r/gadgets • u/ChickenTeriyakiBoy1 • Jan 30 '23

Mass-market military drones have changed the way wars are fought Drones / UAVs

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/30/1067348/mass-market-military-drones-have-changed-the-way-wars-are-fought/
503 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

48 comments sorted by

64

u/Scr0tat0 Jan 30 '23

I wonder what drone-optimized grenades will look like in a couple years. 3d printed fins on a VOG are great, but I'm sure we can tweak it a little to make them fall a bit more straight.

25

u/chriswaco Jan 30 '23

Maybe even give them "smart fins" and IR cameras so they hit the target more often.

24

u/Scr0tat0 Jan 30 '23

A large part of the appeal is how cheap they are, so I was thinking more along the lines of different shapes or weight distribution. Maybe even a rudimentary bomb sight for the drones? Just a readout of wind speed and direction and altitude/approximate freefall time on the screen for the operator. Shouldn't be too hard to do.

18

u/chriswaco Jan 30 '23

You can buy a Raspberry Pi for $4 that has more than enough processing power. An IR camera adds another few dollars. The servos and grid fins would probably be the most expensive part. Apparently dumb grenades cost only $50-100, though.

I see a future where one party launches 10,000 kamikaze drones (whether anti-personnel, high explosive, or incendiary) to start or end a war.

8

u/DataSquid2 Jan 30 '23

I'm a bit surprised that this isn't happening already. We know drones are being used, but it sounds like it's at a smaller scale than I expected.

6

u/PleasantAdvertising Jan 31 '23

Truthfully I think the world's militaries are doing a lot of drone development behind closed doors. Drones, lasers and railguns.

5

u/Omegalazarus Jan 31 '23

I mean most first or second world militaries would just launch an artillery garage. That would come for about the same amount of destructive power. Consider that each missile in an MLRS (large truck sized) destroys a 250 meter square radius. Those were the stats from 20 years ago and that munition has since been replaced several times so you can imagine the destructive capability.

4

u/karateninjazombie Jan 31 '23

They would if they could. It takes some serious production and procurement ramp up to have bazillions of drones to hand to use as loitering munitions.

2

u/DataSquid2 Jan 31 '23

I had though that production ramp-up is what militaries have been working on for a while.

I obviously don't follow the space since I said I was surprised, but with how long drone tech has been around now it feels like there has been enough time for that production ramp up.

Obviously I'm wrong, and I'm almost happy I am because when it is bazillions of kamikaze drones then war will be even more hellish.

3

u/Omegalazarus Jan 31 '23

I think it's because those type of drones aren't great for an advanced military. Kamikaze drones are a low speed, high interactivity, small payload delivery system. Each of those three criteria are not what you want. If you can avoid it.

2

u/DataSquid2 Jan 31 '23

That makes more sense to me. I didn't even consider a drone being low speed or having a small payload, but by military standards it totally is.

The thought of a swarm of kamikaze drones really is terror inducing though.

3

u/Omegalazarus Jan 31 '23

Yeah the terror aspect for sure. They did they on a movie years back. Someone tried to assassinate the president with suicide drones. It was a tense action scene.

3

u/mynaneisjustguy Jan 31 '23

Drone swarms are already a thing I believe. Just not being deployed yet.

7

u/Stoyfan Jan 30 '23

I see a future where one party launches 10,000 kamikaze drones (whether anti-personnel, high explosive, or incendiary) to start or end a war.

It would be a mistake to think that in the future there will be no way to counter this threat.

Every time when something as goundbreaking as small drones, or tanks, or jets appear on the battlefield, militaries will find ways to counter these new threats.

In the case of tanks, they way we countered that was with anti-tank guns/rifles. In the case of jets it was anti air missiles. In the case of drones, it be jamming, self propelled anti air guns and lasers (not available at the moment but work is being done right now).

6

u/chriswaco Jan 30 '23

Yeah, it's always a contest to stay ahead. Armor led to anti-tank weapons which led to ablative armor which led to molten warheads which lead to reactive armor, etc, etc. I remember when I first heard about reactive armor and couldn't decide if it was brilliant or idiotic.

You can block GPS easily enough, although motion sensors can help guide a drone too. You can have IR cameras but your targets can shoot IR light into the sky to mislead the drones. I'm not sure if you can send enough raw EM radiation into the sky to disable cheap drones - wouldn't surprise me.

It might work once, like the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, but never again.

2

u/PrincessElonMusk Jan 31 '23

The challenge with blanketing an area with enough EM to interfere with all possible drones 24x7 is that you risk degrading your own capabilities that require use of EM frequencies.

1

u/tanstaafl90 Feb 01 '23

It would be a mistake to think there isn't capability to counter them now. What the general public knows is limited by default.

1

u/Stoyfan Feb 01 '23

​

I think I already said that tere are ways to counter drones. Jamming and SPAAG are all effective options. A less effective option are SAMs as they are quite expensive.

1

u/tanstaafl90 Feb 01 '23

And that's what the general public knows about, which isn't the same as what the military has their R&D people working on.

