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To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#141

Post by antihero »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #120
sliken wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slow and easy to kill? Seen a drone race? At what range and with what weapon would they be easy to kill? How long would the kill take? At what range could the drone be killed at? Sure often drones fly in straight lines or hover. But in an adversarial environment they could easily move pseudo randomly and be quite difficult to kill.

Current point defense systems are already capable of placing a 20mm round with a muzzle velocity of 1000m/s onto a falling mortar shell in the last three seconds of its flight time. How hard do you think drones are by comparison?

> Current point defense systems

Which are available to how many militaries?

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#142

Post by wespiser_2018 »

Drones 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".

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#143

Post by sudosysgen »

godtoldmetodoit wrote: post #101
jude- wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed - in this awful scenario where the US is fighting China, their economy would absolutely crater as the US shoots any ship heading towards Chinese ports after the embargo was declared. China can't feed itself. China only produces a third of the oil it consumes. If your people begin to starve as soon as war starts and you all of a sudden have 1/3rd the oil you used to.... well, that's not exactly a recipe for suc…

This is incorrect. China is self sufficient in calories. Chinese citizens would have to eat less meat and less fish, but they would be very far from starving.

China has a border with Russia, and gigantic strategic oil reserves. They are not going to run out of oil. Maybe ration it initially, until enough can be delivered from Russia.

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#144

Post by floxy »

dogman144 wrote: post #70
samuelizdat wrote: post #20

Wouldn'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…

I'd back up and say it might be even more simple from a cybersec perspective, holding off the military drone capabilities and related hardening. Embedded consumer electronics/IoT generally have awful security configs and an internet connection. Consumer-grade, and I bet a fair bit of the more high powered drones, are vulnerable to this same risk. I'd love an educated opinion on this, but to the extent I've thought ab…

>People have already started committing crimes using quadcoptors

I'm interesting to know what kinds of crimes people are commiting with quadcopters. Is it more of a spying/industrial espionage thing? Or stealing Amazon packages off of people's doorsteps? Arsonists?

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#145

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

milesward wrote: post #122
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current point defense systems are already capable of placing a 20mm round with a muzzle velocity of 1000m/s onto a falling mortar shell in the last three seconds of its flight time. How hard do you think drones are by comparison?

ballistic trajectory versus active evasive behavior.

https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a426717.pdf

A target with a 300mm frontal diameter, capable of evading at 10g, is expected to require 6 rounds to achieve a P_hit of 0.5 at 200m range, based on the parameters of your typical Phalanx CIWS. Said Phalanx weapon system might fire a burst of 1s duration in such an engagement, which is 75 rounds.

For a missile engagement, that's a problematic number, but for a drone that's probably only moving a few dozen m/s and carrying a small payload, it's an entirely satisfactory engagement.

Phalanx is an early 1980s weapon system. The Army is going to be fielding directed-energy SHORAD systems next year, equipped with 50kW lasers.

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#146

Post by anonAndOn »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #120
sliken wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slow and easy to kill? Seen a drone race? At what range and with what weapon would they be easy to kill? How long would the kill take? At what range could the drone be killed at? Sure often drones fly in straight lines or hover. But in an adversarial environment they could easily move pseudo randomly and be quite difficult to kill.

Current point defense systems are already capable of placing a 20mm round with a muzzle velocity of 1000m/s onto a falling mortar shell in the last three seconds of its flight time. How hard do you think drones are by comparison?

So what you're suggesting is instead flying in a giant predictable parabolic flight pattern, just dropping the drone in front of the actual targets and let the big cannon do the work? Friendly-fire/own-goal for the win.

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#147

Post by _carbyau_ »

This 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.

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#148

Post by lazide »

kevinventullo wrote: post #111
lazide wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even drone races are slow and predictable compared to what is possible with an applied military mind and decent tools. I suspect (or hope) we already have some decent options in the top secret space. Nothing we have now (publicly) is going to do a damn against a shipping container full of 2-5 lb drones each carrying 1 lb of C4 in a swarm with cheap off the shelf sensors going 100 mph nap of the earth in a distrib…

This made me realize something like a TAS drone race would be interesting to watch.

What is TAS? Haven’t heard that term before. total autonomous system?

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#149

Post by tw04 »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #68
sliken wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slow and easy to kill? Seen a drone race? At what range and with what weapon would they be easy to kill? How long would the kill take? At what range could the drone be killed at? Sure often drones fly in straight lines or hover. But in an adversarial environment they could easily move pseudo randomly and be quite difficult to kill.

Modern CIWS are designed to be effective against substantially faster and more agile rockets. Drones really are slow and easy to take down compared to guided rockets and especially kinetic ones, and the military has been working on means of defending against those for decades. The Phalanx is being modified to serve as an anti-UAS system, for example. The challenge is more to do with detection than firing.

Most of those systems are designed to target dozens of incoming targets. It’s entirely reasonable and plausible for drone swarms to number in the thousands of targets.

That ciws will likely exhaust its magazine before it can take out all the drones unless I’m missing something.

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#150

Post by cwkoss »

g8oz wrote: post #131
tarruda wrote: post #3

I 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.

Exactly. The drive by gang shooting may become a fly by soon.

They don't even need guns. Drones can just lift a rock or metal sphere up a few hundred feet and drop it over the target. Imagine a fleet of 50 drones dropping dense objects onto a house or car: would be more destructive than an automatic weapon, and harder to avoid.

I wonder if standard BBs or ball bearings could achieve sufficient terminal velocity to pierce skin - would mitigate accuracy requirements if you could dump them by the dozens or hundreds.

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