This feels like the same thing that happened with tanks. The end of WW1 saw tanks deployed effectively. WW2 was then fought using entirely new tactics and strategies enabled by tanks (not least "blitzkrieg").
Britain and France, notably, hadn't really worked out how to use them effectively and so were left fighting the last war, horribly disadvantaged until they worked out how to catch up (though air power being developed at the same time also had an influence).
So now we have drones, and all those incredibly expensive fighter planes are useless. Aircraft carriers will be replaced with cheap drone swarm carriers, so naval strategy will need to change. Anti-tank drone swarms will make conventional armour more or less ineffective. And so on.
The good news is that there will be anti-drone swarms too. And so we'll end up fighting battles mostly by destroying drones instead of people. Once you've knocked out all the enemy drones, they'll surrender because humans can't fight drones.
> Once you've knocked out all the enemy drones, they'll surrender because humans can't fight drones.
Or will lead to blending in with civilians, more advanced camouflage, or “hugging the enemy” tactics (staying close enough that they risk harming their own people). Or more terrorism rather than open warfare.
It might be that with these killer drones, we will look back on WW2 style armies in the field as equivalent to 18th century musketeers lining up and firing volleys at each other in bright colored shirts.
> It might be that with these killer drones, we will look back on WW2 style armies in the field as equivalent to 18th century musketeers lining up and firing volleys at each other in bright colored shirts.
When the guns were so inaccurate that getting more shots was more important than actually aiming, that's the natural tactic to employ.
Lining up was hugely important for other members of the army to know what you're doing. If you're 1st in line, you shoot. Back of the line you're loading gunpowder (with everyone else). Middle of the line, you're dropping the bullet into the musket. Etc. etc.
Like a choir performance: its more about having tons of other people doing the same thing you're supposed to be doing. So no one in the army ever "misses" a step in the ~1-minute reload process.
Even if you're not that good at singing, you get "better" in a choir because you just follow the crowd. Similarly, even if you've forgotten a few steps in the long reload process, you just mimic the actions of your neighbors.
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Note that the Redcoat beat the US rifles at pretty much every engagement. It was guerilla warfare that allowed George Washington to survive and last through the war.
Rifles took longer to load. Without precision machining, the bullets needed to be wadded up with paper to stick with the rifling, adding a laborious step in the shooting process. Muskets could fire more shots per minute due to the smooth (though inaccurate) barrels. In army vs army battles, aim doesn't matter, your bullet will hit somebody over there, so there's no advantage to the superior aim that rifles have. You've added 20-seconds to your reload process for almost no tactical advantage at all.
USA experimented with rifles / guerilla warfare, but it really wasn't that successful in the 1700s. (It got the job done but... George Washington lost far more battles than he won). Even in the mid 1800s, the British Square formations were doing decently.
I don't think the parent was saying that firing lines were ineffective - indeed, like you say, if they were actually ineffective, people back then would've stopped using them. Rather, the parent was comparing the changing nature of warfare, such that we see field armies today as being eternal in warfare, but just like firing lines, they too will be replaced by new tactics. It doesn't mean that field armies don't work currently, just that they won't work in the future.
I guess my overall point is that the specific, nitty-gritty reasons militaries do one thing over the other is more interesting and enlightening when put into context.
If drones are the weapon of the future, then they will have some kind of advantage over their predecessor. A lot of people in this page are talking as if drones will replace fighters (lol no), cruise missiles (lol no), and other weaponry.
Lets really think about things: What does a Predator Drone really do? How is the military using drones TODAY, and how does that change in the future?
We can see that the #1 advantage of a drone is its __loitering__ capabilities. Missiles can't loiter, and sending a pilot in there to loiter is higher-risk than sending in a drone.
Can __loitering__ help in a fight vs a tank? Yes: if the loitering drone is faster than air support (which it will be, because its at the time/place to support the infantry), then it is reasonable to expect infantry to use a drone rather than call on air-support.
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This is how combat changes. One step at a time, as people incrementally think about the distinct advantages a weapon has over its predecessor. Musket-warfare was such because shooting a bullet-per-minute was better than shooting a bullet-per-1.5 minutes.
Rifle warfare (thanks to the Minié ball) allowed accurate rifles to shoot faster than once-per-minute AND do so accurately. And as such, tactics changed. It was no longer a question of "bullet throughput vs bullet accuracy", an invention happened that allowed both simultaneously.
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What advantages do drones have in combat? That's really the big question that needs to be discussed. Today's modern theory of combat is "Combined Arms". We want to invent devices where "Device X" requires special weaponry, while "Device Y" requires OPPOSITE weaponry.
RPGs kill tanks, but are terrible vs infantry. Machine guns kill infantry, but are terrible vs tanks. SAM kill airplanes, but are terrible vs tanks and infantry.
Each "leg" of your combined arms forces the opponent to make a difficult choice. What gun do I pack in my bags today? Where do drones fit in this puzzle?
As far as I'm concerned, drones are looking increasingly like "infantry replacement", more than anything. Their ability to "loiter" in an area, and probably have specialized weaponry (through with a small payload) means you can carry a wide variety of weapons on a wide variety of different drones, in support of a greater overall mission. At least, if future drones are as cheap as everyone seems to be making them sound...
I agree with much of what you say, but I think you're limiting your imagination in drones' current and imminent capabilities are.
Drones can, and are, replacing fighters and cruise missiles, if not make those ideas of weapons platforms entirely obsolete. Autonomous jets exist already, you may have not heard of missiles composed of thousands of small single-use bombs with onboard auto guidance, which also exist already.
While yes, loitering is a strength, it is far and away not the only thing a robot can be engineered to do.
