Can we please just fight all of our wars on the moon with giant robots like God intended?
Killer drones pioneered in Ukraine are the weapons of the future
Submitted 8 months ago by boem@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 8 months ago
tal@lemmy.today 8 months ago
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
The Outer Space Treaty, formally the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, is a multilateral treaty that forms the basis of international space law. Negotiated and drafted under the auspices of the United Nations, it was opened for signature in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union on 27 January 1967, entering into force on 10 October 1967.
en.wikisource.org/…/Outer_Space_Treaty_of_1967
Article IV
States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.
The moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manœuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited. The use of any equipment or facility necessary for peaceful exploration of the moon and other celestial bodies shall also not be prohibited.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That is so 2023.
Carlo@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
NO👏WAR👏BUT👏THE👏MOON👏WAR!👏
Evotech@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Drones currently outpace their countermeasurs. This will definitely not be a thing forever. I think the effectiveness of cheap drones will go down as be countermeasures are invented.
We already see new very effective military drone jammers starting to come out
eleitl@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Onboard AI guidance is not difficult.
turkishdelight@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
I will be very suprises if this isn’t already happening.
cynar@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The only reliable counter to a drone is likely another drone.
I suspect Peter F Hamilton got it close, in the Confederation series, with WASPs. They are space based weapon platforms. They carry a mix of offensive and defensive subsystems, and operate with swarm logic.
I could easily see a larger drone carrying a swarm of 1 shot micro drones. When close, some would be sacrificed to get better sensor data, others would go on the attack. Conversely, a defensive target would launch their own swarm. It’s goal would be to stop the attackers getting a good shot on a high value target. It might also counterattack, either against the mother ship drone, or backtracking to find the launch site.
Jamming would also be part of this. A jammer could easily cut off the swarm from external data sources. Live satellite or remote surveillance systems would be cut. Point to point lasers are far harder, as are burst transmissions. Local sensor drones could easily punch short range data back, or paint targets, until they are destroyed by defensive systems.
Doug7070@lemmy.world 8 months ago
There are in fact a huge number of reliable counters to drones, including but not limited to anti-aircraft gun systems, anti-aircraft lasers, RF jamming devices (especially effective against cheap/makeshift drones), and several more. Drones are currently an emergent threat without a robust countermeasure scheme, but given their massive role in the Ukraine war that is not going to go unaddressed for long. From a purely mechanical standpoint, small drone munitions are also physically very vulnerable, making them readily destroyed by anti-air autocannon fire or even laser weapons if you assume RF jamming will not solve the problem.
dragontamer@lemmy.world 8 months ago
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr7ym1zkda8
Anti-air guns are the countermeasure. RADAR good enough to detect drones + an aimbot and air-burst round to “shotgun” your pellets to damage those soft plastic bits.
We’re going back to WW2 tech. AA guns were considered obsolete because Helicopters + Missiles had more range. But now we need to build cheaper AA Guns for the anti-drone role.
VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
It’s going up be interesting and scary when we see the first mega swarm of drones, a river of them just pouring through the sky and hammering from every direction at the defenses.
Constant evolution of drone and antidrone, a production race with frontlines being slowly shifting walls of drone combat, them pouring out of factories as fast as they can be made with the front moving based on who can make more per hour
KeenFlame@feddit.nu 8 months ago
You use the word easily so many times here where it becomes more and more apparent that you probably don’t think it means what it means
t0fr@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
I saw a YouTube clip explaining that they use a secondary drone to boost the signal to get around some of the jamming.
The game of cat and mouse continues.
Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Jammers only work against remote controlled drones. Autonomous ones have no such issue.
