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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

#161

Post by lazide »

bob33212 wrote: post #151
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…

If you mass produce these things you are going to leave traces of your logistics supply chain. Even if you brought them into a staging are one at a time your frequent trips would lead back to where they were made or by whom.

Which wouldn’t stop someone using it in a declared war - which we haven’t had yet by an actor likely to want it. Doesn’t mean it isn’t sitting in a military port somewhere though.

And since China makes like 99% of the parts used in drones, they very well could already have a couple hundred of those lying around and we’d never know.

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

#162

Post by spaetzleesser »

blutack wrote: post #35

Military 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.

I 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.

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

#163

Post by stubish »

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?

It depends on how long it takes the weapon to lock on and align. If it takes 1s to work out the trajectory and fire, the drone just needs to change its trajectory every second.

But I guess taking down a drone is not like taking out a mortar shell. It is probably much easier with some sort of flak or even launching a net.

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

#164

Post by Quikinterp »

lazide wrote: post #148
kevinventullo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"tool assisted speedrun" is a term in video game speedruns referring to the use of software/external tools to help with speedrunning games. So imagine a drone race where everything is programmed rather than remote controlled by a pilot

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

#165

Post by petre »

trhway wrote: post #121
FridayoLeary wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they even proved themselves in the recent Gaza campaign.

I don't think there were any real military drones. While an RC model/quad with a grenade does qualify as a weapon, the purposely built military drones have orders of magnitude better communication over longer range, incl. remote high precision targeting, loitering times, and carry a high precision stand-off missiles (that is an important point because the defense has to shoot the small fast incoming missile while the…

They don't even claim it works on bigger military drones, but smaller drones or drone swarms. It uses a microwave beam to disable or a high energy laser to shoot down the drones. I think the bigger ones like Predator could be shot down by other drones armed with low payload missiles. Repurposed Iron Dome style defenses could also be used at shorter range.

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

#166

Post by bombcar »

mlyle wrote: post #93
sliken wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the phalanx wiki: Whereas naval Phalanx systems fire tungsten armor-piercing rounds, the C-RAM uses the 20–mm HEIT-SD (High-Explosive Incendiary Tracer, Self-Destruct) ammunition, originally developed for the M163 Vulcan Air Defense System.[26][34] These rounds explode on impact with the target, or on tracer burnout, thereby greatly reducing the risk of collateral damage from rounds that fail to hit their target…

You wouldn't generally let a C-RAM fire at a low angle over a city. And even if you did, the problem of how many of these you need for decent coverage becomes large, because there's no ideal placement that doesn't involve shooting straight at friendly things from some approach vectors. A CIWS is not a reasonable way to stop drone attacks on civilian targets.

And one of tue whole advantages of a drone army is that it can fly between zero and ten feet off the ground - thereby undercutting lots of defenses that are designed to point in the air.

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

#167

Post by bombcar »

jellicle wrote: post #139
Animats wrote: post #37

The 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…

> commercially available drones and fuel-expedient (?) A transcription error that has been carried forward over several sources, apparently. The general undoubtedly said "field-expedient", meaning devices that can be cobbled together in the field. Take a commercial drone from ToysRUs and tape a hand grenade to it, and you have a field-expedient war drone.

Tape a knife to a roomba and you have a weapon of war.

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

#168

Post by ivankolev »

floxy wrote: post #144
dogman144 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I've heard of cross-border drug trafficking: https://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/narcodrones-1809749...

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

#169

Post by matheusmoreira »

lazide wrote: post #148
kevinventullo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Tool-assisted speedruns. People use emulators and record inputs frame-by-frame, allowing nearly perfect performance and even reliable exploitation of game vulnerabilities. I remember one where the author exploited a bug in such a way that it completely reprogrammed the game:

http://tasvideos.org/5384S.html

Check it out, it's incredibly fun:

http://tasvideos.org/

There's an entire category for movies containing arbitrary code execution:

http://tasvideos.org/Movies-C3050Y.html

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

#170

Post by kragen »

Animats wrote: post #37

The 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…

The key strength of drones is that they kill who you want to kill, or destroy the materiel you want to destroy, without any collateral damage at all. Coupled with adequate intelligence, which they also help obtain, drones make nuclear weapons obsolete; they are a dramatically more effective means of coercion. There are a lot of fantasies in this thread about how they're easy to defend against, and that would be true if we were talking about drones that cost the same as a fighter jet or a Tomahawk or even a Toyota, but you can mass-produce drones that are capable of delivering sub-kilogram munitions with centimeter precision for under ten dollars.

So the relevant comparison isn't a slow cheap drone versus a Tomahawk or a Toyota; it's a hundred thousand slow cheap drones versus a Tomahawk, or two thousand slow cheap drones versus a Toyota. A hundred thousand slow cheap drones is enough to coerce all the officers of any army into resigning; all you need is the realtime whereabouts of their parents, siblings, children, and spouses, and effective ransomware that reliably spares the children of officers who have already resigned, or who haven't yet been contacted. And no CIWS is going to help with that, even if it doesn't run out of ammo after the first fifteen drones, because the children aren't on an aircraft carrier or an army base.

Jef Raskin pointed most of this out in 02001 in an underrated essay, 'next time it can be worse'. At least so far, it hasn't been.

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