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How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

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Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#231

Post by vasco »

stego-tech wrote: post #226

Drone warfare has always been equal parts distressing (it’s impersonal, it’s too easy to leverage, and therefore too easy to abuse) and incredible (ultra-thin fiber as a kite line? Brilliant!) to me. These advances are no different. That said, I do fret we’re staring down a new age of guerrilla warfare. Drones are cheap, widely available, and increasingly autonomous. Their countermeasures are either impractical for c…

> As an engineer, I am fascinated by it all. As a human, I am horrified that we democratized violence on this scale.

How do you even defend against this in a terrorist use case? When a small drone with a grenade or homemade explosive is so accessible? Any Christmas market in central Europe these days is surrounded by car barriers to prevent mass run-overs, but what do you do when soon someone has the idea of dropping some molotov cocktails from drones in public places? Answering my own question I guess you can already throw one manually without a drone. Securing public places is weird, I'm glad it's not my job.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#232

Post by bell-cot »

theptip wrote: post #105
bell-cot wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best-case scenario: The expensive laser system just became the most obvious and highest-value target in the area.

Depends, in this case the strategic bombers are worth more.

Micro-scale, very likely true.

Bigger picture - if knocking the laser defense off-line slashes the unit cost of destroying bombers, then it may be the obvious first move in any competent attack.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#233

Post by WillAdams »

JohnBooty wrote: post #46
flave wrote: post #15

I really don’t get all the fretting about drones making kill-no-kill decisions. You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private? Reminds me of the debate about a self driving car that might need to mount the curb to avoid hitting a car - and therefore endangering a pedestrian. It’s not an easy decision but I’d rather a machine made it than a stressed person!

Can we think slightly more broadly? Targeting a stationary Tu-95 bomber with no protective measures in place is probably the easiest possible identification task for a drone. A lot of kill/no-kill decisions are more subtle, or involve unknowns, possible nearby civilians, etc. Or look at this crazy FPV piloting job. You think AI could do this? Pilot maneuvers through an absolute maze of anti-drone nets to hit a moving…

Drone operators seem to become quite jaded by their safety/removal from the theater of operations.

c.f.,

https://notabugsplat.com/

and reporting of the use of this term by U.S. drone operators.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#234

Post by xeromal »

Paradigma11 wrote: post #223
xeromal wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first volley would work of course but then container ships are gonna be nuked from orbit after that

Which would utterly destroy the US economy and do more damage than any drone attack. Plus imagine if those attackers realize they can ship those containers from Mexico or Canada.

Pretty sure it would destroy whoever is on the other side of those shipping containers too though

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#235

Post by spacedcowboy »

masom wrote: post #138
ivape wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what did they do, just stick GPS coordinates and the drones were that successful autonomously (talking of the Russian fighter base attack from the last 48 hours)? I'd be shocked if they didn't manually pilot these things.

OpenCV and other onboard computer softwares can be trained to recognize shapes, 10+ years ago there was a demo of a NodeCopter controlled small drone following red flags. Stick the GPS coord, fly there, and once in a geofence look for a shape to crash into doesn't seem impossible given what was possible 10 years ago.

Hell, 30 years ago I was working for the MOD (they sponsored my PhD and turned it into an RA) in the UK creating context-aware neural network inference engines for FLIR (Forward-looking infra-red) data. We had all sorts of "fun" stuff running on a Meiko computing surface, with parallelised network training and implementations, temporal and spatial averaging, and relaxation labelling all thrown into the mix to aid the recognition engine, done with a voting system of various architectures sharing to a "blackboard" where information could be posted to and read from. Visualisation was all on high-end (for the time) Silicon Graphics workstations.

The context (together with the features extracted) was the killer (forgive the pun) feature though - everything else reduced noise, but context increased signal.

My gast remains flabbered that the sort of thing I was working on back then hasn't become commonplace in the interim. The computing power available today, compared to then, and the accuracy we had (I know for a fact at least one of the designs was made into real hardware, it was called RH7, and "RH" stood for "Red Herring" - oh how we laughed) ... It beggars belief that it was just left to digitally rot.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#236

Post by mrandish »

m4rtink wrote: post #180
masom wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenCV and other onboard computer softwares can be trained to recognize shapes, 10+ years ago there was a demo of a NodeCopter controlled small drone following red flags. Stick the GPS coord, fly there, and once in a geofence look for a shape to crash into doesn't seem impossible given what was possible 10 years ago.

