This was true say 20 years ago. The current future of warfare is a small team of hackers taking out a power grid, freezing banks and financial transactions, mucking with the transportation system, etc. *And* these attacks may not be state-sponsored.
Fighting for land via physical violence? Really?? That's as old as cavemen.
Really. When armed men enter the room any team of hackers is immediately pwned, and raises hands up. FWIW if current wars prove anything it's that no matter how sophisticated miltech got, the real control is still by infantry present at wanted place
If armed men enter the _correct_ room. And finding that is not as easy as it looks in movies, taking into account the fact that there can be no _the_ room rather than several rooms in different countries. Infantry can get stretched too thin to cover all of them at once.
The Geneva Conventions aren't offering you any protections, so if the infantry is stretched a little too thin you probably can't do much complaining about the "treatment" they give you.
What you describe is exactly how it looks in Hollywood movies, while in real life we still yet to see any strategic achievements anywhere caused merely by cyberattack in spite of all sci-fi propheting. E.g. Ukrainian, and Russian hackers have been attacking each other relentlessly since RF started the war, and most successful operations include Ukrainians transmitting anti-Putin images on advertisement screens somewhere, and some e-services downed for a few hours on both sides. It looked cool in news, but didn't move a needle on the ground. Or during massive protests in Belarus in 2020, pro-opposition hackers penetrated almost everywhere, leaked tons of info, but when it all eventually boiled down to armed gov't loyalist forces vs unarmed crowds in streets, guess who won? Organized power is not that dependent on internets, and really important electronic systems are not that fragile anymore. Meanwhile infantry changes power on the ground in a very tangible, inescapeable way.
True of false, Israel "blacked out" comms in Gaza*, and is controlling just about anything else entering.
Physical attacks are for revenge. And are based on the past more than a view to the future.
* Similar happened in Ukraine. The media doesn't highlight such things because their reporting what keeps you engaged in the short term, not what ultimately matters further out.
I know for sure that in unoccupied territories Ukrainians do great job keeping their communications reliably working (to the point that there are plenty of software development businesses successfully doing their jobs despite of war) unless a rocket hits some piece of infrastructure nearby. Which sort of disproves your claim. Zero blackouts were caused by hacking, and multiple by explosions.
I’ve heard very similar claims since the 90s but it hasn’t happened yet - Russia has certainly tried but their war in Ukraine is very much physical violence with a tiny fringe of cyber warfare, and their most famous success helping Trump get elected was an old school propaganda play exploiting existing fractures in the Republican Party, not the movie plot stuff like voting system tampering.
The NSA appears to have been a little more successful with things like Stuxnet but even there it’s hard to say that had much lasting impact compared to, say, the Mossad’s more direct targeting of scientists.
This makes me think that we’re prone to dramatically overweight the importance of the types of systems we work on, and forget how most physical systems have a fair amount of robustness stemming from human operators being able to notice problems and halt things before too much damage happens.
Other things aside, the style of war Russia is engaged in has little to do with the lack of (or neglect of or unimportance of) cyber aspect, it has more to do with the fact that Russian officials did not expect a war at all. For them it was more of "freeing good population from their bad and corrupt government", to the point that some troops had their parade uniform when going to Ukraine, to celebrate rather than to fight.
So the physical presence was a requirement since it is hard to parade remotely ;-)
[EDIT] Clarify the point
Oh, they definitely weren’t prepared but if anything I’d have expected them to lean more on cyber attacks since they’re faster than getting tanks out of long-term storage and shipping them across the country. There have been some reports of activity but I found it interesting how what was widely predicted to be a major threat has been so marginal.
Yeah, China totally plans to hack Taiwan into rejoining the mainland.
You realize how ridiculous that sounds? The types of attack you mention are perhaps an additional dimension of war in the future, but you sound a lot like all the experts back in WWII who thought strategic bombing would make ground forces obsolete.
And your last line is weird. We do lots of things today that are as old as cavemen, physically and socially.
