Can we please just fight all of our wars on the moon with giant robots like God intended?
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Not as things stand from a treaty standpoint.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
The Outer Space Treaty, formally the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, is a multilateral treaty that forms the basis of international space law. Negotiated and drafted under the auspices of the United Nations, it was opened for signature in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union on 27 January 1967, entering into force on 10 October 1967.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty_of_1967
Article IV
States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.
The moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manœuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited. The use of any equipment or facility necessary for peaceful exploration of the moon and other celestial bodies shall also not be prohibited.
I have accidentally seen far too many videos from !ukraine@sopuli.xyz to know that these things are fucking brutal.
Knowing full well that on a metric of pure numbers, these don’t compare to other weapons of war, but there’s something about the personal nature of these fuckers that are just so fucking soul-destroying.
Those videos are definitely NSFL (and are usually marked as such, in fairness), but most of them have zoomed-in, full-screen footage of the carnage they leave behind. They are mostly individual or 2-3 individuals hiding/cowering alone in a trench, blown to literal pieces and left dying, completely unaware that somewhere on the other end of that drone is an operator watching their final excruciating moments of life.
It is one thing to be operating a long-range artillery weapon, or a drone flying at several thousand feet firing long-range missiles, or being in a close-combat life-or-death situation, but it’s a completely different experience watching a shell drop on a defenseless, terrified and cowering human (likely coerced into war or forcibly compelled to the front-line) as if you’re 10 fucking feet above them, while yourself are completely out of immediate harm.
Fuck war, but especially fuck these drones in particular.
c/ukraine@sopuli.xyz
The syntax you want is this:
!ukraine@sopuli.xyzWhich yields this:
That’ll create a hyperlink to the community through whichever lemmy frontend a given person reading your comment is using. So, for example, I’m reading it on lemmy.today, and there, it’ll be https://lemmy.today/c/ukraine@sopuli.xyz . Lets a given user just click and then subscribe to the community.
thanks
Drones currently outpace their countermeasurs. This will definitely not be a thing forever. I think the effectiveness of cheap drones will go down as be countermeasures are invented.
We already see new very effective military drone jammers starting to come out
The only reliable counter to a drone is likely another drone.
I suspect Peter F Hamilton got it close, in the Confederation series, with WASPs. They are space based weapon platforms. They carry a mix of offensive and defensive subsystems, and operate with swarm logic.
I could easily see a larger drone carrying a swarm of 1 shot micro drones. When close, some would be sacrificed to get better sensor data, others would go on the attack. Conversely, a defensive target would launch their own swarm. It’s goal would be to stop the attackers getting a good shot on a high value target. It might also counterattack, either against the mother ship drone, or backtracking to find the launch site.
Jamming would also be part of this. A jammer could easily cut off the swarm from external data sources. Live satellite or remote surveillance systems would be cut. Point to point lasers are far harder, as are burst transmissions. Local sensor drones could easily punch short range data back, or paint targets, until they are destroyed by defensive systems.
It’s going up be interesting and scary when we see the first mega swarm of drones, a river of them just pouring through the sky and hammering from every direction at the defenses.
Constant evolution of drone and antidrone, a production race with frontlines being slowly shifting walls of drone combat, them pouring out of factories as fast as they can be made with the front moving based on who can make more per hour
I suspect it will be more subtle even if it’s only battery life limited. Huge swarms will also struggle against fixed defences. More likely it will be used in ambush. E.g. air deployed near an enemy convoy, or swarming from rooftops and windows onto an infantry unit. Counter deployment will have to be seconds to stop the lead elements. Potentially with heavier reinforcements flying in.
I’ve personally got visions of a Boston dynamics dogbot with a harness full of drones. 1 button press and a few dozen micro drones swarm out, with larger ones launching as needed.
I could also see facial recognition drones being deployed from a predator drone, like cluster bombs. A little akin to the bots used in the film minority report. They swarm a building or block, and try and identify all the faces they can find.
