4 ms·

OTOH there's no mass adoption of autonomous drones after 3+ years of real active war between two technologically advanced nations.

Swoerd 1y ago
-That you know of.
ceejayoz 1y ago
As long as the end of civilization comes soon, we'll be fine!
insane_dreamer 1y ago
The seeds of the Butlerian Jihad
jandrese 1y ago
There is already mass adoption of drones, the AI stuff is only lagging behind slightly.
- stackedinserter 1y ago
  Please read before responding.
karn97 1y ago
[dead]
dghlsakjg 1y ago
Are you sure? One of the theories for why there were tires on top of the russian planes that were bombed is that it confuses automatic targeting systems by breaking up the profile of the airplane used in automatic target recognition systems. Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed to run an autonomous route with or without a radio link connection. This is a huge reason that GPS is just constantly jammed in this part of the world. If you can get a GPS signal on the battlefield, you can tell a drone to go destroy something.
- stackedinserter 1y ago
  Sigh. The tires on the planes thing is very clear to anyone who served in russian/soviet army. > Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed Lock on a moving target and hit it is not the same as put waypoints in INAV. My point was that there's still no mass adoption of target locking or self-aiming drones, overwhelming majority of hits, on both sides, are done with regular FPV drones with very standard school hardware that's barely modified for combat use (namely: custom frequencies for VTX and ERLS).
  - pjc50 1y ago
    > The tires on the planes thing is very clear to anyone who served in russian/soviet army. Why is this, for the rest of us?
    - vbezhenar 1y ago
      To imitate. There was order from the higher ups: protect the planes. There was no specific order like "build a garages for planes". So they put tires on planes and called it protection. Now soldiers have to move tires around, fill the journals, sign them up. New procedures are developed. Order is fulfilled. Everyone was happy. May be someone even got a promotion for creating a plane defence system so cheap.
  - dghlsakjg 1y ago
    If you know more about it, you seem to now more than this source at cent-com https://www.twz.com/air/russia-covering-its-aircraft-in-tires-is-about-befuddling-image-matching-seekers-u-s-military-confirms https://www.twz.com/air/russia-covering-its-aircraft-in-tire...
  - robotresearcher 1y ago
    > there's still no mass adoption of target locking or self-aiming drones As long as you define ‘drone’ as a tiny quadrotor. Missiles like Sidewinder and Hellfire, cruise missiles like Tomahwak, fire-and-forget MANPADs, GPS-guided gravity bombs, even ICBMs with MIRV warheads. All autonomously travel to their target and destroy it. There are even some loitering anti-tank missiles that climb up above the launching aircraft and sit on a parachute for a while until they see a tank to destroy. The pilot never has to see the tank. All autonomous and adopted. The main novelty in the electric drone tech is very very low cost.
dji4321234 1y ago
There's enormous adoption of autonomous drones. A large number of front-line FPV drones are equipped with automated last-second targeting systems like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coUwYOyIoAU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coUwYOyIoAU , based on Chinese NPU IP / CCTV systems and readily available as full solutions on Aliexpress. The basic idea is that if the drone loses control or video link due to EW countermeasures, it can continue to the last target. Loitering and long-range fixed wing reconnaissance drones have been fully autonomous since the beginning. One common recent technique taken from traditional "big" militaries is the use of loitering autonomous high altitude base stations with Starlink or LTE on them providing coverage to the battlefield below, since it's much harder to jam things when they are flying high above the ground.
- stackedinserter 1y ago
  You have no idea what you're talking about and your video is just a demo from some chinese account. There are tons of footage from drone units, from both sides, and they are all old school analog FPV until the very last moment.
  - dji4321234 1y ago
    https://x.com/sternenko/status/1770348417102819563 https://x.com/sternenko/status/1770348417102819563 Rather, it is you who does not know what you are talking about. Here is a real frontline video characterizing these systems. Yes, it is all still analog FPV. The lock-on system selects a target and overlays the reticle on the analog video. As the FPV flies closer and encounters the jamming from the target, the lock-on unit ensures it is still a hit. These have fallen out of favor as fiber optic is a little easier to get than it used to be but they are still in wide use.
    - stackedinserter 1y ago
      Your link literally says: > Технологія нова, потребує вдосконалення і масштабування. > Eng: "The technology is new and will need improvement and scaling" I don't understand what you're trying to prove. They do exist and I never said they don't. They keep popping up here and there, mainly working in demo conditions against static contrast targets. My point was that so far, these things are just curiosities with very limited usage and there's no mass adoption. Maybe some, but there's some of everything in this war. All the main uav units that I'm aware of use manually controlled fpvs and there are reasons for that. > These have fallen out of favor as fiber optic is a little easier Oh gosh.
