Which is one of the scariest things I've seen in a while. The video glosses over the fact that EMPs would probably make for a viable (if collateral-damage-inducing) defense, but still pretty terrifying.
I'm sure someone can correct me if I am wrong, but I think countering EMPs wouldn't be that difficult of a task.
Commercial electronics designers have been designing around EMI for decades now. Is it that hard to imagine that actors would put in the effort to shield their devices? A Faraday cage around the electronics would go a long way towards eliminating the effects of an EMP.
Even if you couldn't stop the EMP from knocking systems out, you could design them to come back online very quickly, making the EMP a rather expensive temporary measure.
For home-made drones it might be effective, but those drones are cheap, and the attackers could always launch more. I just don't see EMPs as posing a real threat to any military.
EMP in a Whitehouse? OK you get rid of the drones, but you just broke every computer, telephone, camera, and radio on the premises. Hope no one needs a pace maker.
What about the next wave of drones coming in 5 minutes later? Now you are in an arms race against amount of drones/waves and speed of your EMP generators to generate deadly enough pulses.
I am not at all familiar of what kind of equipment you need to generate EMP that would fry electronics in a building wide scale, but would that make financial sense to include in every building? Would they be fast enough to produce and install before attacks become too prevelant?
> A Faraday cage around the electronics would go a long way towards eliminating the effects of an EMP.
Perhaps if you made the Faraday cage out of superconducting material. But that would currently require huge cooling equipment, so that's not really an option.
Being certified for 10V/m does not mean the device will withstand 11V/m. Shielding for almost arbitrary field strengths is still hard. At 100V/m any short cable will pick up high voltages.
No, you're not wrong at all. Most equipment that's designed to hold up under CE immunity testing is not going to be affected by EMP from any source short of a nuke.
A carrier's radar has a vastly different power budget than basically anything else which is mobile, though. I mean, the AN/SPY-1 puts out a full megawatt of RF power. Even the gas turbine on an M1 Abrams tank, if it was coupled directly to a generator and powering nothing else, can't provide enough electricity to run that. Hell, even if you put two of them together, they'd struggle.
That's not a traditional "EMP" attack, it's a brute-force assault with massive, expensive, and power-hungry microwave transmitting equipment that is never going to be feasible to deploy against drones.
It will be effective for maybe 50-100 yards. I can afford more drones than you can afford Aegis platforms.
Fun story, according to some whistle-blowers, after we started testing nukes and UFOs started showing up around test sites and and bases, it was our radars that fucked up their nav systems and caused the Roswell and other few crashes that happened in the late 40s until they adjusted somehow and the crashes stopped.
Ever since I saw that video I've been wondering how effective it would be to use essentially an upgraded fire suppression system to take on the drones.
Essentially instead of spraying water out of the sprinklers, spray paint or other liquids that would block the vision of the drones. I think that would be a lot cheaper and harder to build defences for than an EMP.
(Just realised that you could also spray a opaque gas which would also block vision and might make less of a mess to clean up).
I imagine instead of liquids or silly string, we'll witness the first robot wars.
A military base might have robotic sentry guns [1] to begin with, as they are already armed with these today to defend against incoming mortars. Later on, I imagine with offensive drone capabilities being developed, it will lead to repurposing the drones in a defensive posture. Perhaps the best answer is to scale with the threat.
The defensive drone fleet circle the base. Upon a detection of an incoming fleet, rather than one sentry gun taking on 100 or 1000 drones, a defensive swarm targets the incoming swarm. More of a one-to-one fight or perhaps 1:4 if your drones are more capable fighters.
This is all a bit of a bummer. We talk about how we'll get robots to obey the three laws of robotics, but it'd be nice if we could just get humans to follow the first law. "A robot (human) may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."
"The defensive drone fleet circle the base. Upon a detection of an incoming fleet, rather than one sentry gun taking on 100 or 1000 drones, a defensive swarm targets the incoming swarm. More of a one-to-one fight or perhaps 1:4 if your drones are more capable fighters."
