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by RussellThor
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1.  Introduction

It is probably becoming clear to anyone who follows war lately, especially the Ukraine conflict that automatic weapons, especially drones are rapidly changing what weapons and tactics are effective.

The purpose of this article is to first consider how a fully autonomous force with current or near term tech would go against a state of the art conventional force, then to consider where the equilibrium would be on attack vs defense for autonomous forces using advanced but foreseeable tech.

1.1 Description of fully autonomous force using near term tech

The idea is to have a force with as few different types of units as possible controlled in a distributed, mesh network fashion. The goal is for them to take over unlimited land territory, even in the face of tactical/strategic nukes, and without air superiority against very fast or high flying aircraft. Units are assumed to be fully autonomous, and emphasis is on economics as well as capability. For example many units are so cheap that they cannot effectively be countered by conventional missiles.

1.2 Unit Overview

All units can fly, they are optimized to destroy all land based armor, slow flying aircraft, competing drones and humans. Combat units are supported by larger logistics units.

1.3 Communication and Defense

All units are expected to communicate with point to point links (e.g. laser) and are hardened to varying degrees against microwave attacks. Given they are autonomous this would make jamming very difficult and electronic warfare not very effective.

1.4 Unit details

1.4.1 Recon and targeting drone

The cheapest and smallest – it is a battery powered drone with video and targeting system. Recon units form a mesh network.

They coordinate with missiles to defeat countermeasure such as flares and chaff from slow moving aircraft (helicopters etc) by observing and transmitting the position of the target from somewhat further away and transmitting that info to their missile.

They spot opposing drones, troops, fortifications etc. They can spend a brief time in the air, before being recharged by a larger unit.

1.4.2 Suicide drone

This unit is optional – Sniper drones and Javelin type missiles may make it not needed. This is the drone we already see, however with AI, the same p2p comms system as above and with some protection against microwave and laser attack.

1.4.3 Sniper drone

Larger unit, still likely battery powered. Sniper gun is its weapon. This is intended to be more efficient than using suicide drones against soldiers. It is cheap enough to be uneconomic to target it with quality missiles. When in the air it normally flies in a jitter pattern at high speed and ~1,000 m high up to defeat automatic ground based targeting systems that fire unguided bullets. It uses guided bullets if they are technically possible. It can also be equipped with sensor blinding rounds to help defeats tanks or similar. These shells explode close to the target and release IR and flak to confuse Active Protections Systems, so that Javelin type missiles can get through.

1.4.4 Missile launching drone

This is heavier and launches a single missile against larger ground or air targets. That is the Javelin or MANPAD type. It spends most of the time hidden on the ground and only takes to the air when a target has been identified. It fires, then immediately hides again. These units will often coordinate for a swarm attack, i.e. 2-10 Javelin simultaneously against one tank. To take new territory, these units will first attack anti-drone systems, (armed with lasers or guns) in coordination with the sniper drones.

1.4.5 Logistics drone

The most expensive drone, capable of carrying ammo and fuel. Contains a fuel cell or similar so it can use chemical energy to power itself and charge up battery powered drones. It needs to be large for physical reasons related to carrying efficiency, however too large and it will be vulnerable to attack from missiles from fast aircraft (too fast or high for MANPAD to stop). Many aircraft missiles cost ~$1M, so if these units cost $100K that may be a good tradeoff.

Where possible it will move on land using wheels, however its flying ability would be essential. It has some defense against existing missiles by flying low to the ground and taking cover if an income missile is detected, perhaps accompanied with simple flares/chaff deployed the seconds around landing.

The challenge for this unit is supporting and resupplying a force across a large and somewhat contested territory, say 1000km. The mass required would be much less than a conventional army because there are no soldiers to support, drones won’t shoot unless they are very likely to hit, and there are no heavy armored units in this setup. Fuel can be further conserved by a system where only light recon drones go into the air in an initially contested area, with sniper and anti-armor only becoming airborne when targets are identified. These units can refuel each other and also operate as a mesh pattern. They may create static hidden caches to extend range.

2. Results when proposed system takes on a conventional force

2.1 Unarmored soldiers

It should be clear they are no match for sniper drones or suicide drones by now.

2.2 Ground Armor

The missile drones carry MANPAD or Javelin to destroy ground armor or low flying aircraft. Fast or high flying aircraft can be ignored. They cannot hit anything with bombs as all units are mobile, and missiles will be at least as expensive as any drone they can target. 

Lets consider attacking an armored anti-drone system (gun or laser) with active protection systems.

2.2.1 Attack details

1. Recon drones pinpoint the armor from a long distance, out of range of the system.

2. Sniper and missile drones get into position by staying very close to the ground and hopping from cover to cover while they are potentially in range of the system.

3. Sniper drones fly up from behind cover 500m-1K away and quickly shoot the system’s sensors, directly with bullets and indirectly with shells that explode with IR and chaff in a cloud surrounding it.

4. While the chaff cloud still surrounds the armor, missile launching drones coordinate an attack so all the Javelins arrive at the same instant from multiple directions when the target systems sensors are still degraded. 

This is expected to work against an anti-drone system with a gun, laser or combination.

2.3 Slow aircraft, helicopters

The above attack could also work, however aircraft are more maneuverable and can deploy flares, so the MANPADs could lose lock. Flares can be overcome by a mesh of recon drones somewhat close to the target that can give targeting information to the missile. A smarter missile with a reasonable flight time could also break off, circle round again when flares are detected and take another pass when they are gone.

2.4 Proposed system’s defense against other existing counter measures

2.4.1 Protection against jamming

1. Communication can be done with directional point to point laser. If the system is sufficiently directional, then a more powerful laser would not be able to jam it.

2. Jammers can be easily targeted. They have to emit a strong radio signal which can then be targeted.

3. AI autonomous systems would mean communications would be needed much less.

2.4.2 Microwave weapons

If radio/microwave comms are not needed then shielding can be cheap and effective. If radio comms is needed, then it can be active in safe areas – for example retractable antenna deployed when such weapons are not in range.

2.4.3 Guided Missiles

The idea is that almost all drones are cheaper than missiles, leading to the saying that if you have more drones than they have missiles, then you have air superiority! 

2.4.4 Unguided bullets

These cannot hit drones flying in a jitter or random pattern at medium range. Sniper drones should outrange a hand-held anti-drone system as a result. The sniper drone could be accurate from 1,000m away but out of range of the anti-drone system.

Rough calculations:

A drone can accelerate to 200Kph in 1 sec

A fast gun fires at 1,200 m/s. If the sniper drone was 1K away, moving at 200Kph, it can move approximately 50m in the time it takes for the bullet to reach it, so it can’t be effectively targeted.

A sniper drone can still accurately hit a stationary object from 1K away. It could hover for 500ms at a randomly chosen time, target and fire, then fly off again.

