Home-made drones now threaten conventional armed forces
economist.com
economist.com
Which is one of the scariest things I've seen in a while. The video glosses over the fact that EMPs would probably make for a viable (if collateral-damage-inducing) defense, but still pretty terrifying.
Some other possible defenses are other drones and flack clouds. A flack cloud in the classroom in the video might have defeated the drones.
Both of these defenses might be staged strategically throughout various public places or even carried by individuals for their own protection.
If drone attacks become common, anti-drone defenses are likely to become widespread as well.
I'm personally more concerned about potential chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare, against which there's really not much that people can do, and which might eventually become as easy to perpetrate as conventional drone attacks (and might even be facilitated by them).
I think most of that concern is misplaced. It will never be easy for non-state actors to conduct nuclear warfare (unless you count inefficient small scale radiological attacks) and while a sufficiently dedicated group can synthesize chemical weapons, it's easier and generally more efficient to just build a big truck bomb (or ten). Biological warfare is more complicated, both because it depends on your definitions (it could be said that every person stupid enough to go to work with the flu is engaging in biological warfare, they're certainly doing more damage than all the world's terrorists put together ever have), but also because that's the one area where rapidly developing technology really could have a huge impact in the near future.
Well, you could say that.... But it's about as smart as engaging in a fight against micro-aggressions. If you fight for a society where the individual can't even handle minor stress factors, you fight for a society with little to no immune system, that is all but guaranteed to crumble.
Most of our resistant bacteria are coming from something that makes holding onto resistance a survival trait. Antibiotic overuse in factory farming or hospitals which obviously are continuously battling bacteria are two of the prime generators.
This is the first time I've heard this. Can you recommend some references with more info on it?
Long-term starvation-induced loss of antibiotic resistance in bacteria
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24196362
Loss of Antibiotic Resistance in Staphylococcus aureus Resulting from Growth at High Temperature
http://www.microbiologyresearch.org/docserver/fulltext/micro...
And here's a more high level answer from the Biology StackExchange on the mechanism by which this happens with a link to 3 other papers on the underlying subject https://biology.stackexchange.com/a/15930
That said, a lot of it is surprisingly plausible (though maybe not the grainy filming-a-CRT overlays).
http://www.businessinsider.de/drones-carrying-drugs-and-expl...
The part where the chap at the end explains the purpose of the video? It's not supposed to make people think it's real.
It's very chilling that this new vector of attack is very much here for everyone to utilize.
Essentially instead of spraying water out of the sprinklers, spray paint or other liquids that would block the vision of the drones. I think that would be a lot cheaper and harder to build defences for than an EMP.
(Just realised that you could also spray a opaque gas which would also block vision and might make less of a mess to clean up).
String polymer sounds like it could work, my only concern would be if you could design prop guards for the drones such that they filter the air (very coarsely) and don't allow any objects to touch the props.
https://hackaday.com/2011/09/05/engine-hacks-a-pulse-jet-uav...
A military base might have robotic sentry guns [1] to begin with, as they are already armed with these today to defend against incoming mortars. Later on, I imagine with offensive drone capabilities being developed, it will lead to repurposing the drones in a defensive posture. Perhaps the best answer is to scale with the threat.
The defensive drone fleet circle the base. Upon a detection of an incoming fleet, rather than one sentry gun taking on 100 or 1000 drones, a defensive swarm targets the incoming swarm. More of a one-to-one fight or perhaps 1:4 if your drones are more capable fighters.
This is all a bit of a bummer. We talk about how we'll get robots to obey the three laws of robotics, but it'd be nice if we could just get humans to follow the first law. "A robot (human) may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."
The question to me is how do you defend civilian targets like universities, city halls and malls? You can't build military style defences around these targets and the budget is going to be pretty low. Also you need a exceptionally low response time since the drones can deploy and kill in seconds.
Beyond that, you might see people purchasing defensive measures once attacks become more of a threat. Whether that's lasers, other drones or something we haven't thought of. There would be a demand for counter measures - you can already see the market forming for such counter measures.
Do you really think that it would work to avoid to someone grab the necessary components to build a cheap drone ?
What must criminalise is the components to make drones a weapon. Aka, EXPLOSIVES and WEAPONS. And restrict access to chemicals to make explosives.
And this would not work when the guys building it, are living on anarchy place where the effective law are made by they.
Against drones? You probably don't. I mean, those are pretty vulnerable to all sorts of attacks; aerial drones don't really change things.
In this scenario, cyber-warfare will become even more critical. Imagine being able to hack and take over your enemy's defensive drone contingent.
I think that arms race will rather quickly lead to the use of very fast moving objects that don’t slow down much due to air resistance (i.e. bullets or missiles)
The other direction you could possibly go is a super-fine, but conductive powder (would carbon powder work?) that could get in the motors and potentially cause a short. Particulates that fine would probably be a health risk though.
Just as a side note, as long as your elemental carbon nanoparticles are larger than 10PM (most recommend 2.5PM) they are not considered damaging to health by the WHO [1].
[1] http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/162535/e...
