Drone warfare has always been equal parts distressing (it’s impersonal, it’s too easy to leverage, and therefore too easy to abuse) and incredible (ultra-thin fiber as a kite line? Brilliant!) to me. These advances are no different.
That said, I do fret we’re staring down a new age of guerrilla warfare. Drones are cheap, widely available, and increasingly autonomous. Their countermeasures are either impractical for communities (AA Cannons or automated firearms) or costly (jammers, interceptors). The programming can be set-and-forget, meaning operations can be staged months ahead of deployment and make it difficult to find or prevent. The autonomy of target termination specifically raises concerns for the immediate future of violent uprisings, coups, and civil wars.
As an engineer, I am fascinated by it all. As a human, I am horrified that we democratized violence on this scale.
I'm also fascinated by the political implications on state formation, state size, and form of government.
State formation tends to track the relative military effectiveness of large highly-trained standing armies vs. small distributed arms making. The Roman Empire collapsed when they ran out of money to pay their legions. The smaller tribes and kingdoms of the Early Middle Ages unified into the larger kingdoms of the High Middle Ages as the longbow and mounted knight gave the advantage again to large, highly trained standing armies. These collapsed into the city-states of the Rennaissance because the gunpowder musket rendered all the armor of the knights useless. Then the nation-state took over as mechanized arms and airplanes became military weapons, and needed the resources of a large territory to produce them.
It's likely that the drone, being both cheap to produce, easy to use, and extremely lethal to existing weapon systems, will produce a similar political revolution. And it seems tailor-made for smaller political units: drones can lay waste to an invading army, but they suck at power projection because their range is only ~10-20 miles. Might we see a return to city-states as the primary form of political organization? Maybe all the arguments about whether Russia vs. the U.S. vs. China will come out on top are moot, because the very concept of a nation-state will disintegrate, and instead we'll have Beijing vs. Shanghai vs. Shenzhen vs. Moscow vs. Kiev vs. the Bay Area vs. NYC vs. Washington DC? Drones are also ideal for defending shipping lanes, so perhaps we'll see a loose confederation of economically-bound city-states, but each having their own culture and social laws.
> As an engineer, I am fascinated by it all. As a human, I am horrified that we democratized violence on this scale.
How do you even defend against this in a terrorist use case? When a small drone with a grenade or homemade explosive is so accessible? Any Christmas market in central Europe these days is surrounded by car barriers to prevent mass run-overs, but what do you do when soon someone has the idea of dropping some molotov cocktails from drones in public places? Answering my own question I guess you can already throw one manually without a drone. Securing public places is weird, I'm glad it's not my job.
This article did not even cover some of the weird solutions being deployed against drones. For example, Russia has surrounded many of their critical infrastructure sites with huge nets (similar to golf course barrier netting). They have also developed anti-drone drones that drop nets from above, catching and tangling target drones in a bunch of netting that simply snags the blades.
> The programming can be set-and-forget, meaning operations can be staged months ahead of deployment and make it difficult to find or prevent.
This is something I haven't considered before. What's the worst case here? Is it feasible for me to go live on a farm in <country I want to harm>, buy a fleet of DJI drones at flea markets etc, stick something harmful to them, then hide them in the woods.
I can move away, wait a year or two, and then have them fly to the nearest metro area and wreak havoc. This seems to be cheap and relatively straightforward, and hard to detect. What am I missing?
Jammers don't work against optical cable or AI vision controlled drones. That's a big problem today in Ukraine for both sides.
As for defense, first of all it's detection and tracking. Copters and long range gas powered drones are very loud and easily detectable. Ukraine uses a net of cell phones. Several devices with microphones can accurately pinpoint all drone like sources in real time. That's cheap to install miles around important targets. Then we need just fast AI interceptors 'on hold', in the air if can afford. The last part is missing today, but we'll get there soon.
As for danger, etc. Small remote controlled firearms were easily available for decades. Drones _are_ trackable. When one takes off in big city Russians know immediately where. By using radio scanners. All DJI drones, and most others, communicate and simply broadcast their coordinates. This is used in Ukraine to find their operators.
What is also distressing is that drones make false flag attacks even easier. Add to that the fact of AI generated media/propaganda means no war will be factually comprehensible to anybody.
>horrified that we democratized violence on this scale
Violence has always been pretty democratic - you've always been able to punch someone or hit them with a rock and the US seems to have more guns than people.
Pandora's box is now open and multiple groups have access to drones[0].
This is something that I think escapes engineers in this line of work - that something they invented will eventually end up (legally or not) in the hands of people with no scruples.