The bigger idea here is the problems being solved when diplomacy breaks down into violence. You seem to not be aware that modern warfare consists of Shock and Awe. Not like the movies. If there could be a combatant in an office building in the next village, you call in an AC130 and you blow up the building. The idea is that warfare isn't a battle of contrition, but a battle of financial resolution.
So, looking at it from this angle, yes; the natural evolution of warfare will be robot on robot until one side runs out of the ability to make more robots.
Everything else resulting from this has been stated already.
But I think you're just underestimating human engineering and imagination.
Some autonomous weapons blur the line, like the 'sniperbot' recently used to kill an Iranian nuclear scientist as he drove by. The weapon itself was mounted to the back of a truck, and could have lay waiting for days/weeks/months. There is no need for the fighters to blend in, when the weapons can - I imagine in the future where some high ranking military or political figure is sniped by a traffic light (by way of facial recognition or a humble license plate reader)
> those incredibly expensive fighter planes are useless. Aircraft carriers will be replaced
I'm not fully convinced. The advantage of drones is that they are relatively cheap. That automatically comes with significant range and speed limitations; after all, as someone else mentioned, we already have long-range semi-autonomous drones called missiles. They aren't cheap.
Naval engagements, not to mention aircraft engagements, happen at distances that are just not in the reach of cheap drones. Someone might get a surprise shot at an aircraft carrier in peacetime, but probably not while alert on the open sea. And I'm sure ships will be upgraded with defenses (if they haven't already).
Tanks and infantry, that's a more interesting problem.
>> And I'm sure ships will be upgraded with defenses (if they haven't already).
They already have CIWS (and a bunch of other stuff) to shoot down incoming supersonic and maneuvering anti-ship missiles. Any drone slower or less difficult to hit than those missiles stands little chance. Drones can extend the eye and ears of a ship but they are not going to be killing ships themselves anytime soon.
Aircraft carriers engage at range because they're high-value targets themselves and they need to stay at range.
If you produce 100 small boats (I'm thinking torpedo-boat size), each of which carry a few thousand cheap drones with a 5km range, then you can do 90% of the job of an aircraft carrier for 10% (or less) of the cost.
The Venn diagram of people who have cruise missiles and people who have anti-missile defences is a circle. I think parent was talking about various guerrilla fighters/terrorists who have neither technology but still engage in conflicts with those that do.
Cruise missiles are expensive. In theory a million person guerrilla army that stays somewhat spread out can be too expensive to use cruise missiles against effectively. But small, cheap drones…
This analysis is slightly off because WWI and WWII were great powers fighting each other. If the great powers were ever to directly fight this would still be nuclear war. Nothing about "swarming bots" has significantly changed this domain.
Where bots and swarm bots would be used is likely in asymmetric warfare.
"Aircraft carriers will be replaced with cheap drone swarm carriers" I would argue that Aircraft carriers are the size and cost due to large munitions and maintenance constraints.
> I would argue that Aircraft carriers are the size and cost due to large munitions and maintenance constraints.
Pretty sure runways are the reason. VTOL aircraft are too expensive to operate. Helicopters aren't good at attacking ships. Conventional aircraft need a runway: aircraft carriers have to be that big.
Swarm bots would also be useless against tanks or carriers. Too small to carry enough explosives to do much. As the drone becomes big enough to do more it approaches the size of a missile, which we already have.
A TOW anti-tank missile's warhead is about 10 lbs, and it penetrates tanks just fine. That's well within the carrying capacities of commodity carrying drones, which can carry about 20-100 lbs.
Shaped charges are remarkably effective at penetrating armor, penetrating up to 7x their diameter. A 4-inch wide charge will penetrate up to 28 inches of solid steel armor, more than a WW2 battleship's armor.
I don't know how much armor a modern aircraft carrier has, but they're designed for the era of not-very-maneuverable warheads. Send it through the aircraft lifts and blow up the hangar filled with munitions and jet fuel, or punch through the bridge windows and kill the command staff.
Same goes for common tank countermeasures against HEAT rounds, like composite or reactive armor. These are both designed on the assumption that the same exact spot is not going to be hit twice, but you can program a drone to invalidate that assumption pretty easily.
Armored vehicles have thin armor on top, which allows effective top-attack by smaller munitions such as SADARM.[1]
SADARM is smaller than a typical toaster and weighs 12 kg.
An even smaller micro-drone could just attack a tank's gun by setting a small charge or providing blockage that would be devastating when the tank fired.
how much of a missile's weight is payload, and how much is "missile"? I don't know enough about either to be able to say for certainty, but it's probable that the ratio of payload:delivery is different for drones, and possibly better.
also, drones can do stupid things like fly underneath tanks, or land on them and then place a charge right up against the armour (or a vision slit, etc). Or even place a charge, back off, detonate it, then place a second charge on the same spot and detonate that. And of course a swarm can see multiple drones attack exactly the same spot on a tank's armour.
also, they don't need to destroy the tank. They just need to mess with it enough that it needs repair.
> also, drones can do stupid things like fly underneath tanks
I'm not sure how this is superior to just shooting a tank with a missile.
> Or even place a charge, back off, detonate it, then place a second charge on the same spot and detonate that
Now you've halved the payload. If your drone can carry 10kg, you now have 2x 5kg bombs instead of 1x 10kg bomb. If you have a single payload, you have just a shitty, slow moving cruise missile.
> And of course a swarm can see multiple drones attack exactly the same spot on a tank's armour.
We have *guns* that attack the same spot on a Tank's armor. Let alone missiles or drones. Al Qaeda was chaining RPGs in the last war together (__literally__ a chain) that accomplishes that goal.