We're talking about the future here. Imagine if in 1990 someone said, "You'll carry a computer in your pocket in 20 yrs.?" Only fools underestimate the possibilities of the future.
Words like ridiculous in this context are...ridiculous.
Tanks and ships, etc. are *very* expensive. A team of hackers, much less so.
Allow me to say that your answer seems particularly naive.
As another HNer has already commented, control of physical space trumps any hacker doing anything. Particularly true when you can't simply H-Bomb an enemy, or the entire world would rise against you.
> As another HNer has already commented, control of physical space trumps any hacker doing anything. Particularly true when you can't simply H-Bomb an enemy, or the entire world would rise against you.
I think we have seen that opposite is true. Both russia and its allies has a lot of hackers etc and so does Ukraine and its allies. Despite this we have seen very little use of hacking other than DDOS public site and defacing sites.
Just want to point out...the title specifically mentions *the future* of warfare, not the current which is still very much based on a 20th Century paradigm, 20th Century educated decision makers, etc.
Also keep in mind, the media loves to show carnage and destruction. A _______ crippled and disabled due to a cyber attack isn't sexy. Sure, they mention it but their level of attention is not an indication of importance for a given objective.
If the hackers are doing their jobs, there should be little evidence that there ever was a hack -- like if stuxnet had never made it into the wild presumably everyone might have thought the centrifuges were faulty.
“Hurdling trenches, crawling over shell craters, and walking through forests unhalted by intense gunfire, the tanks cannot be stopped by anything less than a direct hit from shells of considerable caliber,” reports The Ogden Standard of October 21, 1916, 4 p.m. City Edition
https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-wwi-tanks
The Ukrainians were effective destroying Russian tanks using Javelins and NLaws and civilian drones for spotting.
https://mwi.westpoint.edu/an-unerring-sense-of-locality-ukra...
>the Russian tank crews fell victim to roving bands of hidden Ukrainian light infantry armed with Javelin and NLAW ATGMs, as well as armed drones. Like the destruction waged by Egyptian and Syrian Sagger teams, these ambushes resulted in the widespread destruction of Russian tanks and contributed to Russia’s operational abandonment of its northern axis of advance. As a result, between February 2022 and March 2023, Russia lost 1,917 of what the International Institute for Strategic Estimate estimated to be a prewar total of 3,417 tanks in active service
As I understand in WWI mechanical failure was the king of stopping tanks, which then allowed a lot of other options for the enemy to deal with the crew.
I just realized terrorism is about to level up to a terrifying degree of anonymity. Frag grenade (maybe homemade) dropped into a crowd. How do you trace that back when these have a range of many miles
Mortars are extremely simple devices with similar effectiveness.
If you can build a frag grenade you can probably make an effective mortar. It’s more difficult to make something that can hit large targets at 2+ miles, but not extremely so.
You need to know math for that. To build something that can drop a bomb requires buying two pieces of equipment on amazon that are made completely for civilian use.
You’re definitely right that it’s not unprecedented - and as Americans know all too well, even a single gunman can produce a hundred casualties – but there is something worrisome about further reducing the skill threshold and increasing the likelihood of the attacker getting away cleanly.
I think the main difference is precision and anonymity - mortars are noisy and would attract attention, but a drone fits in a backpack and there’s no obvious connection between the launch site and the targets, so things like ballistics analysis and “shot spotter” systems are less effective. If there’s, say, a hotel or apartment building you’re going from needing to check the roof to needing to worry about every window even on the non-facing sides.
Why haven't we seen any drone terrorism (AFAIK) yet? There are grenade attacks in Antwerp on a weekly basis (usually related to drug gang wars). What's stopping these people from using drones instead of having to drive up to their victim's houses?
I suspect that triangulating the source of the control signal will be an effective deterrent to people attempting this anonymously. Anything that can fly unaided even without remote control will probably leave some digital fingerprints in its design. For the rest, well I'll admit there's a part of me that hopes it remains only a very small minority that seriously considers this type of terrorism, and that social and political programs keep that segment of the population in check. The realist in me sees the dramatic amount of naivete in that sentiment, but then isn't all hope a fair amount of naive?
