INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Last week someone knocked out 5% of world oil production with a small swarm of drones and cruise missiles, and in doing so, inaugurated &a
change in the nature of warfare globally,& to quote The Independent
These were relatively crude drones, too
Let pause a moment to imagine what happens if and when sophisticated autonomous drones become cheap enough for even small groups of
technically capable insurgents and terrorists to use at scale.
There controversy over where and whom the Abqaiq&Khurais attack came from
Even in cases like this, where video exists and wreckage is indicative — &serial numbers on some of the missiles used by the Yemeni rebels
in past attacks reveal their Iranian origin& — attribution is hard
What happens if and when autonomous attack drones can be built relatively easily from off-the-shelf parts?
We&re already in the midst of a
Here some video of Indra anti-drone system
Here Boeing Compact Laser Weapon System
Startups are in on the action too: Dedrone and especially Fortem.
The need for these defenses is obvious
Remember when small, unarmed commercial drones basically shut down the second busiest airport in the UK for days last year?
But, looking
forward, will those detect small autonomous drones which hug the ground while avoiding obstacles like a Skydio? Or kamikaze drones which can
conceivably defend themselves? Iterations will continue, on both sides, in a classic arms race
One side builds better defenses; he other side builds bigger drones that fly faster/farther and carry more explosive and nosedive onto their
targets, or smaller nimbler drones that outswarm defenses; then the defenders upgrade; then the attackers innovate
All in a highly irregular, punctuated way, over the space of years.
That future already seems all but guaranteed
But the bigger question is: even if you can protect hard targets — oil infrastructure, airports, the White House, etc
— how do you defend against the innumerable soft targets out there? What happens when autonomous drones can recognize and target a
particular license plate on the highway, and are all but impossible to track back to the attacker?
I&ve been asking these questions for more
than a decade now and I still don''t have any good answers
What I do know, though, is that we&d best start analyzing and answering these questions before we are thrown into collective irrational
panic and fury by some kind of widespread coordinated drone attack, high-profile assassination, and/or soft-target drone massacre …
because if we wait until that hits, we&re pretty much guaranteed to get our answers wrong.