I'm very interested in the consequences of vigilante applications of this kind of technologies. Imagine a scenario where people start taking out corrupt police officers who have until now been able to terrorize small communities with impunity.
It may motivate actual reform in policing because law enforcement will realize that police officers who kill innocent people with no regard for the law are safer in prison than out on the streets with a paid vacation / desk job punishment.
Also spoofers that could take over a drone - not sure how much encryption is used in most of these off-the-shelf drones, but it would seem like it wouldn't be too difficult to create a Flipper Zero-type device that could spoof the codes used between controller and drone.
The latest attack deep inside Russian borders were apparently using ArduPilot [1], it is mentioned in the Atlantic article [2]. ArduPilot also has C++ source code in Github [3], also adding an article specifically about ArduPilot and Ukraine [4]
Assuming they were remotely operated - at least partially during the final few minutes of the attack - I wonder if the pilots remained in Ukraine or were hidden somewhere close by. I'm assuming they remained in Ukraine, thousands of kilometers away. If so, how did they pull off the remote connection over enemy territory? The only option somewhere as remote as Irkutsk seems to be Starlink, unless the trucks carried custom transceivers (which seems like it would be easily discovered during transit).
“In the perfect world, the drone should take off, fly, find the target, strike it, and report back on the task,” Burukin says. “That’s where the development is heading.”
That's the problem in a nutshell. A few years back, few would argue against keeping a human in the kill/no-kill decision chain. It just took one war to get pop tech authors writing on it without even a mention of the ethical considerations or autonomous killing machines.
India used oldschool L70 Guns, zu 23 and ZSU-23-4 Shilka against pakisthan's drone swarm attacks. They are modernized to track, lock, and fire automatically. But they are cheap.
Immediate post-WW2 vintage. The classic design of AA gun.
As far as I understand it from talking about Turkish drones, you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayraktar_TB2 style, aircraft size drones, rather than the quadcopter size ones? The latter can more easily hide in terrain.
There hasn't been much coverage because it's not as sexy as drones but the degree to which AA tech that was formerly the domain of well funded armies has proliferated down the economic spectrum in recent years is really hard to overstate.
If your country is an adversary of China, I would be scared. I've seen videos on YouTube of how the drones from Chinese drone light shows take off and return to their launch areas. They have remarkable accuracy.
These generally just use RTK and a base station; nothing interesting and extremely easily rejected by EW (since they need both accurate global positioning signal _and_ RTK signal).
Inside-out SLAM strategies and on-device ML are much more interesting and are starting to trickle into COTS drones. For example, the latest DJI drones all use SLAM for return-to-home even when GPS denied: https://www.facebook.com/reel/440875398703491 , and the latest Matrice 4 enterprise drones also have end-user ML model runtimes that can fine-tune flight plans using user-provided logic.
Inside-out last-second targeting is also very popular in Ukraine, with off-the-shelf "find the nearest car/person in analog video, lock to it on signal lost, and send Betaflight MSP stick commands to hit it" modules readily accessible on Aliexpress.
Awesome technology!
Nice to see Dead Reckoning being used with computer vision and offline maps!
Something college students have been doing in robotics competitions here in the USA ;)
Shaheds and Ukrainian long-range drones are based on inertial navigation, the drone knows its coordinates and the coordinates of the target it is to hit, and the entire route between them is covered based on data from accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers.
However, the decision-making based on image recognition mentioned in the article is undoubtedly more effective in more changing fields, when the target is moving
Beyond jamming, I imagine some kind of autonomous laser system could also be pretty effective at downing large numbers of drones within a given radius.
There's a few, but they're large, expensive, require a lot of electricity and have limited range; there's the Silent Hunter [0] which is 30-100 kilowatts max power but which has a range of up to 4 kilometers. Raytheon has a 10 kilowatt palletized version that can go on a truck bed [1]; I can't find any numbers but it's listed as short-range, so I presume it's only effective at distances of less than 1 km, probably only tens or hundreds of meters. Plus they need to detect the drones first, but there's multiple ways to do that. It likely needs a network of detectors though.
Lasers aren't effective. Most of the drone is just an empty frame. The control board is pretty tiny, as is the ordnance. Targeting those or the propulsion systems is quite difficult. Sure, you can punch holes in the chassis but it takes a lot of guesswork to hit something vital. It's the wrong weapon. Something with an area of effect, like a shotgun or a net is much better suited to stopping drones.
The main defence drones have against both lasers and Bofors-type guns is staying low, such that they are below the horizon or behind ground clutter until as late as possible.
Now imagine that but with a shotgun shooting bird/buck shot at decent ROF. Way better.