I'd imagine as stealth goes, driving up to someone's house is a much more subtle way to deliver a grenade than launching a drone that goes EEEEEEEEEEEE all the way as it is hastily steered to its destination while the operator attempts to avoid bumping into a street lamp and then fiddles with the controls to drop the grenade in such a way it actually detonates before the victim figures out what's going on.
Drones are hardly even a daily occurence let alone frequent enough not to catch anyone's attention. Cars on the other hand are everywhere.
Back in the 1970s, the IRA demonstrated lots of ways to make bomb attacks anonymously - such as leaving a bomb in a stolen car parked near their target, or putting a bomb in a trash can near their target, or sending a bomb through the mail addressed to their target.
(They would often be accompanied with a telephone warning allowing people to evacuate - but hoax warnings and deliberately vague warnings were also sometimes made)
The good news is it would appear very few people are inclined to carry out anonymous bombings, in spite of the ease with which it can be done.
The problem is that if the bomb is intended to kill a specific target, it's much harder to do so anonymously. If it is intended to "send a message", anonymity is usually the opposite of what the bomber wants.
A lot of so-called anonymous attacks also leave traces that can be used to pin the attack on someone if there is sufficient political will to lead a thorough investigation. And of course the victim can still decide to interpret them differently even if you didn't want to remain anonymous. Consider for example how Turkey would attribute acts of terrorism in Turkey to the PKK despite ISIS claiming them, because it was politically useful to justify a focus on attacking PKK-aligned Rojava in Syria even when it meant aligning with ISIS.
I guess what's saving us from anonymous bombings being commonplace is that few people are willing to carry them out, foolhardy to do so despite the risk of being caught, competent enough to carry them out successfully and sufficiently motivated to cause the death and injury of their victims. And of course the people most likely to be targeted tend to also be much harder to target.
And on an individual grievance level: while it's almost trivially possible to kill someone without being found out, it's much harder to kill a specific someone you want to kill without being found out.
> If it is intended to "send a message", anonymity is usually the opposite of what the bomber wants.
Well, coffeebeqn did speak of terrorism with a "terrifying degree of anonymity"
In the IRA case they would generally make an anonymous phone call where the organisation claimed responsibility, but the actual individuals have long since fled the scene.
Regulate away; you can only really regulate stuff that's offered for sale. Ukraine is making its own drones, according to TFA. It can't be hard to make an airframe from bits of wood, and the motors are COTS. The controller chips are "cheap as chips", you can use and modify FOSS software, the only piece that I couldn't buy easily myself is HESH warheads.
Related: Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez. He wrote about a near future world in which non-state actors could use swarms of cheaply made drones to wreak havoc.
Kill Decision is OK, not a masterpiece but not bad either. Don't go in expecting another Daemon/Freedom and you'll probably enjoy it more (not as slight on Mr Suarez, its just that Daemon was really really good and not every book can be that).
The gap between Military and Civilian tech is shrinking. It used to be a safe assumption that "the military is always 30 years ahead". But with consumer grade hardware becoming cheaper and cheaper, it's raising a pretty obvious risk to military operators.
- Off the shelf Drones are dirt cheap. Plus you could build much more capable drones from consumer parts. See some of the long range drone people on youtube.
- Communication. It used to be a billion dollar operation to put up a satellite. now closer to $20-30k.
Sometimes it vacillates between times of war and peace. The gap is usually wider when extended times of peace allow the "war tech" to be developed with the increased funding and secrecy allowed by peacetime.
Sometimes it vacillates with general tech advancements. Tech driven by large bureaucratic structures will still occasionally fall behind what's available on an open market driven by competition and the public's bias toward cheaper goods. In other words, as a country's general economy goes, so goes its war chest... unless it manages a quite large war chest, in which case it can attempt to conquer another country and pillage the economic spoils of that country.
