A Drone Arms Race

The Ukraine-Russia conflict accelerated field testing and technological development of flying and mobile ground drones for war. It is the era of a drone arms race letting a thousand forms of drones bloom. Extensive field testing and upgrades for efficiency adaptations taking down opposition force armored vehicles, personnel and other point targets honed the sharp edge of the military technology.

The United States for decades enjoyed a lead in development of drones for war. Drones like the Predator and Global Hawk required a skilled remote pilot. Next generation drones will be flown by A.I. chips in the aircraft. That upgrade will free up paramilitaries from needing a pilot for each drone. Instead of having 100,000 soldiers flying drones there will be none; saving a huge investment in personnel and support while building a more lethal, efficient and cheaper combat environment for humans. Drones have barely started on their course of evolution to revolutionize the planetary battlefield; they will become more than flying land-mines and missile launching spycraft.

Conventional military forces and infantry had a form of specialized soldier tasks and deployments of large numbers of coordinated personnel to meet enemy forces in combat. The U.S. Marine corps has planned to change it force structure to use fewer yet more highly trained warriors to defend the pacific regions against larger numbers of Chinese aggressors. In theory the Marines would control high-tech weapons to attack Chinese troops from a distance. Drones tech changes that. The Red Army not only makes personal computers, they can manufacture millions of drones guided by A.I. chips to seek and destroy Marines without risking casualties of the Red Army. Drones will radically changed the way wars are fought, when people are stupid enough to fight them instead of investing in peace, prosperity and a healthy, recovering ecosphere.

The next Hamas war on Israel would have 100,000 A.I. guided drones targeting specific addresses in Israel using ubiquitous g.p.s. for guidance in a sneak attack before the g.p.s. satellites are turned off by Israeli allies. Hezbollah and Yemen would also send waves of drones flying at night. The reason that A.I. chips are more useful that F.P.V. drones is that the A.I. controlled drones can continue to attack if jamming of waveform signals to remote drone controllers blocks control of the aircraft. A hundred thousand drones launched from some third world’s air force warehouse flying about without control would be of little military value.

The security of airports was greatly tightened and very effective after the mass of hijackings of the 1960s and 70s. The 9-11 hijackers were the primary exception to phasing out hostile takeovers of aircraft. The 9-11 hijackings were designed by an American college trained engineer and hijackers trained in U.S. flight schools during the Clinton administration to fly aircraft. Schools and cockpit doors were screened better after that. Terrorists that wanted to blow up civilian aircraft needed to sneak explosives aboard thereafter and that practice too was curbed. Richard Reed who tried to detonate his shoes flying over Chicago after 2001 was the last serious nearly functioning terrorist attempt. F.P.V drones have changed the criterion once more. It will be ridiculously easy for terrorists flying F.P.V. drones to attack European aircraft near runways. No longer do terrorists require direct physical access to aircraft to place explosive on the fuselage, engines or wings.

Drones are very cheap in comparison to regular state of the art fighter and bomber aircraft. Some aircraft cost as much or more than half a billion dollars. Mass produced drones of various kinds may cost as little as $50. Thus even the smallest nations will be able to afford an air force with meaningful attack capability, and the aircraft may be launched from any place in the world such as submarines, oil tankers, balloons and carriers of various sorts.

Armies will field hundreds of thousands of solar power scout drones of very small size to search for opfor soldiers in forest, desert, mountains and plains to transmit locations to A.I. drones coordinators able to dispatch larger ordinance carrying drones to attack. Scout drones may use optical, laser light to signal high altitude relays with data if jammers of radio waves interfere with communications. Conventional troop concentrations and even small, squad size components will be quite and risk in the drone-saturated new world military order of battle.

Terrorists and guerrilla forces will obviously exploit the ability of drones and their low cost to attack cities and military vehicle. The recent Iraq and Afghanistan wars has improvised explosive devices yet very few flying drone attacks, so far as I know. In the future drones will saturate areas of conflict to attack military bases, convoys and civilian targets regarded as of value to the enemy.

None of this speculation involves much change from present capabilities. It is simply a matter of scaling up from the demonstration of the practical of drones for war in Ukraine. If political leaders and the military industrial complex continue to downgrade environment and social welfare globally in preference to manufacturing weapons and ideology for combat the prospects for a radical upgrade in the lethality of the global battlefield looms large.