Borepatch thinks it’s going to be a while until we get autonomous drones in combat. I think he’s probably mistaken, as he seems to be thinking about using them to pilot big, expensive things like tanks.
I think we’re going to see autonomous drone swarms used in combat a lot sooner.
Soldiers are expensive (at least for first world armies). Drones are cheap and getting cheaper. Imagine inserting a drone delivery system behind enemy lines and let them wreck havoc in bases and depots. Make some exploding, some small caliber anti-personnel, some with top-down anti-vehicle shaped charges. They don’t have to be perfect, they only have to be more discriminating than artillery barrages or cluster bombs. Give them a one-time encrypted activation code and some 30-60 minutes of juice. Make them low cost enough and no one cares if you lose them all; picking up depleted drones to be sent back and reworked after you take the objective is just gravy.
Or use Mischief Reef as a concrete example. Have a stealthy submersible surface just long enough to unleash a thousand autonomous drones designed to attack personnel, ships or aircraft. It’s quite possibly you could destroy half a billion dollars worth of expensive combat aircraft and facilities using $500,000 worth of drones.
Borepatch brings up the problem of hacking. It doesn’t matter if the enemy can hack one or two if you’re deploying a hundred at a time at a cost comparable to one M829 round.
Done right, a drone swarm can be plenty dumb and plenty cheap and still be lethal. You don’t need to make them smart enough to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants if you limit their use cases to combatant areas.
There are dozens of other use cases for drones in combat. Heavy refueling drones, each of which carry enough diesel to top off an M1A2 tank during a prolonged armor push. Small swarms of small drones that perform automated sweeps of restricted areas, sending up alerts (and possibly deploying non-lethal weapons) after detecting intruders. Automatic long-range search drones deployed for sea rescue operations.
All this is coming sooner rather than later.
Tags: AI, drone, Military, tanks, technology
I think you’re correct. My post was focusing on autonomous vehicles – there’s no good definition that separates these from drones but the distinction is (as you point out) price. Expensive ones are worth trying to hack, inexpensive ones (used in large numbers) ARE NOT.