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To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths
- robotnikman 5y agoI can already imagine ships being outfitted with hundreds of anti aircraft autocannons just for shooting down drone swarms, kind of like the USN ships of WWII. An old solution for a new problem
- jessaustin 5y agoCould someone get something like that for her house? Asking for a friend...
- korse 5y agoIf you really wanted to, I'd recommend a microwave 'cannon'. You can build one yourself for cheap-ish based off a directional antenna and some recycled microwave-link components. Then you just need to target it. Probably need some sort of weather proof retractable cover so that the neighbors don't freak out. Gimbal under the cover to aim the thing, and then a means of target acquisition. People have tried to use audible input to pick up the propellers, but I don't really know how well that would work in practice and what kind of / how many microphones you would need to get a fix. The generally idea would be, system detects and gets a fix on probable drone, notifies you and allows you to do a visual check and give the fire signal. Microwave directional targets and roasts the target microelectronics.
- AlexCoventry 5y agoHow hard is it to shield electronics from a microwave blast? What impact would surrounding them in alfoil have?
- K0balt 5y agoPretty easy to protect electronics from rf energy.
- korse 5y agoYes it is, but most consumer drone hardware doesn't do a very good job of it. Also, most drones require a a couple of RF/EM sensors for position and heading which can't exactly be Faraday caged. I was being somewhat facetious about mounting a microwave auto-turret on your house, but the technology has been toyed with for years as a man-portable solution to consumer drone intrusion.
- K0balt 5y agoYeah, it would need to be customized for sure. Antennas can be filtered pretty effectively even in high rf environments, but they might be jammed. The Magnetometer will work in a box. Straight consumer drones should be easy to disable though.
- kova12 5y agoShielding might end up warming up and frying device with heat
- snovv_crash 5y agoNot if it also needs to have an antenna to listen with. That's always going to be an easy way in.
- K0balt 5y agoStill, can clamp it as long as the attacking frequency is out of band. Also, no real need for telemetry in most cases anyway.
- snovv_crash 5y agoNot telemetry, but usually C&C, GPS, etc.
- capeterson 5y ago> audible input to pick up the propellers Does not really work that well, as far as I've seen. One is probably best off using an SDR to pick up the communications between the drone and the remote. It's a rather inexpensive solution, as well. Microdoppler is promising for this as well, but that is likely astronomically out of the range of purchasing power for the average person.
- capeterson 5y agoIf you've got the budget for it, the company I work for may be of use: https://www.whitefoxdefense.com/ https://www.whitefoxdefense.com/ I'm not sure if I would recommend jammers or kinetic weapons, haha.
- rolph 5y agosubmersible drones could be a problem, especialy if engineered for water travel and aerial travel
- aerostable_slug 5y agohttps://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/orca-extra-large-unmanned-underwater-vehicle-xluuv.html https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/orca-extra-lar...
- stickfigure 5y ago...otherwise known as "torpedoes".
- rolph 5y agowhat i have in mind is a hybrid that may transition between aquatic or aerial, in a seamless fashion
- throwawayffffas 5y agoThey are going with lasers instead. https://news.usni.org/2020/05/22/video-uss-portland-fires-laser-weapon-downs-drone-in-first-at-sea-test https://news.usni.org/2020/05/22/video-uss-portland-fires-la...
- jayGlow 5y agomulti turreted tanks fell out of favor early in world War 2. I wonder if there could be a resurgence as a counter to drones.
- tarruda 5y agoI wonder how long until DIY weaponized drones are available to common criminals. It doesn't seem like we are prepared to deal with something like this.
- WanderPanda 5y agoStrap a knife on a fpv rc airplane and you have something as deadly as a sniper
- abz10 5y agoUnlike a bullet you could hear an RC airplane coming.
- korse 5y agoActually this isn't a big problem. Quads or RC planes at a reasonable height aren't audible. Add in night and lack of running lights and no one is going to notice. If you are using a wing, then you just program your robot to come in high, cut it's engine and continue on a glide trajectory to the target. The flap servos make nearly no noise. If you've got a quad, come in fast and basically huck the vehicle at the target. Ardupilot + ROS make this all relatively straightforward to implement and provide an easy way to interface with necessary sub-systems.
- abz10 5y agoArdupilot will not hit a human size target. People can barely do it. You're not going to lob a tumbling quad at a target with any accuracy that's a joke. To do this with any reliability you need custom software and probably hardware. It'll look more like a smart munition. But it'll also be more difficult than strapping a knife to a RC plane.