Evotech@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That’s only one example
tal@lemmy.today 8 months ago
Western countries have been slow to absorb these lessons. Simple and cheap weapons will not replace big, high-end platforms, but they will complement them. The Pentagon is belatedly embarking on Replicator, an initiative to build thousands of low-cost drones and munitions able to take on China’s enormous forces. Europe is even further behind. Its ministers and generals increasingly believe that they could face another major European war by the end of the decade. If so, investment in low-end drones needs to grow urgently. Moreover, ubiquitous drones will require ubiquitous defences—not just on battlefields but also in cities at peace.
I think that any war determined by who can churn out more low-end drones is going to be dominated by China, given their overwhelming share of the consumer market.
That will only change if the basic methods of manufacture change, like, production is far more heavily automated. And even then, it’s not clear to me that China has a disadvantage in industrial automation.
I think a more-interesting technology question is who has better counters to low-end drones. There, I can imagine room for a technological advantage. As things stand today, though, we really don’t have a compelling answer, and we probably should have come up with one by now.
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
These flying IEDs can be defeated with some simple radio jamming. They will fall out of the sky without a remote control signal.
eleitl@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
AI guidance does not rely on remote.
tal@lemmy.today 8 months ago
So, I haven’t played with them, but even commercial, off-the-shelf DJI consumer drones have the ability to return to some location if they lose link, so they’re gonna have at least GPS in there. You can jam that, but they’ve got accelerometers, and you can’t jam that. They shouldn’t drop out of the sky even if you can manage to jam things.
It looks like DJI drones have frequency-hopping spread spectrum support, too. So you have to jam all frequencies that they’re using, since you don’t know which they’re using at any given instant. For consumer hardware, it probably doesn’t matter much – nobody is jamming you, so you sit in your little assigned piece of spectrum – but in a war, you can probably expand the frequencies you use, use a huge chunk of the spectrum, if need be.
There are also some forms of jam resistance that AFAIK are not being exploited – beam-forming or directional antennas.
Both Russia and Ukraine have a pretty strong interest in using electronic warfare against drones, and the fact that both are still using a lot of them seems like a pretty good argument that they can’t currently successfully stop them via electronic warfare.
And even if you can jam signal when it gets really close to the target, if you have a second drone watching – which it looks like Ukraine and Russia often are, from the videos I see, maybe to do damage assessment – you can probably stick a laser designator on those, if they haven’t already, use it to guide the weaponized drone in.
TransplantedSconie@lemm.ee 8 months ago
The Radio Guy in the squad just got real important lmao
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 8 months ago
And even then, it’s not clear to me that China has a disadvantage in industrial automation.
They have slight ones but nothing significant from what I have seen.
sturlabragason@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Anyone have a non paywalled or more info on the subject. All signs point towards an impending global war and I’d like to be as prepared as possible.
tapdattl@lemmy.world 8 months ago
PRECISION-GUIDED weapons first appeared in their modern form on the battlefield in Vietnam a little over 50 years ago. As armed forces have strived ever since for accuracy and destructiveness, the cost of such weapons has soared. America’s gps-guided artillery shells cost $100,000 a time. Because smart weapons are expensive, they are scarce. That is why European countries ran out of them in Libya in 2011. Israel, more eager to conserve its stockpiles than avoid collateral damage, has rained dumb bombs on Gaza. What, though, if you could combine precision and abundance?
For the first time in the history of warfare that question is being answered on the battlefields of Ukraine. Our report this week shows how first-person view (FPV) drones are mushrooming along the front lines. They are small, cheap, explosives-laden aircraft adapted from consumer models, and they are making a soldier’s life even more dangerous. These drones slip into tank turrets or dugouts. They loiter and pursue their quarry before going for the kill. They are inflicting a heavy toll on infantry and armour.
The war is also making FPV drones and their maritime cousins ubiquitous. January saw 3,000 verified FPV drone strikes. This week Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, created the Unmanned Systems Force, dedicated to drone warfare. In 2024 Ukraine is on track to build 1m-2m drones. Astonishingly, that will match Ukraine’s reduced consumption of shells (which is down because Republicans in Congress are shamefully denying Ukraine the supplies it needs).