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The __ONLY__ advantage I can see drones having is sustaining a position for hours at a time. Missiles always fly at top speed, so you can't just "wait around" an area with a missile.
A drone with a gun can sit in a location for 4 hours waiting for the tank to come, then fire the RPG when the tank comes into position. That is, the drone plays a role similar to a modern infantry, except the drone is cheaper to make.
But as soon as you're talking "hit the same spot twice", then we're back to guns / RPGs with a chain on it. Maybe a drone can fire that gun, but... don't have the drone do the job directly.
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EDIT: The theory of "Combined Arms" means that in practice, you'll never face a lone tank. In practice, infantry move to protect tanks, and tanks move to protect infantry.
If you are a soldier who is facing an enemy army: you only have enough strength to carry one weapon. So what do you pick? An anti-tank RPG? Or an anti-infantry machine gun?
Drones seem to fit the same conundrum on both sides. I'd expect drones to be weak against small arms (a machine gun would quickly disable a drone, even if it moves at 100 mph). While RPGs are useless vs drones. Similarly, a drone has a very small payload, so it only can have a certain number of weapons.
> I'm not sure how this is superior to just shooting a tank with a missile.
armour underneath a tank is usually much lighter, because it's difficult to hit. Missiles have to do fancy armour-penetration stuff to get through the main armour on a tank. If you can get a shaped charge stuck to the underside of a tank, you don't need to do the fancy stuff.
> If you have a single payload, you have just a shitty, slow moving cruise missile.
yes. exactly. Except that for the cost of a single conventional cruise missile, you now have 10,000 shitty slow-moving, intelligent, able-to-do-evasive-maneuvres missiles.
> Al Qaeda was chaining RPGs in the last war together
so it works then? Imagine 10,000 RPG grenades flying by themselves, able to chain-hit a target, with no human operator in sight.
> A drone with a gun can sit in a location for 4 hours waiting for the tank to come, then fire the RPG when the tank comes into position.
The drone is the grenade. It doesn't fire the grenade. It flies to the target, attaches itself, goes bang. Next one flies to the same point, attaches, goes bang. There's thousands of them.
A tomahawk with a 1000 lbs warhead weighs 2900 lbs (or 3500 lbs with a booster)[1]. It's a long range missile so, it is probably possible to achieve a better ratio for something shorter range but I have doubts regarding quadcopters like the ones discussed in the article being able to do so by virtue of how fixed wing craft (which the tomahawk is IMHO).
yeah, but for the cost of 1 tomahawk you could launch 100,000 ish kamikaze drones. Maybe 10,000 if we made them more sophisticated and a bit larger. And if the maths work out that a tomahawk is cheaper than a tank, then there's room to increase those numbers. The maths really favour drones on this.
And the infrastructure is so much easier - the tomahawk needs a specialist launch vehicle, that is in turn vulnerable to being spotted and attacked. Drones need a backpack and a bluetooth connection (for each 100 drones or so).
They could also target specific systems on the tank. The main gun, the engine, the tracks. They’re essentially anti tank hand grenades that don’t require someone to get close to the tank.
> "Aircraft carriers will be replaced with cheap drone swarm carriers" I would argue that Aircraft carriers are the size and cost due to large munitions and maintenance constraints.
Mostly the need to carry big heavy bombs and missiles to attack big targets, and big heavy radars to find those targets, and big fuel tanks to stay up long enough to get to them, which then requires catapults to get them airborne and arrestor wire landing strips to recover them.
> So now we have drones, and all those incredibly expensive fighter planes are useless.
Not useless. The idea seem to be that fighter planes will become something like a command center for the drone swarm. There is value in having a human on site, to take quick decisions for instance, and links to drones can be jammed.
And if you look at the F-35 program, you'll see hints that it is the way we are going. It is a stealth fighter with a heavy emphasis on communication systems. Perfect for managing a fleet of drones. Ok, the execution is far from perfect, but that's another debate.
In the end, it is not entirely unlike the current situation. The difference is that these drones blow themselves up on arrival and are called missiles.
Oh, and swarms of drones won't be cheap, that's the army we are talking about. "Predator" style drones are multi-million dollar machines. A small missile like the Hellfire costs around $100k apiece. Forget your idea of a swarm of hobby quadcopters.
> The good news is that there will be anti-drone swarms too. And so we'll end up fighting battles mostly by destroying drones instead of people. Once you've knocked out all the enemy drones, they'll surrender because humans can't fight drones.
They can still fight the guerilla war among citizens. That's been an incredibly effective strategy because it's so expensive to fight. One might wonder if drones are the key to fighting these wars cheaply. If all you need is a small local base and then a thousand drones to surveil a populace... Well that sounds pretty nightmarish for the citizens, but it would certainly change the nature of war.
> And so we'll end up fighting battles mostly by destroying drones instead of people.
This is one piece of possibly good news that it seems like everyone is overlooking.
Automation/Remote control applies not just to drones, but tanks, boats, other aerial vehicles, and maybe troops(after seeing that Boston Dynamics dog robot) etc. Seems like it will be a small squad of highly advanced human troops to move in after the Remotes to secure and maintain control of the area.
So many lives will be spared during wars.
However, this may be unbeatable tech by humans, so any future revolutions will be easily quelled by a gov't with a few drone pilots piloting a drone swarm in a room a thousand miles away.
More likely it will cause a greater loss of life while invalidating previous military tactics. These weapons are more similar to land mines than guided missiles. They’ll be used primarily against troops and armour but also stationary targets like radar, command posts, barracks, depots, and in a bigger war probably against civilian targets. You could drop hundreds of these from a bomber or dozens from a large truck that an insurgent can park close to the target but outside the secured area or a single terrorist could deploy a single drone at a high value target. I’m hoping anti drone technology turns out to be easier and cheaper otherwise we’re seriously screwed.
