I guess this was inevitable as quadcopters and drones got cheap/mainstream, but still unsettling to see the high quality video recordings. And how does one defend against that? Suicide bombings of marketplaces or a shooting spree are bad enough, but at least the terrorists have themselves a deadly cost. Cheap 3D-printed drones dropping explosives from above are something else.
> "The bombs have hand-painted numbers on them, and some of the components show a honeycomb structure which could mean they were 3D printed. If so, then insurgents may be able to share their designs over the internet and newcomers can print their own guided bomb without any experience."
I'm honestly surprised that it took this long. It's something that has been a worry in circles for a while.
One of the bigger worries was using IEDs and drones to deliver payloads to semi-secure locations, like data center power and cooling infrastructure. I know that exfiltration of information via drone was another worry, that came to light.
I don't think we will see 3D printing of drones and terrorists collaborating over the Internet on CAD files, as these platforms are manufactured cheaply, en masse in China.
I've always thought drone defense would be a massive industry. I don't think radio jamming will be a viable option to prevent an attack. Perhaps, GPS spoofing, but that has other side effects. You can't use projectiles safely, because of the potential for collateral damage.
I think we should I'll begin microwave and laser based weaponry for this. One of the most intriguing weapons is an Electrolaser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser. I believe that every US airport will need drone defense in ~10 years -- but alas, I've been saying that for the past few years.
Of course, it's an edited version of the video with no audio. I wish there was somewhere that kept these online, every time there's a new one released I have to go hunt it down, usually off some gore site filled with weird shit.
Wow, that video was so disturbing. They show all these teenagers talking and then show them in drone footage driving bomb laden cars into tanks and exploding them. Then they show you photos of their dead bodies, I guess to prove it's real. So messed up.
These have been coming out regularly for years now. The worst ones are the ones with kids executing prisoners, one was a toddler.
I heard the British PM call them a "death cult" and I can't think of a better name for it.
As a kid I always found it weird going into any Catholic church (it was mandatory in my school) and always front and center you see a very life like statue of a person being crucified, always with added red blood paint. Taken out of context normal every things in human culture can be very weird. I'm happy that at least modern mainstream society has grown up away from ideas of religious martyrdom.
In fact I am surprised it hasn't already been used by terrorists on western soil. I don't see how one can protect a VIP against a drone loaded with explosives flying quickly.
No one will be allowed to deploy automated anti-drone guns in populated civilian areas of Western countries. They would be tremendously expensive to install and maintain, would present their own security risks, and would endanger people if they ever fired at a wrong target or missed. Those systems will only ever be used to guard military facilities and maybe select sites in Washington DC.
With one's own drones, programmed to crash into the attacking drones kamakaze style, or maybe armed with mini gattling guns or other weapons to shoot down enemy drones in flight. Might also have the assistance of other drones flying higher in surveillance mode, like AWACS. All kinds of possibilities.
Actually, I think a variation on this makes the most sense: Go cheap. Kamikaze drones, cheap as possible - then it becomes a question of logistics, and AFAIK I'd bet on the US military's logistics over just about anyone else's.
Except they aren't that narrow of a beam. If that drone was hovering 20ft over that tank and you aimed an EMP blast at it, you will likely disable some of the tank's systems too.
If the army can't figure out how to defend against a quadcopter, it would be an enormous opportunity for any RC hobbyist who happens to know or could learn a little machine learning.
I thought less about the army, the army will be fine, but civilian terror targets. Imagine how you would secure an open air concert at night against such a drone attack?
Small scale CWIS, or high-power near IR lasers will mitigate it a bit, but only on expensive equipment. General awareness of things in the sky (mesh nets of radar/optical?) should help individuals without expensive countermeasures.
The scariest, science-fiction-coming-to-pass quote from this article:
"in the future, these cheap, highly available tool/toys turned into weapons will be used in greater numbers and, eventually, will feature autonomous flight coordination, also known as swarm technology."
Just picture a swarm of 50 or 100 drones suddenly emerging over a building and coming at you (or your tank) like a flock of killer bees. Note that they would NOT need conventional radio control from an observer station -- the kind of radio that currently you try to jam in order to disable a drone. All they need is to communicate between themselves, which could be done in a variety of ways, even optical (blinking IR light on the leader, etc).