2.4.5 Laser

Drones can be hardened against a laser by reflective or ablative coatings and rolling when targeted so that the same spot is not hit. They could fire smoke flares or reflective chaff to help further. They can then target the laser like for armor – shells that explode near the laser to blind it, so anti-armor weapons can get through. Drone sniper bullets could hit the sensors or laser directly also.

3. Current situation

It seems to me that such a system could wreak massive havoc against a conventionally far superior force for a fraction of the cost. Russia has a massive incentive to develop such a system, as do Iran and others. Countries such as China could mass produce drones or components of such a system without getting directly involved and with somewhat plausible deniability. 

Ways to ensure international stability include preventing such weapons from being developed or quickly making sure the balance of power stays the same if everyone has them.

4. Drone army duel – how a fight between two similar systems would look

What would the balance of power look like if such systems where developed to their fullest? If two such systems where to fight each other, what would determine which side won.

4.1 Guided bullets

These would be a major advantage in a sniper drone dog-fight because both drones can change direction fast, having the bullet adjust and track the target drone would give a large increase in effective range. 

For two drones in the air, a small range advantage would enable one side to keep pushing the other back. Tech to target and guide the bullets would be the deciding factor.

4.2 Drones vs slow ground based armor revisited

If the armored vehicle is without support then it looks like the lighter drones can destroy it, even if the vehicle out-ranges it with faster better guided ammo. If somewhat out-ranged, the drones could stay on the ground for cover, and carry out the attacks above, they would sustain losses but it probably would be a cost effective attack. However if the armor has backup drones it could change things. For example a swarm of very small, cheap recon drones out of range of enemy sniper drones to detect javelin and missile launches and continuously track their position. Additionally rather than having the Hard Kill Active protection system attached to the vehicle, it could consist of larger drones flying nearby each capable of destroying a Javelin type anti-armor missile. 

What is the point of the armor in such a situation? It can be used to interrupt the logistics drones discussed above, and for area denial and protection. If the opposing side has local air superiority then the transport drone cannot get past – however flying high above the vehicle could still work.

It also could attack fortified positions or facilities, e.g airport hosting conventional fighters or hypersonic missiles.

4.3 Bombs are ineffective

That is anything that falls by gravity alone is too slow and predictable to reach the target. It would be intercepted by the anti-missile defense or simply a much cheaper suicide drone in mid-air.

4.4 Offense vs Defense - Strong side vs dug in weaker side?

It seems to me that fortifications, cover and dug in units would offer defense a large advantage. For example a sniper duel where one was on the ground and could hide behind cover would have a large advantage against one in the air. The outranged drone could still hold off the stronger one by only coming out from cover for a very short time to shoot, but still guide the bullet against the airborne one. Similarly for larger units, a unit that could shoot from within ground based tunnels would have a large advantage. The stronger side may be able to fly at high altitude over the weaker sides fortifications, however to be truly effective, they would need their logistics units to be able to do that un-opposed.

The defensive side tries to create a ring protecting their entire territory, especially from logistics units crossing. A laser within a protected tunnel system would also be more effective.

4.5 Railgun perfected

This would favor dug in defense – given the long range of a rail gun, any logistics attempting to overfly could likely be shot down by the guided slugs. Sniper drones would probably be too numerous and uneconomic for the railgun to take down most of them.

4.6 Water

Our current tech is very far from the limits allowed by moderate tech advances. Our drones don’t compare to the capabilities of sea creatures in speed, maneuverability, range. For example a water unit that could swim with the capabilities of a dolphin, recharge itself by coming to the surface and deploying floating solar panels, and carry explosive would be very disruptive. A swarm of them could attack a cargo ship, targeting the propellers or other weak points and disable a much larger more expensive vessel. Detecting such a swarm would be very difficult as they could spread out and just sit on or slightly below the surface until needed. They additionally could launch airborne units to attack the ship above water. In this situation, even a much weaker side could cause MAD destruction of seaborne cargo transport. Unlike in the red sea where choke points are most vulnerable, wide areas would be hard to defend. Even if the cargo ship had an escort say of 100 similar units, then 1,000 attacking units could swarm up to overcome them.

5. Conclusion

New weapons can change the balance of power – for nukes it became MAD that prevented one side launching an attack instead of an advantage to defense for the conventional warfare that existed before. For drones it looks like defense will be favored, however the two sides need to be somewhat matched for that to happen. No current military is close to such a capability so there is potentially a dangerous and unstable time as militaries quickly increase capabilities. War often breaks out when one or both sides do not know how they compare to the other, or have false beliefs.

6. Links Related to Current Progress

AI drones

AI drone for Ukraine

Sniper drones:

Sniper drone

Laser guided bullet

Anti-Armor

Tank vs drone

Overall picture

Military

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Drone Wars Endgame
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[-]anithite182

RF jamming, communication and other concerns

TLDR: Jamming is hard when comms system is designed to resist it. Civilian stuff isn't but military is and can be quite resistant. Frequency hopping makes jamming ineffective if you don't care about stealth. Phased array antennas are getting cheaper and make things stealthier by increasing directivity.(starlink terminal costs $1300 and has 40dbi gain). Very expensive comms systems on fighter jets using mm-wave comms and phased array antennas can do gigabit+ links in presence of jamming undetected.

civilian stuff is trivial to jam

... (read more)
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1RussellThor
Thanks for the info. What about RF weapons that is a focused short or EMP pulse against a drone. What range and countermeasures?
3anithite
EMP mostly affects power grid because power lines act like big antennas. Small digital devices are built to avoid internal RF like signals leaking out (thanks again FCC) so EMP doesn't leak in very well. DIY crud can be done badly enough to be vulnerable but basically run wires together in bundles out from the middle with no loops and there's no problems. Only semi-vulnerable point is communications because radios are connected to antennas. Best option for frying radios isn't EMP, but rather sending high power radio signal at whatever frequency antenna best receives. RF receiver can be damaged by high power input but circuitry can be added to block/shunt high power signals. Antennas that do both receive and transmit (especially high power transmit) may already be protected by the "switch" that connects rx and tx paths for free. Parts cost would be pretty minimal to retrofit though. Very high frequency or tight integration makes retrofitting impractical. Can't add extra protection to a phased array antenna like starlink dish but it can definitely be built in. Also front-line units whose radios facing the enemy are being fried are likely soon to be scrap (hopefully along with the thing doing the frying).
[-]Richard Horvath120

A lot of important technology do not exists yet for the above.

You assume independent movement and coordination of said movement in a hostile area, while we barely arrived at self-driving cars in well governed, 1st world areas (available only very few places afaik due to not being able to demonstrate high enough reliability to be convincing to lawmakers).

Point-to-point laser communication would be a great solution indeed, but that would also be a great solution for a bunch of other military applications. Yet it is not used, as we do not have reliable solution for working with it in case of moving objects (apart from satelites), too much coordination is needed to find the end points.

There is no software system currently that is even close to completing the requirements.