The key thing however will be battery life. Multicopters are power hogs. You need around 40% battery to get maybe 5-20 minutes flight times (depending on how the manoeuvre). Longer times can be achieved , but requires larger systems with higher costs. Is 1 system with a 2 hour flight time worth 20 smaller systems only good for 10 minutes?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr7ym1zkda8
Anti-air guns are the countermeasure. RADAR good enough to detect drones + an aimbot and programmable air-burst round to “shotgun” your pellets to damage those soft plastic bits.
We’re going back to WW2 tech. AA guns were considered obsolete because Helicopters + Missiles had more range. But now we need to build cheaper AA Guns for the anti-drone role.
AA Guns are also useful vs infantry, so in an infantry vs infantry fight, having an AA Gun platform will be useful even without any drones around. Airburst and rapid fire is always useful, and I expect the computers that make RADAR possible will be far cheaper today than decades past.
They may both have a role.
If you know that a given point is at risk of attack, using a static defense like AA guns is practical. Say you have some sort of specific, high-value target that you can put AA guns around. That may be a very sensible thing to do.
But the problem, if you intend to rely only on those, is that there is then a concentration of force issue. The attacker can choose which point to attack; they get the initiative.
Say you’re trying to defend against something like a Shahed-136. It can hit pretty much anywhere in Ukraine. You can’t stick an AA gun on everything that Russia might consider trading a Shahed-136 for.
But, okay, say you try to go big with static defenses. Let’s say that you can obtain and pony up the resources to hypothetically stick an AA gun at every single point along the front line and border, and that your AA gun has the altitude to hit a drone. You have an unbroken line of engagement envelope all around a country. That’d be an extraordinary expenditure, but it could hypothetically be done. So a drone has to fly through defended airspace. The problem is that if the other guy expends an equivalent amount of resources, he can buy a shit-ton of drones and fly them all through a single gun’s engagement envelope. Even if he doesn’t even bother to try to attack the antiaircraft gun, your gun defenses are just going to get overwhelmed, because all of the attacker’s resources are engaged, whereas the vast bulk of the defender’s resources are not in the fight. Maybe you hit a tiny percentage of drones, but the rest are going to be able to simply fly through.
The problem is that the cost of static defenses in that scenario grows at something like the square of the scale of the air conflict – you have to have enough static defenses to counter all of the attacker’s aircraft, and pre-place those defenses at all points that might be attacked, whereas the cost of the attack grows only linearly. It’s cost-effective to use static defenses only if the attacker is compelled to attack a limited number of points.
If that’s not the case, then using some form of mobile defense is more important – say, I don’t know, you have a fleet of gun-armed, jet-powered counter-UAS UASes. Dollar-for-dollar, they might not be as effective as a static gun. But…you can route most or all of them in to meet any given attack.
The spot where we intend to fight must not be made known; for then the enemy will have to prepare against a possible attack at several different points; and his forces being thus distributed in many directions, the numbers we shall have to face at any given point will be proportionately few.
For should the enemy strengthen his van, he will weaken his rear; should he strengthen his rear, he will weaken his van; should he strengthen his left, he will weaken his right; should he strengthen his right, he will weaken his left. If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.
Numerical weakness comes from having to prepare against possible attacks; numerical strength, from compelling our adversary to make these preparations against us.
Knowing the place and the time of the coming battle, we may concentrate from the greatest distances in order to fight.
But if neither time nor place be known, then the left wing will be impotent to succor the right, the right equally impotent to succor the left, the van unable to relieve the rear, or the rear to support the van. How much more so if the furthest portions of the army are anything under a hundred LI apart, and even the nearest are separated by several LI!
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War, ~400 BC
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There are in fact a huge number of reliable counters to drones, including but not limited to anti-aircraft gun systems, anti-aircraft lasers, RF jamming devices (especially effective against cheap/makeshift drones), and several more. Drones are currently an emergent threat without a robust countermeasure scheme, but given their massive role in the Ukraine war that is not going to go unaddressed for long. From a purely mechanical standpoint, small drone munitions are also physically very vulnerable, making them readily destroyed by anti-air autocannon fire or even laser weapons if you assume RF jamming will not solve the problem.