The drone is not a wonder weapon—no such thing exists. It matters because it embodies big trends in war: a shift towards small, cheap and disposable weapons; the increasing use of consumer technology; and the drift towards autonomy in battle. Because of these trends, drone technology will spread rapidly from armies to militias, terrorists and criminals. And it will improve not at the budget-cycle pace of the military-industrial complex, but with the break-things urgency of consumer electronics.
Basic FPV drones are revolutionarily simple. The descendants of racing quadcopters, built from off-the-shelf components, they can cost as little as several hundred dollars. FPV drones tend to have short ranges, carry small payloads and struggle in bad weather. For those reasons they will not (yet) replace artillery. But they can still do a lot of damage. In one week last autumn Ukrainian drones helped destroy 75 Russian tanks and 101 big guns, among much else. Russia has its own fpv drones, though they tend to target dugouts, trenches and soldiers. Drones help explain why both sides find it so hard to mount offensives.
The exponential growth in the number of Russian and Ukrainian drones points to a second trend. They are inspired by and adapted from widely available consumer technology. Not only in Ukraine but also in Myanmar, where rebels have routed government forces in recent days, volunteers can use 3D printers to make key components and assemble airframes in small workshops. Unfortunately, criminal groups and terrorists are unlikely to be far behind the militias.
This reflects a broad democratisation of precision weapons. In Yemen the Houthi rebel group has used cheap Iranian guidance kits to build anti-ship missiles that are posing a deadly threat to commercial vessels in the Red Sea. Iran itself has shown how an assortment of long-range strike drones and ballistic missiles can have a geopolitical effect that far outweighs their cost. Even if the kit needed to overcome anti-drone jamming greatly raises the cost of the weapons, as some predict, they will still count as transformationally cheap.
The reason goes back to consumer electronics, which propel innovation at a blistering pace as capabilities accumulate in every product cycle. That poses problems of ethics as well as obsolescence. There will not always be time to subject novel weapons to the testing that Western countries aim for in peacetime and that is required by the Geneva Conventions.
Innovation also leads to the last trend, autonomy. Today, fpv drone use is limited by the supply of skilled pilots and by the effects of jamming, which can sever the connection between a drone and its operator. To overcome these problems, Russia and Ukraine are experimenting with autonomous navigation and target recognition. Artificial intelligence has been available in consumer drones for years and is improving rapidly.
A degree of autonomy has existed on high-end munitions for years and on cruise missiles for decades. The novelty is that cheap microchips and software will let intelligence sit inside millions of low-end munitions that are saturating the battlefield. The side that masters autonomy at scale in Ukraine first could enjoy a temporary but decisive advantage in firepower—a necessary condition for any breakthrough.
Western countries have been slow to absorb these lessons. Simple and cheap weapons will not replace big, high-end platforms, but they will complement them. The Pentagon is belatedly embarking on Replicator, an initiative to build thousands of low-cost drones and munitions able to take on China’s enormous forces. Europe is even further behind. Its ministers and generals increasingly believe that they could face another major European war by the end of the decade. If so, investment in low-end drones needs to grow urgently. Moreover, ubiquitous drones will require ubiquitous defences—not just on battlefields but also in cities at peace. Kalashnikovs in the skies
Intelligent drones will also raise questions about how armies wage war and whether humans can control the battlefield. As drones multiply, self-co-ordinating swarms will become possible. Humans will struggle to monitor and understand their engagements, let alone authorise them.
America and its allies must prepare for a world in which rapidly improving military capabilities spread more quickly and more widely. As the skies over Ukraine fill with expendable weapons that marry precision and firepower, they serve as a warning. Mass-produced hunter-killer aircraft are already reshaping the balance between humans and technology in war. ■
tal@lemmy.today 8 months ago
All signs point towards an impending global war
Like what?
rayyy@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This is similar but not paywalled either.
tal@lemmy.today 8 months ago
Drone advances in Ukraine have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world’s first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare.