switchbak 1y ago
Maybe we should come back to this in a few years, I think this will have aged worse than the old dropbox comment. Governments are falling over themselves to: acquire drones, figure out how to defend against existing and future drones, and to figure out how to exploit them well. Given the recent attack against Russian bombers, I find it hard to take you seriously here. Hell, the US knows it can't compete with China on aircraft numbers, and is placing its money on collaborative combat aircraft to give it the advantage. That's about as strong an endorsement as you can get.
- XorNot 1y ago
  What the Loyal Wingman program is trying to build is extremely far from what people keep thinking when someone says "drone". The word is overloaded as hell: no one draws a distinction between a quadrotor with a 20 minute flight time and an air breathing jet aircraft costing $20 million a piece. But then they go and say "drone swarms will defeat all future adversaries!" Like in the Ukrainian context everyone seems to think the drone swarm was the deciding factor and is saying "this will replace air forces!"...kind of ignoring the multi month infiltration and espionage operation which got those systems in range (they were literally trucked right up to almost the fence line).
  - switchbak 1y ago
    "when someone says", "no one draws" ... who are these people you're talking about? The folks I listen to make it very clear the kinds of platforms they're talking about, and use different terms to describe things at different levels of specificity. Many/most folks use the term "drone" to talk about CCA's and other expensive platforms. In fact, "drone warfare" predates the common application to quadcopters, people were calling the Predator drone a drone in the early 2000's. I do agree that calling everything a drone is annoying though, and makes it hard to know what people are talking about. "AI" is having the same problem today.
    - XorNot 1y ago
      The general public. If the people you're talking to are military or professionals, then fairly obviously they'll be setting up very precise language and expectations. But every post vaguely about drones on HN has a whole bunch of people acting like a 1000 quadcopters will replace an F-35.
arcticfox 1y ago
Remember when TB-2s and grenade bombers were the peak of drone technology in Ukraine? That was like 2 years ago, now the frontlines are draped in equal parts anti-drone netting and fiberoptic threads.
- baq 1y ago
  The recent picture of sun rising or setting above a field of fiber threads really drives the point home. At peace time you have to pay $50k to get fiber to the home. At war it’s coming at you at 50mph and you can’t do anything to stop it.
- stackedinserter 1y ago
  Do you follow this war closely? Show me which drone units adopted anything autonomous, just name it. There are cases when they are used but there's no mass adoption, they all use regular FPV and FO drones. Anti-anti-drone avoidance systems on Russian zala's is the only example of autonomous action that I can remember.
pjc50 1y ago
I think people are missing the word "autonomous" here, which means you're right .. so far. I wouldn't bet against it changing.
542354234235 1y ago
An interesting paper just published about the current state of AI in Ukrainian and Russian drones on the battlefield [1]. "Promises of an immediate AI/ML drone revolution are premature as of June 2025, given that both Russian and Ukrainian forces will need to allocate more time, testing, and investment to deploy these drones on the frontlines en masse. Russia and Ukraine will continue improving their ML and machine vision capabilities while training and testing AI capabilities. Russia and Ukraine will then need to tackle the issue of scaling the production of the new AI/ML drones that will require additional time and resources to facilitate. Russia and Ukraine may start to use some AI/ML drones to carry out specific tasks in the meantime, such as striking certain types of targets like armored equipment or aircraft, before learning to fully operate on the battlefield. AI/ML drones are also unlikely to fully replace the need for the mass of tactical FPV drones over the coming months because the latter are cheaper to produce and adapt to the current battlefield conditions at the current state of technology." [1] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/battlefield-ai-revolution-not-here-yet-status-current-russian-and-ukrainian-ai-drone https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/battlefield-ai-rev...
numpad0 1y ago
Yeah. I guess military taboo and export control schemes/scare tactics is doing phenomenal jobs restraining and de-escalating use of computers in arms development. Less money spent improving means to kill people might be good, but the long gap between the cutting edge of technology in general to technology applied to military domain feels weird.