 

Let me offer a different point of view on the whole question:

A suicide drone is just a missile. Until recently there was just no way to propel and guide an explosive charge accurately,  reliably and cheaply other than using a rocket engine.

A recon drone is just a helicopter. Until recently there was just no way to propel and guide a good enough observer and transmit the information reliably and cheaply other... (read more)

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4anithite
Self driving cars have to be (almost)perfectly reliable and never have an at fault accident. Meanwhile cluster munitions are being banned because submunitions can have 2-30% failure rates leaving unexploded ordinance everywhere. In some cases avoiding civvy casualties may be a similar barrier since distinguishing civvy from enemy reliably is hard but militaries are pretty tolerant to collateral damage. Significant failure rates are tolerable as long as there's no exploitable weaknesses. Distributed positioning systems Time of flight distance determination is in some newer Wifi chips/standards for indoor positioning. Time of flight across a swarm of drones gives drone-drone distances which is enough to build a very robust distributed positioning system. Absolute positioning can depend on other sensors like cameras or phased array GPS receivers, ground drones or whatever else is convenient.
1RussellThor
Thanks for the thoughts. Firstly that we both agree that much such tech does not exist. The major goal of the article is to think about what could exist within physical limits and foreseeable etc. For independent movement - I am not convinced that self driving cars tell you that much. Mostly airborne drones that are expendable seem like quite a different problem. Radio mesh networks for many fixed points is a very mature tech now - smart meters all coordinate, making the mesh automatically as desired. I expect adapting it to moving units is either not hard or already solved by the military. Sure there is still a long way to go to anything like military hardened optimization but a military would be foolish to assume their adversary was not close to achieving it. For light vs radio, see this comment - rather than expecting p2p immediately my more important claim is the EW and Jamming will lose out in the "endgame" situation. I may look at the physics/cost of laser diodes with beam spread, intensity if I have time. I am not sure entirely how your different point of view changes things, or if it is even different to mine. To be specific I claim that front line infantryman carrying rifles will soon be obsolete, then infantry driving vehicles. The front line (or zone as it may be much more spread out) if there are soldiers there at all will be spending almost all their time stationary in well protected areas such as well underground, or in heavily armored units coordinating the battlefield. 
[-]Hastings91

You still need something to contest stealthy high altitude aircraft to protect your logistics drones. Against the proposed setup, any force with ground attack aircraft would shred the entire force of logistics drones from 40,000 feet and then wait for the rest to run out of batteries. If your price ceiling per unit is a laser guided bomb, you are going to have a damned hard time making a logistics drone carrying multiple attack drones, each carrying multiple guided munitions. 

Taking off when you spot it will not save you from a laser guided bomb. http... (read more)

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2RussellThor
Upon further thought the logistics drones fly low over roads and disguise themselves e.g same color so that they cannot be seen from that altitude. Cheap decoy drones with the same cross sectional area from above would also seem to work very well
2Hastings
Flying low works when the other guy is either on the ground or forced to also fly low by your ground based radar. It doesn’t actually do anything against a high altitude radar. Also there’s a bit of domain knowledge you need: Anything with rotors reflects 500mph doppler shifted radio waves even when stationary, which makes them incredibly visible to any radar that is looking for aircraft.
2RussellThor
Good point. Am on holiday so can't reply in detail. However drone deploys chaff turns sideways changing profile in a way heli can't. Bomb loses lock. Also cheaper drones can attack bomb sensor and control surface. Logistics drone can also deploy decoys such as large parachute or similar looking decoy drones. Bomb can be optimized however to being cheaper faster glide and turn speed. Also swarm of bombs can communicate. Where do you think that would lead if both sides optimized
2Hastings
Mostly I think your thought process is quite good! But if you list out the design constraints of your logistic drone: (deliver airborn self guided munitions into maximally hostile area) vs the design constraints of a modern attack aircraft (deliver airborn guided munitions into maximally hostile area) you’ll find that they’re the same constraints- so likely a fully optimized logistics drone is going to just be an F35 or MQ9. This assumes that dropping mesh-networked batteries on parachutes or even just fresh drones will work better than landing the mothership or docking to recharge. I think thats the key takeaway- most of the killing will be done by the small drone infantry as you described, the air war still controls where the small drone infantry can deploy, the small drone infantry has limited ability to affect the air war.
1RussellThor
OK don't agree with that - I think there is great benefit to flying low/slow/cheap. For a start the logistics drones wont be in maximally hostile - the other drones will have taken care of anything that could easily destroy a logistics drone. I was thinking of this drone as a logistics drone, but I its load is too low. Instead imagine the logistics drones are modified fixed wing from micro-light to Cessna specs (single prop, chemical powered). This gives large range and reasonable carrying capacity. Add some elec powered quadcopter like rotors for short bursts of power. This could fly low over roads as i have said, and even perhaps have strengthened landing gear wheels so it can cruise along the road to save fuel. The elec rotors let it take off much faster than normal aircraft. It could be say $~100K rather than F35 cost. I don't see how this can be easily attacked by bombs - for a start the bomb needs to out-run it laterally. Secondly if the bomb is locking onto the rotor, then it will be giving off radar and be able to be picked up and targeted. How is it going to stop a cheaper suicide drone exploding next to its fins and disabling them so it can't track? If it can handle that, then how will it tell from prop signature which is a logistics drone vs cheap drone? Cheap drones could deliberately have a similar rotor signature or spoof one with a radar transmitter. When the bomb is detected (say 10 seconds warning) how about if the logistics drone stops its propellor, and puts a brake on it to slow it down fast, at the same time as the jet powered drone mentioned before takes off from it? Surely the bomb will be tricked into chasing and not catching that instead? Finally (and I am not expert on radar) can the prop signal be concealed by a metal plate mounted above it (think a spoiler but over the front and square) thus blocking the signal from say +20% from any angle above. Can the plate be filled with material that will either absorb or reflect radar so that th
[-]Lalartu9-2

In general, lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian war are not very relevant for a "state of the art" conflict, because both sides have weak air forces. It is like watching two armies fighting with bayonets because they are out of ammo and concluding that you should arm your soldiers with swords and shields.