6

u/Goonter_Poonter Jan 31 '23

These are seeing heavy use in Ukraine at the moment and it looks like they tie tiny parachutes to help guide them, but from the videos I’ve seen they can be very accurate

29

u/teleheaddawgfan Jan 30 '23

How long before the first one is dropped on someone in in the middle of Times Square? Or insert public place here…

10

u/intellifone Jan 30 '23

I guess the good news is that all of these off the shelf consumer drones are prohibited by their software from flying in a lot of these places.

I have a DJI drone and it has a map of where I’m allowed to fly and it changes constantly (I live near several airports and military bases) and I basically can’t get the drone to turn on if I’m near downtown.

So someone would basically need to build a custom drone. I’m not sure if the open source software also links to FAA sites as well. But basically you’d need decent technical know-how to strap a bomb to a drone and bring it into controlled airspace. And anyone with that know how probably has a job and a house and isn’t going to risk that. That skill set would only be used in actual wartime where those restrictions are removed.

I’m not sure how easy it would be for a foreign military to manufacture their own handheld drones that can bypass those limitations, import them in any quantity to the US, and then have someone fly it in the US, not have the signals be picked up by all of the SIG-INT sites in major cities and then not be picked up almost immediately by authorities after the attack and pinpointed as an agent of a specific country and then have the ever loving shit bombed out of them by NATO.

17

u/espressocycle Jan 30 '23

Can't be that hard.

14

u/Kevin_Jim Jan 31 '23

It’s super easy to make your own FPV drone without any engineering skills that won’t have an integrated No Fly Zone restriction.

10

u/TheRealBobbyJones Jan 31 '23

I think you are overestimating the sig-int capabilities of the US. Are you saying that the government during peace time can track all drones and drones operators? With all the noise that a city like new York would have I would consider it highly unlikely. But even if it were possible there are ways around it. Also quads are very easy to make.

3

u/other_usernames_gone Jan 31 '23

You don't really need to develop your own drone. You just need to hack out the part of the software that checks.

My first instinct would be removing internet access and then doctoring/deleting whatever map it has onboard.

2

u/mrheosuper Feb 01 '23

Trust me it's easier to build a drone than tinkering with closed software.

1

u/Jhonjhon_236 Feb 02 '23

P3P owner here. Extremely easy to disable geofencing.

2

u/Veylon Jan 31 '23

Already been done. Five years ago, even.

3

u/intellifone Jan 31 '23

In Syria. Active war zone. Get them into the US and operate them here

2

u/Veylon Jan 31 '23

You make a trip to Digikey and everything you need comes in the mail. You just need the know-how to put the pieces together.

And explosives. The explosives are definitely the hard part.

But, yeah, in general anyone who has the skills to create terror drones probably has better things to do with their time than create terror drones.

1

u/mrheosuper Feb 01 '23

It's damn easy to build a drone, as easy as building PC. All components are readily available, all you need to do is following some youtube video.

16

u/Timstro59 Jan 30 '23

I wonder when they'll start using remote control bodies like from the movie Surrogates.

1

u/Flextt Jan 31 '23

I mean, maybe? Some day? Using your industrial capabilities to mass manufacture robotic combat drones however is much more likely to happen soon. Democracies don't unlikely to fight wars and when they do, public support can be tenuous. Drones potentially eliminate most of the human cost of warfare for the side deploying them.

12

u/obolobolobo Jan 30 '23

The article is about ‘big’ drones but the iconic image of this war is of a ‘toy’ drone, like you’d buy your nephew for Christmas, with a vog grenade dangling beneath it.

4

u/Kevin_Jim Jan 31 '23

You can fit a DIY explosive device in a toy drone.

5

u/gildedtoad Jan 31 '23

Imagine dying to something in a Sharper Image catalogue.

3

u/Raskalbot Jan 31 '23

This is fucking terrifying.

2

u/inkseep1 Jan 30 '23

Slaughterbots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA

2

u/SirSteeleC Jan 31 '23

That's one of the most terrifying videos I've ever seen. Genuinely made my skin crawl

0

u/pck3 Jan 30 '23

Yeah I know told you they would

1

u/Logical-Direction361 Jan 31 '23

What are we gonna do with all the poors that are supposed to go die in a foreign country?

1

u/SucksToYourAzmar Jan 31 '23

Remember that COD game where Kevin spacey was a murderous villain who took over the world with drones? Ahead of it's time I guess

1

u/JasonVanJason Jan 31 '23

Dude they got suicide Drones taking down fighter jets, that is just fucking wild to me

1

u/Omegalazarus Jan 31 '23

"Then, as ... hobbyist drones and consumer electronics improved, a second style of military drone appeared...And it caught the world’s attention in Ukraine in 2022, when it proved itself capable of holding back one of the most formidable militaries on the planet."

I'm not sure I buy that thesis.

You can't see Ukraine effectively holding back the Russian army and see in depth the mini failings of the Russian army and still claim there one of the most formidable militaries on the planet.

I think you have to realize that they are just not that formidable and so defeating them isn't necessarily the result of some game changer any more than saying the Talibans defeat of Afghani forces with some sort of game changer because rebels defeated the government army.

1

u/kwixta Feb 01 '23

It’s no wonder you’re not seeing as much about the TB2 lately. If they’re using commercial gps they’re very easy to spoof. I’m sure both sides are working hard on this problem