My recent piece on Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) in Wired News> traces a familiar pattern in the evolution of air warfare. When balloons were invented they were first used for observation, then for bombing. The first fragile biplanes flying over the trenches in WWI were unarmed, but within a few years they carrying machine guns and bombs. Unmanned Air Vehicles like Predator were flying reconnaissance for years before they were armed for strike missions.
(UAV pedants note: the V-1 doesnt count as it was only ever one-way)
So its not surprising that British SAS troopers should decide that rather than just spying on Taliban with their WASP micro air vehicles, they should be able to take them out. Sticking a small C4 charge on these toy-sized craft is a relatively crude approach, but one that should effectively convert them from silent spies to stealth assassins. And at $3,000 a time they are by no means the most expensive weapon around.
But, as the article explains, the US Air Force has much more ambitious plans for arming MAVs to take out installations, vehicles and people. They might initially be used individually like the SASs WASPs, but the obvious approach is to release swarms of them as I have previously described networked robots forming an efficient single unit.
One area I did not have space for was the use of incendiaries, which can be far more effective than explosive pound-for-pound. This is real fire-ant warfare.
A single insect-sized MAV carrying a few milliliters of napalm would be a dangerous nuisance, especially indoors or inside a vehicle. Several dozen of them would be lethal, especially when they can locate stored fuel or ammunition. Just program them to look for those distinctive danger inflammable signs
Similarly, thermite could give tiny robots a disproportionate destructive capability. A mixture of powdered metal and metal oxide, it burns at very high temperature (up to over 2,500 degrees centigrade), enough to turn most metals to liquid. It can burn through metal; in WWII, thermite charges were used as a quick way of disabling artillery. It would not take too much thermite to make an artillery barrel hazardous to use; and surface-to-air missile batteries are an obvious target.
One armed MAV, or termite with thermite, would not be too much of a menace, but dozens or hundreds could be effective, against even large installations. The small size of the warhead is offset by the extreme precision with which it can be placed by the sort of flying/crawling robot insect which the Air Force has in mind.
This should help put the earlier report on swarming robot cockroaches intended to attack underground installations into perspective. Such weapons are too indiscriminate to be used in an urban environment, but in an enemy bunker, everything is fair game. Stamp on one and the thermite will burn through your shoes and keep going…
Individual cockroaches can burn through grilles or other obstacles, making a way for the rest of the swarm. With their collective intelligence they can identify the complexes vulnerable points, and by combining together, they can destroy most things. When the lights in your bunker start to go out and the air fills with the smoke of burning insulation, how long would you hang around?
– David Hambling
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Micro Drones’ Killer IntentLeave a Reply |
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Very good piece, but I wonder…
When you start talking about swarms of micro UAV’s being dispatched to takeout a particular target, aren’t you in essence resetting the UAV to a previous stage? Sounds to me (and I know this is simplistic thinking) like you’re really talking about a form of smart bomb and nothing more. To start to send UAV’s on these one way missions (swarms or not) is to make a smart bomb and nothing more. If this is true then where is the utility? If I can send a swarm of micro UAV’s after a target then why not a cruise missile or SLAM-ER?? Please explain.
UAVs have a special kind of precision that smart bombs don’t — they get the same CEP as a smart weapon but they can arrive slowly, perhaps even stopping on or near the target, and then execute complex or articulated actions when they arrive. Imagine a UAV trained to land on a metallic ventilation grille and then open a small canister of laughing gas / nerve gas / fluorescent taggants into the intake. You could either kill or track everyone in the facility. As above, imagine sending a group of UAVs to drop thermite on the same spot, in sequence, so that a near-vertical opening was created leading into a deeply-buried facility. A special forces team or a very high precision bomb could put a fuel-air explosive down the shaft and make it a very unfriendly place.
The precision arrival along with the possibility for departure (or onsite BDA, or onsite intel collection, or-or-or…) makes them either (a) the next step in UAVs or (b) the next step in smart bombs, or both. Calling it a step backwards isn’t giving the innovations the credit they deserve, but calling it “revolutionary” (vice “evolutionary”) overstates the case until we see some innovative doctrines employed.
In response to Solomon: One answer is survivability. Take a bat to a football flying at your face; now take a bat to swarm of wasps flying at your face.
You’ll likley render the ball harmless and hit it to the ground, you’ll also likley wack a wasp or 2… 50 others wasps will soon be biting your face and neck.
Of course there are counter-measures to swarms. Weapons such as water-canons, HEMP, and nukes.
Yes, I thought of mentioning the bats, as they have something in common: the small size of the warhead is offset by the precision of delivery.
With WWII technology you need many tons of bombs to hit a building. Later that came down to a single guided bomb and these days you can put a Hellfire missile through a specified window. MAVs would increase the precision beyond that, and a pound of MAVs will (one day) be able to take out a target with extreme accuracy and zero
collateral damage.
Consider the sort of mission currently carried out by Hellfire-armed Predators. if instead of firing a missile, the Predator unleashed a swarm of MAVs, they could get close enough to the target to get a positive ID and kill the specified target without endangering bystanders. Crawling MAVs could even pick up DNA samples to confirm identity, and all the unused MAVs could rendezvous back with the Predator ready for the next mission.
Such an MAV swarm could also carry out searches over a large area for an individual or go sniffing out explosive. Or they could perch near a vehicle/safe house and lie in wait.
These capabilities are far in excess of anything currently out there.
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the lingering shadow of shaking in my face, in order to play this game I spend money to buy the flyff penya, the BB again left me at the same time, same situation when I hard to get it, my angry can not use the words describe
This is interesting but there is a similar example from WWII that should be considered. During the war, The Army Chemical Service proposed using bats as a transport vehicle for incendiary devices. The idea was that the bats would fly into the attics of old buildings in Europe and rub they legs together, igniting small incendiary devices.The was a pretty good theory but during tests the bats flew into hangers unnoticed and burned the aircraft hangers down. There was also a problem with high altitude delivery. The bats would freeze and bounce rather than fly. So…low altitude delivery was required. That was much more dangerous. Finally the entire idea was dropped.