Also, this makes many assumptions which are dubious (like, sniper drones aren't anywhere close to practical use, and it is not clear if they are viable), but also some which are strictly false:

  1. Bullets can't carry enough chaff to "surround" a tank
  2. Lasers can destroy artillery shells (which are made of steel) in flight, there is no practical way to harden a light drone against them.
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1RussellThor
OK firstly if we are talking fundamental physical limits how would sniper drones not be viable? Are you saying a flying platform could never compensate for recoil even if precisely calibrated before? What about fundamentals for guided bullets - a bullet with over 50% chance of hitting a target is worth paying for. Your points - 1. The idea is a larger shell (not regular sized bullet) just obscures the sensor for a fraction of a second in a coordinated attack with the larger Javelin type missile. Such shell/s may be considerably larger than a regular bullet, but much cheaper than a missile. Missile or sniper size drones could be fitted with such shells depending on what was the optimal size. Example shell (without 1K range I assume) however note that currently chaff is not optimized for the described attack, the fact that there is currently not a shell suited for this use is not evidence against it being impractical to create. The principle here is about efficiency and cost. I maintain that against armor with hard kill defense it is more efficient to have a combined attack of sensor blinding and anti-armor missiles than just missiles alone. e.g it may take 10 simul Javelin to take out a target vs 2 Javelin and 50 simul chaff shells. The second attack will be cheaper, and the optimized "sweet spot" will always have some sensor blinding attack in it. Do you claim that the optimal coordinated attack would have zero sensor blinding? 2. Leading on from (1) I don't claim light drones will be. I regard a laser as a serious obstacle that is attacked with the swarm attack described before the territory is secured. That is blind the senor/obscure the laser, simul converge with missiles. The drones need to survive just long enough to shoot off the shells (i.e. come out from ground cover, shoot, get back). While a laser can destroy a shell in flight, can it take out 10-50 smaller blinding shells fired from 1000m at once? (I give 1000m as an example too, flying drones would
1Lalartu
The point about chaff is that a regular size sniper rifle bullet can't contain it in any significant quantity. Smalest existing chaff shells are for 23mm cannons, and a drone carrying ~20mm cannon has to be rather large.
[-][anonymous]80

Regarding sniper drones: carrying around a long heavy barrel weighs down the drone/forces it to be bigger and more expensive.

So bring back 1960s gyrojet ammo : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrojet

These are bullets propelled by internal rocket motors and much lighter barrels will work because the gas pressure is lower when fired.

Also note that guided bullets have been demonstrated multiple times, it would be accurate to say they are present tech and no further advancements are needed to develop them. Militaries are just slow and inefficient and not alwa... (read more)

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[-]anithite64

Disclaimer:Short AI timelines imply we won't see this stuff much before AI makes things weird

This is all well and good in theory but mostly bottlenecked on software/implementation/manufacturing.

  • with the right software/hardware current military is obsolete
  • but no one has that hardware/software yet
    • EG:no one makes an airborne sharpshooter drone(edit:cross that one off the list)
    • Black sea is not currently full of Ukrainian anti-ship drones + comms relays
    • no drone swarms/networking/autonomy yet
  • I expect current militaries to successfully adapt before/as n
... (read more)
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1RussellThor
Thanks for the thoughts. "I expect current militaries to successfully adapt before/as new drones emerge" - I hope so as I think that would make a safer world. However I am not so confident - institutional inertia makes me think it all too likely that they would not anticipate and adapt leading to an unstable situation and more war. Also without actual fights how would one side know the relative strength of their drone system? They or their opponent could have an unknown critical weakness. We have no experience in predicting real world effectiveness from a paper system. I am told war is more likely when sides do not know their relative strength. "Economies of scale likely overdetermine winners" - yes especially important for e.g. China vs USA if we want an example of one side with better tech/access to chips but worse at manufacturing. Ground vs Air All good points - I am agnostic/quite uncertain as to where the sweet spot is. I would expect any drone of medium to large size would be optimized to make as much use of the ground as possible. Radio vs Light Yes, I do not know what the "endgame" is for radio comms vs jammers, if it turns out that radio can evade jammers then light will not be used. My broader point I think I will make more specific now is that EW and jammers will not be effective in late stage highly optimized drone warfare. If that is because radio/stealth wins then yes, otherwise light comms will be developed (and may take some time to reach optimal cheapness/weight etc) because it would give such an advantage.
2anithite
Not so worried about country vs. country conflicts. Terrorism/asymmetric is bigger problem since cheap slaughterbots will proliferate. Hopefully intelligence agencies can deal with that more cheaply than putting in physical defenses and hard kill systems everywhere. Still don't expect much impact before we get STEM AI and everything goes off the rails. Relative strength is hard to gauge but getting reasonable perf/$ is likely easy. Then just compare budgets adjusted for corruption/Purchasing power parity/R&D amortisation. Building an effective drone army is about tactical rock paper scissors and performance / $. Perf / $ emphasis makes live fire tests cheap. Live fire test data as baseline makes simulations accurate. RF/comms performance will be straightforward to model and military is actually putting work into cybersecurity because they're not complete morons. Add to that the usual espionage stuff and I expect govts to know what will work and what their enemies are doing. Ukraine war was allegedly failure to predict the human element (will to fight) with big intelligence agencies having bad models. Drone armies don't suffer from morale problems and match theoretical models better.
[-]Yair Halberstadt60

I think this is wildly off base.

Cheap drones are far easier to destroy than pretty much anything else on the battlefield, and are highly susceptible to electronic measures. Their only advantage is they are cheap, and current tactics and equipment hasn't yet adapted to them. Once every vehicle contains a cheap jammer, and every unit carries them around, the cheapest drones will be far less useful (except for reconnaissance).

You suggest various countermeasures, but these end up taking us back to where we started. For example you suggested reconnaissance dron... (read more)

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4[anonymous]
So the OP addressed this, and I believe the OPs described mitigations will make the drones almost completely immune to electronic measures: Laser light between drones is not easy to jam, it can be done by shining a brighter laser on the receiving drone at the same frequency, but that requires the defense system to be tracking the drone. This will also not stop the drone, see "given they are autonomous". This means that the drone has circuit cards that likely host a multimodal transformer neural network that analyzes video frames for valid targets. Once a target is found, coordination is needed to deploy the optimal weapon on a given target and to avoid wasting munitions such as multiple suicide drones attacking the first infantry soldiers perceived. But without coordinating the drone still fly and still fight, just less effectively. Note that the reason why the drones are difficult to attack with microwaves would be the use of metal shields over the electronics, forming a faraday cage. Theoretically this defense is perfect, although in reality there have to be things like exposed gps antenna and camera sensors. Finally I think you are not fully updating on the consequences of drones as seen in an actual battlefield. In reality drones are so fast that were they autonomous and built in greater numbers, I suspect they would be strictly dominant against most land forces. Any defense you propose is too expensive when there are hundreds to thousands of drones in low flying swarms, traveling at 100-300 mph. They also can react extremely quickly and the drone commanders can order them to concentrate forces in key areas, bypassing defenses and defeating conventional ground forces.
1RussellThor
LOL ... "make a meme picture based of the very common one of a man looking at another women when holding his gf hand. The situation is where you write a blog post, someone criticized it, and rather than replying you wait for someone else to defend it well. There are exactly two texts, one on each women. The text on the other women, in the foreground on the left is "wait for someone else to defend it" The text on the girlfriend on the right is "defend your own post"  <Drone wars are ahead of meme wars for the moment>
1RussellThor
Thanks for the detailed and well thought out replies! I was about to make most of the same points you make, and you have done a good job of making them for me.
4Yair Halberstadt
Now I don't doubt we'll be seeing incremental changes here, and more uses of drones and autonomy, but I don't think this is going to rewrite the rules of war anytime soon.
9Daniel Kokotajlo
Drones already rewrote the rules of warfare. The recent invasion of Ukraine would have gone very differently without drones. Primary effect they are having is on sensors/surveillance; every assault is seen building up miles before it reaches the front line, and artillery is targeted on it in real time. Big buff to artillery and big nerf to armored assaults. Secondary effect is kamikaze drones -- now the #1 weapon by monthly kills maybe, or maybe #2 after artillery. It says a lot that I'm not even sure which is doing more killing now, since artillery is far and away the obvious contender for a static conflict. Even ww2 which was mobile saw most deaths from artillery I think.  Special mention to naval and long-range drones (bayraktar, shahed, etc.) which are not exactly revolutionizing anything but which are having a noticeable effect. All in all I think yes the war has been revolutionized by drones. But the biggest changes are yet to come.
[-]Daniel Kokotajlo110