I agree. This isn't all bad :) Like the move from conscript peasant armies to volunteer professional armies, leave the rest of us out of it.
It'll come down to "how many drones, and of what quality, can your manufacturing base produce?". But this is not that dissimilar from WW2's "how many tanks, and of what quality, can you manufacture?" equation.
Insurgencies will be about getting a small swarm in exactly the right place at the right time.
On that note, it is interesting how a British military theorist more-or-less invented these tank tactics used by the Germans. (Although it is debated as to how much influence he actually had.)
This is a rough explanation of the "generations of warfare" where our tactics are defined by the tools and weapons we have available. Unfortunately, we (humans, not just the US) tend to then treat those as the "right" tactics even as the underlying tools and weapons change so we're always fighting the last war.
Cheap, autonomous, easily-deployed tools - weapons drones, sensors, etc - are a huge change that some are adapting to leverage but few have adapted to respond to.
Which is scary considering the "generations of warfare" model where in fourth generation warfare, the boundary between civilian and combatant is blurred..
Exactly. Machine guns invalidated cavalry charges, but we ended up in a trench war just trying to create a break in the trenches long enough to get the cavalry through. Tanks invalidated trench warfare, but the French built an impregnable defensive line along the border that would make them invincible in the next trench war.
And it's fascinating seeing the comments here saying "nah, this won't change anything" when it already is changing things.
And yes, the blurring of the lines is a problem. As others have pointed out, hiding drones in civilian populations is easy.
I was at an SMS aggregator before joining Twilio back in the day.
At the SMS aggregator, it took $10k to get started, $1k/month for a short code, and $0.1/message.
When I discovered Twilio and found it took $0 to get started, $1/month for a long code, and $0.01/message, the world changed.
It became easy enough to build yourself, fast enough to experiment with, and cheap enough to fail. I see the same thing happening here but with lives on the line.
> And so we'll end up fighting battles mostly by destroying drones instead of people. Once you've knocked out all the enemy drones, they'll surrender because humans can't fight drones.
This makes no sense. If we're talking about an opponent that can field fighter aircraft and missiles that can destroy anti-drone defenses at 50-100km away, they could just use those missiles instead of drones to destroy the "real" target.
Seems to me the likely scenario is some sort of cheap projectile automatic weapon mounted on a vehicle. It doesn't take much to take down a drone and they move incredibly slowly compared to "real" missiles. Sure, 22LR, why not.
iirc the "slaughterbot" concept is about tiny kamikaze drones. Enough explosive to crack open a skull in a drone about the size of a coin, and not much more expensive than that coin. Release hundreds of thousands of them for less than the cost of a single missile, and each of them will independently target and execute a single human.
I don't think any kind of conventional gun is going to do anything against this.
Bullets are a truly silly approach. Grapeshot is already banned in war, and seems like it could be significantly more effective (but still they'll only tear a cone out of a cloud). As far as I can tell, the best defense is an EMP pulse to fry their electronics. If they aren't fully autonomous, jamming the radio might work.
Because they're subsonic soon after they leave the barrel. A swarm could have fairly precise directional hearing, so dodging such a slow bullet isn't out of the question.
I mean, you can drop in 5.56 or even magnum rimfire rounds like 17HMR (anything that is supersonic past eg 200m) and that issue is mitigated. The swarms could hypothetically still detect muzzle flashes, so that could allow them to respond.
But the real issue is that the threat is a swarm, why are you taking potshots at it. Whatever weapon you use should be able to consume as many of them as possible at once.
To sum up the conclusion of the several-hour video series: the Aegis Combat System is essentially impenetrable to all but the most overwhelming of forces.
Perhaps not, but missile cruisers can :) They try that in a different series, a fully armed WWII battleship group against a modern US carrier group. Guns just don't have the range compared to surface launched missiles and they can't get close enough.
I won't pretend to be some expert on military hardware, I'm a guy interested in flight sims, and that video series just happened to catch my attention. They make a compelling argument though, cruise missiles are one of the methods they try (unsure if supersonic), and they are attacking the carrier group in the absolute worst defensive position it could be in: a narrow gulf surrounded by unfriendly territory on most sides.
Still, not much gets through. If it's not the missile defense system that gets you, it's the F/A-18 patrols. If not them, it's the F-14s that can scramble in minutes. Scary stuff.
The problem with arms races is that they are races: no one wants to be left behind.
What is likely to happen is any major nation-state that signs a treaty agreeing to a ban will STILL secretly be researching and building autonomous (or nearly autonomous) weapon systems because they do not want to be left behind.
I would add that it's also very difficult to study and develop countermeasures without cultivating cutting-edge knowledge of how such weapons are designed, built and operated. Doing that means you eventually need field data. The slope is extremely slippery, but it's also dangerous not to traverse it.
It would be a disaster to enter a military conflict with an adversary that has autonomous weapons if you don’t have at least effective countermeasures yourself.
I suppose nuclear states could in principle rest on their laurels, but at least from a layman’s perspective it doesn’t give an impression of being strategically sound.
But obviously it’s a scary rabbit hole to enter. It’s not fun when game-theoretical considerations or human nature seems to make dubious technological developments inevitable.
They also need to research them to learn how to counter them if an enemy does use them. Given that most of the conflicts of the last few decades were not with states but with groups the chance of someone using them is high. Especially as technology becomes more accessible.
It's fairly easy and cheap to make an explosive drone and train a neural network to drive it using off the shelf components and open source software. It follows that it's inevitable that at least semi-autonomous drones will be made to counter radio jamming.