In this scenario, cyber-warfare will become even more critical. Imagine being able to hack and take over your enemy's defensive drone contingent.
I've seen the robotically controlled Lockheed Martin laser that is meant to be able to take on drone swarms which is very similar to what you are talking about.
The question to me is how do you defend civilian targets like universities, city halls and malls? You can't build military style defences around these targets and the budget is going to be pretty low. Also you need a exceptionally low response time since the drones can deploy and kill in seconds.
That's difficult to answer. Soft targets are, well, soft. If you arm the state capital, they'll move to the university, museum, or large landmark. Protect those, and they'll move to further down the chain. Perhaps one of the best option is to try to prevent social unrest before it happens. Maybe we can repurpose tech to help us communicate better with each other.
Beyond that, you might see people purchasing defensive measures once attacks become more of a threat. Whether that's lasers, other drones or something we haven't thought of. There would be a demand for counter measures - you can already see the market forming for such counter measures.
Some kind of explosives are trivially made, a fact which is severely complicating basic STEM education as common materials that have other uses but happen to be usable for making weapons are increasingly difficult to obtain...
It also comes up in STEM education content. For example, industrial dust explosions could be a good illustration of several principles (including the importance of surface to volume ratio), but... there are potential downsides to using it. More generally, STEM education remains innocuous only as long as it pervasively fails. If that ever changes, society will have some issues to decide. And not a great track record of handling similar ones. Even a simple matrix of "what do you get when you mix one common household material with another" has some "seriously: don't do that" nodes.
A person with the right knowledge, time, and some land in the middle of the nowhere can manufacture explosives with no external inputs. Banning explosives can never completely prevent their creation, and trying to do so would have numerous harmful effects to agricultural and chemical industries.
The same way you defend them against all other sorts of attacks: you make sure the attackers don't get close to the target. Ie: good law enforcement and intelligence work. For a drone to attack and kill in seconds, you need to basically launch it from the parking lot. If you are bringing weaponry to the parking lot, there are plenty of other (much simpler and cheaper) non-drone-attacks available to you, yet these attacks are really quite rare.
Whatever you want to put on the enemy drone, you’ll want to get it there fast, to prevent the drone from making evasive maneuvres. For a fixed reaction time of the drone, speedier delivery also means you can attack from larger range.
I think that arms race will rather quickly lead to the use of very fast moving objects that don’t slow down much due to air resistance (i.e. bullets or missiles)
I would worry about spraying rapidly hardening foam in a room filled with people (not sure if you can breath under it, nevermind how you get people out).
String polymer sounds like it could work, my only concern would be if you could design prop guards for the drones such that they filter the air (very coarsely) and don't allow any objects to touch the props.
In the former case, granted. In the latter, you could also use powdered magnets, some form of self-adhering powder, etc. the basic idea of attacking rotors should be hard to defend against.
Potentially, but it would be easy for drone manufacturers to defend against, and you would likely need to make the target area so dense with the particulate that it probably wouldn't stay in the air long and the drone could potentially wait you out.
The other direction you could possibly go is a super-fine, but conductive powder (would carbon powder work?) that could get in the motors and potentially cause a short. Particulates that fine would probably be a health risk though.
To cause a short you would need to be able to get inside the motor and nowdays you can buy fully sealed IP68 brushless motors (or even IP69K at a higher cost) for your attack drones.
Just as a side note, as long as your elemental carbon nanoparticles are larger than 10PM (most recommend 2.5PM) they are not considered damaging to health by the WHO [1].
If you don't mind getting yourself on a list, go to youtube and search for '2g ETN' (also PETN, APAN, HMTD, MEKP, etc). These are all home gamers, imagine military grade stuff...geesh.
Double yikes, the precursors are not hard to find at all.
The only comfort I can find is that the process is probably just complicated enough that 50% of the idiots who try to make it will probably maim themselves instead of succeeding.
Non-nuclear EMP weapons are not viable defenses. They are short ranged, very expensive, single use, and require detonating powerful conventional explosives.
The only effective defenses today are the same as against regular missiles: guns, missiles, decoys, ECM, and blinding lasers. In a few years high-powered lasers might become viable.
