Jamming systems can neutralize drones by causing them to crash, land, or return to the operator. They work by blasting electromagnetic noise at the radio frequencies that drones use to operate and emit information. This drowns out the conversation between a drone and its operator. The UK estimates that Ukraine is losing 10,000 drones each month to jamming.
This is showing that the fictional Slaughterbot scenario will not work in modern warfare. the movie proposed that a $25 million order of unstoppable drones can kill half a city. The 10,000 drones being destroyed each month on the Ukrainian side of the war is about the $25 million worth of drones. The smaller drones that are working in the Ukraine war are fast launched short range systems for flying a few hundred feet and dropping a grenade. There is minimal flight control needed. Large swarms of small drones would get hit by larger jamming systems. The jamming systems are constantly operating.
There were debates about whether a lot of small drones could become a weapon of mass destruction after the Slaughterbot movie was made. The military analysts who said that cheap and simple counter measures would massively reduce the effectiveness of small drones were right.
The US is developing and buying bigger drones with more powerful systems and ability to shoot missiles at longer ranges. US drones will be about the size of a Cessna or the existing Predator drones.
Binkov’s Battleground summarizes what is and is not working so far in the Russia Ukraine war. Tanks, small drones and jets are being shown to be less useful than military analysts expected a few years ago. What is working is coordinated operations of softening troops and disrupting supply lines and then surprising with overwhelming force with proper backup.
Tanks, swarms and small drones and jets are not useless in the Ukraine War but they are secondary to long range precision artillery, intelligence on enemy military concentrations and soldiers.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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The US Military disagrees with you and is ramping up Project Replicator to produce 1000s of cheap and quickly replaceable drones. Hopefully, we won’t have to buy them from China.
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-08-military-unleash-thousands-autonomous-war.html
Slaughterbots are closer than you think though.
https://www.news.uzh.ch/en/articles/media/2023/Drone-race.html
This recent demo at ETH showing an AI driven FPV drone beating high end human FPV racers in a closed course race should be a little concerning. This navigation feat was strictly with FPV single camera views and IMU readouts only. Once there is sufficient compute on board to do this, no amount of jamming will stop them, only destructive effect AA. One could argue those Nvidia Jetson boards are just on the edge of feasible now.
Now, to highlight issues, the AI got confused when the lighting on course changed, but that could be attributed to insufficient training with diverse light sources. This was training for a closed race course, so not yet a general purpose flight AI. Still, single camera FPV with no ranging data is nothing to sniff at.
Do Not Fear the Slaughterbot Drone Scenario Because It Won’t Work?
Yes, we will never to be able to reuse rockets either. All that is needed is time, motive and opportunity. I’m sure their will be enough conflict in the near future to make them operational AND mass produced.
The slaughterbot scenario is about autonomous drones that run object and facial recognition locally, thus not depending on external signal for terminal guidance. That makes the entire “we’ll just jam them” handwave not particularly constructive.
No need for facial recognition. Kill anything that moves without an IFF signal.
Ukraine losses 100 drones a day as they are intercepted by Russian troops, tanks, radars and fuel trucks.
Aircraft have been ineffective because they are Soviet or Russian designed, the 40 year old F-16’s will dominate in the EW sector,and of course, the F-35,has even more powerful EW suites.
Small drones have devastated Russian forces, at the front and in Russia,the flat packed Ikea type card board drones from Australia, are particularly interesting . Used by Russians deep inside Russia to target aircraft at bases far away from Ukraine.
EW is a huge problem, that is why when the losses for Russia are published,I pay close attention to “special equipment”.
Modern weapons are programmed to target jamming devices, incoming origin, and attack radar. That takes all the fun out of targeting drones. Right back atcha. NATO counter battery radar connects directly to automated howitzers. The coordinates are received, gun laid, round fired at the enemy howitzer before the incoming arrives. Ukraine averages killing 25 crews of five men and 25 howitzers per day. Russian howitzer crews are afraid to take the first shot. Front line Russian infantry complain they don’t get fire support for over a day. Putin liquidated four generals who complained. If you hanker to become a high status artillery officer the Russian Military Academy has plenty of vacancies for the freshman class. The traditional bribe has been waived.
I do not see how this stops the idea of an enemy turning up to a city with a truck load of drones and then releases them to kill civilians.
They could release them from outside the city. But if you surround the city with jamming systems they can just drive the truck into the centre of the city.
In any case jamming electronic communications in a city is not practical.
This has been warned about by a number of AI researchers.
If I want to make an attack..
I just wait for high winds
The Jamming of drones can be countered with tech that adds autonomous operation of the drones. This is certainly possible to implement in a cost effective, lightweight and energy efficient package. Just look at what insects can do. It is not possible in 2023 but it’s not hard to imagine it will happen ASAP.
Another way to counter the jamming is to deploy another type of slightly more expensive drone together with the cheap ones. The role of the second type would be to go deeper, detect and destroy whatever is emitting the jamming EM radiation.
Also, the drones don’t have to be airborne. Imagine being swarmed from air, land and sea simultaneously by big-insect like, semi-autonomous drones.
Anyone remember the old sci-fi movie “Screamers” with the “Autonomous Mobile Swords” ?
The counter to these scenarios is of course defensive drone swarms and/or fast shooting directed energy weapons.
Possible sooner than you think, but if you invent your angry hornet dive bombers, you ain’t gonna give it away.
The west has been trying to give only enough guns to kick Russia out, but not enough to threaten Russia’s existence.
In the meantime, can I get a emp round for a shotgun?
Or a jammer for flare gun?
The problem of only focusing on jamming technologies fails to account for other existing technologies for striking vehicles. US missiles now can use terrain-mapping navigation, inertial navigation, infra-read sensors, and with visual targeting techniques would invalidate jamming efforts against drones. It is only a matter of time before such technologies would be small enought and cheap enough to fit to small, inexpensive drones. All information required for such drones need only be a fairly close set of coordinates of the target. Suck information would be readily obtained by direct observation, other drones, aircraft systems, or satellite sources. We may very well indeed have to worry about something like slaughterbots.