I think it’s hard to say really. We can say that effective civilian tech is getting cheaper, but without knowing really what tech the military has, it’s hard to comment on the gap between the two.
Given we had the SR71 blackbird in ‘64, a mere 20 years post WW2 which could honestly look to be something from the last couple decades, I’m convinced the global military powers have some eye watering tech that we can’t even comprehend.
For example, it’s in the US’ best interest for people to think (re: Govs) “US has no defense against hypersonic missiles”. I would bet an arm and a leg that given the amount of money the US pours into military tech, that we have a counter measure available.
I think the military advantage will me more and more concentrated in technology that is commercially impractical. Things like the Blackbird. Or a nuclear powered aircraft carrier.
Although I wouldn't be surprised if cargo ships start getting approved to use nuclear propulsion in the near future.
"or example, it’s in the US’ best interest for people to think (re: Govs) “US has no defense against hypersonic missiles”."
This is the crux of the matter. The USA was fine letting people think the patriot system was still suffering from the early teething problems and that it was an overpriced system that couldn't take down ballistic missiles as promised (and it did perform lacklustrely during the first gulf war). Queue the donations to Ukraine successfully shooting down Russia's "unstoppable" hypersonic missiles with quickly trained troops.
I really do wonder how the F-35 actually will perform in combat one day (which in a way I hope we never need to know).
> It used to be a safe assumption that "the military is always 30 years ahead".
IDK if that isn't still true about the US military. The most high-tech equipment sent to Ukraine is still decades old. Israel receives more up-to-date equipment but we haven't seen them deal with $400 drones yet -- it's likely they'd fare much better.
We actually don't know how far US military tech is ahead because we haven't seen that tech being actively used in the battlefield. I think the greater issue is that if the US were to enter a conflict where that tech would be necessary, it would likely face an opponent that also has access to nuclear weapons and then that tech is unlikely to remain relevant for long unless it can prevent every single nuclear weapon from launching and arming.
Yes and no. While some of the off-the-shelf drones can do damage to military equipment right now, militaries will always adapt to the threat, just as they have for thousands of years.
The thing to always bear in mind is scale: slightly less-advanced tech, but 100x as much of it, is probably still better.
Part of me wonders if the (relatively) small scale of current military engagements is skewing the discussion. Bret Deveraux[1] mentions that WW2 saw millions of tons of explosives being dropped on London and Berlin. Even last winter, Russia didn't come close to matching the destruction of the Blitz.
The Hamas is using drones heavily and did use them to disable the fence. They planned to use them against tanks which would have worked against older versions of Israeli armed vehicles. Newer versions have a defensive system that can stop most anti-tank warfare and everything the Hamas have (they have many Russian weapons supplied via Iran, they have a very deep cache of weapons).
This tank defense system is also designed to stop drones.
You know what Hamas primarily used to disable the fence? Construction vehicles. There are literally videos of Hamas militants using a loader to tear down a fence to create an opening. They also infamously used motorized paragliders to cross the border.
We're talking about a terrorist group operating on hand-me-downs from foreign sponsor states in a very small and densely populated mostly-urban territory that has no control over its borders or foreign trade. They likely have impressive caches for an organization of its size but that doesn't make the conflict any less one-sided given Israel is one of the best equipped militaries in the world subsidized directly by the US. Let's not confuse Hamas and Hezbollah, which is actually better equipped than the official military of its host nation Lebanon and also receives massive funding from Iran - but still pales in comparison to the tech available to Israel.
Yes. They used the drones to take down the cell towers communicating with video and unmanned machine guns.
> that doesn't make the conflict any less one-sided given Israel is one of the best equipped militaries in the world subsidized directly by the US.
That's one sided in terms of modern warfare. Sure. But they have plenty of anti-tank missiles and are still firing many rockets into cities in Israel on a daily basis. Israel is also required to hold back on many of its capabilities both due to international law (which the Hamas ignores) and due to the fear of hurting the kidnapped hostages.