Between GPS (jammable but likely gets you into the target area), dead reckoning, optical flow sensors and increasingly impressive onboard camera processing, RF jamming will soon be irrelevant.
Almost a decade ago I was flying agricultural mapping missions that were 99% autonomous, and the parts that weren’t were problems a military drone doesn’t have (soft launch and landing)
The clear counter is autocannons, likely fully automated themselves to manage large swarms. The other would be cheap anti-drone missiles that either are basically a drone themselves or a glorified model rocket. Possibly tiny, cheap and fast interceptors launched from fixed-wing drones. The weak point of drones is literally their physical weakness.
Onboard AI guidance is not difficult.
Yes it is.
Both of you are right.
It’s difficult, but how difficult depends on the task you set. If the task is “maintain manually initiated target lock on a clearly defined object on an empty field, despite the communications link breaking for 10 seconds” -> it is “give a team of coders half a year” difficult. It’s been solved before, the solution just needs re-inventing and porting to a different platform.
If it’s “identify whether an object is military, whether it is frienly or hostile, consider if it’s worth attacking, and attack a camouflaged target in a dense forest”, then it’s currently not worth trying.
I will be very suprised if this isn’t already happening.
It’s one thing detecting a person with machine learning in a test and an actual soldier with camouflage in a very imperfect environment. Also good luck telling friend from foe from civilian.
This has all sorts of problems while making the whole system more complicated and prone to issues. Not the mention moral questions of autonomous weapons. I have no doubt it will happen but not yet, not here.
Why would the drone differentiate an armed person from a civilian? I mean, you’ll be asking to separate out children next, at that rate!
I know it already does, at least in newer Lancets. Expect this in fpv type devices soon.
You can’t be serious.
Tracking a moving object in realtime with video is a standard task for a machine learning engineer. You can do it on an embedded platform with ML hardware support. I don’t know what hardware newer Lancets use but they can already do it according from developer reports from Telegram channels like e.g Разработчик БПЛА.
Edit, apparently I’m an idiot and my ability to tell truth from fiction is a lot worse than I thought.
In my defence however, all the parts are completely viable. I also saw it mixed in with Boston dynamics videos.
I’ll leave the original comment for context of my folly.
The US already has them.
There are single shot drones, designed to be deployed into a building, or cave system. They then use cameras etc to navigate, while running face recognition. When they find their target, they fly just in front of it. The shaped C4 charge is designed to reduce their head to red mist, while not risking those close by.
AI + cheap drones will completely change warfare. Probably on the same level as the tank, or machine gun.
The US already has them.
Do you have a source for this? These sound uncannily close to the Slaughterbots short film…
Jammers only work against remote controlled drones. Autonomous ones have no such issue. And jammers are never a problem against civilians, which tech like this will eventually be used on.
That’s only one example
If I had to guess, the government has had this tech since at least the early 2000s. The CIA has been doing shady ass shit since their inception, and shit like that is probably only the tip of the iceberg of what they currently have. Though they’re probably using something closer to grenades than in that film, as 1 drone to 1 kill probably isn’t enough.
That short film is one of only a few that has stuck with me.
Western countries have been slow to absorb these lessons. Simple and cheap weapons will not replace big, high-end platforms, but they will complement them. The Pentagon is belatedly embarking on Replicator, an initiative to build thousands of low-cost drones and munitions able to take on China’s enormous forces. Europe is even further behind. Its ministers and generals increasingly believe that they could face another major European war by the end of the decade. If so, investment in low-end drones needs to grow urgently. Moreover, ubiquitous drones will require ubiquitous defences—not just on battlefields but also in cities at peace.
I think that any war determined by who can churn out more low-end drones is going to be dominated by China, given their overwhelming share of the consumer market. Consumer drones are made there because China has comparative advantage.