Elaborating: Current assault tactics (pioneered by Wagner) involve sending in a steady stream of small (<10-man) teams to go forward & get killed, so that enemy positions are revealed to overhead drones and can be destroyed by artillery and other drones. This sort of constant piecemeal infantry pressure is night and day different from the armored columns we saw in Desert Storm and 2003 iraq invasion and early 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And it's also different from the bombardment + human wave assaults from previous static wars like WW1 and Korea and Iran-Iraq.

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3Shankar Sivarajan
I believe it will, but not in the way described here. What drones facilitate is terrorism, and maybe assassinations. If developed to fruition, they would "rewrite the rules" of irregular, asymmetric warfare.
2Yair Halberstadt
What is an example of a terrorist attack drones enable where with the same cost and effort terrorists couldn't do something similar already?
3Vaniver
To elaborate, it's pretty easy to kill someone important if you are willing to be arrested/executed afterwards; the main thing a suicide drone might enable is killing someone important and being able to escape afterwards. This could already be done with dupes, like the 2017 killing of Kim Jong-nam, but I think the nerve agent involved was more expensive than a handmade gun.
2Yair Halberstadt
Ok, that makes sense, targeted killings from a distance greater than a sniper rifle does seem like a good choice for a drone.
2the gears to ascension
Is this what you meant to say?
2Yair Halberstadt
Just realised I misunderstood this section of the post, going to delete, rewrite and repost.
[-]Roko50

The sniper drone that can move at 200km/h, fire an accurately aimed shot and then relocate in 500 milliseconds is not realistic.

A powerful sniper rifle like a Barret 50 cal weighs 15kg; a drone that can carry that will add say another 35kg at a minimum. Now you have to accelerate from 0 to 50 m/s in 500ms which is a 10g acceleration. Drones available today seem to have a thrust to weight ratio of around 2, so your maximum acceleration is only 2g - and some of that is taken up just hovering. there's also some time required to change the orientation of the p... (read more)

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1RussellThor
Ok sure without going into the details I don't dispute an advanced gun system can take out the drones. However such a system counts as armor in my system. It would get the anti armor attack I have described elsewhere. Surely the gun costs more than a suitably sized missile so we get back to coordinated drone swarm with different units vs fixed armor
[-]cousin_it52

The goal is for them to take over unlimited land territory

I'm not sure that goal is achievable. When the drones you're describing become mature, another pretty horrible technology might become mature as well: smart mines and remote mine-laying systems. A smart mine is cheaper than a drone (because it sits still instead of flying around), much easier to hide and harder to detect (same reason), they can see stuff and talk to each other just like drones can, and they can be deployed at a distance in large numbers.

So that's the picture I'm imagining. Thousa... (read more)

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3RussellThor
Yes that sure sounds difficult. However if drones can fly over with logistics drones following, you mostly control the territory. Its more like MAD where no-one can settle anymore.  The worst mine I can think of is one that cannot be detected by a metal detector and is a little bit underground. It stays  underground, to come to the surface at a random time, then finds a target. Think a large cicada with explosive that can be detonated without needing metal. Not sure how possible, but seems maximally horrible.
2mako yass
The difference in cost between automated mine laying and automated mine cleanup doesn't seem very large to me.
1anithite
Current landmines are very effective because targets are squishy/fragile: * Antipersonnel: * take off a foot * spray shrapnel * Antitank/vehicle: * cut track /damage tires * poke a hole with a shaped charge and spray metal into vehicle insides Clearing an area for people is hard * drones can be much less squishy * need more explosives to credibly threaten them * Eliminating mine threat requires * clearing a path (no mines buried under transit corridor) * mine clearing vehicle * use line charge * block sensors so off route mines can't target vehicles * Inflatable barriers that block line of sight/radar This is enough to deal with immobile off route mines. If the minefield has active sensors, those can be spoofed and/or destroyed or blocked at slightly higher expense. Past this, the mines have to start moving to be a threat and then you're dealing with drones vs. drones, not mines. Ideal mine clearing robots and drones in general should be very resilient: * No squishy center like people filled vehicles. * battery powered drone with per wheel motors and multi-part battery pack has no single point of failure. * Doing meaningful damage to such a drone is hard. * flimsy exterior can hide interior parts from inspection/targeting. * Vulnerable systems with fluid like cooling/hydraulics can include isolation valves and redundancy. * alternatively, no fluids, air for cooling and electric motors/generators/batteries? * multiple locations/configurations for important components that can be moved (EG:battery/computers)
2cousin_it
I think you're describing a kind of robotic tank, which would be useful for many other things as well, not just clearing mines. But designing a robotic tank that can't be disabled by an ATGM (some modern mines are already ATGMs waiting to fire) seems like a tall order to me. Especially given that ATGM tech won't stand still either.
1anithite
Current ATGMs poke a hole in armor with a very fast jet of metal (1-10km/s). Kinetic penetrators do something similar using a tank gun rather than specially shaped explosives. "Poke hole through armor" is the approach used by almost every weapon. A small hole is the most efficient way to get to the squishy insides. Cutting a slot would take more energy. Blunt impact only works on flimsy squishy things. A solid shell of armor easily stopped thrown rocks in antiquity. Explosive over-pressure is similarly obsolete against armored targets. TLDR:"poke hole then destroy squishy insides" is the only efficient strategy against armor. Modern vehicles/military stuff are armored shells protecting air+critical_bits+people Eliminate the people and the critical bits can be compacted. The same sized vehicle can afford to split critical systems into smaller distributed modules. Now the enemy has make a lot more holes and doesn't know where to put them to hit anything important. This massively changes offense/defence balance. I'd guess by a factor of >10. Batteries have absurd power densities so taking out 75% of a vehicle's batteries just reduces endurance. Only way to get a mobility kill is to take out wheels. There are still design challenges: * how to avoid ammo cook-off and chain reactions. * misdirection around wheel motors (improves tradeoffs) * efficient manufacturing * comms/radar (antenna has to be mounted externally) Zerg rush Quantity has a quality of its own. Military vehicles are created by the thousands, cars by the millions. Probably something similarly sized or a bit smaller, powered by an ICE engine and mass produced would be the best next gen option.
[-][anonymous]50

The one drone concept that seems to already be obsolete is the "missile" launching drone. Why launch a missile, just use the drone.

https://www.anduril.com/roadrunner/

This ends up being a cheap jet engine with a quadcopter built around it, for dealing with aircraft.