"The video glosses over the fact that EMPs would probably make for a viable (if collateral-damage-inducing) defense, but still pretty terrifying."
Some other possible defenses are other drones and flack clouds. A flack cloud in the classroom in the video might have defeated the drones.
Both of these defenses might be staged strategically throughout various public places or even carried by individuals for their own protection.
If drone attacks become common, anti-drone defenses are likely to become widespread as well.
I'm personally more concerned about potential chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare, against which there's really not much that people can do, and which might eventually become as easy to perpetrate as conventional drone attacks (and might even be facilitated by them).
The scariest thing I've seen in the past few years was that "artwork" with a culture (I think it was E. Coli but it might have been staph) growing on a large sheet of agar which had been doped with a gradient of various antibiotics, and showed the bacteria slowly adapting and working its way through them. A small change to this setup could easily be used to grow multi-antibiotic-resistant diseases in someone's back shed. I actually kind of don't want to post this comment in case it gives someone ideas.
Except that antibiotic resistance also goes away very quickly unless the bacteria are kept in an environment conducive to it. Antibiotic resistance is expensive evolutionarily.
Most of our resistant bacteria are coming from something that makes holding onto resistance a survival trait. Antibiotic overuse in factory farming or hospitals which obviously are continuously battling bacteria are two of the prime generators.
> Except that antibiotic resistance also goes away very quickly unless the bacteria are kept in an environment conducive to it. Antibiotic resistance is expensive evolutionarily.
This is the first time I've heard this. Can you recommend some references with more info on it?
And here's a more high level answer from the Biology StackExchange on the mechanism by which this happens with a link to 3 other papers on the underlying subject https://biology.stackexchange.com/a/15930
That's the one! I was looking for a paper but couldn't find one. Now imagine that with multiple different types of antibiotic simultaneously ramping up, and something nasty and contagious as the subject... :S
> I'm personally more concerned about potential chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare, against which there's really not much that people can do, and which might eventually become as easy to perpetrate as conventional drone attacks (and might even be facilitated by them).
I think most of that concern is misplaced. It will never be easy for non-state actors to conduct nuclear warfare (unless you count inefficient small scale radiological attacks) and while a sufficiently dedicated group can synthesize chemical weapons, it's easier and generally more efficient to just build a big truck bomb (or ten). Biological warfare is more complicated, both because it depends on your definitions (it could be said that every person stupid enough to go to work with the flu is engaging in biological warfare, they're certainly doing more damage than all the world's terrorists put together ever have), but also because that's the one area where rapidly developing technology really could have a huge impact in the near future.
> every person stupid enough to go to work with the flu is engaging in biological warfare
Well, you could say that.... But it's about as smart as engaging in a fight against micro-aggressions. If you fight for a society where the individual can't even handle minor stress factors, you fight for a society with little to no immune system, that is all but guaranteed to crumble.
In this scenario "IED" is a keyword. Drone is trivial compared to making a small IED capable of killing a person or damaging military equipment without blowing yourself up first. If one can do that, he's dangerous with or without drones anyway.
Time to build that EMP-surviving car I've been dreaming of – one that can run even with all its electronics (except sparks) burnt out, falling back on mechanical timing and such!
I had the relay box catch on fire (in the pouring rain!) once. Put the fire out, pulled all the twisted charred copper off itself as not to short out, found another battery and bam! Off she drove again.
If I hadn't stopped immediately as the fire started, the car would have happily kept running - it only needed the relays for the starter motor. Everything else runs from the points/distributor/alternator.
If you had an old diesel, it'd be even better. Those literally have no electronic components necessary for the engine to run - mechanical fuel pump, glow plugs. They can basically run underwater as long as it's got fresh air coming in.
The US Army has had to react by rebuilding short-range air defense capabilities. They used to be able to depend on the US Air Force to protect ground forces from aerial attack but now those days are gone.
The EM gun looks like a great solution - portable, similar range to a firearm and you don't have to worry about hitting the target with a projectile. It's still a guy doing that who's not carrying a gun though.
