Ukraine is using ultra-cheap "First Person View" drones to destroy Russian tanks:
A typical FPV weighs up to one kilogram, has four small engines, a battery, a frame and a camera connected wirelessly to goggles worn by a pilot operating it remotely. It can carry up to 2.5 kilograms of explosives and strike a target at a speed of up to 150 kilometers per hour, explains Pavlo Tsybenko, acting director of the Dronarium military academy outside Kyiv.
“This drone costs up to $400 and can be made anywhere. We made ours using microchips imported from China and details we bought on AliExpress.”
Now add two things to this picture: (a) advanced artificial intelligence for targeting and (b) mass production by a large country like China or the US. You can shoot down drones, but can you shoot down a swarm of 10,000 or a million drones? Not a chance.
For naval battles the details change but not the big picture. Even a thousand tiny drones can't sink an aircraft carrier, but a few hundred bigger drones might. That's maybe $100 million to destroy a $10 billion carrier.
We aren't there yet, but how long do we have to wait before this becomes reality? A few years?
The other thing that appears to be happening with drones appears to be (although neither side will officially share, of course) that the element of surprise is almost completely eliminated.
With the combination of smart artillery and drones, the type of massed attacks seen in movies seems completely out of date. Russia is sustaining incredible losses by even trying massed attacks in relatively small waves.
This has huge tactical implications. Sooner, rather than later, anti drone tech will arrive to match (note now missile defense has matched missiles), but in the meantime its astonishing how this technology is making other, as Kevin points out, expensive, technology obsolete.
The Russians have deployed so many FPV drones, they are using them to target individual soldiers. You can defend a carrier with CIWS and ECM, but how do you defend an infantryman?
This will certainly inspire the development of anti-drone drones.
What I've been thinking about today is, how are underwater drones doing? They never talk about that.
I would suspect that the difficulties of communicating with a submerged vessel means that underwater drones must be fully autonomous. Fairly long-range homing torpedoes exist, and they are sort of technically autonomous underwater drones. They don't necessarily need to be launched from submarines; torpedoes have been launched from submarines, surface ships, airplanes, and fixed launchers.
Just listened to a podcast about this (can't remember which one) and they are very much a technology being actively used and developed by the US and of course other militaries and present basically the same problems airborne drones: cheap, numerous, hard to detect and capable of carrying significant explosive payloads. They also are developing ones that can operate autonomously for weeks or months.
Kevin, what is the range of this small, inexpensive FPV drone. How about your postulated bigger brothers? How will they be brought within range of their aircraft carrier targets?
there are commercial off the shelf drones with 40+ mile range so long as there cell network available for remote control. i'm sure specialized military purposed drones, even very low cost ones, can exceed that.
40+ mile range with what payload?
Not much cell network out there by a carrier battle group.
"Even a thousand tiny drones can't sink an aircraft carrier"
Why not? I have no knowledge of the vulnerabilities of military ships or power of available explosives, so I'd be interested to know if this is accurate. And also, there's a difference between sinking and disabling for effective operations which seems like the more relevant issue.
If nothing else, a matter of relative mass.
Going further, an aircraft carrier has an armored flight deck. I don’t know that it is tougher than the top armor of a tank but wouldn’t be surprised. We also don’t know which model(s) of tanks these small drones are taking out.
Fly into openings.
In reality, they could take out communication and radar, possibly even systems for flight operations on the deck. But that would require fairly close operators else lag time defeats purpose--unless software could "lock on" to an image.
And for an aircraft carrier, take out any aircraft on deck and target the catapult launch assist system.
Most of the catapult system is either in the armored deck, or below decks.
It's fairly obvious why several countries are working on anti-drone lasers. The drones are soft targets and can be killed with a lot less energy than bigger missiles or aircraft, meaning a laser of plausible power can do the job, and even if the weapon is expensive the cost per shot should be low and the effective range fairly long.
I was wondering if masers could cook the electronics quickly.
One data point: There's a very early SV startup I heard about that is working on civilian drone-defense tech. I know that because I was thinking the same thoughts and was exploring the idea, before concluding I don't know the right people to start something with.
This tech is already dirt cheap. Some friends of mine and I were building cheap "drones" out of trash, literally styrofoam we pulled from dumpsters and cheap electronics, in the early aughts. The requirement for relatively high-density explosives to compensate for the light payload weight is a tradeoff that is easy to adjust for availability. Targeted assassination fears are going to drive deployment, but I expect much more use in routine crime and black-market commercial violence.
Going to be interesting.
Operation Crossbow has pivoted?-)
Or perhaps a return to the WWI "Flying Circus" in miniature.
In Kim Stanley Robinson's book "Ministry for the Future", he describes something called a "pebble mob", or clusters of small, inexpensive drones that swarm their targets from multiple directions at once, only converging at the last second. In his book, set in the near future, these drones have rendered large surface navy ships almost obsolete.
The US defense establishment seems fixated on a few, incredibly pricey, difficult to learn to operate, and finicky weapon systems (fighter jets, etc). We may recall how German equipment in WWII was the best made on the battlefield, but few -- and was overwhelmed by the inferior mass produced aircraft, tanks, ships, etc from the US and other allies.
are you picking on the F35?
The Ukranians have also begun using remote controlled mine vehicles the size of lawnmowers. Each has a stack of mines in the center, which are then dropped off as they roll along. They were using these across fields since they're low profile and can be placed into active areas where tanks had previously crossed and thought were still safe.
"Now add two things to this picture: (a) advanced artificial intelligence for targeting and (b) mass production by a large country like China or the US."
So, you're basically just coming out and asking for The Matrix now, huh?
