[trabant00]

Any fully autonomous drone that can be produced in the near future will be easily foolable. And if it has a remote fail-safe deactivation system the enemy can figure it out and deactivate it too. So you solved absolutely nothing of what a wire solves. And made the same pitch we have for every ML product right now: we're X% there, next year we're there. When in fact next year we're still going to be next year away from there.

[LorenPechtel]

There's a simple way to build a failsafe that the enemy can't figure out. The basic rule of cryptography--assume your enemy knows everything but the key.

When the launcher and the drone connect they make up a completely random key. It is known only to the launcher and the drone. The drone will self destruct if it receives said key. The enemy could jam the destruct but they couldn't trigger it. Note that no encryption is even needed.

One time pads are inherently unbreakable crypto other than by compromising the pad. And in this case the secret is known only to the drone and controller.

[trabant00]

But if the destruct is jammable it's not a real fail safe.