6 ms·

> For a trillion dollars, you can overwhelm enemy air defenses with cheap, primitive drones in a saturation attack. For a few hundred dollars I can jam your co

> For a trillion dollars, you can overwhelm enemy air defenses with cheap, primitive drones in a saturation attack. For a few hundred dollars I can jam your communications channel(s) to the drones. Asymmetric warfare sucks.

simoncion 11y ago
And, depending on how your jammer works, I can probably kill it for a few thousand dollars (+- an order of magnitude). Pentagon procurement is a shitshow, but the DoD has many brilliant radio, radar, and signals guys working for them directly, or indirectly.
kogepathic 11y ago
> For a few hundred dollars I can jam your communications channel(s) to the drones. The same could be said for manned fighters. Granted, you still have a pilot who's there and capable of making decisions independently of communications. But, I imagine if you threw up enough interference to screw with a drone, you'd probably make some very pretty lights happen on an F-35's radar.
ObviousScience 11y ago
> For a few hundred dollars I can jam your communications channel(s) to the drones. Asymmetric warfare sucks. The problem is that once we're talking tens of millions of dollars and up -- no, you can't. We're talking the swarm is likely operating in a shared point-to-point link mode, either using highly directional antennas that are essentially deaf to below, optical links, or (more likely) a mixture of both modes. At 10,000 drones, they likely can form a stable mesh network over the city covering a wide enough area at a few miles in the sky that you're talking about having to run power plants or detonate magnets with high explosives to generate the kind of wattage needed to shout in to the directional communications gear. Jamming a few hobbyist drones is nothing like jamming thousands of military grade drones, and the techniques you think will stop their communications aren't all that effective. However, scanning the area under your bot swarm of amateur attempts to jam the network is probably a great way to target RF engineers in preparation for a ground invasion, and minimize their ability to improvise communications gear once the main communications networks are knocked out. tl;dr: Taking out a $10,000,000+ swarm of military grade weapons isn't the same as disabling a few hobbyist trinkets, and may get you seriously hurt in the process.
- akira2501 11y ago
  > The problem is that once we're talking tens of millions of dollars and up -- no, you can't. Sure. If you're willing to build a new GPS system, because that's decently jammable for cheap. Also are you proposing that all the drones will be individually piloted on missions as they are now? If so, I don't strictly have to jam the drones on the battlefield, I can just jam your satellite uplink or physically attack your operations centers. Add the cost of a plane ticket. So far, we haven't used these weapons against any military that could be considered our peers. I wouldn't be so confident in our operational deployments without anything to base it on.
  - irishcoffee 11y ago
    You've done an exceptional job of proving you have no idea what you're talking about. (Hint: I write software for a govt. contractor that builds drones and their control stations)
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      Can you point us to any public information about military systems' jamming resilience? E.g. here's a simple comm system, here's how you jam it, and here's a better comm system that can't be jammed that way?
      - irishcoffee 11y ago
        I can't really get into the details, I apologize. I can tell you that the specific topic of jamming isn't a concern. Try and think about UAVs in the same way you might think about commercial planes. It would tend to make sense that the UAV model was most likely forked from there, at least initially.
        jessaustin 11y ago
        Even with respect to radio interference in commercial planes, the public is subjected to more misinformation than information. How many planes have crashed due to cellphone use? Have there ever been any? Speaking specifically of commercial GPS use, was all the uproar about LightSquared just bullshit? They weren't on the GPS band, they were only near it. I recall lots of authorities confidently ordering us to just trust them, that LS was a dire threat to civil aviation. If LightSquared is a threat to UAVs too, our "enemies" might want to buy their old equipment off eBay. For that matter, if USA military radios are so robust, why do they have to reserve half the usable spectrum for their private pristine use? Wouldn't they be just as comfortable on the Wifi band? There are reasons why civilians might be reluctant to simply trust the confident assurances of random anonymous defense contractors.
nl 11y ago
Good thing cruise missiles are self guided, then. Gyroscopes arent easy to jam.
spacefight 11y ago
For a few hundred dollars, someone will make the drones self aware with pre planned routings along optically recognizable waypoints. No more need for a comms channel. What then?
- simoncion 11y ago
  Tomahawk missiles were doing exactly this and more back in the 1990's. Shoot off a few and they would communicate amongst themselves, detect (or get blown up by) threats, and alert the other Tomahawks in the swarm who would then reroute to avoid that threat. Additionally, the missiles shared weighted target lists and knew if a missile on the way to a target was destroyed or disabled, and so would reroute in-flight missiles -if needed- in order to hit the highest-priority targets.
  - spacefight 11y ago
    That is still relying on comms which I pointed out will be solved eventually (if it hasn't already).
    - simoncion 11y ago
      Tomahawks can operate fully autonomously with no substantial loss of functionality. Indeed, picture a swarm of one, and you're operating in this mode. The missile commlinks serve to enhance the missile's effectiveness; they are not the sole source of its effectiveness. Here's something for you to puzzle over: Your missile has up-to-date topographical maps of an area, and as-up-to-date-as-possible maps of all known anti-missile sites in the area. Thing is that you're not going to know about all of the anti-missile sites: many sites are portable (thus they move around), and some remain offline and nearly impossible to detect until enemy command determines that that site can kill a missile. If your missile doesn't have commlinks, how do you tell it to avoid anti-missile sites discovered after the missile was launched? Additionally, a careful reading of the comment that you replied to will reveal that the Tomahawk has -since the 1990's- been a fully autonomous missile fully capable of flying a pre-determined path to a target. Indeed, that is the least interesting part of the missile's capabilities. In short, we've had "self aware" warhead-tipped "drones" since at least the 1990's.
astrodust 11y ago
There are some ways to communicate that are significantly harder to jam than others, plus the degree of autonomy these systems have will only increase over time. I'm surprised weaponized drones aren't displacing cheap rockets.

simoncion 11y ago

And, depending on how your jammer works, I can probably kill it for a few thousand dollars (+- an order of magnitude). Pentagon procurement is a shitshow, but the DoD has many brilliant radio, radar, and signals guys working for them directly, or indirectly.

kogepathic 11y ago

> For a few hundred dollars I can jam your communications channel(s) to the drones. The same could be said for manned fighters. Granted, you still have a pilot who's there and capable of making decisions independently of communications. But, I imagine if you threw up enough interference to screw with a drone, you'd probably make some very pretty lights happen on an F-35's radar.