The main problem is detection and tracking. Even if you can counter the drones, the distraction of keeping an eye out for them and communicating back to your anti-drone guy is something you just don't want to have to deal with in close combat. Bear in mind these things can pop up and execute an attack in just a minute or two, possibly in swarms. Ideally you want an automated solution so your door kickers can focus on the job at hand.
That is a really good idea. My first thought was basically start with the tree, a drone's natural enemy, and amplify the stuff that makes it so dangerous to a drone - tiny sticks that are hard to see. Fishing line would pretty much accomplish that.
Related: "Kill Decision" by Daniel Suarez. Talked about this exact thing. What happens when drones become so cheap and able to be armed, that a swarm of drones could come out of nowhere, commit a crime, and no one would have a clue where they came form.
Similar technology like using a gun from a car [1], or putting a bomb in a rubbish bin, or mailing antrax, already exists and does cause occasional mass killings. The main the stopping it is humans usually don't want to do that. Even with drones, there will still be evidence and police hunting for who did it. It's not going to be anarchy.
19 people decided to fly planes into buildings and we invaded two countries, massively expanded and accelerated the most powerful surveillance apparatus that has ever existed, and invented a gargantuan bureaucracy that carries out tens of millions of man-hours a year of security screenings. it doens't take anarchy to shift the security calculus enough to greatly alter culture.
Sure, there might be overreaction. I'm saying we don't need to worry about criminals or terrorists using them any more than we do conventional weapons. Of course people will still worry too much if it's on the news, just like 911.
There is this approach of using airplanes taking pictures every second. When a crime like drive by shooting and putting a bomb in a bin is commited, this technology allows the investigators to rewind time and fast forward to discover where the car/person come from/went and eventually catch it. It was used to figure out location of drug cartel head quarters.
This wouldn't be efficient against a swarm of drone attack though, as they can be operated remotely from miles away.
You can locate radio signal sources fairly accurately. You could get around that with the cell phone network although, which is partly why many countries have stringent ID requirements behind them.
You can also get around that with some sort of hardwired control laptop that you leave somewhere, but that has a SPOF issue like the cell networks do.
You can also get around that with self programmed drones, but they are more limited in adaptability.
> You can also get around that with self programmed drones, but they are more limited in adaptability.
For now (perhaps).
My android phone for 300 quid has more computing power than my fast desktop had 20 years ago in about one hundredth the power budget with a powerful high speed network connection.
And which is becoming easier to create P2P distributed systems that could mesh together over prepaid and falsely registered connections.
Obviously this would require serious sophistication (not just anyone could string it together), but I think that anyone capable of being the first to build a serious threat with any of this technology will likely have funding and serious skills on tap.
What I think, is why no body weaponized aircraft model before.
Since 80's/90's small aircraft models had enough capacity to carry grenades and small explosives.
Also, I'm impressed that a cheap drone can use optical navigation. The last time that someone talked about it, was about it's usage on Tomahawk cruise missiles, since 80's, as a tech miracle of electronics.
...aircraft have been weaponized for a longgg time. Kamikaze pilots! That's been the problem, though. They cant be self-guided, you have to lose a human life in order to use them. And that's where rockets came from, the Germans started trying to figure out how to weaponize flight without losing soldiers (see V2 rockets). That's why autonomous control is so scary, it's the first time that this sort of thing is actually realistically hitting the point of being cost-effective, and especially scary when we're talking about it become cost-effective for really small forces to use. (I feel awful using a term like "cost-effective" when talking about human life, but that's the way military-types think about these things. Yuck.)
It is natural that if one side starts to develop a new technology and employs it successfully, that the other parties will follow as well. This changes the landscape, sure. But it's not threatening. That's the normal process of development.
Every army is better of if they can use machines to do their attacks for them. At least between both armies this should also decrease the overall casualties I hope. I'm not so naive to assume that this would decrease civilian casualties, though.