Swoerd 1y ago

-That you know of.

ceejayoz 1y ago

As long as the end of civilization comes soon, we'll be fine!

insane_dreamer 1y ago

The seeds of the Butlerian Jihad

jandrese 1y ago

There is already mass adoption of drones, the AI stuff is only lagging behind slightly.

stackedinserter 1y ago
Please read before responding.

karn97 1y ago

[dead]

dghlsakjg 1y ago

Are you sure? One of the theories for why there were tires on top of the russian planes that were bombed is that it confuses automatic targeting systems by breaking up the profile of the airplane used in automatic target recognition systems. Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed to run an autonomous route with or without a radio link connection. This is a huge reason that GPS is just constantly jammed in this part of the world. If you can get a GPS signal on the battlefield, you can tell a drone to go destroy something.

stackedinserter 1y ago
Sigh. The tires on the planes thing is very clear to anyone who served in russian/soviet army. > Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed Lock on a moving target and hit it is not the same as put waypoints in INAV. My point was that there's still no mass adoption of target locking or self-aiming drones, overwhelming majority of hits, on both sides, are done with regular FPV drones with very standard school hardware that's barely modified for combat use (namely: custom frequencies for VTX and ERLS).
- pjc50 1y ago
  > The tires on the planes thing is very clear to anyone who served in russian/soviet army. Why is this, for the rest of us?
  - vbezhenar 1y ago
    To imitate. There was order from the higher ups: protect the planes. There was no specific order like "build a garages for planes". So they put tires on planes and called it protection. Now soldiers have to move tires around, fill the journals, sign them up. New procedures are developed. Order is fulfilled. Everyone was happy. May be someone even got a promotion for creating a plane defence system so cheap.
- dghlsakjg 1y ago
  If you know more about it, you seem to now more than this source at cent-com https://www.twz.com/air/russia-covering-its-aircraft-in-tires-is-about-befuddling-image-matching-seekers-u-s-military-confirms https://www.twz.com/air/russia-covering-its-aircraft-in-tire...
- robotresearcher 1y ago
  > there's still no mass adoption of target locking or self-aiming drones As long as you define ‘drone’ as a tiny quadrotor. Missiles like Sidewinder and Hellfire, cruise missiles like Tomahwak, fire-and-forget MANPADs, GPS-guided gravity bombs, even ICBMs with MIRV warheads. All autonomously travel to their target and destroy it. There are even some loitering anti-tank missiles that climb up above the launching aircraft and sit on a parachute for a while until they see a tank to destroy. The pilot never has to see the tank. All autonomous and adopted. The main novelty in the electric drone tech is very very low cost.

dji4321234 1y ago

There's enormous adoption of autonomous drones. A large number of front-line FPV drones are equipped with automated last-second targeting systems like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coUwYOyIoAU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coUwYOyIoAU , based on Chinese NPU IP / CCTV systems and readily available as full solutions on Aliexpress. The basic idea is that if the drone loses control or video link due to EW countermeasures, it can continue to the last target. Loitering and long-range fixed wing reconnaissance drones have been fully autonomous since the beginning. One common recent technique taken from traditional "big" militaries is the use of loitering autonomous high altitude base stations with Starlink or LTE on them providing coverage to the battlefield below, since it's much harder to jam things when they are flying high above the ground.

stackedinserter 1y ago
You have no idea what you're talking about and your video is just a demo from some chinese account. There are tons of footage from drone units, from both sides, and they are all old school analog FPV until the very last moment.
- dji4321234 1y ago
  https://x.com/sternenko/status/1770348417102819563 https://x.com/sternenko/status/1770348417102819563 Rather, it is you who does not know what you are talking about. Here is a real frontline video characterizing these systems. Yes, it is all still analog FPV. The lock-on system selects a target and overlays the reticle on the analog video. As the FPV flies closer and encounters the jamming from the target, the lock-on unit ensures it is still a hit. These have fallen out of favor as fiber optic is a little easier to get than it used to be but they are still in wide use.
  - stackedinserter 1y ago
    Your link literally says: > Технологія нова, потребує вдосконалення і масштабування. > Eng: "The technology is new and will need improvement and scaling" I don't understand what you're trying to prove. They do exist and I never said they don't. They keep popping up here and there, mainly working in demo conditions against static contrast targets. My point was that so far, these things are just curiosities with very limited usage and there's no mass adoption. Maybe some, but there's some of everything in this war. All the main uav units that I'm aware of use manually controlled fpvs and there are reasons for that. > These have fallen out of favor as fiber optic is a little easier Oh gosh.