ObviousScience 11y ago

> For a few hundred dollars I can jam your communications channel(s) to the drones. Asymmetric warfare sucks. The problem is that once we're talking tens of millions of dollars and up -- no, you can't. We're talking the swarm is likely operating in a shared point-to-point link mode, either using highly directional antennas that are essentially deaf to below, optical links, or (more likely) a mixture of both modes. At 10,000 drones, they likely can form a stable mesh network over the city covering a wide enough area at a few miles in the sky that you're talking about having to run power plants or detonate magnets with high explosives to generate the kind of wattage needed to shout in to the directional communications gear. Jamming a few hobbyist drones is nothing like jamming thousands of military grade drones, and the techniques you think will stop their communications aren't all that effective. However, scanning the area under your bot swarm of amateur attempts to jam the network is probably a great way to target RF engineers in preparation for a ground invasion, and minimize their ability to improvise communications gear once the main communications networks are knocked out. tl;dr: Taking out a $10,000,000+ swarm of military grade weapons isn't the same as disabling a few hobbyist trinkets, and may get you seriously hurt in the process.

akira2501 11y ago
> The problem is that once we're talking tens of millions of dollars and up -- no, you can't. Sure. If you're willing to build a new GPS system, because that's decently jammable for cheap. Also are you proposing that all the drones will be individually piloted on missions as they are now? If so, I don't strictly have to jam the drones on the battlefield, I can just jam your satellite uplink or physically attack your operations centers. Add the cost of a plane ticket. So far, we haven't used these weapons against any military that could be considered our peers. I wouldn't be so confident in our operational deployments without anything to base it on.
- irishcoffee 11y ago
  You've done an exceptional job of proving you have no idea what you're talking about. (Hint: I write software for a govt. contractor that builds drones and their control stations)
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    Can you point us to any public information about military systems' jamming resilience? E.g. here's a simple comm system, here's how you jam it, and here's a better comm system that can't be jammed that way?
    - irishcoffee 11y ago
      I can't really get into the details, I apologize. I can tell you that the specific topic of jamming isn't a concern. Try and think about UAVs in the same way you might think about commercial planes. It would tend to make sense that the UAV model was most likely forked from there, at least initially.
      - jessaustin 11y ago
        Even with respect to radio interference in commercial planes, the public is subjected to more misinformation than information. How many planes have crashed due to cellphone use? Have there ever been any? Speaking specifically of commercial GPS use, was all the uproar about LightSquared just bullshit? They weren't on the GPS band, they were only near it. I recall lots of authorities confidently ordering us to just trust them, that LS was a dire threat to civil aviation. If LightSquared is a threat to UAVs too, our "enemies" might want to buy their old equipment off eBay. For that matter, if USA military radios are so robust, why do they have to reserve half the usable spectrum for their private pristine use? Wouldn't they be just as comfortable on the Wifi band? There are reasons why civilians might be reluctant to simply trust the confident assurances of random anonymous defense contractors.

nl 11y ago

Good thing cruise missiles are self guided, then. Gyroscopes arent easy to jam.

spacefight 11y ago

For a few hundred dollars, someone will make the drones self aware with pre planned routings along optically recognizable waypoints. No more need for a comms channel. What then?

simoncion 11y ago
Tomahawk missiles were doing exactly this and more back in the 1990's. Shoot off a few and they would communicate amongst themselves, detect (or get blown up by) threats, and alert the other Tomahawks in the swarm who would then reroute to avoid that threat. Additionally, the missiles shared weighted target lists and knew if a missile on the way to a target was destroyed or disabled, and so would reroute in-flight missiles -if needed- in order to hit the highest-priority targets.
- spacefight 11y ago
  That is still relying on comms which I pointed out will be solved eventually (if it hasn't already).
  - simoncion 11y ago
    Tomahawks can operate fully autonomously with no substantial loss of functionality. Indeed, picture a swarm of one, and you're operating in this mode. The missile commlinks serve to enhance the missile's effectiveness; they are not the sole source of its effectiveness. Here's something for you to puzzle over: Your missile has up-to-date topographical maps of an area, and as-up-to-date-as-possible maps of all known anti-missile sites in the area. Thing is that you're not going to know about all of the anti-missile sites: many sites are portable (thus they move around), and some remain offline and nearly impossible to detect until enemy command determines that that site can kill a missile. If your missile doesn't have commlinks, how do you tell it to avoid anti-missile sites discovered after the missile was launched? Additionally, a careful reading of the comment that you replied to will reveal that the Tomahawk has -since the 1990's- been a fully autonomous missile fully capable of flying a pre-determined path to a target. Indeed, that is the least interesting part of the missile's capabilities. In short, we've had "self aware" warhead-tipped "drones" since at least the 1990's.

astrodust 11y ago

There are some ways to communicate that are significantly harder to jam than others, plus the degree of autonomy these systems have will only increase over time. I'm surprised weaponized drones aren't displacing cheap rockets.