For dealing with tanks, fpv suicide drones work well. A version of the drone guided by onboard AI, and upgrading the brick of HE that Ukraine seems to put on the front to a shaped charge, would deal with most armor. That is because the drone can just fly behind tanks and other armored vehicles... (read more)

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[-]Yair Halberstadt3-1

The chances of the vision you're espousing being viable (autonomous air based drones replacing the majority of all existing army units in the near future) is extremely low.

I think you're looking at a war between two seconds rate armies, which have not adapted to a new technology and are suffering a large rate of attrition due to it, and assuming based on that that such a system is unbeatable.

I'm not going to go into detail about all the issues with this article, I'm just going to focus on one specific issue.

If you manage to build this entire system, how w... (read more)

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1RussellThor
For the phalanx or similar - check this link this link. The consensus seems to be that the gun can't take out multiple missiles. Wikipedia gives a Javelin (surface to air) with a max speed of "Mach 1.7+ approx." EDIT the ground one is much slower, probably because its has more penetrating power. I don't think we need that against the gun, it is not as armored as a tank. I don't doubt that a fixed gun can take out drones, but its missiles vs gun that matters here. At 115 degrees per sec, 2 Javelin 120% apart going Mach 1.7 is going to be a serious problem for it. I get a cost quoted of about US$5M for the land based gun vs $78K for the missile. https://www.thedefensepost.com/2023/03/02/us-uk-javelin-missile/ If it was made cheaper, would it be less effective? Also note that the land based system needs to withstand armor piercing rounds from the heaviest gun something like  this drone  could carry. Sure you could destroy the drone but probably not before it can get some rounds off. Especially if it engaged from >1500m out. That drone could also carry the Javelin and I doubt someone  (soldier) could shoot it down easily. See this comment thread about jamming. 
2Yair Halberstadt
Like everything you have layers of defence. Phalanx takes out all drones in an area. Against any ATGMs you use trophy or an equivalent ADS. Also once you have a javelin/anti armour carrying drone it's going to set you back hundreds of thousands of dollars and be a suitable targets for iron dome style defences, which can cover a larger area and where each missile costs some 75000 dollars.
1RussellThor
Trophy sounds less effective than phalanx for missile defense in this situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophy_(countermeasure) "The system is currently incapable of defeating kinetic energy anti-tank weapons." So a Javelin type missile that released a rail gun type slug when on the outside of the Trophy defense  range would destroy the target. "In the ATGM's case, the EFP will affect the shaped plasma jet, dramatically decreasing its penetration ability." - This sounds a normal missile will still cause damage, and since Phalanx is not as armored as a tank, probably destroy it.  I don't see why https://newatlas.com/drones/huntress-turbojet-drone/ should cost >$100K when mass produced. In the context of this article, before we talk about strengths/weaknesses of Iron dome type defenses, the vast majority of countries don't have them currently deployed and can't afford to.
3Yair Halberstadt
When is talking about kinetic energy weapons it's referring to armour piercing sabots, because that's what needed to pierce tank defences. I don't know how effective ADS would be against other kinetic energy weapons because there's never been any need to try, they're useless against tanks. These rounds are so heavy, and fly so fast, that's it's practically impossible to fire them from anything weighing less than a few tons. Not relevant for a drone/Javelin. Also notice how you're creating epicycles upon epicycles here. A drone that fires a Javelin, that fires a railgun, to defeat an existing fairly straightforward defence. Each of those is going to be an impressive technical achievement, the entire package is going to take a while to iron out the kinks, and is going to be expensive. If drones are so powerful they're going to completely replace existing armies, I wouldn't expect all the epicycles. A single javelin missile on its own costs more than an iron dome tamir interceptor, so becomes a valid target for existing SAM defences. Sure it might be existing ADS defences aren't enough to defend something like the phalanx, but there's lots of implementations out there, and the trophies characteristics were chosen because it was sufficient to protect tanks. Could trophy be modified to protect more delicate equipment, or could something like the Iron Fist work? I don't know, it's never been tested because it's never been necessary. As for the drone you linked - it contains a turbojet. I cannot find any production turbojet with hundreds of kilos payload plus strong performance characteristics selling for less than a few hundred thousand dollars. Finally I think all of this is mostly irrelevant. The phalanx consists of two parts - a relatively long range, delicate and expensive radar, and a pretty robust, shorter range, cheaper M61 Gatling gun + turret. On a ship they're colocated because that makes sense given limited space. But most land based SAMs separate the rada
3[anonymous]
I think you're really really badly off base, and let me show you why: That's what they are capable of under human control.  The actual drone hardware is under $1000. None of your radar proposals are any use.  The drones will fly inches from the ground and are a lot of plastic, and their speeds are low, and will keep terrain between them and the enemy.  These are generally not going to be detectable on radar until it's too late.  Radar is not effective now. The biggest objection to why you won't see these drones immediately is you need powerful onboard GPUs to run a realtime AI control model to get human (or insect) level flight control, and to actually coordinate a drone assault you essentially need much more expensive "mother" drones that have combustion engines and racks of GPUs running a transformer or newer model. What needs to happen is the drones can implement strategies with respect to waypoints, and as the drone encounter possible enemy forces their models need to select and upload to the mesh network high resolution pictures of what they perceive, as well as lots of compressed metadata. The model aboard the "mother" drone - or human commanders - have to decide on a tactical solution to engage the enemy assets they can see/estimate exist.  Each of the objections you mention has a tactical solution, and in most cases it will be hugely asymmetric, killing armored vehicles and trained soldiers for a fraction of the cost.  It will never be 1 drone against a defense, but enough drones calculated to overwhelm the known defenses. For example, if the approach path chosen, hugging the terrain, exposes the drones to 3 phalanx guns, and there is a total of 5 seconds of exposure time, and the gun can change targets every 250 ms, then up to 60 drones can be engaged. If 70 drones are sent, is the cost of 70 drones worth trading for 3 armored vehicles?  It the answer is no, you don't engage and instead seek weaker targets like supply trucks.
1Yair Halberstadt
