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

• EG:sending disconnection messages to disconnect wifi devices requires very little power
• most civvy stuff sends long messages, if you see the start of a message you can "scream" very loudly to disrupt part of it and it gets dropped.
• Civvy stuff like WIFI BT and cellular has strict transmit power limits typically <1W of transmit power.
• TLDR: jamming civvy stuff requires less power than transmitting it. Still, amplifiers and directional antennas can help in the short term.
• military stuff hops from one frequency to another using a keyed unpredictable algorithm.
  • Sender and receiver have synchronized clocks and spreading keys so know what frequency to use when. Hop time is short enough jammer can't respond in time.

Fundamentals of Jamming radio signals (doesn't favor jamming)

• Jammer fills big chunk of radio spectrum with some amount of watts/MHz of noise
• EG:Russian R-330ZH puts out 10KW from 100MHz to 2GHz (approx 5KW/GHz or 5W/MHz)
  • more than enough to drown out civvy comms like wifi that use <<1W signal spanning 10-100MHz of bandwidth even with short link far away from jammer.
  • Comms designed to resist jamming can use 10W+ and reduce bandwidth of transmission as much as needed at cost of less bits/second.
    • low bandwidth link (100kb/s) with reasonable power budget is impossible to jam practically until jammer is much much closer to receiver than transmitter.
• GPS and satcom signals easy to jam because of large distance to satellite and power limits.
• Jamming increases required power density to get signal through intelligibly. Transmitter has to increase power or use narrower transmit spectrum. Fundamentally signal to noise ratio decreases and Joules/bit increases.

Communication Stealth

• Jammer + phased array antennas + very powerful computer gives ability to locate transmitters
• Jammer forces transmitters to use more power
• Phased array antennas + supercomputer:
  • computer calculates/subtracts reflected jamming signal
  • Phased array antenna+computer acts like telescope to find "dimmer" signals in background noise lowering detection threshold
• Fundamental tradeoff for transmitter
  • Shannon channel capacity
  • Even with perfect spreading of signal across available spectrum, there's fundamental capacity limits to avoid detection.

directional antennas/phased arrays

• military planes use this to communicate stealthily
• increases power sent/received to/from particular direction
• bigger antenna with more sub-elements increases directionality/gain
• Starlink terminals are big phased array antennas
  • this quora answer gives some good numbers on performance
    • Starlink terminal gives approx 3000x (35dbi) more power in chosen direction vs omnidirectional antenna
    • Nessesary to communicate with satellite 500+km away
  • Starlink terminals are pretty cheap
    • smaller phased arrays for drone-drone comms should be cheaper.
  • drone that is just a big Yagi antenna also possible and ludicrously cheap.
  • stealthy/jam immune comms for line of sight data links at km ranges seem quite practical.

development pressure for jam resistant comms and associated tech

• little development pressure on civvy side B/C FCC and similar govt. orgs abroad shut down jammers
• military and satcom will drive development more slowly
• FCC limits on transmit power can also help
  • Phased array transmit/receive improves signal/noise
  • This is partly driving wifi to use more antennas to improve bandwidth/reliability
  • hobbyist drone scene could also help (directional antennas for ground to drone comms without requiring more power or gimbals)

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 than a human carrying object using gas turbines.

What happened is now we have better battery and material technology, and way better (smaller) electronic devices (and optimized global supply chains). The cost advantage against missiles is mostly due to inertia in the military-industrial complex: most missiles in inventory were designed against targets with different size and performance parameters. You need a a million dollar AMRAAM missile to intercept an Su-30 flying 80 kms away, maybe flying at 2 mach or at 40 000 feet or pulling 9g maneuvers while dispensing chaff, flares and using EW. (and the missile carrying aircraft may have already pulled the same speed and maneuvers, and may have took off from the desert with 45 degrees Celsius and arrived to - 30 degrees Celsius flight attitude in the next couple of minutes, yet the missile must stay safe and reliable).

The infantryman did not get replaced. They just got missiles available in large numbers, and their own miniature recon helicopters in every bush. It is harder to hide and there are more precision fires to throw at you after getting spotted.

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. https://www.sandboxx.us/news/how-an-f-15e-shot-down-an-iraqi-gunship-with-a-bomb/ 

Only two moves have worked against NATO forces since the development of the F-117: hide among civilians and threaten nuclear retaliation. I don't see anything here that proposes a third effective move.

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.

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 always eager to adopt better technology, there has to be budget allocated, it has to be something a given military branch feels they have a compelling need for, and then a multi year process to select a vendor.

