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.
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?
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?
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.
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).
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."
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)
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 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.
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.
It's very chilling that this new vector of attack is very much here for everyone to utilize.
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.
That said, a lot of it is surprisingly plausible (though maybe not the grainy filming-a-CRT overlays).
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.
http://www.businessinsider.de/drones-carrying-drugs-and-expl...
This wouldn't be efficient against a swarm of drone attack though, as they can be operated remotely from miles away.
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
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.
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.
I think they will soon be capable of that too[0].
0. https://qz.com/1185488/chinese-scientists-used-crispr-gene-e...
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)
[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/news/a2751...
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?
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.
I guess terrorists will use them against US drones, and military and commercial aircrafts.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think it is real, but it shows the future.
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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...
There is nothing new under the sun.
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.