So while the best outcome a treaty could hope for is to prevent mass manufacturing these things by some countries, any motivated small country/individual will be able to craft them.
Drones can't beat nylon nets or other low tech countermeasures.
I think anti drone water cannons will outpace drone assassinations. And more than both, regular bombs and guns will still do most of the killing.
A motorized sniper rifle with face detection to find targets and a high rate of fire seems like it could exist with current technology, require about the same effort to deploy as a sniper with a typical sniper rifle, require less training from the person in the field, and be a hell of a lot more deadly. Same with a machine gun for closer quarters.
Regular bombs and guns probably still do most of the killing for quite awhile because of inertia, but I'm pretty firmly of the belief that they are outdated technology or will be soon, especially the regular guns part.
Regular bombs are arguably already outdated by missiles with (frequently autonomous) guidance... but for a lot of applications dumb explosives do work pretty well so those probably stick around for a long time.
While it isn't impossible in principle to make an aerial stabilized firing platform, I think you underestimate the difficulty. You definitely can't do it with a quadcopter, which doesn't have anywhere near the precision reaction capability to counteract rifle recoil. Even the most advanced fighter jets in existence right now can't do this. They need to use guide missiles for precision targeting.
In practice, a drone swarm is an area weapon. It's why it's kamikaze and relies on explosives right now. It can say it has the ability to find a specific person using computer vision and maybe it can, but it definitely can't make sure it only kills that one person and it can't kill from a distance.
No flying platform will be replacing snipers any time soon.
> You definitely can't do it with a quadcopter, which doesn't have anywhere near the precision reaction capability to counteract rifle recoil.
I think you're overstating the difficulty here. There's three things a drone needs to do:
1. Provide a stable/stabilized platform (for sensors and effectors)
2. Respond to recoil in such a way to make the point-of-impact consistent
3. Not fall out of the sky in response to recoil
I think 1 is demonstrated today with drones flying around 4k/8k movie cameras - a lot of that might be the mount, but you could put an AR-15 in that mount too. 2 is presumably easy as well - just make sure that the drone is in the same physical orientation before each shot as in 'training'. 3 is trivially solved - if your drone is robust enough to withstand the recoil, just let the computer autolevel the drone in whatever new location it's found itself in. If this costs altitude, make sure to fire from farther up.
newton's third law says yes, at least to some extent. unless the barrel is perfectly aligned with the platform's center of gravity, it will be deflected (at least a little) before the projectile exits. and it's not trivial to hold a quadcopter or fixed wing craft steady enough to aim precisely in the first place.
Hell you don't even need to go that high tech. Just make model jet aircraft cheaper, easier to handle, maybe even autonomous and I'd like to see those current anti-drone countermeasures stop it from zooming in and dropping whatever dumb payload someone could possibly want.
Sniping isn't that simple. The risk of counterfire is real.
I think autonomous weapons will always be more successful in area denial and holding territory. Ie landmines.
The risk of counterfire is a lot smaller when the only thing to fire on is the few thousands of dollars worth of gun and electronics... and you could even armor it pretty effectively at the cost of mobility.
It's not that easy. A startup tried to build a smart gun with aim assist, but couldn't keep it calibrated for more than a couple shots and eventually went under.
Banning autonomous weapons is a good idea, but history indicates that the bad guys might very well continue to develop them while claiming that they are not. For example, see the biological weapons program pursued by the former Soviet Union in secret despite being signatories of the international ban on biological weapons[1].
There's an interesting similarity between autonomous weapon systems and ransomware discussions. Both have just come to the attention of the mainstream audience (or audiences outside their usual niche) and discussion in those spaces is about where it was 5 years ago.
Also I'd really expect HN of all places to understand why banning what is basically computer vision based targeting systems is absurd.
Technologists tend to underappreciated relative utility as a driving popularity metric -- does it accomplish a job I need, better / cheaper / faster?
My thought is that ransomware is seeing a resurgence because corporations are increasingly internetworked and hybridized with the global internet, because they have to be. So ransomware has begun to outweigh espionage as a method for extracting money from corporations.
Drones (as used so far, in the remote suicide version) solve a key problem many states have: lack of effective tactical ISR. The US and major powers do not have this problem.
Autonomous drones solve... what problem?
My inclination is that they'll deliver the same value as current-gen ML systems: mass, automated intelligence collection & basic analysis. As well as continuous monitoring and triggering on a pre-configured event (e.g. truck leaves this building, launch missile).
Killing something, once you know what and where it is, is not a problem most militaries have.
Training and paying and allocating large numbers of soldiers to do basic intelligence trawling is absolutely a problem most militaries have.
I think you see this in the US drone approach evolution. Shifting from a single vehicle approach to a survivable system with attritable assets communicating back through stealth communication hubs. Because persistence is the real value.
>Killing something, once you know what and where it is, is not a problem most militaries have.
It would be if there was a real war with a lot of things at once. That statement is only true for peacetime "executive action" wars with a 100:1 force ratio. It is an auxiliary role that has little to do with how things would go if there was a war between somewhat equal powers.
The lessons of enforcing foreign policy on ten people who live in a country with neutral diplomatic status will probably not apply if you change the number ten or the neutral diplomatic status.
There are never enough bombs to go around, especially smarter versions. Classic every problem is a nail and I have a hammer situation for commanders and strike planners once they have access to such munitions.
This bit NATO forces in Libya[1], for example.
Building drones may well be more scalable and economically viable than smart bombs. Consider a multiuse drone that could be utilized for battlefield recon with its camera, or the user snaps something akin to a BLU-108[2] smart munition onto the bottom of the chassis and now they have a remote controlled smart anti-tank weapon. The drone being multi use could increase the use cases, increasing the order size, decreasing the unit cost.