- korse 5y agoFirst, we aren't talking knives. Second, who said the quad was tumbling? Significantly cutting engine speed and removing significant lift forces on a quad in order to kill the buzz doesn't mean it will start wildly gyrating. Third, Ardupilot will get you within a few feet of a specified point with a good enough vector and speed. Luckily you can use a subroutine (secondary control program) to handle the final approach from the 'point' to the target.
- ProjectArcturis 5y agoDrones are the new aircraft carriers. That is, pre-WWII, the dominant naval ship was the battleship. Heavily armored, with enormous guns, military planners expected that the battle for the Atlantic and Pacific would be carried out by these monsters slugging it out. Though there were hints that planes could be quite effective against ships, few admirals realized that the longer range of an aircraft carrier would make the battleships effectively obsolete in ship-ship battles. And after all, they'd spent a ton of money producing those battleships, and developing doctrine. Would you really want to throw that all away on some newfangled novelty? After Pearl Harbor, it became clear that the answer should have been Yes. Drones offer overwhelming advantages -- they're cheap and disposable. A drone generally costs less than the US missile used to shoot it down. You can lose 100 of them, and there will be no lives lost on your side. During WWII, by 1943 the European theater was essentially decided, except for a lot of killing. The US was producing tanks and planes so quickly that it was simply mathematically impossible for the Germans to counter them. Will the same thing happen when China decides to throw its manufacturing capacity into war drones?
- dtwest 5y agoWhen battleships and tanks are the weapon, manufacturing capacity powers the war machine. Perhaps drones usher in a new dynamic in that regard too. Maybe it's not how many drones you produce but how well programmed they are, what sensor or communication technology they use, etc.
- _carbyau_ 5y agoFit-for-purpose quality(including design, construction, tech) vs efficiency of production(cost) has always been a factor for the battlefield since forever. Iron vs bronze vs wood. In modern times, software already runs a lot of tanks/missiles/planes/ships/communications etc. As I see it the single biggest new factor is that "drone enabling software" significantly reworks hardware design parameters and thus affects manufacturing capacity. For example, in a plane, the drone technology allows removal of a lot of weight along with "human onboard" red tape safety factors while enlarging G force parameters. It has added other factors for control and operation. But on the whole it is deemed a quite significant win it seems. Drone on drone warfare leads to thinking about "software exploits" but on the battlefield it is always about exploits. Historically see spitfires and their limited ability to dive being exploited by the opposition but then being hardware "patched". edit: conciseness
- jessaustin 5y agoIn 2018, an unidentified nonstate actor used two explosive-bearing commercial drones in the attempted assassination of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. It's funny to see the phrase "nonstate actor" here, when we're assured that ransomware script kiddies who use Coinbase are all "state actors". Maduro knows who sent the drones. [0] Why is even IEEE Spectrum in ideological thrall to the military-industrial complex? [0] https://thegrayzone.com/2019/08/06/interview-venezuelan-president-nicolas-maduro/ https://thegrayzone.com/2019/08/06/interview-venezuelan-pres...
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoWhy would think that the IEEE has been enabled by something else than the military-industrial complex?
- jrochkind1 5y agoIndeed. 1989: > For computer scientists, the role federal funding plays in shaping research in their field presents both good news and bad news, according to the preliminary report on a study by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Science Policy Committee of the Special Interest Group on Automata and Compatability Theory. The good news is the fact that no abatement is in sight for the dramatic rise in federal support of computer science research https://www.the-scientist.com/profession/does-dod-funding-skew-computer-science-research-62152 https://www.the-scientist.com/profession/does-dod-funding-sk...
- splithalf 5y agoIn theory it could all be a vast conspiracy of the news media to misinform people, sure, but that would be a conspiracy theory.
- dkarl 5y ago> The potential of consumer or commercial drones harming world leaders became immediately evident when a protester hovered one close to German chancellor Angela Merkel at a campaign rally in 2013 Pretty arbitrary incident to choose, but I suppose the writer would have felt silly mentioning the flying dildos that buzzed Gary Kasparov at a political event in 2008.
- 1MachineElf 5y agoI'm more interested in the potential of world leaders' drones harming regular people.
- dkarl 5y agoI have no idea who was responsible for the flying dildos, but Kasparov was an outspoken critic of Putin, so I imagine the incident made him even more conscious of how easily Putin could reach him if he wanted. He continued his political activities, but he left Russia a few years later and announced that he couldn't go back in the near future because if he did he wouldn't be allowed to leave again. He has still not been back, to my knowledge.