I feel like the goalposts keep changing. This is not what was described in the original post. So a few questions: How do these drones communicate? Low on the ground P2P communications will have awful range, as will most low energy communication systems. Are they so autonomous they don't need to communicate at all? What's their range? Existing drones only fly for about 20 minutes, and at a speed of about 70 km/h. Their range is usually about 10 to 20 km. Flying low to the ground and having to navigate will imply much lower speeds, and less efficient flight, as will having to run a powerful GPU, and whatever communication system you end up using. They also have to carry a payload capable of destroying a tank. Unlike in Ukraine that requires getting past the ADS (e.g. trophy), so is going to be more sophisticated than a grenade. Again, how are you actually destroying the tank? Firstly ADS systems are likely to be extremely effective against drones. Secondly tank armour is actually really really difficult to pierce. Drones are only effective because tanks have weak spots where it was considered to be too unlikely that an enemy could target, and it turns out that assumption was wrong. The next generation of tanks will likely not leave such weak spots, possibly by using lots of slat armour, requiring far more sophisticated - and heavier - solutions to destroy a tank using a drone. Now for this to revolutionise warfare requires that your drone + payload can be mass produced cheaply, but everything above seriously cuts into that. You need sophisticated communication systems, battery, navigation systems, payload etc. if each unit costs 100,000 dollars instead of 1000 dollars, sending 70 to destroy 3 tanks is much less valuable a proposition.
3[anonymous]
To a mother drone located farther from the enemy at higher altitude, but not high enough to be engaged.  Using laser or directional (phased array) RF.  This is how drones are fighting in Ukraine right now. See: https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-military-reservist-describes-flock-ukrainian-fpv-drones-2024-1 Most drones are short range, yes.  Some are hybrid with gas engines, like the mother drones or like the below, from https://news.mit.edu/2017/hybrid-drones-carry-heavier-payloads-greater-distances-0804 .  These will have hundreds of kilometers of range.    > Again, how are you actually destroying the tank? Firstly ADS systems are likely to be extremely effective against drones. Secondly tank armour is actually really really difficult to pierce. Standard package.  Switchblade 600 has the same warhead as the javelin missile.  It's listed at 33 lbs.   Tanks have a lot of weak spots, for instance from this video  you can just look for yourself at the very thin plate on the Abram's roof that appears to just be rolled homogeneous steel.  It would be pretty difficult to armor tanks to withstand attacks from all sides, for one thing someone will just build slightly larger drones. Currently the cost when built without the inefficiencies of USA contractor system is under $1000.  https://www.economist.com/interactive/science-and-technology/2024/02/05/cheap-racing-drones-offer-precision-warfare-at-scale  from the article : "A simple FPV drone costs perhaps $400" These have every element you mentioned except the GPUs for full autonomy.   And ok, it's consumer grade, let's go to milspec, and suppose it does cost 100k a drone*.  Well, how much does 3 tanks cost?  Each Abrams is listed at 24 million dollars (present day export cost).  So 70 drones will be 7 million dollars, killing 72 million in tanks and 9 crewmembers who needed time and money to train, and who will have lost their combat experience. Note the drones don't lose their combat experience when destro
2Yair Halberstadt
If it has line of sight to the drones, then it has line of sight to the target, and can be engaged by them.
3[anonymous]
The mother drone produces the tactical plan and gives the plan to every drone in the swarm. It doesn't need to have los to execute it although there would be a lack of flexibility during the attack. The tactical plan would consist of things like waypoints, references images for positioning, and targets. Each drone for that hypothetical "70 vs 3 tanks" engagement has a track to follow, a period of exploiting the terrain, a maximum speed final approach, a specific place on a specific tank to target etc. The plan can fail if say the target vehicles have moved and additional guns are brought in but the entire process will be a few minutes. Getting the plan would be done with disposable scouts, these are mid altitude drones with a good laser link to the mother. They upload images of the target area before the shots to shoot them down hit. Ultimately you are not going to beat this with conventional forces with more air defense. You need a rapidly relocatable force to counter drone swarms that is cheap. Meaning a defense in depth with your own drones.
2Yair Halberstadt
On the assumption we have self navigating drones that can detect the weakest point in a tank as soon as it gets live of site, and head straight towards it, we would presumably have developed the ability to detect such drones via cameras on the tank as soon as they have line of site. Than all you need is a bunch of pretty weak guns on turrets mounted on the tank to shoot the drone as soon as they are detected. Most of these pieces already exist - modern Merkavas have cameras with 360 degrees view, the software to detect a moving drone quickly from a camera is pretty trivial, hardest part is avoiding false positives, but that seems easier than navigating, software to control guns and track targets has existed for a long time. I assume that mounting a m16 style gun on a turret with 360 by 180 degrees rotation, and sub second rotation to any position is fairly straightforward. Imagine a few of these mounted along the sides of a tank. Most of the time they're lying flat for protection but can shoot a drone within a second of it becoming visible. A drone moving at 70 km/h would take 5 seconds to cover the last hundred metres to a tank, plenty of time to shoot it down. This is mostly proven technology - it's basically what trophy does, just we can use cheaper bullets against unarmoured drones, and use the theorised AI advances to use cheap cameras instead of more complex solutions, and the ability to distinguish enemy targets that are less obviously projectiles.
-5[anonymous]
1RussellThor
Yes - fair enough and I hope you are right - I would be happier if defense wins too. I hope soon  Europe/USA develops such a system, including the ability to mass produce it in the quantities needed.
1Lalartu
Anti tank FPV drones? Almost certainly not long term as they’re more expensive than ATGMs, That is not true at all, anti-tank fpv cost is about 1/100 of a Javelin missile. It is not obvious how much autonomous guidance would add to a drone cost, but probably less than 10000%.
2Yair Halberstadt
Why compare with a Javelin, and not e.g. a Kornet which exports for 25,000 dollars (similar to a top range GPU), and can be produced for much cheaper (as evidenced by the fact Hamas is perfectly capable of producing them).
[-]Daniel Kokotajlo32

It seems to me that such a system could wreak massive havoc against a conventionally far superior force for a fraction of the cost.


+1

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[-]Carl Feynman32

For all of history, until just now, the physically smallest military unit has been the individual soldier. Smaller units have not been possible because they can’t carry a human-level intelligence. This article is about what happens when intelligence is available in a smaller package. It seems to have massive consequences for ground warfare.