See https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2015-04-27

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 new drones emerge
  • soft kill systems (Jam/Hack) will be effective against cheap off the shelf consumer crap
  • hard kill systems (Airburst/Laser) exist and will still be effective
    • laser cost/KW has been dropping rapidly
• minimal viable product is enough for now
  • Ukraine war still involves squishy human soldiers and TRENCHES
  • what's the minimum viable slaughterbot
    • can it be reuseable (bomber instead of kamikaze) to reduce cost per strike

Drone warfare engame concerns are:

• kill/death ratio
  • better per $ effectiveness
• conflict budget
  • USA can outspend opponents at much higher than 10:1 ratio
• R&D budget/amortisation
  • Economies of scale likely overdetermine winners in drone vs drone warfare since quantity leads to cheaper more effective drones

A few quibbles

Ground drones have big advantages

• better payload/efficiency/endurance compared to flying
• cost can be very low (similar to car/truck/ATV)
• can use cover effectively
• indirect fire is much easier
  • launch cheap time fused shells using gun barrel
• downside is 2 or 2.5d mobility.
  • Vulnerable to landmines/obstacles unlike flying drones
  • navigation is harder
  • line of site for good RF comms is harder

Use radio, not light for comms.

• optical is immature and has downsides
  • RF handles occlusion better (smoke, walls, etc.)
• RF is fine aside from non-jamming resistant civilian stuff like WIFI
• Development pressure not there to make mobile free space optical cheap/reliable
• jamming isn't too significant
  • spread spectrum and frequency hopping is very effective
  • jamming power required to stop comms is enormous, have to cover all of spectrum with noise
• directional antennas and phased arrays give some directionality and make jamming harder
  • phased array RF can double as radar
• stealthy comms can use spread spectrum with transmit power below noise floor
  • need radio telescope equivalent to see if something is an RF hotspot transmitting noise like signal

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 drones communicate via missiles. There is no way to do that for a few hundred dollars, we're going to be talking about 10s of thousands of dollars and a much larger drone.

At that point it sucks if 50,000 dollars of reconnaissance drone is shot straight out of the sky by a cheap bullet. So you have to have some combination of armoring it, making it fly higher, giving it various countermeasures, making it fly faster, camouflaging it, etc.

Your 50,000 dollar missile carrying reconnaissance drone is also quite heavy. How long can it fly without recharging? 20 minutes? Adding more batteries barely helps because it just makes it heavier, and takes even longer to recharge. Kind of sucks to pay so much money for something which is only available 20% of the time. It's range is also far too short for it to reach the front lines by itself. It's going to need a mobile forward operating base with a huge battery or a generator pretty close to the front lines. Not a great place for delicate, poorly defended, expensive equipment.

All these things push you to get a petrol or diesel engine, and scale it up.

Suddenly you're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars and have a platform not very dissimilar to ones that have existed for years.

Ok, you might say, but what if we have autonomous drones that lock onto a target from a distance, fly straight towards them, and blow them up? That won't be vulnerable to electronic countermeasures, and so can stay cheap.

We've had them for years. They're called ATGMs or Manpads.

↑ comment by [deleted] · 2024-02-01T18:12:31.479Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Cheap drones are far easier to destroy than pretty much anything else on the battlefield, and are highly susceptible to electronic measures

So the OP addressed this, and I believe the OPs described mitigations will make the drones almost completely immune to electronic measures:

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.

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.

Replies from: RussellThor, RussellThor

↑ comment by RussellThor · 2024-02-01T20:14:18.011Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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>

↑ comment by RussellThor · 2024-02-01T20:09:51.150Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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.

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 propeller blades. So realistically it'll be a 1g acceleration after a few hundred millisecond or more delay and that thing will be very vulnerable to high-velocity counterfire, especially 25mm and 30mm airburst rounds.

I'd love to see a swarm of sniper drones go up against a 30mm airburst system

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. Thousands of mine-laying shells burst over a territory and make it un-takeable, a kind of hostile forest. Your drones will fly over it and see nothing. But the moment your people or vehicles enter the territory, something jumps out of the ground 50 meters away and they're dead. Or a column of your troops enters, the mines wait and then kill them all at once. Stuff like that.

Not sure there's any real counter to this. Even in peacetime, removing unexploded dumb bombs and mines from long-past wars (e.g. in Laos) takes more time and money than laying them in the first place. And if the mines fight back, the task of demining probably becomes unrealistic altogether. Especially as the defender can just keep dropping in more mines.

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 to strike at the thinnest armor, usually the rear, roof, or from below.

You can see recent videos of this used in Ukraine, obviously they are pretty disturbing.

Current transformers networks seem to be more than capable of perceiving and analyzing the features of a complex target such as a Russian T-72 with addon armor. Biggest limitation now is the several H100s needed would require over a kilowatt of power, take several seconds per frame, and add $25k an H100 to the BOM of an under $1000 drone.

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 would the US respond?

With ease.