From [1], it seems like the European stocks are a compatibility issue (can't mount US munitions) and a funding issue (don't purchase and store enough for a sustained campaign).
> Building drones may well be more scalable and economically viable than smart bombs
That's the heart of the matter. Is it, or isn't it? And for what? The commentary usually glosses over this.
E.g. what's the difference between a JSOW-ER deploying CBU-103s / BLU-108s or a "drone"?
I think the more important future distinctions are going to be between attritable/simple vs expensive/capable platforms, temporary vs persistent platforms, and organic autonomy vs network-reliant. Where some combination of the qualities is optimal for any particular mission.
As an example: Is a mid-air refuelable X-61 without organic sensors but carrying smart munitions a cruise missile or a drone?
Weapons caches are valuable targets, so unless all the world's major powers are keeping all of their missiles in a number of locations much smaller than the number of missiles their opponents have, I don't see how armament stocks can be large compared to the number of targets. That's even assuming that the only targets will be military targets, which wasn't even true in WWII.
Um... you are way off the mark here. You just missed the latest war of Azerbaijan vs Armenia, where the azeri forces had these drones, that just hovered in the battle field for hours, and when the Armeni forces turned their radars off their would just home on them and destroy them immediately.
They were acting like moving air-landmines. They key part of this is that they are super cheap to make (cost of a car), and operate, and work autonomously. Thousands of them launched, can wreck havock even on a sophisticated military like the US of Russia.
That's why there is a return of modernized cheaper ww2 type of anti aircraft guns.
>> Drones (as used so far, in the remote suicide version) solve a key problem many states have: lack of effective tactical ISR. The US and major powers do not have this problem
That describes Azerbaijan and Armenia's war precisely.
> work autonomously
The TB2 [0] is not capable of autonomous engagement. It's remotely operated for weapons release. And half its key components rely on foreign technology (regardless of what Turkey claims).
The Israeli Harop platform [1] does have autonomous engagement, but intended for the S/DEAD role and is in a different class of technical sophistication and price.
Calling Russian export military equipment "sophisticated" is a bit of a stretch, considering modern delivered models are circa-1995 designs, only recently realized.
Maybe 30 years ago, but they haven't been able to even afford to modernize their own forces, and basically lost 20 years of progress to post-Soviet upheaval and kleptocracy.
We'll see what happens when drones go up against a military keeping pace with the times.
>...Also I'd really expect HN of all places to understand why banning what is basically computer vision based targeting systems is absurd.
On the contrary, I would expect a site with a usersbase that screams incessantly about "privacy" and has an intense hatred of data-mining dark patterns, dislikes opaque ML models, would be against the lack of privacy and data-mining culminating in an execution by the state.
Whether they kill you with a remote-controlled drone, an autonomous drone, some manned platform, or just a man is orthogonal to whether the decision to kill you is based on privacy invasion and inscrutable threat detection algorithms.
I would hope (but definitely not expect) HN commenters to see past this and realize the problem isn't computer vision or firepower. It's tying those two together, writing some code and cutting it loose on humanity. Put it this way: if you wrote the code for an autonomous machine gun platform, would you park it in your house? I'm twenty years into this and I wouldn't trust my code that well.
Just like with chemical weapons, banning them makes total sense to avoid overwhelming mass production and ubiquitous use.
You'll still see them used in targeted assassinations and some countries will have illegal military stockpiles, but that's very different from these things being treated like regular guns/ammo, being commercially available or legal to build.
Chemical weapons are banned because they kill indiscriminately, and it causes undue suffering compared to conventional weapons, not because you can mass produce them. Drones wouldn't have either of those issues.
Flying land mines can be equally indiscriminate. Especially if you set the targeting to an ethnic group. These are explosives so they won’t always kill their target, they’ll do a lot of maiming and anyone standing near the target will be on the receiving end too.
I guess the answer to me is "it depends". Modern cruise missiles are pretty much drones, but at the same time they're always what I guess I'd call "weapons of state". Big, expensive, and part of a large decision-making loop. You can't just lob one; someone signed for it. Attacks are planned in advance at high levels.
whereas this "slaughterbot" idea is smaller, low-cost, and with far less top-down control.
I think the latter. For what it's worth, the 'arms' that are still protected by the 2nd Amendment are still approximately the same as in 1787 (line of sight, bang bang), as you're legally restricted from owning guided bombs, cruise missiles, nuclear weapons, etc, but even aside from that, you're practically restricted because of limited availability and/or extreme cost.
On the flip side, the hardware for Slaughterbots is basically here: TinyWhoops cost ~$100, say ~$100 to upgrade the ARM processor to one that can process realtime video, ~$100 for a shaped charge. So the hardware is super cheap, and once developed, the software to tie it all together has nearly no incremental cost. Once it's out there, that's the genie leaving the bottle.
That is my question too. Tomahawk missiles have been fielded since early 80s, and are very much fire and forget autonomous weapons that can track targets based on sensor data (i.e. not reliant on GPS or other external guidance).
Maybe the small difference is that cruise missiles generally are not anti-personnel weapons; maybe the article is seeking a ban in the same sense that Ottawa treaty banned anti-personnel mines but allows anti-tank mines. But I think this is something that would need to be explicitly addressed instead of just spouting sky is falling rhetoric.