Fully-autonomous robots that kill without a human in the loop have been around for quite a while. They just aren’t as pervasive or visible as they could be.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS
The Phalanx CIWS (SEE-wiz) is an automated gun-based close-in weapon system to defend military watercraft automatically against incoming threats such as aircraft, missiles, and small boats.
The only inputs required for operation are 440 V AC three-phase electric power at 60 Hz and water (for electronics cooling).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot
Patriot was one of the first tactical systems in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to employ lethal autonomy in combat.
JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Better brush up on my e-sports skillz, then.
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Bombs strapped to remote controlled planes aren’t the weapons of the future. The American military has fucking autonomous robot dogs that carry machine guns and have thermal imaging sensors.
Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I disagree. Ukrainian style suicide drones combined with autonomous robot dogs carrying guns with thermal sensors are the weapons of the future, and it is a horrifying future. Governments will absolutely use both.
marcos@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That looks like something that will work very well, until a bomb gets dropped on it from a $5 remote controlled plane.
anon5621@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
*autonomous Aircrafts with AI,tanks with AI.
anarchy79@lemmy.world 8 months ago
[deleted]vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
The first drones date back as far as WW2, so its even funnier that their being called the weapons of the future. Mind you the WW2 equivelents are very primitive by todays standards but still.
The german had the Goliath anti-tank mine, which allied soldiers would use as go-carts when they captured them. Also they were badically small RC tanks. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath_tracked_mine
And the United States had a full on flying drone. They used an early version of TV signals and required a chase plane to function. They were largely relegated to comabt training post war. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_TDR
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 8 months ago
There was also the V-1 flying bomb.
My father grew up in London during the Blitz. I remember being told by my grandmother that if you heard an engine and looked up and saw a V-1, you just started saying to yourself, “keep going… keep going…” because if you heard the engine stop, you knew you were dead.
And then my father told me you wouldn’t even know if the V-2 was coming because it flew faster than sound.
EatATaco@lemm.ee 8 months ago
It’s funny how often I come into the comments and read something that belittles the article, when they clearly didn’t read the article because they are getting basic facts wrong.
For those while care what the article actually says, someone copy pasted it below. But let this post be a reminder that the vast majority of responses to the article are simply people applying their prejudices and assumptions to the headline.
ours@lemmy.world 8 months ago
WW2 Germany also tested ground-to-air and anti-ship missiles with manual radio guidance.
tsonfeir@lemm.ee 8 months ago
You mean Ukraine was just a proving ground for drone warfare? Shocking.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Every war is a proving ground, a subject for putting bets, and a source of perverted entertainment for the rest of the world.
KeenFlame@feddit.nu 8 months ago
I was gonna prove you wrong but it checks out even when being thoroughly obtuse
FiskFisk33@startrek.website 8 months ago
remove the “just” and I’m with you.
archomrade@midwest.social 8 months ago
I have accidentally seen far too many videos from c/ukraine@sopuli.xyz to know that these things are fucking brutal.
Knowing full well that on a metric of pure numbers, these don’t compare to other weapons of war, but there’s something about the personal nature of these fuckers that are just so fucking soul-destroying.
Those videos are definitely NSFL (and are usually marked as such, in fairness), but most of them have zoomed-in, full-screen footage of the carnage they leave behind. They are mostly individual or 2-3 individuals hiding/cowering alone in a trench, blown to literal pieces and left dying, completely unaware that somewhere on the other end of that drone is an operator watching their final excruciating moments of life.
It is one thing to be operating a long-range artillery weapon, or a drone flying at several thousand feet firing long-range missiles, or being in a close-combat life-or-death situation, but it’s a completely different experience watching a shell drop on a defenseless, terrified and cowering human (likely coerced into war or forcibly compelled to the front-line) as if you’re 10 fucking feet above them, while yourself being completely out of immediate harm.
