I've been watching this loom for a very long time.
Basically...
China is building them, and won't stop. So everybody else also must.
Given the overwhelming strategic power that is on offer, the reluctance to set up a ban never gets anywhere. Many discussions at the UN, no progress. I bet every nation's military must have carefully considered them by now, and a ban must look like tactical suicide.
The possibilities are staggering:
[ul]
[li]Increased scope and detail in patrols (borders, no fly zones, etc.)[/li]
[li]Lighter vehicles (esp. aircraft) with higher maneuverability[/li]
[li]Land air and sea vehicles all carry more weapons payloads, need less safety protocol[/li]
[li]Fewer casualties; losing an "asset" does not mean losing a soldier[/li]
[li]Fewer soldiers can control more weapons[/li]
[li]Faster response to enemy movement, countermeasures and counterattacking[/li]
[li]Resistance to jamming (including superiority to remotely-operated weapons)[/li]
[li]Effects of fatigue, fear, injury are eliminated from battle outcomes[/li]
[/ul]
You could almost convince yourself it's a good idea. Until you think about everyone they can target...
Perhaps the only obstacle I can see is where allied nations do not permit each others' drones on their territories, even in mutual defense. Can you imagine some of the current NATO joint-patrol missions in eastern Europe being carried out by drones?
When machine guns were introduced, they were supposed to reduce the number of troops on the field, and reduce casualties. Drones will do an excellent job of exterminating natives. Up against damn foreigners with drones, there will be an effort to attack your drone headquarters, killing everything in the vicinity.
I scanned the photo above from the Typhoon and Tempest At War, by Arthur Reed and Roland Beamont. Pilots were mis-identifying these things as Fw[‑]190s. This photo is from 1942 or 1943. The black and white strips below the wings, and the yellow strips on top of the wings were used on Typhoons and on Mustang[ ]Is to help with identification. In 1942, lots of people "knew" that Messerschmidt Bf[‑]109s had square wingtips. The white painted nose was a further attempt at friendly identification.
The USA does a terrible job of Identification Friend or Foe (IFF). Who is going to program these drones to identify targets?
the white painted nose possibly made it look more like a 190 … shortening the fore-deck ?
in WW2, the Germans applied light coloured paints to their night fighters (unlike the RAF's black) as they figured out that even at night planes are silhouetted in the night sky.
so the white nose may disappear in daylight ?
as for black RAF bombers … maybe they were most concerned with search lights ?
another day in paradise, or is paradise one day closer ?
That is a scary scenario, but what if it actually happened. What would we do?
Dropping that many drones would be a significant logistics and manufacturing effort [—] easily traceable. Given the selection of victims, there would be an obvious motive for the attack, pointing to whoever it is ordered the drone parts.
Note how every single person in your manufacturing chain either has to not notice it is a weapon, or they must support your activity and STFU.
Do you let people like this alone, or do you exterminate them, using conventional weapons if necessary?
Not really; the average manufacturing assembly person doesn't always know what some little black box does. The scenario in the video only requires a handful of people outside of manufacturing to know what one particular black box is. This scenario has already been argued in Huawei's and others' electronics boxes having surreptitious eavesdropping boxes scabbed onto otherwise innocent electronics.
The last winter Olympics featured swarms of drones operating in mass formations, so that part is already a reality; someone just needs to call out a -002 configuration with part SEMT-001 soldered into the motherboard to be delivered to AQII instead of Intel.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
Yea, I wonder how many of the people working the 'manufacturing chain' back during the Manhattan Project knew what it was that their effort was contributing to?
Most of the people working the Manhattan Project, at least for the first few, probably were the scientists themselves; the long-term production would have had less knowledgeable people, although they probably still would have known that they were working on a nuclear weapon, since the Geiger counters and dosimeters would have had to be an ever-present reminder.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
Scary video indeed, but Sci-fi has been predicting that for ages.
It's just easier now. Nothing in that video is particularly hard to do.
There are already drones that need very little human attention carrying out surveillance of US cities. Many operated in secret for a while. Elizabeth, New Jersey Baltimore MD Compton, CA
I can see a positive use for drones by law enforcement in many cases. Pursuit and tracking of a felon that is fleeing is an obvious good use. Searching for missing persons has been done with success many times, now. Deploying a drone from the patrol car to do this makes sense. I do have a problem when the drone becomes permanent and collects data on all citizens. It can then be a mechanism to trace-back any person's path (vehicle, walking etc) to other locations. This gets done without a warrant or any public scrutiny or limitations that prevent abuse (cops surveil their ex-wives all the time, charges laid in my city in yet another case recently). Now we have a way for the cops to become the criminals again.
And open your eyes to how easy it would be to manufacture and deliver a fleet of such drones anywhere in the world. They can re-locate themselves, either by program or by remote pilot, so quite seriously you can fly them into the hold of any unguarded airliner and land them anywhere else on the planet within a day. You don't need a godawful Herc to bumble over the victim city for hours. That scene in the linked video is just a failure of the imagination on the long-distance delivery system. Delivery without a trace can be EASY.
Just a few months ago the USA carried out a remotely-piloted assassination. To make it happen, personnel in the US military had to be involved meaning they needed authorization and sought it from the president. There was probably a very small circle of people who knew about it before it happened. The use of an autonomous AI drone to do this would shrink the circle even further. How many human beings do you want to eliminate from the chain of command to action between any president and an assassination?
I have posted a few times about drones in the past few months. Each time I found myself confronted with people boosting for the use of drones and liberating the operation of the machines. I usually bit back on my opinions and fears about these things being used as weapons. Somehow it brands people as paranoid, to suggest that a drone can be used to do harm. "They're just silly toys, after all"
I don't see it that way.
So I limit my extrapolation of the trouble it forebodes, even when confronted with fervent supporters of drone-use and drone operation liberties. In some ways they scare the CR** out of me. Either they really don't realize how much harm is possible, or they are concealing their desire to build weapons and writing as trojan-horses.
In the public at large, the profound ignorance of things like how the internet works, how computers work, how anything is built for that matter... it all plays into the hands of anyone with ambitions to create and use the next greatest weapon. Saying or writing things that assume only a government will use this just exposes your own ignorance. Saying or writing things that assume building these things requires technological sophistication on the part of the builder or the operator also exposes how naive you are. You use a smartphone but you didn't build it yourself, did you?
I think that's to rent for one show, not to buy, since it includes
on site operations, animations, rehearsals, aviation permits, and site survey. Costs associate with the shipment of drones and Intel operations team travel will be added to the final quote. Client is responsible for expenses related to onsite infrastructure.
