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To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths
41–50 of 214 posts
Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths
#42Wouldn'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 i…
There is no practical way to use EMP as a defense against small drones. That's something that only works in movies, not real life. Generating enough power to disrupt electronics at a useful range requires a powerful explosion. The military uses a mix of jammers, small missiles, guns, and (soon) lasers.
There are some jammers, but they're not too useful if the drone is programmed to head out of jammer range if jammed. Currently, the most useful weapons against small drones are compressed air guns that fire nets.[1]
Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths
#43The 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 no…
>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-ka...
Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths
#44Drones 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…
Plausible. One thing that makes China today different to the US of WW2 is that China's export oriented economy would collapse in a war with the West and their industrial production capabilities would be hurt significantly along with that.
Doubtful. The CCP runs a command economy. It doesn't need to sell its goods to finance a war when the state can simply force the economy to produce the means of war.
Want to stop China from waging war? Knock out its means of production -- target its imports.
Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths
#45Wouldn'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 i…
Jamming 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
Jamming 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).
Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths
#46The 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.
Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths
#47In 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?…
Why would think that the IEEE has been enabled by something else than the military-industrial complex?
Indeed. 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-sk...
Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
The drone swarm can have a carrier vehicle, like a (perhaps autonomous) big plane or sub to get it within range
Or perhaps a missile full of drones, similar to those bombs with lots of guided submunitions.
Tomahawk TLAM/D carries 166 submunitions in 24 canisters. There's no reason those submunitions need to be dumb — or stationary for that matter.
Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jamming 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
Jamming 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).
Lasers are already used for inter-satellite communications, so there's no need to just use gross color shifting (though perhaps the BOM impact would be less).
Related side story: my resume had something about PKI in it so I kept getting calls from Boeing recruiters trying to fit me into a job doing said satellite laser comms (presumably using PKI). I kept telling them I knew nothing optics-related aside from basic Newtonian stuff, and they kept calling me back. I hope they finally found someone.
Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths
#50I 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
submersible drones could be a problem, especialy if engineered for water travel and aerial travel