The Hamas is no Hezbollah but who are also taking a part in the fight albeit to a minimal extent at the moment. But they have a home court advantage and urban warfare is difficult even for the most advanced armies. It reduces a lot of the advantages. E.g. in the past the IDF used to rely on night vision goggles and take advantage of the night. The Hamas has those now and many of their soldiers received training in Iran.
> Israel is one of the best equipped militaries in the world subsidized directly by the US.
Notice that a lot of the tech Israel has is home grown. One of the reasons the USA funds Israel (besides the alignment on many issues) is to keep Israeli arm manufacturing in its niche. Israeli weapons such as its jets and guns (famously the Uzi) were hot items in the late 60's and 70's. The USA's funding effectively made it uneconomical for Israel to make some of its weapons. Most specifically the fighter jets.
Israel is also an amazing "demo stage" for US weapon superiority.
The west is allied with both Ukraine and Israel. It shouldn't be any surprise we are being shown videos of their victories in an effort to maintain support.
This doesn't surprise me, not because I have any real world knowledge or experience of warfare, but because I used to have fun taking out tanks in Unreal Tournament 2005 with more maneuverable vehicles armed with energy weapons. I guess this is a case of sci fi becoming reality.
(I mean no disrespect to those fighting on the front lines by trivializing their experience with a video game metaphor; I pray for safety for both sides and for eventual peace).
Nets above structures seem like a terrible defence. What's to stop me from launching a drone from within the net? Unless you're going to cover all sides of these buildings with nets. And a net-cutting drone seems like something that would be trivial to engineer.
Honestly I've been wondering for years why this is not already happening routinely. Not that I hope it, but I would say that even right now move a small bomb on a drone and letting it explode close to a random target should be quite easy for lightly organized movements, let alone modern armies. Why is so hard for the US to launch a horde of exploding drones towards Putin at the next time he sets foot outside of a building? Or for Russia to do the same for Biden?
Again, I don't hope that's our future, I just cannot understand why it's not our present already.
> The US at least wants a human pressing the button and is not willing to let AI make a lethal order.
I'm old enough to remember exactly how crazy the US went after 9/11. It's going to take exactly one surprise attack on the US before it puts out the first weapons contracts for automated killbots.
That's not convincing: such a technique could still be in use since quite long for less sensitive targets; or it could be used by less "responsible" actors. Again, it doesn't look like the kind of stuff that you need to be the CIA to do.
The PTSD of veterans of the russian invasion of Ukraine will be horrific.
At any point, a drone that you often can't hear or see can drop a grenade or mortar shell that might kill all your squad but leave you unhurt. Or kill one person next to you in the trench. Or your vehicle may just explode with no warning.
Sure, it could be argued that is not "worse" than other wars, but how will these veterans react to drones in the sky back in civilian life?
Probably recreational drones will need to be banned in places like Ukraine with a large contingent of traumatised war veterans. It must also be disturbing for Ukrainian refugees in Austria and Germany to have air raid sirens go off every time the local fire department needs to be summoned.
Which parts of Austria and Germany are that? In Germany the air raid sirens are part of the emergency broadcast system and outside natural disasters only heard during tests. These tests happen on a schedule and when done at a federal level )(i.e. when the cellular emergency system is also tested rather than just the sirens) you'll hear about them on the news in advance.
I'm not aware of them being used to summon the fire department and don't think that's very common outside maybe extremely rural areas. AFAIK volunteer fire departments use mobile phones.
Germany doesn't even have them as a federal thing anymore. However I know that our village siren goes off to notify the firefighters that they have to hurry to the station. And I can also hear the sirens of the neighbouring town if its an especially big fire.
But hasn't this always been the evolution of warfare? Once upon a time you had to look your enemy in the eye to fight them (sword, axe, fist, etc). And then someone invented the longbow and suddenly an arrow could silently fly out of a thicket 100 yards away and kill you without warning.