- anigbrowl 5y agoSomeone literally did that the other day (flying a drone with a dildo attached) to a person running for mayor in New Mexico, and then punched the candidate when an event staffer was able to grab the drone. https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/new-mexico-sheriff-running-for-mayor-interrupted-by-sex-toy-attached-to-drone-punched-at-campaign-event/ https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/new-mexico-sheriff-running...
- philsnow 5y agoDaniel Suarez has a 2012 near-future novel that features this kind of thing [0]. In the book there are drones swarms armed with single-use tube guns, essentially, Saturday Night Specials [1]. I shill for his books regularly on HN. They're a guilty pleasure for me: snappy, easy to blow through in a single sitting, and are each begging for a movie adaptation (think "The Martian"). Start with Daemon. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Decision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Decision [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_night_special https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_night_special
- samuelizdat 5y agoWouldn't the solution be jamming or EMP related? Of course, because the technological system must propagate itself at any cost this idea is counter-intuitive. Technological progress is seen as bending towards an inherent good. People never stop to think if it will be bad. Now people are to live in fear of drone swarms because nobody has autonomy in the technological system. People think they control technology, but it is really technology that controls us. -sent from my iPhone
- swiley 5y agoAt least in the US we're already surrounded by people with firearms. The situation isn't really very new IMO. People have already started committing crimes using quadcoptors and everyone knows about them now. You don't hear about them shooting people because that's already illegal and we have social structures in place to deal with it. TL;DR if anything this is an improvement because it makes the 2A thing make more sense (almost no one is building guided missiles in their backyard except that one youtuber who's trying to make his model rockets land on their own.)
- Manuel_D 5y agoI suspect that jamming would push people to make drones fully autonomous, so that they're capable of carrying out their mission even is comms are down.
- greedo 5y agoJamming would address inter-swarm communications, but then they'd revert to solo operations. EMP isn't realistic, but microwave systems have already been tested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlmf032NmHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlmf032NmHU
- jude- 5y agoJamming wouldn't break line-of-sight or optical communication. Imagine drones that can simply see one another, and communicate by changing color (e.g. with LEDs).
- narrator 5y agoAre we entering an age kind of like the 18th century when most people could own a musket and the government didn't have better weapons or effective defenses from these weapons?
- blutack 5y agoMilitary drones also remove part of the political calculation otherwise involved in attacking somewhere. When soldiers are put in situations where they are being killed, in a fairly free society someone is generally going to ask the question of why they are there and whether they should continue to be. Loss of military drones is only reported in specialised press if at all.
- FredPret 5y agoWith human soldiers, voters and family of voters get killed. With drones, it's just some robots that were broken by the enemy.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoI still remember the Iraq war in 2003 and later. IF they had had weaponized drones available back then I am 100% convinced the Bush Administration would have invaded more countries. The only thing that stopped them was the loss of life of US soldiers. Same for the Vietnam war. The only thing that stopped the war was loss of life.
- Animats 5y agoThe article has a good intro, and then never goes on to discuss the "key strengths". It's just clickbait. They're also late to the party on this. The US professional military has been discussing this for over a decade. There have already been more than a half dozen articles on drones in Parameters, the U.S. Army War College's journal. "The coercive logic of militant drone use" [1] is worth reading. This covers how non-state groups have used drones, what worked and what didn't. The US Army is unused to fighting under a hostile sky, and now, a few times, they've had to. "In 2017, then commander of US Special Operations Command General Raymond A. Thomas noted, “[the] most daunting problem [of 2016] was an adaptive enemy who, for a time, enjoyed tactical superiority in the airspace under our conventional air superiority in the form of commercially available drones and fuel-expedient (?) weapons systems, and our only available response was small arms fire.” They also mention a drone disabling an Israeli naval vessel in 2006. There's been a lot more military use of drones than is generally realized. Much of it is for recon. Commercial hobbyist drones are more than good enough for finding out what the enemy is up to, and most drone use by militant groups is for that. So far, that article indicates, drones have been unable to yield a decisive advantage in any conflict. At least to militant groups. Not many people read Parameters. That paper has only 65 downloads. More should. [1] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3069&context=parameters https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
- coderintherye 5y ago>So far, that article indicates, drones have been unable to yield a decisive advantage in any conflict Drones gave Azerbaijan a decisive advantage in the recent conflict with Armenia: https://www.csis.org/analysis/air-and-missile-war-nagorno-karabakh-lessons-future-strike-and-defense https://www.csis.org/analysis/air-and-missile-war-nagorno-ka...