The phalanx is a gun designed to track and shoot down cruise missiles. It fires bullets at a speed more than 300 times faster than a drone. It can track this stuff incredibly accurately since it's designed to be accurate enough to directly hit a jet powered missile moving 20 times faster than a drone. It can target at 115 degrees/sec, and usually engages targets at 2000 yards, but has a much higher maximum range. It can fire approximately 1000 bullets before being reloaded, and has a rate of fire of 3000 bullets/seconds.

At a distance of 1000 m a phalanx bullet takes less than a second to arrive. In that time, given costs of accelerating and decelerating, a drone could maybe get half a metre of uncertainty via jitter, at huge energy cost, something easily handled by firing 5 bullets instead of 1 (something the phalanx is already designed to handle).

The phalanx weighs about 6 tons, and has been adapted for land based use. If drones became a serious threat it could easily be mounted on tracks and provide defence for an armoured brigade over a range of a few thousand metres. It would shoot down any drone pretty much as soon as it came in range. In practice the Phalanx is probably overkill designed as it is for cruise missiles, but smaller cheaper systems could easily be developed.

The US army is not going to just obsolete all it's existing equipment because you've come up with some new technology.

Also I think you've seriously underestimated how much these drone armies you're trying to create will cost. Commercial drones are cheap, but not very useful once you buy an even cheaper jammer. Military grade equipment is expensive because it has high performance requirements, and is developed inefficiently for various reasons which drones don't magically fixes. Once you add high performance P2P links, some powerful GPUs, large batteries to run these GPUs, loads of custom software running on these drones, all the infrastructure this stuff will need, etc. you'll be looking at something no cheaper than existing weapons systems. But unlike existing weapons system which are designed to be hard to destroy, these things are basically sitting ducks. You could send a swarm of this stuff against an enemy battalion and within a few seconds a few million dollars of hardware would be shot straight out the sky.

Are bits of this valuable? Possibly. Cheap drones are likely to be used for reconnaissance, but they only have about 30 minutes of range before needing recharging, and will have to stay well away from enemy jammers, so are hardly a game changer, just another tool in the toolbox, to be used at the right times. Anti tank FPV drones? Almost certainly not long term as they're more expensive than ATGMs, and easier to defend against using existing ADS like trophy.

And as for other stuff, like missile carrying drones. That stuff literally already exists, and is widely used. The drones are just jet engines instead of quadcopters as quadcopters have terrible range, terrible speed, terrible payload, and missiles are heavy and expensive. JDAMs are commonly used on bombs weighing 500 pounds. The Quadcopter that could carry that would be massive, slow, expensive and could be shot down by anyone with a rifle.

↑ comment by RussellThor · 2024-02-06T09:09:32.115Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

For the phalanx or similar - check this link this link. The consensus seems to be that the gun can't take out multiple missiles.

"We’re gonna assume that by “missile” you mean a trans-sonic rocket propelled guided warhead, which is incapable of significant evasive or deceptive course changes within the last 1500 meters of its approach. We’re further going to assume that by CIWS you mean a guns only Phalanx installation or foreign equivalent, firing 4200–4500 rounds per minute of 20mm kinetic energy projectiles at 1200 meters per second. The unit would have the standard assemblage of radars and fire control.

A typical Phalanx installation has about a eighty percent chance of destroying two of these missiles if they are detected within ten seconds of each other in an unobstructed field of fire. If the missiles are “jinking” to avoid destruction, the chance of getting both with one Phalanx unit drops to thirty percent. If the missiles enter the kill zone more than ten seconds apart, the kill rate climbs to well over ninety percent."

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 [LW(p) · GW(p)]. 

Replies from: yair-halberstadt

↑ comment by Yair Halberstadt (yair-halberstadt) · 2024-02-06T11:25:13.476Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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.

Replies from: RussellThor

↑ comment by RussellThor · 2024-02-06T20:07:37.783Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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.

Replies from: yair-halberstadt

↑ comment by Yair Halberstadt (yair-halberstadt) · 2024-02-07T06:22:54.931Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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 radar and missile launcher.

I expect that if drones ever become a serious threat will see the proliferation of lots of Gatling guns mounted on tanks and other vehicles, linked to a decentralised radar system combining lots of different radars of different specs. The radars will generally be deployed further behind the front line, (although some cheaper short range ones might be mounted on tanks) and will give targeting information to the guns scattered across the front line which will take out the drones.

The guns are much less vulnerable, and less expensive so don't make good targets. The radars are very expensive but much further behind the front line, out of range of cheaper drones and well defended by both guns and missiles against more expensive solutions. And taking out a single radar just degrades performance, doesn't take down the whole system.

This will be expensive and complex to develop but far quicker than your autonomous drone army, since all the pieces are already in place.

Finally you claim iron dome is out of reach of most countries, but most countries do have SAM systems of various sizes. Iron dome is unique in it's ability to target SRBMs, and reflects the trade offs needed for that, but drones are much simpler to take down, and countries that deploy SAMs capable of taking down modern fighter jets could easily deploy ones capable of taking down drones. Tamir is just a good example since I know it's cost and it's not that expensive.