I wonder what the defining moment of drone combat will be? The equivalent of the Battle of Agincourt where English longbows devastated the opposing French force.
We did everything wrong at Agincourt, the English longbows were just the nail to the coffin.
French tactics were so bad that it is said that the English were looking in amazement how we were basically fighting with ourselves (cavalry vs retreating infantry)
Yes most of the time, but the occasional unlucky person would still get hit by a longbow arrow from seemingly nowhere. Maybe they're passing by some training grounds or some other non-combat zone.
> The psychological effect of the V-2 was considerable, as the V-2, traveling faster than the speed of sound, gave no warning before impact (unlike bombing planes or the V-1 flying bomb, which made a characteristic buzzing sound). There was no effective defence and no risk of pilot or crew casualties.
Man I really wonder if anyone working at DJI ever imagined one day the internet would be filled with footages of Russian main battle tanks being blown up by the toys they built.
My Grade 11 social studies teacher would often, (as in several times per class), pound his fist into his other hand and declare "More bang per buck! More dead per Dollar!" in reference to the incentive structures of modern warfare.
So many aggreived parties in the world with the need to explode from a distance, but on a limited budget. What's the alternative? A bomber plane? A howitzer? A suicidal dude? Nobody's got time for that. Cheap Kamikaze FPVs are the next big tech market and it's blowing up, like right now!
I realize that tank armor is weak at the top, but it's amazing to me that a few kilograms of explosives dropped anywhere on a tank can disable it. Are these drones even using a shaped charge?
Most modern anti-tank rounds (including the famous Javalin and NLAW) actually use a small "pin" object to penetrate the tanks, which causes a shrapnel or gas explosion inside the tank. Some antitank rounds (HESH) don't even penetrate the armour, but cause the inside layer of armour to separate and shred the inside: https://www.ontrmuseum.ca/tankmuseum/blog-post/modern-anti-t...
Potentially it's being poorly described by the writer.
Tanks have comparatively weak turret and upper armour. Plus you don't need to destroy a tank to reduce its combat ability, you can just make it throw a track, or destroy its external sensors. A grenade will sometimes do that, but even better is a cheap rocket propelled grenade warhead that you drop onto the turret of the tank, as those are designed to penetrate armour.
In addition, russian tanks would be driven with their hatches open for fresh air, providing an easy entry point for a skilled Ukrainian drone pilot.
I expect lasers as the military defense innovation to follow, more than the widespread deployment of nets. There are demonstration units out there that can potshot mosquitos out of a farm field. Power that up and you've got something that will knock small drones out of the sky.
Also, some Israel and US tanks already have active protection system (APS) that can automatically shoot down anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs), rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), anti-tank rockets, and high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) rounds [0].
Don't think it'll take too much to update them to also shoot down drones.
I saw video (coupla years ago) of a Russian tracked vehicle using radar and a gatling gun to shoot down a swarm of about 20 drones in about 2 seconds. But (a) it was a staged demo; (b) I imagine that drone-swarm technology should be able to defeat that, by having the drones jump around unpredicatably (they're very agile); and (c) tracking radars can only track a finite number of targets. Send up enough drones at once, and one of them will be able to kill the tracking radar.
These (birdlike drones) absolutely terrify me because once they can sense thermal upcurrents, they'll be able to loiter for significant periods of time. Plus they're incredibly agile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXg-qoRN0co
A worrying sidelight here: the idea that Russia is faster at scaling up this new kind of warfare than Ukraine (and therefore, Ukraine's Western allies). Tech is moving fast, and the final form of drone warfare has not yet been seen. Countries which are slow to innovate will be at a grave disadvantage.
Doesn't really worry me. Drone warfare gives the cost-advantage to the party that doesn't rely as much on heavy equipment, expensive air-defence and massed artillery. And Russian military doctrine doesn't change very quickly; they're fighting the war in Ukraine in much the same way they fought WWII (smash up everything with artillery, and then try to roll in with tanks).