STM, the Turkish company that makes the KARGU drone referenced in the article has a promotional video from 2018 showing the unit being demonstrated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oqv9yaPLhEk
Weapons that have been successfully banned in the past typically had an alternative technology that it could be substituted with. I'm not sure you can say the same of lethal drones. In the case of Azerbaijan vs Armenia, the sum total of the fighter aircraft of BOTH nations combined is just 5. For poorer nations, drones represent a democratization of the battlefield; an extraordinarily cheap technology with a lot of firepower per dollar. I don't think these countries will be willing to give this up easily.
How silly. How can such a ban be enforced? Will Al Qaeda and ISIS sign the treaty? Will Assad sign it? Will he respect it any more than he respected the ban on chemical weapons?
How about a change to how we choose to live as a world and make them illegal to build, enforce those laws strictly, etc. The fact we live in a world where arms is a hyper-profitable amoral (at best) industry doesn't mean we should or have to.
>‘It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations’
It's a piece in IEEE Spectrum, lots of people submit articles there.
With respect to unconstitutionality, really? Are you also able to acquire and keep on your property a functioning ICBM or nuclear bomb? Arms controls exist in the US despite the 2nd amendment.
Considering that the technology to build such drones is so widely available there's no reason why small arm drones wouldn't be protected under the 2nd amendment. Drones with bombs are a different story, but will be developed regardless of any international agreement (just like bio weapons).
I, for one, welcome our murderbot overlords. If we can't stop using drones to kill people, we should at least try to reduce collateral damage. With some advancements autonomous drones could be more precise and reliable than human operated ones, meaning that as an outcome fewer weddings will get blown up.
But we can stop using drones to kill people, we choose not to. Instead, we see drones as a measure to lower the operational cost of killing people allowing us to kill people simply because they are there.
And that's the problem, there is always the Western idea that someone far away must absolutely be killed. And magically, when that person is killed, someone else pops up in their place who needs to be killed even more than the first guy.
It's efficient collateral reducing killing of people who "need to be killed" when it's the West doing it, but uncivilized brutish terrorism when the Other does it.
And if fewer weddings get blown up, we'll use them more and more to kill people. I wonder whether the absolute number of killings will go up or down this way.
If they're accurate (or more accurate) then there's less resistance to using them more. They will be used to target an increasingly large number of people (or individuals) with a kind of specificity that present weapon systems cannot be used for and which impedes their use in some cases (because of the risk of collateral damage or the political fallout from a recent incident of bombing a wedding party).
The RAF's Brimstone missile is in big demand for airstrikes because it has much lower collateral damage than the bigger Hellfire and Maverick missiles that allies use. This has actually spurred its use; the number of strikes actually went up.
The pentagon literally have lawyers that designate an acceptable amount of civilian casualties a general can risk to take out a given target. With more precise weaponry theyll be able to get under the threshold much more frequently.
One example comes to mind, where an Apache helicopter gunner killed a journalist holding a large camera, thinking the silhouette looked like a rocket launcher.
One soldier made this mistake. What if a faulty image fitting/target classification algorithm deployed in a fleet of autonomous drones was vulnerable to a similar misclassification and started flagging some innocuous objects in people's hands as weapons? Would the rules of engagement be permissive enough for the drones to begin killing those people on their own, would there be human operators in the loop confirming and authorizing the strike?
Any failure of the technology will be scoped away. If the drone blows up a city block targeting a kid with an ice cream cone, the cone will be classified as a potential weapon, therefore tragically the child was a militant.
I agree 100%. So naive. Just think of a world where we (US, EU, etc.) stop investing in this technology while Russia, China, etc. continue.
It really burns me to hear AI professors rail against “autonomous weapons” yet go work at Facebook, Google, etc. Information, especially manipulation of it, is a weapon too.
Autonomous weapons should be embraced, otherwise less scrupulous people will embrace them, and they will win. Non-autonomous weapons will simply not be able to compete long term.
Actually we wouldn't even be able to compete today, things like missiles are already autonomous, and if they weren't we would simply be unable to compete in any battlefield where radio was jammed, and it would give a large force multiplier to adversaries even in battle fields where radio is not jammed.
These countermeasures generally only work against drones that are not fully autonomous since they rely on disrupting communication with a ground controller. If your drone is perfectly happy to loiter and kill people based on facial recognition and some basic parameters, dronegun won't work. The other point to keep in mind is that cheap lethal drones are often designed to operate in swarm mode rather than individually. It's pretty difficult to knock out an autonomous swarm with weapons designed to target one drone at a time.
In the book “The Diamond Age” by Neal Stephenson there are mist-like swarms of nanobots that act as an immune system for regions against malicious nanobots.
I can picture there being something like this with drones.
There are problems to this. The major one being that, as mentioned by the posts on this thread, you have to develop the weapon to really know how to counter it.
A more direct science fiction forerunner of this is Bruce Stirling's _Islands in the Net_ (1988). There is a scene where cheap explosive drone swarms are used in terror attacks.
And of course, there's the famous first line of _Count Zero_.
"They sent a Slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW - Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT."
I see lots of people offering elaborate solutions to take down a swarm of drones. I may be wildly off the mark here but would it not be feasible to fly over them with a jet fighter and let the supersonic shockwave take out a lot of them?
I am thinking of some other more low tech solutions to whittle them down as well: firing a weighted net; sticky silly string type stuff to tangle and gum up the rotors.
They seem to be only presenting the negative aspects of "slaughterbots".
Could they not potentially be better than human controlled devices since they should be able to more accurately target things and create less collateral damage?
Of course, there's always the doomsday terminator scenario where they go haywire and decide to start targeting all humans....