Replies from: None, RussellThor

↑ comment by [deleted] · 2024-02-07T06:57:41.867Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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.

Replies from: yair-halberstadt

↑ comment by Yair Halberstadt (yair-halberstadt) · 2024-02-07T07:39:21.685Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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.

Replies from: None

↑ comment by [deleted] · 2024-02-07T15:36:30.365Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

 

How do these drones communicate?

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

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.

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.

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.

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 destroyed because you can stream the weight deltas from the mother drone to satellite and rehost it on replacement hardware when it gets destroyed.

And as I mentioned:

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

Yes that will reduce battery life, and the bigger issue is cost.  However the model I am proposing is to use a small GPU on each drone, and:

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.

Keep all the intelligence in the mother drone, which can be shot down.

 

* Switchblade 600s are listed at 80k each, are anti tank, and have some level of autonomy.  

Replies from: yair-halberstadt

↑ comment by Yair Halberstadt (yair-halberstadt) · 2024-02-08T04:29:42.696Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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.

If it has line of sight to the drones, then it has line of sight to the target, and can be engaged by them.

Replies from: None

↑ comment by [deleted] · 2024-02-08T05:40:04.898Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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.

Replies from: yair-halberstadt

↑ comment by Yair Halberstadt (yair-halberstadt) · 2024-02-08T09:10:02.785Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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.

Replies from: None

↑ comment by [deleted] · 2024-02-08T11:23:44.808Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The key piece of information missing from all your assumptions is you keep forgetting 3 things:

(1) drones, even 100k+ drones, are cheaper than anything else

(2) drone speed of 100-300 mph, and very low altitude flying, allow for new tactical possibilities the legacy assets do not have.  None of the countermeasures you mention will work like you think.  The issue isn't that you can't strap guns to existing armored vehicles and shoot down drones.  The issue is that you cannot concentrate enough forces in one place with existing vehicles to not get annihilated.  To stop drones you need defense in depth, multiple perimeters of interceptor drones in a relocatable swarm.  

Last ditch guns are not going to save you, because drones can be relocated and concentrated into lethal numbers at the most promising locations on the battlefield. 

(3) None of our armchair pontificating, yours or mine, actually matters.  What matters is that drones are murderously effective on the battlefield.  Historically there were arguments that sounded reasonable by cavalry officers and battleship admirals, long after the technology that replaced them was proven effective on the battlefield.  This is what I think you should take away from this discussion: when a major change in technology like this arrives, or anything else, you should update on the data.

the subreddit r/combatfootage has hundreds of drone snuff videos if you wish to see people get murdered by drones, a lot of the data I am using for this analysis comes directly from there.  

↑ comment by RussellThor · 2024-02-07T06:50:12.169Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I expect that if drones ever become a serious threat will see the proliferation of lots of Gatling guns mounted on tanks and other vehicles, linked to a decentralised radar system combining lots of different radars of different specs. 

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.

 Anti tank FPV drones? Almost certainly not long term as they’re more expensive than ATGMs,

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

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, where they engage as OP describes. A local concentration of force that can be delivered anywhere seems like a decisive advantage.

Shooting aircraft at high altitudes requires either large missiles or fighter aircraft. In either case, large radar antennas are needed for guidance. So I don’t think that AI lets air warfare be miniaturized, like it does ground warfare.

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

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.

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.

• "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 taking significant ground with these would be difficult.
• You would need a considerable amount of relay drones if you want them to stay relatively low to the ground and avoid detection. The horizon - and in some cases, trees and hills - will block the communications lasers. This is the main reason we don't see point-to-point links used more often.
• In general you are talking about adding a great deal of capability to these drones, but this will balloon the cost. Adding capabilities also increases weight, which further increases cost and logistics footprint. The growth in cost to size is exponential.
• The force composition presented seems to be geared towards anti-armor at the expense of all else. There isn't an answer for infantry in buildings here.
• You cannot "ignore" aircraft! Bombs may not be able to target moving drones, but they can target your command and control infrastructure, your logistics, and your industry. 
• You will need stationary infrastructure because you will need to maintain and repair those drones.
• You can't occupy territory with drones. Infantry will still have a place enforcing the occupation, gathering HUMINT, and performing labor duties.
• You would be able to counter these drones with flak guns. Anti-air cannons firing explosive shells can destroy drones, and the drones may not be agile enough to dodge them. Fuzed explosive shells can be very cheap, so this would bring the economic calculation back in favor of conventional forces.
• The US military seems to believe it will need to conduct a lot of tunnel warfare in the near future. There are miles of tunnel networks beneath many major cities in the forms of sewers, drains, subways, and nuclear bunkers. You can't use drones here.

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.