The russian drone attacks are less publicized, but they are numerous. Also while Ukraine uses mostly domestic drones converted to drop grenades, russia uses purpose built ones. Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZALA_Lancet. And the bigger iranian made Shahed drones.
The Russian drones are expensive; hugely more expensive than the Ukrainian ones. And ISW says the Ukrainians are shooting down most of the drones Russia sends over (and vice-versa, of course).
Granted: what ISW says is probably based on what Ukraine says.
And granted: if you dont shoot down every kamikazi drone in a swarm, then the swarm succeeded (or could have succeeded).
https://lostarmour.info/ - site dedicated to collect, filter and analyze data about "Losses of military equipment in local conflicts of the XXI century" (citation)
It's in Russian but should be readable with translation
And a few saudis with some boxcutters makes some huge flying missles full of jet fuel and a 20 year war, where the taliban got replaced with the taliban. Asymetric warfare was always a thing... be it sharply cut bamboo for paratroopers, molotov cocktails for burning down buildings to laser pointers against helicopters.
A better question here is, what kind of a shitty tank this is, with all the "active armor" and other sales buzzwords, that can't even survive something dropped from a cheap drone (so, relatively light and weak compared to conventional munitions used in the stationary/ground battlefield), while at the meantime the same people are making fun of russian "cope cages".
Evidence suggests all modern tanks without "cope cages" are vulnerable. There are videos from this month of FPV drones destroying a bunch of Leopard 2's and even a Merkava.
Well yeah, but tanks are a "living" thing, they get modified, updated, upgraded... more than a year has gone by from when the russians put "cope cages" on, the "international community" (eu, us, au) lauged, and the germans are still holding a comitee if mounts for the cope-cage poles should use M10 or M12 nuts and bolts. It's been almost two years now, it's not a hard modification.
No mention of jamming technology at all? FPV drones all operate in a fairly narrow bit of 5GHz, it seems like it would be quite easy to jam the video feeds at the very least.
This surprises me as well. Of course there are counter-counter measures like frequency hopping and directed antennas, but you won't find them on consumer-grade drones.
Frequency hopping can only help if there's frequency to hop to, and I'd imagine a military jammer would angrily spew as wide a band of noise it can to ensure everything is jammed. A tank with an omnidirectional antenna jamming -30dB (or more because it's not like FCC/similar regulations apply to the military in a war zone) would have a pretty decent RF bubble around it.
This. Just flying near a WiFi signal is enough to screw up my FPV video feed. You could also jam the 2.4GHz control signal and cause the drones to failsafe.
The processing capability of the drones is not that high. In the future we will likely have much higher autonomous capabilities in drones but we are not there today.
Falcons, hawks, and eagles are extremely intelligent birds that can be trained to defend territory. The biggest problem is getting them to cooperate with each other as a swarm.
These small drones are also very useful for propaganda, as they are equipped with 4K cameras. If the Russians make a disastrous attempt to take over a tree line, the attempt will be filmed at different angles.
> "In theory, a specialist with my level of expertise could plan and execute an operation to liquidate the first persons of any European state ... Pandora's box is open.”
Just a reminder in case got misconstrue that Ukraine is fighting Russians with drones. China supplied truck loads of drones to Russians easily at a ratio 1:500. You need to have someone in China (especially near the border) to know this. As for the west, they couldn't even get WMD right. So whatever you got read about how game changer are with new Western weapons, take it with healthy dose of salt. We are now at the 10th or 11th game changer which is ATACMS now. Yes, even Abrahms are now absolutely. Seems like artilleries and Terminators tanks are the future. American elections are nearing. Reminds me how those supported Bush Sr in Iraq, were later gassed exterminated by Saddam. I don't think Hunter gonna make a come back. Let's hope Putin has mercy on those Ukrainians when USA finally abandon them as predictable.
Fighting for land via physical violence? Really?? That's as old as cavemen.
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