That will only change if the basic methods of manufacture change, like, production is far more heavily automated. And even then, it’s not clear to me that China has a disadvantage in industrial automation.
I think a more-interesting technology question is who has better counters to low-end drones. There, I can imagine room for a technological advantage. As things stand today, though, we really don’t have a compelling answer, and we probably should have come up with one by now.
These flying IEDs can be defeated with some simple radio jamming. They will fall out of the sky without a remote control signal.
So, I haven’t played with them, but even commercial, off-the-shelf DJI consumer drones have the ability to return to some location if they lose link, so they’re gonna have at least GPS in there. You can jam that, but they’ve got accelerometers, and you can’t jam that. They shouldn’t drop out of the sky even if you can manage to jam things.
It looks like DJI drones have frequency-hopping spread spectrum support, too. So you have to jam all frequencies that they’re using, since you don’t know which they’re using at any given instant. For consumer hardware, it probably doesn’t matter much – nobody is jamming you, so you sit in your little assigned piece of spectrum, have a handful of channels – but in a war, you can probably expand the frequencies you use, use a huge chunk of the spectrum, if need be.
There are also some forms of jam resistance that AFAIK are not being exploited – beam-forming or directional antennas.
Both Russia and Ukraine have a pretty strong interest in using electronic warfare against drones, and the fact that both are still using a lot of them seems like a pretty good argument that they can’t currently successfully stop them via electronic warfare.
And even if you can jam signal when it gets really close to the target, if you have a second drone watching – which it looks like Ukraine and Russia often are, from the videos I see, maybe to do damage assessment – you can probably stick a laser designator on those, if they haven’t already, use it to guide the weaponized drone in.
Another quick off-the-cuff improvement: the drone feeds being sent today contain a lot of unnecessary information, more than is required for a human operator to guide them in. The less information that needs to make it through, and the more you can afford to cut out and use on redundancy in transmission, the more-jam-resistant the thing is. You can fall back to a unreliable-channel mode if need be for the last bit of the approach.
Here’s a satellite source image. That’s lossily-compressed, JPEG, at 510,254 bytes. It’s pretty, but if you already know what you’re looking at and are trying to just ram it, you don’t need anything like that much information.
Here’s the same image after I’ve run a Laplace edge-detection on it, denoised it, run a threshold on it (you could probably use a simple heuristic to select the threshold, but even if not, it’d be fine for the operator to manually choose a threshold), converted it to 1-bit, and then PNG-compressed it. That resulting frame is enough to keep identifying the objects in the image, enough that if you could see that frame, an operator could hold it on-target, and it’s only 30,343 bytes, about 6% the size.
Then you can use the newly-free bandwidth to send forward error correction information – some folks here may have used it in the form of PAR2, popular in the piracy scene – so that if any N% of the data makes it through, the frame can be reassembled. Now it’s a lot harder to jam.
And that’s an off-the-cuff approach that took me about 2 minutes just using the tools that I have on my system (GIMP and PAR2) and zero time trying to improve on it. You figure that if you pay someone who actually specializes in the area to bang on this a bit, you can probably get something rather better.
Sounds like a good idea. It also sounds like you know a few things about GIMP - are you subscribed to gimp@lemmy.world?
Hi there! It looks like you f*cked up a community link again. Here’s a fixed version:
I am not a bot, and this action was performed manually. Have a wonderful day!
Ah, well spotted, you c*nt! Hope you have a wonderful day too!
AI guidance does not rely on remote.
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Anyone have a non paywalled or more info on the subject? All signs point towards an impending global war and I’d like to be as prepared as possible.
PRECISION-GUIDED weapons first appeared in their modern form on the battlefield in Vietnam a little over 50 years ago. As armed forces have strived ever since for accuracy and destructiveness, the cost of such weapons has soared. America’s gps-guided artillery shells cost $100,000 a time. Because smart weapons are expensive, they are scarce. That is why European countries ran out of them in Libya in 2011. Israel, more eager to conserve its stockpiles than avoid collateral damage, has rained dumb bombs on Gaza. What, though, if you could combine precision and abundance?
