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…
How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming
261–270 of 454 posts
Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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Not sure how that would even work in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Ukraine has lots of ethnic Russians and Russia has lots of ethnic Ukrainians.
Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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Literal enemies don't need an invitation. Ukraine was able to smuggle several literal trucks loaded with weapons, deep into literal enemy territory, and put them near airbases where cruise missiles were launched from.
Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of we could use the opposite of isolationism, something being cut by governments at this time: soft power. Aid programmes and helping some of the more impoverished countries grow. Bombing Middle Eastern countries has been tried for about a century. It doesn’t seem to have helped.
15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. When exactly did we bomb them?
And the Saudis are still our bestest buddies. International relations are weird.
Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
"He said that each of the 117 drones launched had its own pilot." https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1ld7ppre9vo
How could they be navigated from such a long distance? Satellite communication? Wouldn't the lag be too high?
To reduce latency, I wonder if the phones were connecting to a covert site in Russia which had a high-bandwidth, lower-latency wired link, maybe a front company established in Russia for the operation with servers and broadband internet connections. Or maybe just a colocated server at a major backbone site in Russia was rented by a Russian front company. Seems like the kind of thing intelligence services do. While I'm sure Russia has more restrictions on renting colocated servers than the U.S., it's still something that needs to happen every day. Russia also has a fairly robust underground economy of less-than-legitimate companies doing illicit things, so there have to be ways for those companies to avoid restrictions (probably involving bribing certain people).
If the attack was coordinated this way, I assume whoever sold the colo to Ukrainian intelligence thought they were simply setting up yet another server for a shady Russian scam company. Foreign intelligence services often avoid scrutiny by using the same methods as domestic criminals in the target country.
Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming
#266The person who devised this was most likely one Illia Vitiuk, head of the SBU cyber-sec department. Before that position, he was an MMA fighter. In a 2023 interview he says he was inspired by "James Bond films and a life of adventure..." Also apparently stood down then reinstated recently over some unexplained transactions, family finance situation. https://www.npr.org/2023/09/06/1196975759/ukraine-cyber-war-...
Nobody cares. What a star.
Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> whoever is on the other side of those shipping containers
Could take a while to figure that out. It took days/weeks to figure out the 9/11 attacks with some certainty.
Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming
#268“In the perfect world, the drone should take off, fly, find the target, strike it, and report back on the task,” Burukin says. “That’s where the development is heading.” That's the problem in a nutshell. A few years back, few would argue against keeping a human in the kill/no-kill decision chain. It just took one war to get pop tech authors writing on it without even a mention of the ethical considerations or autonom…
I don’t really want to argue this side, but is it that different from a smart bomb or guided missile? A human is in the loop; the human issued the coordinates of the target to the delivery vehicle.
That kind of operation seems extremely different from a stationary turret or patrol robot with standing orders to shoot upon arbitrary targets at any time it decides to.
Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming
#269Drone 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…
What is also distressing is that drones make false flag attacks even easier. Add to that the fact of AI generated media/propaganda means no war will be factually comprehensible to anybody.
Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
So the old “use a single unreliable 2D instrument to coordinate multiple fast-moving projectiles in three dimensional space” approach.
You are just continuing to spout nonsense. Camera drone hovers above target and kamakazi drone intersects the line between camera and target, and drops.
You are just continuing to spout nonsense. All of the drones have cameras. Using a single designated camera drone is a stupid idea, overly complex and completely unnecessary.