This level of swarm AI could be implemented in a RPi right now.
One thing we might see more of in the future is drone-placed IEDs. Steal an Amazon delivery drone, mix up some home explosives and you're practically there. Drones remove one of the largest barriers to IED use, which is that people get shot when placing them. Drone + sniper rifle, sneakily deployed on tall buildings, would be effective for similar reasons.
Lastly, you know what suddenly becomes a lot more effective when you don't have to worry about getting killed by your own payload? Chemical weapons.
It's mobile, for one. You can cover and threaten a big area with a drone, which means a tiny amount of chemicals go a long way, and that solves the other main issue with chemical weapons.
Main goal would be to sap morale: a few grenade-sized bombing runs and you force everybody to wear chemsuits under the desert sun.
Conventional chemical weapons are not cost-effective, because you have to hit a big area and cause big effects for it to be worthwhile, since both delivery and payload are expensive. With drones you can shoot/drop grenade-sized payloads that hits just a few people, barely more effective than an actual grenade. The goal is to sap morale and force lopsided reactions (such as forcing the opfor to wear chemsuits, or invest in cleanup teams).
I think so, actually. The most effective places to set up a bomb are probably among the most dangerous for a covert operative to actually get to. This changes that.
This is a real problem for critical infrastructure. As only one example, this makes it very cheap to damage thousands of power substations. These are usually above ground and unhardened.
Substitute your own favorite critical infrastructure, including freeways at rush hour.
These videos are presented as real but look completely fake and staged.
First we see a winged glider being launched, but then we somehow switch to quadcopters dropping bombs with remarkable accuracy. I mean, they've even gone to the trouble of adding video game overlays at various points.
Please use as much skepticism with ISIS propaganda videos as you would with the next leaked video from Magic Leap.
They do look suspicious but ISIS does have drones filming their Mosul battle suicide truck attacks for a while now it was only a matter of time https://youtu.be/D46BMLYh3zE
The drones are not pinpoint accuracy they are apparently primarily being used as a diversion to attract the fire of Iraqi forces by dropping 40mm grenades near their position.
like many video pieces, they often collage things together. however and unfortunately that tank one looked pretty real. not sure where the'd get a spare m1 to film that
I question the author of this article. The propaganda video is honest in using obvious computer effects and perfectly framed shots. I believe that they produced these films, but this article is garbage.
As a psychological weapon, this has changed the rules dramatically. You can imagine that combatants in the firing zone now have an added thing to think about.
Not just watching buildings for snipers and scouring the road ahead and beside them for IEDs, they now have to have attention aloft to see/hear drone activity as well.
Spreading (the) enemy attention is highly effective. And don't discount low power explosives. A couple of friends of mine who are in the army have said that most weaponry is designed to maim rather than kill. They explained that if you kill a soldier, you take one man out of the battle (and make his comrades angry & vengeful to boot). If you wound him badly - you take two men out - the wounded soldier, PLUS the guy who has to stop what he is doing to care for and patch him up.
Very true. Plus don't underestimate the disastrous effect on morale of having 'your' weapons turned against you, and finding yourself in a victim position that you have indirectly imposed upon others on many occasions. Once American soldiers start coming under drone fire regularly, they will be massively demoralized by the realization that much of the world considers the US to the be The Bad Guys.
I agree with your assessment here. However, I didn't want to voice it because it would lead to a less that savoury place, like other drone threads have.
But I do appreciate the irony that a weapon when wielded from one side is an effective platform for swift and immediate justice & retribution, but when eventually wielded by the opposing side, is suddenly an evil, sneaky and underhanded thing indeed.
I've got very conflicted feelings about it myself. On the one hand, precision drone bombing is preferable to the older approaches of using bombers or conventional ICBMs. The ideal would be to simply stop bombing people, of course, but that would only last until such time as there were a substantial terrorist attack on American soil. As long as military engagement remains a political reality, I prefer it come in as low a cost in human life as possible. But it's arguable that the second-order costs end up being higher. At the same time I think it's inevitable given the available technology.
The US Army has a project they're calling " Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System" that's designed to kill just the person they're after. It's essentially a tiny remote controlled helicopter with high-precision sensors and a stabilized rifle.