switchbak 1y ago

Maybe we should come back to this in a few years, I think this will have aged worse than the old dropbox comment. Governments are falling over themselves to: acquire drones, figure out how to defend against existing and future drones, and to figure out how to exploit them well. Given the recent attack against Russian bombers, I find it hard to take you seriously here. Hell, the US knows it can't compete with China on aircraft numbers, and is placing its money on collaborative combat aircraft to give it the advantage. That's about as strong an endorsement as you can get.

XorNot 1y ago
What the Loyal Wingman program is trying to build is extremely far from what people keep thinking when someone says "drone". The word is overloaded as hell: no one draws a distinction between a quadrotor with a 20 minute flight time and an air breathing jet aircraft costing $20 million a piece. But then they go and say "drone swarms will defeat all future adversaries!" Like in the Ukrainian context everyone seems to think the drone swarm was the deciding factor and is saying "this will replace air forces!"...kind of ignoring the multi month infiltration and espionage operation which got those systems in range (they were literally trucked right up to almost the fence line).
- switchbak 1y ago
  "when someone says", "no one draws" ... who are these people you're talking about? The folks I listen to make it very clear the kinds of platforms they're talking about, and use different terms to describe things at different levels of specificity. Many/most folks use the term "drone" to talk about CCA's and other expensive platforms. In fact, "drone warfare" predates the common application to quadcopters, people were calling the Predator drone a drone in the early 2000's. I do agree that calling everything a drone is annoying though, and makes it hard to know what people are talking about. "AI" is having the same problem today.
  - XorNot 1y ago
    The general public. If the people you're talking to are military or professionals, then fairly obviously they'll be setting up very precise language and expectations. But every post vaguely about drones on HN has a whole bunch of people acting like a 1000 quadcopters will replace an F-35.

arcticfox 1y ago

Remember when TB-2s and grenade bombers were the peak of drone technology in Ukraine? That was like 2 years ago, now the frontlines are draped in equal parts anti-drone netting and fiberoptic threads.

baq 1y ago
The recent picture of sun rising or setting above a field of fiber threads really drives the point home. At peace time you have to pay $50k to get fiber to the home. At war it’s coming at you at 50mph and you can’t do anything to stop it.
stackedinserter 1y ago
Do you follow this war closely? Show me which drone units adopted anything autonomous, just name it. There are cases when they are used but there's no mass adoption, they all use regular FPV and FO drones. Anti-anti-drone avoidance systems on Russian zala's is the only example of autonomous action that I can remember.

pjc50 1y ago

I think people are missing the word "autonomous" here, which means you're right .. so far. I wouldn't bet against it changing.

542354234235 1y ago

An interesting paper just published about the current state of AI in Ukrainian and Russian drones on the battlefield [1]. "Promises of an immediate AI/ML drone revolution are premature as of June 2025, given that both Russian and Ukrainian forces will need to allocate more time, testing, and investment to deploy these drones on the frontlines en masse. Russia and Ukraine will continue improving their ML and machine vision capabilities while training and testing AI capabilities. Russia and Ukraine will then need to tackle the issue of scaling the production of the new AI/ML drones that will require additional time and resources to facilitate. Russia and Ukraine may start to use some AI/ML drones to carry out specific tasks in the meantime, such as striking certain types of targets like armored equipment or aircraft, before learning to fully operate on the battlefield. AI/ML drones are also unlikely to fully replace the need for the mass of tactical FPV drones over the coming months because the latter are cheaper to produce and adapt to the current battlefield conditions at the current state of technology." [1] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/battlefield-ai-revolution-not-here-yet-status-current-russian-and-ukrainian-ai-drone https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/battlefield-ai-rev...

numpad0 1y ago

Yeah. I guess military taboo and export control schemes/scare tactics is doing phenomenal jobs restraining and de-escalating use of computers in arms development. Less money spent improving means to kill people might be good, but the long gap between the cutting edge of technology in general to technology applied to military domain feels weird.