Unless US military comes up with relieable and cheap solution they will eventually starve themselves as the parts to make attack drones gets cheaper and cheaper. Like the stinger missiles in the article, they cost almost $200k while a drone costs $2k + whatever they are dropping. Obviously US has money to spend, but for how long?
There are plenty of examples of asymmetric warfare like what happened to US in Vietnam or what happened to Russians in Finland.
It's pretty disgusting when you actually thinks about it. I don't want bad newspaper headlines about soldier deaths, so I'll use a robot that kills a bunch of civilians as collateral.
I've always figured the Chinese, if they went to a total war footing, would be able to shift their supply/production chains to mass produce effective swarms of drones.
If the Chinese ever switch he'd to a total warfooting, they could switch h their supply/production chains to mass produce whatever the want, short of blonde babies with blue eyes. Just like every other semi-rational economy on Earth.
The thing is, defending against small drones is pretty cheap. Air-to-air missiles aren't needed. A simple 50 cal rifle will probably destroy these planes with 1 or 2 shots.
Not even 50 cal, a regular old assault rifle will do.
The problem is hitting the damn things. They're small, can turn on a dime, don't reflect radar very well, and run cold enough to give IR tracking some issues. Army manuals like [1] typically call for a coordinated fire of small arms across a large volume of airspace to hit a drone, but advise commanders that hit probabilities are low. Their most urgent advice is to keep spotters looking for enemy drones, and to use concealment and camouflage as much as possible to avoid enemy drone surveillance.
I would think that this is something Artificial Intelligence can handle.
A perimeter defense would need to be established, with radars for long range scanning. And cameras for short range confirmation. It will also need infrared cameras to operate at night.
A computer system would monitor the perimeter, for all incoming threats. This computer system must be very powerful, as it is processing a lot of data in real time. However, this kind of technology should now be in the realms of deep learning AI that is currently being developed now.
Once a positive visual confirmation is made, to determine that the aerial object is an intrusion drone, then an alert can be given to the human commander, of the incoming threat. And a human can still stay in the loop to order the execution.
Then, a turret mounted laser cannon, can be used to burn down the drone. Or even a rifle can be used to kill the drone with a kinetic impact. The accuracy of a bullet fired by a robot, should far exceed the skill of the best human sniper. But bullets still follow a parabolic path, so a turret mounted laser cannon is more flexible to destroy drones.
There are plenty of rifle rounds with very low bullet drop rates. For example, the 26 Nosler has close to zero inches of drop at 450 yards (quarter mile.) By extending the turret's barrel length and adding additional rifling/twist, drop can be further decreased while power is increased. Unless the distances are greater than a mile, a high powered rifle round will have so little drop to be negligible.
And a railgun could be used if the energy footpounds of smokeless powder is not cutting it -- but really, a small grain round with a large powder charge will fly straight for the distances we are concerned with here.
Not even 50 cal, a regular old assault rifle will do.
Could you hit a moving drone with a rifle? Even when I shot competitively at 500m, I probably couldn't. You can hit clay pigeons with a shotgun but a drone can easily manoeuvre beyond range.
I think that He was talking about firepower, not about easiness to hit the target. Even, you can strike down a drone throwing a small stone. Other thing is hitting it.
Right. And with missiles, missed shots cost a lot of money. With a high powered rifle round that has a relatively straight trajectory -- the cost is miniscule. So firing many times is no problem in the case of minor errors in accuracy. Even a gatling gun could be used -- warthog style.
If you can't hit it with the weapon what is the point of even mentioning the weapon? You might as well have said you could fight a drone with a baseball bat for all you contributed to this discussion.
I was replying to someone who claimed a .50 cal could do the job. I was pointing out that firepower wasn't the limiting factor - you could do it with something smaller, but that wouldn't matter.
The second paragraph was the main contribution; the first paragraph was a transition from the statement of the person I was replying to.
The games of skeet and trap shooting are played by using a shotgun to hit a target about the size of your hand traveling between 40 and 70 miles per hour.