- hungryforcodes 5y agoOnly once. Everyone has paid attention, and the next drone attacks will be suitably defended against. The fact is the "killer bot" scenario is just a one time thing. After it happens, all cities or armies or whatever, will have very solid defences installed against swarming or even just loitering bots. Flying drones are incredibly fragile and exposed. They are slow and easy to kill.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- m0llusk 5y agoThe conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan is interesting in a couple of ways. Most have focused on how it was possible to win a conflict that has historically been extremely difficult, but also interesting is what happened afterward. As soon as the aggressive drone campaign was dialed back irregular asymmetric warfare flared back up. So it seems that it is possible to accomplish amazing things with drones, but those victories are only as robust as ongoing drone mobilization allows.
- charlescearl 5y agoIs there a comprehensive analysis of the use of drones in policing. Further, are there analyses of the way in which private security companies (G4S) are employing drones in their operations?
- aaron695 5y agoFYI 'swarms' is a magic word. It's meaningless and is introduced to conflate the fact what is talked about is not currently possible or stupid. These words are used a lot in tech. > using autonomous drone swarms against a soft target like a stadium full of people This can be done with a signal crop dusting drone, but if you say that it's easier to understand it's just the Black Sunday movie - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075765/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075765/ or a normal crop dusting plane or one automatic weapon where every bullet is a mini suicide drone. "six drones engaged in complex maneuvers in low visibility conditions, buzzing the destroyer" is not possible. If it was 'one' drone it's obvious there's no way it can get to that location. It is true Slaughterbots has scared the unwashed masses. Currently a glass window stops a drone, they are currently not far off the Dalek's inability to go up stairs. Is it good to keep the public scared about drones? Drones greatest ability in war and terrorism atm is the fear. (Excluding multi-million $ plane sized drones which are strategic)
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoThe critical aspect of drones is as cheap as you can get while being effective. The US Military from a true large-conflict conventional war is currently most vulnerable to an economic conflict. We blew so much money on basically minor military maneuvers relative to a real big war, and it show that our defense industry is parasitic and corrupt. Drones are the perfect counter: if cheap enough, plentiful enough, and effective enough, they don't need to be superior to their american counterparts. They just need to win the cost ratio by a sufficient margin.
- jollybean 5y agoMy guess is that defences against those size and larger drones will improve to the point where they're null without total air supremacy. You can't safely fly a Jet these days without enormous support, interference and then at great risk until the skies are very well cleared. I think possibly the same thing will apply to drones in that 'just as cheap' technology will render them null. Maybe not for the 'very smallest' type drones but certainly anything approaching the size of a car that sticks out on radar - a slow, lumbering, easy target for a range of weapons. It's one thing for Azerbeijan or Libyans to face these things, much like American air power over Iraq, it's not a 'balanced situation'. The moment someone tries to use these against a capable adversary we'll see what toys are hidden away and/or things will change very quickly.
- wespiser_2018 5y agoDrones may very well be revolutionary turn in warfare: giving battlefield commanders are near omnipresent sensor view of a contested space or battlefield which could shift the balance of power back from offense to defense. As a result, we'll see warfare go underground and generally become more fortified in an attempt to evade networked and autonomous small attack vectors. Kind of like WW1, but much more high tech. Just a guess, but we already have the ability to destroy anything, the problem is just knowing "what/when/where".
- _carbyau_ 5y agoThis article doesn't seem to actually list key strengths. Drones are high on my list of "scared to see what they can do when it is unveiled". With little imagination you can put together: - standard consumer quadcopter - standard consumer camera face detection - standard consumer pistol and tie it all together with software. Even without smart projectile prediction for improved aiming. While the software bit is hard-but-not-stupidly-so, the hardware components for all this is relatively cheap. Also, the software can be developed anywhere and anytime. You don't need unobtanium to do it. I have only applied very limited imagination to provide a basic scare scenario. If you take military budget and effort, multiple layers of battlefield coverage and variations of drones the capability is astounding. One day the internet will abound with memes regarding "Carrier has arrived." over real world images.
- conductr 5y agoI’ve unfortunately been waiting for the mass shooter types to discover this as well. Even something as simple as quad, light load of explosives/hand grenade, a simple hobby hardware release mechanism, all combined with public gathering/open air stadium. It’s pretty terrifying.
- _carbyau_ 5y agoAnd I guess that is what makes the "quadcopter" drone so scary to most civilians rather than the military. The application for "shooter event" amplification and without the easy to spot bad guy.
- goatse_aas 5y agoFuck a drone, I want to ride in one of those cylinders.
- OnlyRepliesToBS 5y agolol