Does Israel Really Have ‘Sponge Bombs’ For Sealing Tunnels?
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/does-israel-really-have-sponge-bombs-for-sealing-tunnels
first, kill that name. I know, you did not coin it--but it must die.
Foam insulation writ large. Appealing idea, but practical? I really doubt it.
Oh, come now - what's not to like about something where one can riff on "Sponge Bomb Square Holes" or some such, or how the Israeli soldiers wielding the weapon will decide which holes are sponge-worthy? ...
The swarm idea isn't new, I've seen video of DARPA using it ten years ago. And stopping an off the shelf drone is an engineering problem - one of devising a radiation weapon powerful enough to interrupt an unhardened power supply and/or micro-circuitry.
But the author is of course correct - the face of war is changing. Just like that time the upright ape used the sling against the club tribe.
and now where back to using slings...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/slingshot-drone-blast-big-kids-flna715180
The story I heard in school was that Doug Lenat entered some kind of war gaming competition in the 70s using a strategy devised by his AI “Automated Mathematician” and was barred from future participation.
Why? Because his AI’s strategy was to take all of the resources and make lots and lots of little tiny ships that obliterated everybody else.
i’d have included a link to his wikipedia page but apparently that’s too risky for the moderation bots
There was that. And there was the human that did something similar, the guy wargamed small boats and shore batteries of missiles that stopped the US Navy fairly quickly from transiting the Strait off Hormuz. Until the umpires nixed his strategy. Then he sank tankers in the shallows after they did transit. Trapping the carrier group.
One would thing the tech giants in pay of the US (and every other) government are currently toiling away on the drone equivalent of Drone Bug Spray.
The Drones are disposable, all that's needed is something to disable and dispose of bunches at a time. Radio waves, sonic waves, electromagnetic?
This. A few weeks ago at dailykos, one of the lead commentators (Sumner?) was saying precisely this and compared it to the Monitor/Merrimack battle. The battle was of little consequence but within thirty years all navies in the world were obsolete. The impact of drone warfare is still uncertain but no doubt the consequences will be far lasting. I will speculate on two things, countries with very modern technologies will dominate the battlefield (e.g., drones attacking drones and so forth) and expensive systems like the F-35 are at a peril- see Russia unable to use its air force.
The Daily Kos had an article on the latest submersible drone, called Marichka. Supposedly capable of traveling up to 1000 kilometers. According to Navalnews.com..
My theory of the future of drones is that the AI will be used (1) so that drones in a swarm cooperate with each other to effectively hit their targets and (2) so that targets could be identified for humans to selectively choose, not for automated targeting.
I think we'll always want humans to make that choice of targets for the following reasons:
-- Automated targeting would require real-world experience for the AI to learn and for humans to correct, leading to very embarrassing hits and outcry of AI's usage in targeting.
-- Do you really think governments want their coding to be examinable? Courts would be able to review the conditions that were hard-coded to meet / not meet the articles of the Rome Convention.
-- If targeting is controlled by AI, hacks into that AI could surreptitiously end up leading those swarms of drones attacking one's own team.
And "the bomber will always get through!" As others have suggested, laser or microwave or some other technology will be developed that can destroy wave drone attacks. Perhaps swarms of hummingbird-size drones will do the job simply by smashing into the attacking drones - no need for them even to have a warhead. In the whole history of warfare, no new offensive weapon has ever dominated the battlefield for any significant period before being countered by new defensive measures.
The point is: new offensive measures can make older offensive measures less effective or even useless. So while drone mob attacks will almost certainly be met by some new defense, they may (may!) render some form offensive equipment and strategies redundant.
This is why comic book villains sometimes put their lair behind a waterfall.
Why don't you think we're there yet? My guess is China and US both have this tech ready to go now. It's probably rudimentary now, and will only get better.
There are other unclear aspects.
Starting around the Napoleonic Wars, "modern" war was about the number of soldiers in the field. Of course this gave the advantage to large countries, but it also had perhaps not immediately obvious effects like universal male suffrage.
Starting around WW1 "modern" war was also about production, which, among other things, meant women working in factories while men were on the front. This had eventual consequences in universal suffrage.
Starting around WW2 "modern" war became about serious science. This didn't have effects in terms of suffrage (the only people left were the under-21's, and they got their turn as a consequence of Vietnam...) but it DID have consequences in terms of the Federal govt (and other serious countries) getting much more involved in the financial support of science.
Where Ukraine (and perhaps Gaza, though it's less easy to see what's going on there) differs from say WW2 is that the production and science parts seem to now almost outweigh the manpower parts.
There are people complaining that Ukraine has not mobilized nearly as much of its (male – when the shooting starts it's the males who get called up...) as it could and "should", but to me that's unclear. It seems likely that every male involved in manufacturing weapons or making drones (or weirder side projects like arranging for whatever "controlled" items are not legally purchasable from the US or Germany or China or whatever, are routed via some 3rd party country) is more useful than his being at the front. Will this ultimately have unexpected political consequences?
For example, will we revert from the current universal franchise to something more aristocratic, tilted towards the non-combatant brain power that's really winning the wars? That may seem ridiculous and impossible, but the issue is not what happens in 20 years, it's what happens over the next 100 to 200 years. The past was a world where, more or less, those for fought were those who controlled. This appeared to change during the long 19th C, but only in that everyone (male) now fought and so everyone male had a (nominally) equal share in control. If/when we get rid of mass fighting, that mass political control may, eventually, also disappear...
There are other ways to look at this that arrive at much the same point. For example this review discusses Japan in terms of this framework, and with rather different results from what you might expect.
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-miti-and-the-japanese-miracle