They started flying a prototype in 2009, but I can't tell from public sources if they ever got it to work.
> Spreading (the) enemy attention is highly effective. And don't discount low power explosives. A couple of friends of mine who are in the army have said that most weaponry is designed to maim rather than kill. They explained that if you kill a soldier, you take one man out of the battle (and make his comrades angry & vengeful to boot). If you wound him badly - you take two men out - the wounded soldier, PLUS the guy who has to stop what he is doing to care for and patch him up.
This was the (effective) VC strategy during the war in Vietnam.
I've commented here on HN on a few occasions, that swarms of drones could be challenge to tanks. (Every time, I've been pooh-poohed.) While it might be a challenge to penetrate the armor of a modern main battle tank with explosive charges that can be carried by a drone, there are many parts of a functioning tank that are vital to its combat value, which aren't nearly as tough. With a little bit of AI, drones could specifically target these parts. There's also the well-being of the crew to consider. Forcing a tank crew to remain buttoned up makes them less aware of their environment.
Aside from the fact that the video's demonstrated that their plenty effective even if they can't currently take out tanks. I notice that RPG's don't look that big (when you ignore the "rocket" part) and can apparently do so.
Drone's also get to attack from above while typical RPG's have to attack the better armored sides.
Guns need line of sight. The drone operator here could have been safely ensconced in a house behind a hill a couple of blocks away and doing it all via first person camera view.
I heard similar arguments assuring me that nobody needed cellphones, and then that they didn't need smartphones. If drones are superfluous why do we use them, mmm?
This is only one data point on a line that's already moving very quickly for this data point to have showed up in the first place. What is today one drone is tomorrow two, and in a few months, dozens at a time. And they can get larger, too.
And, yes, absolutely, defenses will be devised and the arms race will march on. In fact, once the US military gets really serious about this it could well swing back to advantage industrial-era military again; I'm not convinced this is a permanently-leveling sort of weapon. But at the moment it's at least a bit of a shakeup on the field.
You can with an explosively formed penetrator [0]. In fact, I don't think it would be all that difficult.
Take, for example, the BLU-108 submunition [1] [2]. It deploys four independent "skeet" submunitions, each of which weighs 3.4 kg. The warheads themselves weigh less than 1kg.
The skeets are ejected from the BLU-108 dispenser with a high angular velocity, resulting in precession. They also deploy a retarding parachute. The precession causes them to "look" in a cone-shape of decreasing diameter as they descend (using passive infra-red and active laser sensors), and when they detect a valid target they fire.
These are designed to destroy tanks.
You couldn't just drop a skeet submunition from a drone -- you would need some way of giving it the required angular velocity. But if you're prepared to sacrifice the drone (which seems reasonable for destroying a tank), you could fix the explosively formed penetrator to the bottom of the drone along with a sensor package. Then you use the drone's own control authority to aim the weapon and detonate it when it's pointed at the target.
I'm not sure what the warhead's effective range would be, but probably somewhere between 10m and 100m. The payload for the drone would be around 3kg.
It should be noted that explosively formed penetrators don't require much technical sophistication to build and a cheap digital camera could be used for aiming.
It may seem seem surprising that such a small weapon can destroy a tank, but tank armour is optimized according to the expected threat environment, so armour is much thinner on the roof. Explosive reactive armour could probably defeat it, though.
I doubt you could get a 3.4 kg submunition on that particular airplane. That's about twenty times what a grenade weighs, and that explosion was definitely more grenade-sized. They're going to have to scale this up quite a bit for it to be effective against armor. Not to mention a high tech submunition like that costs about eight grand in bulk and has to be spinning to work.
And they're not really designed to destroy tanks so much as render them combat ineffective by damaging the engine. You're not going to destroy a tank with something that small.
Often the attack vector isn't "blowing a hole", but rather causing a shockwave that turns the interior face of the armor into shrapnel (technical term - spalling). Of course, modern tanks are designed against this to some degree.
And definitely the danger is much higher for the less-armored trucks and the like.