There is often quite heavy GPS jamming or spoofing. Also in some of the published videos I think you can see a "no GPS lock" status message - but maybe they just did not bother with GPS if all the drones were manually piloted anyway.

Yes, I assumed they didn't need GPS because they knew exactly where the trucks that were the launch sites were to be placed and they knew approximately their targets would be sitting on a certain section of airport tarmac. The pilots would have had a detailed satellite photo map of their entire route until visual target ID was possible. While GPS was probably partially jammed, that deep in Russia I doubt it would have been as severe as near the front lines. Plus there wouldn't have been heavy jamming of the local drone control frequencies because they weren't expecting a drone attack there.

To me the more interesting question is how they managed sending the real-time video feeds and control data. Since the trucks were mobile, I assume it had to be via a bunch of mobile phones signed up to Russian service providers since Starlink doesn't work inside Russia. To reduce latency, I wonder if the phones were connecting to a covert site in Russia which had a high-bandwidth wired link, maybe a front company established for the operation with servers and broadband internet connections.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#237

Post by oneshtein »

tgv wrote: post #145
lenerdenator wrote: post #78

Hoping and praying someone in the administration is able to convince Trump to align closer to Ukraine (even if only slightly) because of this. The Ukrainians pulled off an absolute coup on Sunday. A third of a nuclear-armed country's strategic bomber fleet inoperable for the foreseeable future. Someone at NORAD probably said "they should have sent a poet" while looking at the satellite imagery. If middle powers like…

> If middle powers like Ukraine can do that to Russia, they can do that to countries like the US Ukraine borders on Russia, but the US is separated by ocean from serious threats. Attack by UAVs of this sort seems nearly impossible.

While not a land border, the Bering Strait does include two small islands, Big Diomede (Russian) and Little Diomede (US), which are only 3.8 kilometers apart.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#238

Post by bboygravity »

vasco wrote: post #231
stego-tech wrote: post #226

Drone warfare has always been equal parts distressing (it’s impersonal, it’s too easy to leverage, and therefore too easy to abuse) and incredible (ultra-thin fiber as a kite line? Brilliant!) to me. These advances are no different. That said, I do fret we’re staring down a new age of guerrilla warfare. Drones are cheap, widely available, and increasingly autonomous. Their countermeasures are either impractical for c…

> As an engineer, I am fascinated by it all. As a human, I am horrified that we democratized violence on this scale. How do you even defend against this in a terrorist use case? When a small drone with a grenade or homemade explosive is so accessible? Any Christmas market in central Europe these days is surrounded by car barriers to prevent mass run-overs, but what do you do when soon someone has the idea of dropping…

[flagged]

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#239

Post by detritus »

acdha wrote: post #170
tgv wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If middle powers like Ukraine can do that to Russia, they can do that to countries like the US Ukraine borders on Russia, but the US is separated by ocean from serious threats. Attack by UAVs of this sort seems nearly impossible.

Don’t we receive millions of containers of cargo annually, not to mention having fewer internal movement restrictions? It certainly doesn’t seem implausible that someone could ship some drones around - the hardest part is avoiding explosives detector, but that’s a hard problem and the defense has the unenviable task of having to get it right millions of times.

I've long-wondered about the use of global container logistics for moving something like a small nuclear or chemical/biological weapon and just having it wait in-situ, until it needs to be activated.

I never considered drones, which is even more obvious, in hindsight.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#240

Post by consumer451 »

ivape wrote: post #157
faitswulff wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct: > ...each of the 117 drones launched had its own pilot. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1ld7ppre9vo

They need to make a movie behind this one, that just looks like such a cyberpunk operation.

There are so many possible scripts that could be based on what has happened since 2022 in Ukraine. There would be no need for exaggeration of the heroism, bravery, and loss. The only issue might be that people would not believe it actually happened.

From Zelenskyy, a previous comedic actor refusing to flee, "I need ammunition, not a ride," to the defense of Snake Island "Russian warship, go fuck yourself," to all the brave women who volunteered, the farmers towing abandoned Russian tanks, the constant drone attacks on residential and commercial areas, the 40,000 stolen Ukrainian children, this most recent attack on Russian air bases...

If this was a movie, I would probably think it was a bit much myself, but this all happened. We witnessed it.

"Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!"

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