You shoot those targets about 35 yards ±15 away from where you are standing. You'll hear an alert (or call) for a target which will appear somewhere out in front of you about 3 seconds later. They may be traveling quickly or slowly, near the ground or high above you, in the same or opposite directions. You'll have about 5 seconds to hit two targets with two shells from a "double barrelled" shotgun.
I've little doubt that with an afternoon of practice I could reliably hit clays moving 30% faster; not as accurately as in an ordinary game, but certainly well over 50%.
If the targets were larger and need to be "clipped" rather than fully destroyed then the task becomes easier. Coupled with a shotgun that can hold more than 2 shells, modern sights, and semi-automatic action: I think reliably shooting targets like that is possible.
If drones become considerably more durable then you'd need a tighter pattern of heavier shot to delivery sufficient energy to disable or destroy it. Tighter patterns would make hitting the target more difficult as you need to be more accurate when aiming. As the size and power behind your shot increases it also becomes more difficult to make follow-up shots if you miss because the recoil pulls you off target.
The biggest hinderance wouldn't be speed but maneurverability. In order to hit a moving target you need to be able to predict where it will be, if a drone moves erratically then it would be very hard to predict and so very hard to shoot.
Skeets follow a parabolic trajectory. This makes it much easier to shoot them, as you can basically time it manually.
Drones on the other hand, once they become more intelligent, should be able to fly in a random pattern, to avoid incoming projectiles fired against it.
Yes but shotguns fire slow rounds. With tons of drop. Heavy slugs or buck shot. Or slow bird shot. Garbage selection but that's what makes the sport fun and challenging.
A rifle round like a Nosler 26 will travel a quarter mile with no drop. Fired out of a long barrel, with a good rifling twist, accuracy is ridiculously good. There are plenty of high powered rounds that don't have to be fired with nearly as much prediction necessary in skeet -- because theyll be traveling at 4k feet per second. If the drone is within a mile..its a piece of cake.
You don't have to. An explosive round that detonates nearby will take a drone down, too.
If I remember the details correctly, the Metal Storm[1] weapon system should be able to do just that: Fire explosive rounds set to detonate at a specific point in their flight. Fire n^3 rounds to cover enough space to account for speed, direction and altitude changes and you should be set.
Drones are still a lot more expensive than a 60 or 80mm mortar tube, though. I haven't seen many drones that could put an equivalent payload on target, and unless batteries get wildly better, I don't see much advantage in range for small, home-brew drones.
I've heard from some of my fellow Marines they were starting to get back into camouflaged outposts and such after mostly forgetting those skills in the (early) GWOT days.
That attack was way too sophisticated beyond the capability of any home-made effort. The attackers tried to cover it behind "home-made" veil. At any rate it threatens any conventional army.
The article is somewhat misleading because the Russians claim that the technology was provided by a state actor and that it was only made to look primitive in order to provide deniability.
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On Tuesday, the Russian Defence Ministry appeared to accuse the US of being involved in the latest attack, claiming that an American Poseidon intelligence aircraft patrolling over the base during the attack was a “strange coincidence”.
It also said in an earlier post that the perpetrators needed technology from “countries with high-technological capabilities” and the drones’ explosive devices had “foreign detonating fuses”.
Users often post workaround URLs in these threads, but even if they don't, in most cases there are standard ways of reading the articles that work fine.
Sorry to disappoint you, but they don't work fine.
I've been saying this for months. If you browse HN using a mobile device it is not easy to work around a paywall. Publishers are constantly making it more difficult, coming from google search doesn't give you a free pass anymore. I can't "focus on the content" if there is no way to access it.
Notice how the top voted comment in the thread you posted is asking for the same (a paywall tag). Maybe you could try going mobile-only for a few weeks to understand the pain?
Globally, that might not be a bad thing. The 20th Century has many examples of genocide and mass murder committed by armed State- or State-backed actors against their own population.
Democratizing a means of preventing that might help prevent similar atrocities in the 21st Century.
A second amendment for the 3D printed drone age, if you will.
Which is one of the scariest things I've seen in a while. The video glosses over the fact that EMPs would probably make for a viable (if collateral-damage-inducing) defense, but still pretty terrifying.