Handgun shot shells!
You can blind or short out the cameras using infrared lasers, much better than paint which requires much closer range.
Found a youtube video. ETN stands for Erythritol tetranitrate, an explosive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug3qce3Sae4
Yikes...
The only comfort I can find is that the process is probably just complicated enough that 50% of the idiots who try to make it will probably maim themselves instead of succeeding.
Commercial electronics designers have been designing around EMI for decades now. Is it that hard to imagine that actors would put in the effort to shield their devices? A Faraday cage around the electronics would go a long way towards eliminating the effects of an EMP.
Even if you couldn't stop the EMP from knocking systems out, you could design them to come back online very quickly, making the EMP a rather expensive temporary measure.
For home-made drones it might be effective, but those drones are cheap, and the attackers could always launch more. I just don't see EMPs as posing a real threat to any military.
Am I off in my estimation?
Ever seen a carrier's radar hit a drone? And that's nothing compared to NEMP waveforms.
It will be effective for maybe 50-100 yards. I can afford more drones than you can afford Aegis platforms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XbLz0L6UdI
(Change it to english subtitles)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_comp...
Perhaps if you made the Faraday cage out of superconducting material. But that would currently require huge cooling equipment, so that's not really an option.
EMI protection in devices is meant for normal interference, not high powered EM stuff.
What about the next wave of drones coming in 5 minutes later? Now you are in an arms race against amount of drones/waves and speed of your EMP generators to generate deadly enough pulses.
I am not at all familiar of what kind of equipment you need to generate EMP that would fry electronics in a building wide scale, but would that make financial sense to include in every building? Would they be fast enough to produce and install before attacks become too prevelant?
The only effective defenses today are the same as against regular missiles: guns, missiles, decoys, ECM, and blinding lasers. In a few years high-powered lasers might become viable.
No need to do that, just get an old enough car/truck that can be started with a crank.
I had the relay box catch on fire (in the pouring rain!) once. Put the fire out, pulled all the twisted charred copper off itself as not to short out, found another battery and bam! Off she drove again.
If I hadn't stopped immediately as the fire started, the car would have happily kept running - it only needed the relays for the starter motor. Everything else runs from the points/distributor/alternator.
If you had an old diesel, it'd be even better. Those literally have no electronic components necessary for the engine to run - mechanical fuel pump, glow plugs. They can basically run underwater as long as it's got fresh air coming in.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/7155/isis-drone-droppin...
The US Army has had to react by rebuilding short-range air defense capabilities. They used to be able to depend on the US Air Force to protect ground forces from aerial attack but now those days are gone.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17747/us-army-rushes-to...
The main problem is detection and tracking. Even if you can counter the drones, the distraction of keeping an eye out for them and communicating back to your anti-drone guy is something you just don't want to have to deal with in close combat. Bear in mind these things can pop up and execute an attack in just a minute or two, possibly in swarms. Ideally you want an automated solution so your door kickers can focus on the job at hand.
[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/news/a2751...
You can also get around that with some sort of hardwired control laptop that you leave somewhere, but that has a SPOF issue like the cell networks do.
You can also get around that with self programmed drones, but they are more limited in adaptability.
For now (perhaps).
My android phone for 300 quid has more computing power than my fast desktop had 20 years ago in about one hundredth the power budget with a powerful high speed network connection.
Obviously this would require serious sophistication (not just anyone could string it together), but I think that anyone capable of being the first to build a serious threat with any of this technology will likely have funding and serious skills on tap.
I wonder how many of those allow roaming using SIMs from countries that have no such requirements. All of that seems so much like security theater.
https://plus.google.com/collection/wDwWpB
https://plus.google.com/+DanielSuarez/posts/gQYcxrMhuXZ
https://plus.google.com/+DanielSuarez/posts/Tq6erLaLoof
https://plus.google.com/+DanielSuarez/posts/KcyiPJhMWcu
This wouldn't be efficient against a swarm of drone attack though, as they can be operated remotely from miles away.
Also, I'm impressed that a cheap drone can use optical navigation. The last time that someone talked about it, was about it's usage on Tomahawk cruise missiles, since 80's, as a tech miracle of electronics.
It is natural that if one side starts to develop a new technology and employs it successfully, that the other parties will follow as well. This changes the landscape, sure. But it's not threatening. That's the normal process of development.
Every army is better of if they can use machines to do their attacks for them. At least between both armies this should also decrease the overall casualties I hope. I'm not so naive to assume that this would decrease civilian casualties, though.
It's pretty disgusting when you actually thinks about it. I don't want bad newspaper headlines about soldier deaths, so I'll use a robot that kills a bunch of civilians as collateral.
Unless US military comes up with relieable and cheap solution they will eventually starve themselves as the parts to make attack drones gets cheaper and cheaper. Like the stinger missiles in the article, they cost almost $200k while a drone costs $2k + whatever they are dropping. Obviously US has money to spend, but for how long?
There are plenty of examples of asymmetric warfare like what happened to US in Vietnam or what happened to Russians in Finland.