Fuck war, but especially fuck these drones in particular.
tal@lemmy.today 8 months ago
c/ukraine@sopuli.xyz
The syntax you want is this:
!ukraine@sopuli.xyzWhich yields this:
!ukraine@sopuli.xyz
That’ll create a hyperlink to the community through whichever lemmy frontend a given person reading your comment is using. So, for example, I’m reading it on lemmy.today, and there, it’ll be lemmy.today/c/ukraine@sopuli.xyz
archomrade@midwest.social 8 months ago
thanks
KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.world 8 months ago
If I had to guess, the government has had this tech since at least the early 2000s. The CIA has been doing shady ass shit since their inception, and shit like that is probably only the tip of the iceberg of what they currently have.
ShadowRam@kbin.social 8 months ago
What sucks is that us hobbist's can't get FPV, motors, ESC's, or batteries at reasonable prices (if at all)
The reality of it, is this is short lived.
Anti-Air meant for small drones like this is coming and soon.
And it will shut these down quickly.
tal@lemmy.today 8 months ago
What sucks is that us hobbist’s can’t get FPV, motors, ESC’s, or batteries at reasonable prices (if at all)
In addition to killing hundreds of thousands of people, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage, dislocating millions of people, causing global energy supply disruption, contaminating large amounts of territory with unexploded ordinance, and producing numerous war crimes, including rape and torture, Russia’s invasion had also caused disruption to the hobbyist RC world.
eleitl@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
How would that anti-air against small drones look like? It is not easy.
MethodicalSpark@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Probably miniaturized versions of CIWS / C-RAM or laser systems.
KeenFlame@feddit.nu 8 months ago
No shit sherlock
General_Effort@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots.
Sciaphobia@lemm.ee 8 months ago
What’s that from? The Simpsons?
General_Effort@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The Secret War of Lisa Simpson, Season 8, Episode 25. First aired in 1997.
Clip. Voiced by Willem Dafoe.
NobodyElse@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Yes. I’m a man of few words.
Peanutbjelly@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
Perhaps instead we could just restructure our epistemically confabulated reality in a way that doesn’t inevitably lead to unnecessary conflict due to diverging models that haven’t grown the necessary priors to peacefully allow comprehension and the ability exist simultaneously.
breath
We are finally coming to comprehend how our brains work, and how intelligent systems generally work at any scale, in any ecosystem. Subconsciously enacted social systems included.
We’re seeing developments that make me extremely optimistic, even if everything else is currently on fire. We just need a few more years without self focused turds blowing up the world.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Who told you that?
(If you don’t mean ML-based things fallaciously called “AI”, then ignore this)
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
robots, satellites, or for that matter fighter jets or artillery can’t hold ground, all these units work in support of infantry. the future belongs to what we already have: combined arms warfare
tal@lemmy.today 8 months ago
Maybe not yet. Maybe not even soon. But it will happen.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ
At some point, you’re going to have legged robots out there, and that’ll start cutting into human advantages in mobility over rugged terrain.
BigDog got rejected by the Marines because it was too loud. But that’s not really a fundamental limitation of robotics.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigDog
That’s just a load-bearer. But once you have a platform that’s mobile and can go most places a human can, it’s gonna get armed pretty quickly.
And it won’t happen all at once – you’ll have some humans, some robots. Maybe they just have load-bearers, like what DARPA was interested in BigDog doing. Maybe a robot gets put on point when a squad is patrolling.
But the cost of a human life is pretty high, so there’s a pretty potent incentive to consume a robot than a human life if possible.
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Tell that to an auto turret that shoots anyone that approaches it.
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 8 months ago
States don’t concede wars because of equipment losses—they concede when the cost in lives becomes an existential threat to the ruling regimes. Drones fighting drones means nothing to governments unless there are human lives at stake when the drones break through.
KeenFlame@feddit.nu 8 months ago
What are they supposed to break through
index@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Drones aren’t being used to kill other drones, they are being used to drop bombs on people