While the drone war era has clearly begun, it is not yet clear that these small aircraft are playing a decisive role in the larger Ukraine fight by creating an offensive breakthrough or an opportunity to seize the initiative for one side, Lee says. “I think the open question is: Do the drones have to get more sophisticated. And Group 3 encompasses uncrewed drones that can weigh as much as 1,320 pounds. Group 2 covers the next tier, between 21 and 55 pounds. government divides small drones into three categories: Group 1 describes craft that have a gross takeoff weight of up to 20 pounds. “Less-funded countries now have access to airpower where they wouldn’t have in the past, so that’s changing who’s entering the fray,” says Nicole Thomas, division chief for strategy at the Pentagon’s Joint Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office, an organization created in 2020 to synchronize the U.S. In 2016 French special operations forces deployed in Syria were among the first to see small commercial drones imaginatively converted into instruments of war when the forces were attacked by Islamic State fighters. This enables a group with fewer resources to attack a more powerful foe. Even though an individual machine modified for combat is not capable of causing massive destruction, the number of potentially vulnerable targets is nearly infinite, Kreps notes. These are essentially flying IEDs that have foiled militaries in similar ways, creating asymmetric advantages that have been difficult to counter.”Īnother challenge these small drones present is that they are now widely available and cheap enough to be purchased in large numbers. spent countering improvised explosive devices that were far less expensive or sophisticated than systems our militaries had been trained to destroy. have spent billions trying to solve-not unlike when the U.S. “So it’s a real sensor problem that countries like the U.S. “We can retrain air defenses to look for smaller radar cross sections, but then they’ll pick up every bird that flies by,” says Sarah Kreps, director of the Cornell Brooks School Tech Policy Institute. People can creatively modify these hobbyist machines for combat to allow the drones to conduct overhead surveillance and drop grenades. Defending against such small drones, some weighing just a few ounces or pounds, is difficult. In Ukraine, the initial drone dogfights sprung from the proliferation of commercially available, low-cost, low-altitude aircraft, such as Chinese drone maker DJI’s quadcopter. Drones have already been successfully used to rush extremely perishable donor organs to transplant patients.) (Of course, much of the underlying technology is also expected to usher in changes for the good in the realm of peaceful applications. Beyond the battlefield, weaponized drones could, from the skies above any city, easily threaten things such as crowd safety at major sporting events, prison security and critical infrastructure. This plan is in response to China’s growing challenge to the U.S. Air Force, for example, now envisions a fleet of 1,000 high-performance uncrewed aircraft paired with its most advanced combat jets. “This is the first time we’re seeing drone-on-drone conflict.”Īnd the action in Ukraine suggests that even more novel kinds of aerial conflict-including combat drones armed to fight in tandem with piloted aircraft-are coming to the broader world of warfare. “This is something we haven’t seen before,” says Caitlin Lee, who leads the Center for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Autonomy Studies at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies in Arlington, Va. In other encounters, highly sophisticated craft use advanced radar-backed by artificial intelligence and the latest aerospace engineering technology-to precision fire nets that snag other drones. In some, hobby-type camera quadcopters that are used to spy on enemy positions simply ram each other in a crude aerial demolition derby. These aerial duels don’t involve bullets, missiles or bombs. In the skies over Ukraine, a new epoch in air warfare is emerging: drone-on-drone combat.
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