The problem with any point defense system is radiating any energy makes you a big target. So you would want a passive (EO/IR?) or triggered active/passive system.
One thing I haven't seen explored is using autonomous drones as defense. Like hand sized drones optimized for speed and maneuverability intercepting larger drones. They should be super cheap. They would also be small enough for troops and vehicles to carry one.
I'm thinking the same thing. You don't even need to fully destroy the drone, if you manage to damage the camera sensors or the exposed lithium cell it's game over for the drone.
Hoping and praying someone in the administration is able to convince Trump to align closer to Ukraine (even if only slightly) because of this.
The Ukrainians pulled off an absolute coup on Sunday. A third of a nuclear-armed country's strategic bomber fleet inoperable for the foreseeable future. Someone at NORAD probably said "they should have sent a poet" while looking at the satellite imagery.
If middle powers like Ukraine can do that to Russia, they can do that to countries like the US. We need to be on their good side.
Is anyone familiar how does EW work? I keep hearing they send common shutdown codes, but what does it mean? Obviously thats an easy target but commercial drones (probably built in), but how does it work for custom ones? Can't the code be random?
[+] [-] stego-tech|9 months ago|reply
That said, I do fret we’re staring down a new age of guerrilla warfare. Drones are cheap, widely available, and increasingly autonomous. Their countermeasures are either impractical for communities (AA Cannons or automated firearms) or costly (jammers, interceptors). The programming can be set-and-forget, meaning operations can be staged months ahead of deployment and make it difficult to find or prevent. The autonomy of target termination specifically raises concerns for the immediate future of violent uprisings, coups, and civil wars.
As an engineer, I am fascinated by it all. As a human, I am horrified that we democratized violence on this scale.
[+] [-] nostrademons|9 months ago|reply
State formation tends to track the relative military effectiveness of large highly-trained standing armies vs. small distributed arms making. The Roman Empire collapsed when they ran out of money to pay their legions. The smaller tribes and kingdoms of the Early Middle Ages unified into the larger kingdoms of the High Middle Ages as the longbow and mounted knight gave the advantage again to large, highly trained standing armies. These collapsed into the city-states of the Rennaissance because the gunpowder musket rendered all the armor of the knights useless. Then the nation-state took over as mechanized arms and airplanes became military weapons, and needed the resources of a large territory to produce them.
It's likely that the drone, being both cheap to produce, easy to use, and extremely lethal to existing weapon systems, will produce a similar political revolution. And it seems tailor-made for smaller political units: drones can lay waste to an invading army, but they suck at power projection because their range is only ~10-20 miles. Might we see a return to city-states as the primary form of political organization? Maybe all the arguments about whether Russia vs. the U.S. vs. China will come out on top are moot, because the very concept of a nation-state will disintegrate, and instead we'll have Beijing vs. Shanghai vs. Shenzhen vs. Moscow vs. Kiev vs. the Bay Area vs. NYC vs. Washington DC? Drones are also ideal for defending shipping lanes, so perhaps we'll see a loose confederation of economically-bound city-states, but each having their own culture and social laws.
[+] [-] vasco|9 months ago|reply
How do you even defend against this in a terrorist use case? When a small drone with a grenade or homemade explosive is so accessible? Any Christmas market in central Europe these days is surrounded by car barriers to prevent mass run-overs, but what do you do when soon someone has the idea of dropping some molotov cocktails from drones in public places? Answering my own question I guess you can already throw one manually without a drone. Securing public places is weird, I'm glad it's not my job.
[+] [-] _1tem|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Y_Y|9 months ago|reply
This is something I haven't considered before. What's the worst case here? Is it feasible for me to go live on a farm in <country I want to harm>, buy a fleet of DJI drones at flea markets etc, stick something harmful to them, then hide them in the woods.
I can move away, wait a year or two, and then have them fly to the nearest metro area and wreak havoc. This seems to be cheap and relatively straightforward, and hard to detect. What am I missing?
[+] [-] MoonGhost|9 months ago|reply
Jammers don't work against optical cable or AI vision controlled drones. That's a big problem today in Ukraine for both sides.
As for defense, first of all it's detection and tracking. Copters and long range gas powered drones are very loud and easily detectable. Ukraine uses a net of cell phones. Several devices with microphones can accurately pinpoint all drone like sources in real time. That's cheap to install miles around important targets. Then we need just fast AI interceptors 'on hold', in the air if can afford. The last part is missing today, but we'll get there soon.
As for danger, etc. Small remote controlled firearms were easily available for decades. Drones _are_ trackable. When one takes off in big city Russians know immediately where. By using radio scanners. All DJI drones, and most others, communicate and simply broadcast their coordinates. This is used in Ukraine to find their operators.