For the first time in the history of warfare that question is being answered on the battlefields of Ukraine. Our report this week shows how first-person view (FPV) drones are mushrooming along the front lines. They are small, cheap, explosives-laden aircraft adapted from consumer models, and they are making a soldier’s life even more dangerous. These drones slip into tank turrets or dugouts. They loiter and pursue their quarry before going for the kill. They are inflicting a heavy toll on infantry and armour.
The war is also making FPV drones and their maritime cousins ubiquitous. January saw 3,000 verified FPV drone strikes. This week Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, created the Unmanned Systems Force, dedicated to drone warfare. In 2024 Ukraine is on track to build 1m-2m drones. Astonishingly, that will match Ukraine’s reduced consumption of shells (which is down because Republicans in Congress are shamefully denying Ukraine the supplies it needs).
The drone is not a wonder weapon—no such thing exists. It matters because it embodies big trends in war: a shift towards small, cheap and disposable weapons; the increasing use of consumer technology; and the drift towards autonomy in battle. Because of these trends, drone technology will spread rapidly from armies to militias, terrorists and criminals. And it will improve not at the budget-cycle pace of the military-industrial complex, but with the break-things urgency of consumer electronics.
Basic FPV drones are revolutionarily simple. The descendants of racing quadcopters, built from off-the-shelf components, they can cost as little as several hundred dollars. FPV drones tend to have short ranges, carry small payloads and struggle in bad weather. For those reasons they will not (yet) replace artillery. But they can still do a lot of damage. In one week last autumn Ukrainian drones helped destroy 75 Russian tanks and 101 big guns, among much else. Russia has its own fpv drones, though they tend to target dugouts, trenches and soldiers. Drones help explain why both sides find it so hard to mount offensives.
The exponential growth in the number of Russian and Ukrainian drones points to a second trend. They are inspired by and adapted from widely available consumer technology. Not only in Ukraine but also in Myanmar, where rebels have routed government forces in recent days, volunteers can use 3D printers to make key components and assemble airframes in small workshops. Unfortunately, criminal groups and terrorists are unlikely to be far behind the militias.
This reflects a broad democratisation of precision weapons. In Yemen the Houthi rebel group has used cheap Iranian guidance kits to build anti-ship missiles that are posing a deadly threat to commercial vessels in the Red Sea. Iran itself has shown how an assortment of long-range strike drones and ballistic missiles can have a geopolitical effect that far outweighs their cost. Even if the kit needed to overcome anti-drone jamming greatly raises the cost of the weapons, as some predict, they will still count as transformationally cheap.
The reason goes back to consumer electronics, which propel innovation at a blistering pace as capabilities accumulate in every product cycle. That poses problems of ethics as well as obsolescence. There will not always be time to subject novel weapons to the testing that Western countries aim for in peacetime and that is required by the Geneva Conventions.
Innovation also leads to the last trend, autonomy. Today, fpv drone use is limited by the supply of skilled pilots and by the effects of jamming, which can sever the connection between a drone and its operator. To overcome these problems, Russia and Ukraine are experimenting with autonomous navigation and target recognition. Artificial intelligence has been available in consumer drones for years and is improving rapidly.
A degree of autonomy has existed on high-end munitions for years and on cruise missiles for decades. The novelty is that cheap microchips and software will let intelligence sit inside millions of low-end munitions that are saturating the battlefield. The side that masters autonomy at scale in Ukraine first could enjoy a temporary but decisive advantage in firepower—a necessary condition for any breakthrough.