The problem is hitting the damn things. They're small, can turn on a dime, don't reflect radar very well, and run cold enough to give IR tracking some issues. Army manuals like [1] typically call for a coordinated fire of small arms across a large volume of airspace to hit a drone, but advise commanders that hit probabilities are low. Their most urgent advice is to keep spotters looking for enemy drones, and to use concealment and camouflage as much as possible to avoid enemy drone surveillance.
[1] https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/atp3-01-8.pdf, search for "UAS" (Unmanned Aerial System)
Could you hit a moving drone with a rifle? Even when I shot competitively at 500m, I probably couldn't. You can hit clay pigeons with a shotgun but a drone can easily manoeuvre beyond range.
Please at least read to the second paragraph.
If you can't hit it with the weapon what is the point of even mentioning the weapon? You might as well have said you could fight a drone with a baseball bat for all you contributed to this discussion.
The second paragraph was the main contribution; the first paragraph was a transition from the statement of the person I was replying to.
A perimeter defense would need to be established, with radars for long range scanning. And cameras for short range confirmation. It will also need infrared cameras to operate at night.
A computer system would monitor the perimeter, for all incoming threats. This computer system must be very powerful, as it is processing a lot of data in real time. However, this kind of technology should now be in the realms of deep learning AI that is currently being developed now.
Once a positive visual confirmation is made, to determine that the aerial object is an intrusion drone, then an alert can be given to the human commander, of the incoming threat. And a human can still stay in the loop to order the execution.
Then, a turret mounted laser cannon, can be used to burn down the drone. Or even a rifle can be used to kill the drone with a kinetic impact. The accuracy of a bullet fired by a robot, should far exceed the skill of the best human sniper. But bullets still follow a parabolic path, so a turret mounted laser cannon is more flexible to destroy drones.
And a railgun could be used if the energy footpounds of smokeless powder is not cutting it -- but really, a small grain round with a large powder charge will fly straight for the distances we are concerned with here.
If I remember the details correctly, the Metal Storm[1] weapon system should be able to do just that: Fire explosive rounds set to detonate at a specific point in their flight. Fire n^3 rounds to cover enough space to account for speed, direction and altitude changes and you should be set.
You shoot those targets about 35 yards ±15 away from where you are standing. You'll hear an alert (or call) for a target which will appear somewhere out in front of you about 3 seconds later. They may be traveling quickly or slowly, near the ground or high above you, in the same or opposite directions. You'll have about 5 seconds to hit two targets with two shells from a "double barrelled" shotgun.
I've little doubt that with an afternoon of practice I could reliably hit clays moving 30% faster; not as accurately as in an ordinary game, but certainly well over 50%.
If the targets were larger and need to be "clipped" rather than fully destroyed then the task becomes easier. Coupled with a shotgun that can hold more than 2 shells, modern sights, and semi-automatic action: I think reliably shooting targets like that is possible.
If drones become considerably more durable then you'd need a tighter pattern of heavier shot to delivery sufficient energy to disable or destroy it. Tighter patterns would make hitting the target more difficult as you need to be more accurate when aiming. As the size and power behind your shot increases it also becomes more difficult to make follow-up shots if you miss because the recoil pulls you off target.
The biggest hinderance wouldn't be speed but maneurverability. In order to hit a moving target you need to be able to predict where it will be, if a drone moves erratically then it would be very hard to predict and so very hard to shoot.
Drones on the other hand, once they become more intelligent, should be able to fly in a random pattern, to avoid incoming projectiles fired against it.
A rifle round like a Nosler 26 will travel a quarter mile with no drop. Fired out of a long barrel, with a good rifling twist, accuracy is ridiculously good. There are plenty of high powered rounds that don't have to be fired with nearly as much prediction necessary in skeet -- because theyll be traveling at 4k feet per second. If the drone is within a mile..its a piece of cake.
I think they will soon be capable of that too[0].
0. https://qz.com/1185488/chinese-scientists-used-crispr-gene-e...
I don't think it is real, but it shows the future.
There is nothing new under the sun.
I guess terrorists will use them against US drones, and military and commercial aircrafts.
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On Tuesday, the Russian Defence Ministry appeared to accuse the US of being involved in the latest attack, claiming that an American Poseidon intelligence aircraft patrolling over the base during the attack was a “strange coincidence”.
It also said in an earlier post that the perpetrators needed technology from “countries with high-technological capabilities” and the drones’ explosive devices had “foreign detonating fuses”.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/russia-m...
Users often post workaround URLs in these threads, but even if they don't, in most cases there are standard ways of reading the articles that work fine.
I've been saying this for months. If you browse HN using a mobile device it is not easy to work around a paywall. Publishers are constantly making it more difficult, coming from google search doesn't give you a free pass anymore. I can't "focus on the content" if there is no way to access it.
Notice how the top voted comment in the thread you posted is asking for the same (a paywall tag). Maybe you could try going mobile-only for a few weeks to understand the pain?
Democratizing a means of preventing that might help prevent similar atrocities in the 21st Century.
A second amendment for the 3D printed drone age, if you will.