[+] [-] krunck|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] empath75|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tim333|9 months ago|reply
Violence has always been pretty democratic - you've always been able to punch someone or hit them with a rock and the US seems to have more guns than people.
[+] [-] Yeul|9 months ago|reply
Dutch soldier lives have been ruined because they had to be sent to places like Lebanon and Bosnia. Nobody decent deserves that.
[+] [-] ulnarkressty|9 months ago|reply
This is something that I think escapes engineers in this line of work - that something they invented will eventually end up (legally or not) in the hands of people with no scruples.
[0] - https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/other/drones-in-africa-are-a-...
[+] [-] Teever|9 months ago|reply
It may motivate actual reform in policing because law enforcement will realize that police officers who kill innocent people with no regard for the law are safer in prison than out on the streets with a paid vacation / desk job punishment.
[+] [-] agumonkey|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nadermx|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] drdrey|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] UncleOxidant|9 months ago|reply
Are jammers really that costly?
Also spoofers that could take over a drone - not sure how much encryption is used in most of these off-the-shelf drones, but it would seem like it wouldn't be too difficult to create a Flipper Zero-type device that could spoof the codes used between controller and drone.
[+] [-] Ciantic|9 months ago|reply
[1]: https://ardupilot.org/
[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/06/uk...
[3]: https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot
[4]: https://www.404media.co/ukraines-massive-drone-attack-was-po...
[+] [-] twothreeone|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] defly|9 months ago|reply
Come Back Alive ex. These guys delivered first deep-strike drones https://savelife.in.ua/en/donate-en/
Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation ex. Bought a famous spy satellite https://prytulafoundation.org/en
KOLO Charity Foundation managed by UA tech community https://www.koloua.com/en/
Razom Ukraine (US based) https://www.razomforukraine.org/
[+] [-] Sporktacular|9 months ago|reply
That's the problem in a nutshell. A few years back, few would argue against keeping a human in the kill/no-kill decision chain. It just took one war to get pop tech authors writing on it without even a mention of the ethical considerations or autonomous killing machines.
[+] [-] sreekanth850|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|9 months ago|reply
Immediate post-WW2 vintage. The classic design of AA gun.
As far as I understand it from talking about Turkish drones, you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayraktar_TB2 style, aircraft size drones, rather than the quadcopter size ones? The latter can more easily hide in terrain.
[+] [-] cenamus|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] potato3732842|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] originalvichy|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dji4321234|9 months ago|reply
Inside-out SLAM strategies and on-device ML are much more interesting and are starting to trickle into COTS drones. For example, the latest DJI drones all use SLAM for return-to-home even when GPS denied: https://www.facebook.com/reel/440875398703491 , and the latest Matrice 4 enterprise drones also have end-user ML model runtimes that can fine-tune flight plans using user-provided logic.
Inside-out last-second targeting is also very popular in Ukraine, with off-the-shelf "find the nearest car/person in analog video, lock to it on signal lost, and send Betaflight MSP stick commands to hit it" modules readily accessible on Aliexpress.
[+] [-] mountainriver|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] slicktux|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] major505|9 months ago|reply
https://youtu.be/5xN__ozrbpk?si=vuBtFEcOlgerrVwa
I specially apretiate the small mine clearing drones.
[+] [-] gsekulski|9 months ago|reply
However, the decision-making based on image recognition mentioned in the article is undoubtedly more effective in more changing fields, when the target is moving
[+] [-] Oarch|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|9 months ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hunter_(laser_weapon)
[1] https://www.rtx.com/raytheon/what-we-do/integrated-air-and-m...
[+] [-] glitchc|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jvanderbot|9 months ago|reply
The problem with any point defense system is radiating any energy makes you a big target. So you would want a passive (EO/IR?) or triggered active/passive system.
[+] [-] bell-cot|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ianburrell|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] FirmwareBurner|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] neepi|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dw_arthur|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] MaxPock|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lenerdenator|9 months ago|reply
The Ukrainians pulled off an absolute coup on Sunday. A third of a nuclear-armed country's strategic bomber fleet inoperable for the foreseeable future. Someone at NORAD probably said "they should have sent a poet" while looking at the satellite imagery.
If middle powers like Ukraine can do that to Russia, they can do that to countries like the US. We need to be on their good side.
[+] [-] unknown|9 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] atakan_gurkan|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dzhiurgis|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|9 months ago|reply
I have some vague notion of jamming is blast a stronger signal & countering might be hopping to a different frequency but that's about it
[+] [-] p0w3n3d|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mbones|9 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] throw84i|9 months ago|reply
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