I think air superiority would still be important, because aircraft can deliver ground assets. A cargo aircraft at high altitude can drop many tons of drones. The drones can glide or autorotate down to ground level, ... (read more)

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1RussellThor
Yes I agree about high altitudes. Some people have now started to make the distinction between low altitude air superiority and high/fast altitude. High altitude superiority is still very important, but not having it is not perhaps the crippling problem it used to be. The more evenly matched the forces, the more it probably matters
3[anonymous]
High altitude is also super vulnerable to SAMs, because missiles now generally outperform aircraft and the higher the altitude, the more SAMs will be able to see and possibly fire on the target. In the current battles over Ukraine, it appears to be the case that high flying, non stealth former Soviet aircraft simply can't fly into areas defended by patriot and other modern SAMs. There are also near future weapons like fiber lasers, in experimental use on USN ships, that have the advantage of a beam that cannot be avoided, if the aircraft is in LOS and detected its probably dead. Combined arms to support your drone armada with laser trucks, main point is that arms races don't necessarily keep improving 2 sides and keeping them even. The drones you propose likely make infantry pointless, the main reason infantry has any use is limited drones were available in 2023. If Ukraine successfully builds 1 million FPV drones like they say they will, and they continue to have a 1/3 success rate, that's 300k soldiers lost to the Russian army in 2024. At a certain point it's not going to be be viable to use infantry at all, in the same way horses are no longer used on the battlefield. Laser trucks might simply make high altitude aircraft mostly pointless.
[-]RussellThor30

Next Big Future has just dropped a few articles on this e.g. 

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/01/air-force-research-lab-focuses-on-better-missiles-and-ai-drone-swarms.html

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[-]Daniel Kokotajlo20

Laser links are probably still the future, but for now, they are moving to having drones that just trail thin optical fibers behind them. ​Ukrainian Developers Present Optical Fiber FPV Drone (Video) | Defense Express (defence-ua.com) Cuts the range significantly, from ~10km to ~1km I believe. But still plausibly very useful. For one thing the optical fibers in the future could trace back not to a human operator but to a drone mothership, that carries either a bigger computer or a longer optical fiber tracing back to a human operator.

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[-]Perhaps2-1

Could some kind of caustic gas, or the equivalent of a sandstorm be used to make drones not useful? I feel like large scale pellet spreads wouldn't be too useful if the drones are armoured, but I don't know too much about armour or how much piercing power you could get. I wonder if some kind of electric netting could be fired to mass electrocute a swarm, or maybe just regular netting that interferes with their blades. Spiderwebs from the sky?

Interesting post, although I feel like it would benefit from inline references. For most of the post it feels like you're pulling your assertions out of nowhere, and only at the end do we get some links to some of the things you said. I understand time/effort constraints though.

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4RussellThor
Thanks - yes I was somewhat pulling my assertions out of nowhere, it was somewhat of an invitation to the reader to think about physical limits and question the current situation than to say I knew the details of where it would all lead. If the articles I linked to did not exist yet I would still be writing a similar article and claiming they would soon.  Specifically for netting, it is already used on choke points (trenches for both sides in Ukraine) - however couldn't the cheapest suicide drone explode against the netting to then let others through?
[-]Meme Marine10
  • "Guided bullets" exist; see DARPA's EXACTO program.
  • Assuming the "sniper drone" uses something like .50 BMG, you won't be able to fit enough of a payload into the bullet to act as a smoke grenade. You can't fit a "sensor blinding round" into it.
  • Being able to fly up 1000m and dodge incoming fire would add a lot of cost to a drone. You would be entering into the territory of larger UAVs. The same goes for missile launching drones.
  • Adding the required range would also be expensive. Current small consumer drones have a range of about 8 miles (DJI Mavic) so takin
... (read more)
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1RussellThor
Firstly some context: Missile vs gun Radio comms and protection against jamming For your points 1. Guided bullets - yes good, unsure whether they can be made cheap yet but if they can of course such a system would use them 2. Chaff etc - yes probably correct, however it seems this is not needed for missiles to destroy current guns. 3. Fly to 1000m - Yes it would, however for sniper drone we are comparing the cost to a actual soldier. I have in mind something like https://newatlas.com/drones/huntress-turbojet-drone/ for heavier drones. Other sniper drones could be electric with a very short flight time, carried by the huntress or logistics drone 4. Relay drones - the idea is most of them fly over territory that has been secured - think a drone with flapping wings like a bird circling at 1000m - if you shoot it down with a big gun you give away your position. Also such drones will be doing constant surveillance of territory. 5. Anti-armor only - yes however infantry holed up in a building can't stop the invasion, it can route around them.  6.  Flak guns - yes guns can take down drones economically, however it becomes missiles vs flak gun. 7. Aircraft - yes I overstated a bit - for the initial invasion conducted with stockpiled materiel, they can't easily stop it. However taking out the aircraft is very important for the drone army. The drones can take out the airbases - so it could be a race between the fast aircraft trying to bomb the logistics before the drones reached the airfields. Most countries are ~1000 kilometers or less in length, which is in range of a cheap Cessna type logistics drone before they even do mesh network fuel drops to extend the range. Such low slow cheap aircraft would be protected by MANPAD carrying drones, or just equipped with them. fighter jets would be forced to shoot expensive missiles to destroy them, rather than get in close with the cannon etc. Even if the fighters can do 1,5000-2000 kilometers conventional forces could still
[-]Vaniver10

Flares can be overcome by a mesh of recon drones somewhat close to the target that can give targeting information to the missile.

This seems overly optimistic to me / is my guess of where the next countermeasure will show up. If your missile is accepting external course-corrections, the enemy can maybe spoof incorrect course-corrections; the more directional the system is, the harder it is to actually hit your fast-moving and course-correcting missile. 

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3[anonymous]
Any messages like that are digitally signed, so they cannot be spoofed, only jammed, unless the private key set a drone "unit" uses has been leaked. To mitigate this vulnerability, a drone "unit" could generate the private key from entropy just for this set of drones, with no copies of the keys kept except in the drones. (When the drones are in the drone hive and hard wired to each other in an isolated network they would exchange keys) I can't paste in images from mobile, but Google image search anduril roadrunner for a picture of a drone hive.
3Vaniver
Maybe I'm confused about the amount of overhead digital signing / verification adds to communication, but do you think that works at missile speeds? (I don't doubt that it works at drone speeds.) [To be clear, I'm trying to imagine the whole "distant spotter + laser transmission to missile" system, where increasing the length of messages increases the amount of time you need to have successfully targeted the missile in order to successfully transmit a message.]
3anithite
Overhead is negligible because military would use symmetric cryptography. Message authentication code can be N bits for 2^-n chance of forgery. 48-96 bits is likely sweet spot and barely doubles size for even tiny messages. Elliptic curve crypto is there if for some reason key distribution is a terrible burden. typical ECC signatures are 64 bytes (512 bits) but 48 bytes is easy and 32 bytes possible with pairing based ECC. If signature size is an issue, use asymmetric crypto to negotiate a symmetric key then use symmetric crypto for further messages with tight timing limits.
3[anonymous]
Laser links are fast. A digitally signed message can be extremely small. Suppose the message is 2048 bits with 128 bytes of payload (my cords, relative target coords, your coords, confidence for each number, class of target). It has been signed with a 1024 bit private key, and apparently minimum message lengths are similar to the key length. The Wikipedia article on free space laser comms has a 1 gigabit system in the article picture, though in theory laser comms work just as fast as fiber optic, minus losses due to noise. Anyways that would be 2 milliseconds. How fast is the missile traveling?
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