Western countries have been slow to absorb these lessons. Simple and cheap weapons will not replace big, high-end platforms, but they will complement them. The Pentagon is belatedly embarking on Replicator, an initiative to build thousands of low-cost drones and munitions able to take on China’s enormous forces. Europe is even further behind. Its ministers and generals increasingly believe that they could face another major European war by the end of the decade. If so, investment in low-end drones needs to grow urgently. Moreover, ubiquitous drones will require ubiquitous defences—not just on battlefields but also in cities at peace. Kalashnikovs in the skies
Intelligent drones will also raise questions about how armies wage war and whether humans can control the battlefield. As drones multiply, self-co-ordinating swarms will become possible. Humans will struggle to monitor and understand their engagements, let alone authorise them.
America and its allies must prepare for a world in which rapidly improving military capabilities spread more quickly and more widely. As the skies over Ukraine fill with expendable weapons that marry precision and firepower, they serve as a warning. Mass-produced hunter-killer aircraft are already reshaping the balance between humans and technology in war. ■
What sucks is that us hobbist’s can’t get FPV, motors, ESC’s, or batteries at reasonable prices (if at all)
The reality of it, is this is short lived.
Anti-Air meant for small drones like this is coming and soon.
And it will shut these down quickly.
How would that anti-air against small drones look like? It is not easy.
Probably miniaturized versions of CIWS / C-RAM or laser systems.
Nah, lasers too big. It would be a simple birdshot shotgun. Its detection and aiming.
When they are high up, they can be hard to spot and hear.
But a pair of sensitive mic’s and a camera designed to look for them could easily be paired with some AR glasses.somebody already put lasers on F35 and israelis are using ground-based lasers as a complement to iron dome
These small drones attack single people and small infantry groups as well as small vehicles up to heavy armor. With laser there is the issue of portability, especially power supply. Also cheap reflective coating requires very high power densities for a kill. Apart from detection and tracking which can use fused microphone array and camera array data the time to react is very short and it has to provide high density of fire on the cheap. I’ve seen some shotgun use with very limited effectivity. Ditto nets. Maybe antidrone swarms can work, but power limits loitering time. Swarm attacks can easily overwhelm protection.
It looks like a hard problem.
I haven’t really been paying much attention, but last I looked, lasers ran into sustained-rate-of-fire issues, which is one of the things that you’d want something like this to be able to do.
They’re nice in that they can counter very-fast-moving missiles – can’t outrun light or the laser’s panning speed – but I don’t know if a powerful laser is necessarily a cost-effective way to deal with a large number of inexpensive drones.
There are cheap continuous operation 2 kW fiber lasers for material processing which could be enough for the flimsier slower drones.
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Do those maintain the kind of beam coherency required for long-range use?
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I think that the weaponized lasers I’ve seen in actual military use, like the AN/SEQ-3, are pulse lasers. I don’t know why that is the case; if I had to guess, it might be necessary to avoid some forms of defenses, like producing so much thermal expansion so quickly that it tears apart ablative armor or prevents the target from rotating or rotating some form of shield to change the point exposed to the laser. I don’t really follow laser technology, though. Are these capable of pulsed output?
The small drones do not require a long range use, since you are going to detect them only late, and need to terminate them within few seconds.
I have seen an improvised optics on a Youtube channel where a 2 kW continuous operation fiber laser had enough energy flux at 100 m or farther.
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You mean Ukraine was just a proving ground for drone warfare? Shocking.
Every war is a proving ground, an occasion for making bets, and a source of perverted entertainment for the rest of the world.
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots.
What’s that from? The Simpsons?
The Secret War of Lisa Simpson, Season 8, Episode 25. First aired in 1997.
Clip. Voiced by Willem Dafoe.
Perhaps instead we could just restructure our epistemically confabulated reality in a way that doesn’t inevitably lead to unnecessary conflict due to diverging models that haven’t grown the necessary priors to peacefully allow comprehension and the ability exist simultaneously.
breath
We are finally coming to comprehend how our brains work, and how intelligent systems generally work at any scale, in any ecosystem. Subconsciously enacted social systems included.
We’re seeing developments that make me extremely optimistic, even if everything else is currently on fire. We just need a few more years without self focused turds blowing up the world.
most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots.
Drones aren’t being used to kill other drones, they are being used to drop bombs on people