It's worth noting that this line of reasoning has been used to justify the invention of machines that ended up causing many more deaths than before. Richard Gatling was inspired to invent the Gatling gun as a way to reduce the number of deaths by combat. His logic was that if could replace the lines of musket-wielding infantry with a small team that could fire just as many rounds, the number of soldiers an army would require would drop, and therefore the number of combat deaths would drop as well. This line of reasoning was proven wrong, as the deployment of Gatling guns simply caused more causalities in the American Civil War, and the gun's descendants enabled the mass slaughter in the First World War.
Similar logic was applied to bombers in the Second World War. If bombers could fly into enemy territory, hit key targets behind enemy lines and fly out, then the need for armies would go away. Instead we got The Blitz, the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden, and the deadliest war in history.
Maybe this time is somehow different, but it's an important historical context to consider. Often the expansion of our destructive capabilities simply encourages more destruction.
Yes I'm just playing devil's advocate. My initial response is that they should be banned but like most things someone will continue creating them. Do we really think China cares whether there's a ban?
Typically the only thing that stops WMD type weapons (not sure if slaughterbots fall into this category) is the enemy having them as well. Assured mutual destruction seems to be the only viable option.
I don't fully understand how there is real difference?
If you give a swarm of drones a kill zone and time limit, then they try them to kill every human in the area, how is that so different from MLRS salvo?
Cruise missiles are already slaughterbots. You just give them location and they kill everyone in that location.
Location is wrong argument. The article specifically points out that those drones were said to follow retreating fighters, and keep shooting un-discriminately
It always has been scary to me to how weapons evolve over time. Even though they are (thank god) mostly not needed they still keep developing further to be more lethal and efficient just to be "prepared" to what might happen in the future.
Whenever these discussions are brought up I feel the need to remind everyone that autonomous weapons and drones are not new inventions. The first remotely controlled weapons were developed and tested in the 1910s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettering_Bug . You also saw the emergence of drones being used as targets, to train air crews and anti-aircraft gunners. WW2 saw numerous instances of autonomous weapons being used in combat. The obvious examples are the V1 and V2, which both used internal guidance systems. There's also the Fritz X, a radio-controlled air-launched anti-ship missile. There was also Operation Aphrodite (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aphrodite ) in which the Allies loaded up a b-17 bomber with explosives, re-worked to be radio controlled with TV guidance, and flown into hard targets. Similarly, you have the German Mistel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistel ) which involved a drone loaded to capacity with explosives and guided to a target, but in this case the drone is carried by an aircraft and dropped, making this the first air-launched cruise missile used in combat.
During the Cold War you started to see drones being used for reconnaissance. The US had the Ryan Model 147 and D-21. Once computers became significantly advanced you started seeing an explosion of different applications. The tomahawk missile is extensively programmable, allowing the user to give it a flight course consisting of a number of waypoints, and digital images along its intended path. It would then compare those images to what it sees on the route and use that for course corrections, ensuring extreme accuracy against targets a thousand miles away in a time before GPS. (fun fact: during the Gulf War, the Navy had to plan their Tomahawk stikes to go through the Southeastern portion of Iraq instead of a more direct route because they could use the mountains and hills for course corrections, while the direct route went over relatively featureless desert). In the late 1980s Israel would employ loitering munitions. Essentially these were suicide drones intended to take out enemy radars. It would loiter above for hours until detecting an enemy radar and then dive. There were also decoy drones. These didn't have a warhead, they were intended to simply fly around acting as bait. Some decoys are fitted with radar reflectors to make them appear larger on radar than they really are, essentially the opposite of stealth aircraft.
Autonomous weapons have been around for a long time and aren't going anywhere. Frankly, I think this is probably better in terms of reducing civilian casualties. I'd rather have soldiers use a precision guided weapon like this than calling in mortars or artillery.
Not only should there should be no autonomous drones, the non-autonomous remote controller hardware should be wired up such that if they are shot out of the sky, this kills the human operator and anyone sitting nearby.
This would be much fairer than the current system of gamified point-and-click murder.
I'm pretty sure any artificial rules which make war "fairer" will just be ignored when real bullets start flying since "it's better to be judged by twelve than to be carried by six" is an actual unofficial rule in the military.
As horrible as this sounds, I like the "real world consequence" part of it. Maybe this would lead to people reconsidering their participation in those war games.
Not with current tech but let’s say 5 years from now can’t a country or even a terrorist organization deploy hundreds of autonomous drones with charging stations that will effectively shoot everyone on sight?
It’s like a school massacre but at a city scale or worse.
Sure eventually everyone will go inside or underground but there is still incredible damage to be made in the meanwhile.
You can equip these with heat vision and they will even hunt you at night.
This is also incredible tech for hunting fugitives.
In the US the population has enough handguns that they can probably fight these off to some extent but in Europe it would be impossible.
They'd have to get their hands on "hundreds of autonomous drones" and deploy them on site. Seems unlikely for any of the current terrorist organisations.
really? It’s not like this would cost more than 5K usd each. It doesn’t have to be military grade this is not much more than a DJI drone with better firmware and a micro railgun
sure, looking at how they usually conduct business though, it seems unlikely that would happen. but whatever, it could theoretically happen, what do I know.
Britain and France, notably, hadn't really worked out how to use them effectively and so were left fighting the last war, horribly disadvantaged until they worked out how to catch up (though air power being developed at the same time also had an influence).
So now we have drones, and all those incredibly expensive fighter planes are useless. Aircraft carriers will be replaced with cheap drone swarm carriers, so naval strategy will need to change. Anti-tank drone swarms will make conventional armour more or less ineffective. And so on.
The good news is that there will be anti-drone swarms too. And so we'll end up fighting battles mostly by destroying drones instead of people. Once you've knocked out all the enemy drones, they'll surrender because humans can't fight drones.
Interesting times.