to fight.
But if neither time nor place be known, then the left wing will be impotent to succor the right, the right equally impotent to succor the left, the van unable to relieve the rear, or the rear to support the van. How much more so if the furthest portions of the army are anything under a hundred LI apart, and even the nearest are separated by several LI!
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War, ~400 BC
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.
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.
You use the word easily so many times here where it becomes more and more apparent that you probably don’t think it means what it means
I’ve worked with drones of various sizes. Bigger and more expensive ones are more capable, but hard to make bullet proof. If you can remote off their sensors and weapons into cheap, more disposable systems, it makes sense.
A big drone, like a predator, drops a package into an area. Mid sized multicopters provide local computing power and coordination. Small planes provide fast loiter surveillance. Small multicopters with cameras give more accurate coverage. For attack, you have what amounts to a hand grenade with props. Protection takes the form of similar disposables. A flying strobe light to mess up optical tracking. Chaff bombs to mess up radar tracking. Smoke to obscure the high value units.
A lot of these I could throw together myself, given a few weeks, and a few grand. What part wouldn’t be easy, for a large and well funded military r&d team?
What part wouldn’t be easy? The hand grenade with props. The strobe light. The chaff. The software. The batteries and power supply. The reliability. The compute requirements. There is so many things that are easy sounding to you because you romanticise the idea but it’s not easily done at all
Easy for a remotely advanced military force.
An explosive drone is easy. Just a small amount of high explosives and an electronic detonator.
Strobe lights could just be an overdriven LED. It just needs to dazzle optical sensors for a few seconds.
Chaff is just lightweight foil. It’s effectively an oversized party popper. It’s job is to help overwhelm radar based tracking.
Software is the hardest bit. At the same time, many computer game ‘AIs’ are good enough at this they need to be dumbed down significantly. It would be more specialised, but only needs to be written once, then rolled out to a fleet.
Batteries would be a swarms limiting factor. Single shot lithium would likely be the bulk. 5-20 minutes of flight, then it’s dead. Disposables would likely need to be moved into position by other means, either a dedicated transport drone, ground transport, or air drop. Your transport doesn’t need to stay in the combat zone however, it can bug out and be reused. Larger more specialist systems would land and loiter to save batteries, and/or be fuel cell powered.
Reliability is handled by numbers, losing 10% is fine, when you have 20% extra.
Computing requires would be met by something like Nvidia’s Jetson range. They are designed for low power, low weight AI processing. Putting a tflop of computing power in the close Comms loop would be simple. The controller would be the most expensive part of the swarm. Not only would it need enough power, both computing and electrical, but also significant Comms capabilities. Radio links, with optical backup would be the workhorse. With a mesh setup, including dummies to help hide it’s location. This is similar to how the display drones work. An expensive hub, serving a cheap swarm.
While none of this is “easy” for a random guy in a shed, or a terrorist in a cave, it’s child’s play compared to a lot of the tech the US can deploy.
It’s not easy for you, me
For anyone.
It’s easy for the anime engineers in your head
No, it’s not just arts and crafts foil put in a box and now you have chaffe
Again it’s just you romanticised the idea and don’t understand how complicated such a system would be, it’s beyond our capabilities to make
military hardware is not made to be cool, it’s made to be cost effective and reliable
I design build and operate broadcast equipment. A good chunk goes onto UAVs. I’ve built small quads, and I’ve played around with equipment fully capable of some of the more complex tasks. E.g. live 3D mapping from an airborne capable computer.
I’m also friends with several people who used to design and build military equipment, including radar systems. Military tech is a weird mix of amazingly high tech, stupidly simple hacks and long lifespan versions of off the shelf technology. I’ve a fairly good feel for how hard or easy a good chunk of the bits are to build. Most of what I suggested I could personally design and build, or easily commission, given some time, a reasonable budget, and access to restricted resources as required.
In its simplest form, chaff is just tuned lengths of mylar foil. As it flutters, it glitters in a radar beam. This creates a large noise floor. While modern military chaff is more advanced, the old stuff will still cause problems for modern systems. It’s not trying to hide a tank, or pull off a missile’s lock. It’s trying to swamp the signal from a tiny, mostly plastic, drone.
I’m also not saying to reinvent the wheel. Chaff is now a fairly niche defence tool. It’s hard to use while advancing, and gives away your position. It also needs to be integrated with other countermeasures to be useful. It is still a fairly solved problem however. It’s cheap to make, quick to deploy, and available in bulk, if required.
Most modern military equipment isn’t expensive due to its inherent nature. It’s expensive because it’s a niche product, and the buyers have deep wallets. The same game plays out in broadcasting. A £100k camera isn’t that much better than a £5k one. It is better however, and buyers are willing to pay for that difference.
The reverse is also true, as Ukraine is proving. 100 $1k drones are more useful than 1 $100k, ultra capable, drone or missile. The point of a swarm is to allow multiple cheap systems to do the job of a far more expensive weapon.
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?
Can we please just fight all of our wars on the moon with giant robots like God intended?
deleted by creator
What sucks is that us hobbist’s can’t get FPV, motors, ESC’s, or batteries at reasonable prices (if at all)
The reality of it, is this is short lived.
Anti-Air meant for small drones like this is coming and soon.
And it will shut these down quickly.
How would that anti-air against small drones look like? It is not easy.
Probably miniaturized versions of CIWS / C-RAM or laser systems.
Nah, lasers too big. It would be a simple birdshot shotgun. Its detection and aiming.
When they are high up, they can be hard to spot and hear.
But a pair of sensitive mic’s and a camera designed to look for them could easily be paired with some AR glasses.somebody already put lasers on F35 and israelis are using ground-based lasers as a complement to iron dome