Composites and anti-spall liners have rendered that kind of attack almost entirely obsolete against modern armor. The Challenger II was designed with a rifled gun barrel so it could use HESH ammo, and the Brits have been trying to scrounge up the money to replace it with a smoothbore for decades now (I see they finally did last year).
Some of the counter-measures shown seem to rely on the aircraft needing connectivity with the remote control in order to operate. For example, some of the videos show that by blocking RF, the aircraft slowly descends to the ground.
I see this as a problem, because many drones/UAVs can be configured with waypoints and "loss of connectivity" logic. You can configure drones to fly a set of waypoints and continue doing that, even if connectivity is lost.
This is really concerning, and I think the article points this out saying that countermeasures are way behind the attack vectors.
Both sides have been actively using cheap off-the-shelf drones in Ukraine as well, although it seems to be mostly used for recon and sniper spotting there - I haven't heard about any cases like in this video.
The far future may be similar to Banks's Culture novels: each of us supports a cloud of thousands and thousands of micro-drones. As the ages pass countermeasures against these drones lead to counter-countermeasures lead to counter-counter-countermeasures and on and on until our sea of micro-dones essentially becomes an extension of our own immune system.
Above is a video of the Army's modified close in weapons system, it fires 75 rounds a second and is designed to shoot rockets and mortar shells out of the sky. Mortar shells and rockets move just a weeee bit faster than most drones.
That's a bit like using a tank to hunt rats - it would work in theory, but the rats are a lot more agile than the tank. What are you gonna do, blanket whole neighborhoods in silly string? How are you gonna tell the difference between birds and droves while also flying the plane and avoiding ground fire from people who don't like you? Any anti-drone countermeasures are likely to involves more drones.
Oh I see - I had misunderstood you to mean something like a crop duster. I'm sure we'll see a rapid evolution/arms race involving everything from machine learning to rapid prototyping to autonomous swarming behaviors, and more.
It will only become easier and easier to do great harm to many people. And so there is no number of terrorists that is an acceptable risk.
We can't allow these savages to keep developing their capabilities, growing their numbers, and inspiring sympathizers around the world. The only option is to eradicate ISIS and similar groups from the face of the Earth. We must strike fear deep into the hearts of any who would think to do us harm.
"It is better to be feared than to be loved, if you cannot be both."
Muslims are the primary victims of terrorists groups. They would be very happy to be rid of the likes of ISIS and Al Qaeda.
>That's more or less how we got here in the first place.
I don't agree. We got here because Western institutions and ideas were causing dramatic and rapid social change in the Muslim world, and inspired a violent counter-reaction.
Take your second paragraph and replace the word ISIS with "The USA". That is essentially their recruitment speech for their operatives in the rest of the world.
Checkmate.
Yes, there does have to be a winner and a loser. Given that ISIS aims for a global caliphate and the destruction of the US and Israel, I sure hope you want them to lose...
The problem behind ISIS isn't their numbers, or their land, or their weapons, or their tactics. It's the mentality behind it. And that has already gone worldwide.
You can kill people with violence, but an idea will only grow stronger.
I suspect you are being downvoted not because you are wrong (I happen to think you are right), but because your comment usurps this fairly specific article to discuss a fairly general qualm.
Is there something specific about this happening that you think advances your point?
"Yet the hard truth is that the Department of Defense has had plenty of time and warning to do just that. In fact, they spent many millions of dollars looking at the problem, but no hard action was really taken to develop countermeasures, which makes their scramble for countermeasures now all that more frustrating. "
If they wanted a clean win, then countermeasures would have been researched already.
Instead, in 2017 we get articles about how "drone warfare is just the beginning of things to come". Instead it should have been "Opponents attempt drone warfare, subverted by 10 years of defensive research revealed today".
I guess this was inevitable as quadcopters and drones got cheap/mainstream, but still unsettling to see the high quality video recordings. And how does one defend against that? Suicide bombings of marketplaces or a shooting spree are bad enough, but at least the terrorists have themselves a deadly cost. Cheap 3D-printed drones dropping explosives from above are something else.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a24056/iraq...
> "The bombs have hand-painted numbers on them, and some of the components show a honeycomb structure which could mean they were 3D printed. If so, then insurgents may be able to share their designs over the internet and newcomers can print their own guided bomb without any experience."