“Their latest models navigate by sight alone”
As Ukraine’s stocks of artillery shells have dwindled, its army’s reliance on drones has grown. These are able to deliver ammunition with great precision over long distances—provided they can maintain connections with GPS satellites (so they know where they are) and their operators (so they know what to do). Such communication signals can be jammed, however, and Russia’s electronic warfare, as signals scrambling is known, is fearsomely effective. With large numbers of its drones in effect blinded, Ukraine’s drone technologists have been forced to get creative.
Enter Eagle Eyes, a remarkable software package for drones. Developed by Ukraine’s special forces, it allows drones to navigate by machine sight alone, with no need for outside input. Using artificial-intelligence (ai) algorithms, the software compares live video of the terrain below with an on-board map stitched together from photographs and video previously collected by reconnaissance aircraft. This allows for drones to continue with their missions even after being jammed.
Eagle Eyes has also been trained to recognise specific ground-based targets, including tanks, troop carriers, missile launchers and attack helicopters. The software can then release bombs, or crash-dive, without a human operator’s command. “Bingo for us,” says a captain in White Eagle, a special-forces corps that is using and further developing the technology. The software has been programmed to target jamming stations as a priority, says the captain, who requested anonymity. Russia’s vaunted s-400 air-defence batteries are priority number two.
Optical navigation, as this approach to guidance is known, has a long history. An early version was incorporated in America’s Tomahawk cruise missiles, for example, first fired in anger during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. But lightweight, inexpensive optical navigation for small drones is new. In the spring of last year Eagle Eyes was being tested in combat by just three special-forces teams, each with two or three drone handlers. Today Eagle Eyes is cheap enough for kamikaze drones and is in wide use, says Valeriy Borovyk, commander of a White Eagle unit fighting in Ukraine’s south. With a range of about 60km, the system also guides fixed-wing drones that have struck energy infrastructure in Russia, he says.
Last autumn the number of Ukrainian drones with optical navigation probably numbered in the hundreds. Today the figure is closer to 10,000, says an industry hand in Odessa whose design bureau builds prototype systems for two Ukrainian manufacturers. Anton Varavin, chief technologist at a competing design bureau, Midgard Dynamics in Ternopil in western Ukraine, says optical navigation is increasingly seen as a “must have”, especially for drones with a range above 20km.
Optical navigation works best near distinctive features such as crossroads, power lines, isolated trees, big buildings and nearby bodies of water. For small drones with inexpensive optical navigation, the ideal cruising altitude is about 500 metres, says Andy Bosyi, a co-founder of MindCraft.ai, a developer of optical-navigation prototypes with workplaces at undisclosed locations in and near Lviv. That altitude is low enough for the software to work out terrain details, and yet high enough for a sufficient field of view. The height is also beyond the range of small-arms fire.
MindCraft.ai shipped its first models, appropriately dubbed NOGPS, to manufacturers in December. While cruising, the system needs to fix on at least one object per minute to avoid drifting more than 50 metres off course. That’s good enough for reconnaissance, if not precision bombing. To improve accuracy and allow night flights, MindCraft.ai is incorporating a heat-sensing infrared camera. The upgrade should be ready by the end of this year.
MindCraft.ai has also developed a NOGPS feature for what they call semi-automated autonomous targeting. Now being tested by clients, it allows drone operators to lock onto targets they spot in live video. If jamming subsequently severs the video link, the system delivers the munition without further human input. This function is valuable because jamming typically gets worse as drones approach enemy assets, says Mr Bosyi, who is also MindCraft.ai’s lead data scientist. MindCraft.ai’s clients serially manufacture NOGPS models for a unit cost of between €200 and €500 ($217-$550).
Other systems cost more. Midgard says the componentry in its designs costs its manufacturer clients roughly €1,500 per unit. Their systems augment optical navigation with inertial data from accelerometers and gyroscopes like those used in smartphones. To stay on course while cruising, Midgard’s optical system needs to find a match between a terrain feature below and one in an onboard map only every 20 minutes or so. Mr Varavin says that in ideal conditions precision is within several metres. That is comparable to GPS.
Demand for optical navigation is rising elsewhere, too. An Israeli firm called Asio reports brisk sales of an optical-navigation unit to the Israel Defence Forces and American firms. (Israel forbids exports of such technology to Ukraine.) Introduced in 2021, the roughly $20,000 system, now dubbed AeroGuardian, weighs as little as 90g, draws just five watts of power and is accurate, in good conditions, within a metre or so, says David Harel, Asio’s boss. Asio expects sales this year to exceed $10m, double the figure for 2023.
Ukraine now sees optical navigation as a capability “focal point”, says Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former chief of NATO. Ukraine’s defence ministry has provided detailed terrain maps to Atlas Aerospace, a drone manufacturer in Riga, Latvia. One way to better compare such maps with a drone’s view is with lidar techniques, which record the travel time of laser pulses bounced off the ground. As lasers reduce stealth, Atlas designed a “virtual lidar” system. This measures what founder Ivan Tolchinsky calls “optical flow”—the time it takes a pixel representing a terrain feature to transit the onboard camera’s view. Since an initial shipment in October, Atlas has delivered over 200 reconnaissance drones with such a system to Ukraine’s army, and more have been ordered.
Might optical navigation help Ukrainian forces get off their back foot? Perhaps, says Kurt Volker, a former American ambassador to NATO and, until 2019, Donald Trump’s special representative for Ukraine negotiations. He reckons it could prove to be one of the “technological step changes” that some Ukrainian military leaders have said will be needed to turn the tide. It will take time, however, for the actual effectiveness against Russian jamming to become clearer. Ukraine’s military leadership, Mr Rasmussen says, is rightly keeping tight-lipped about the technology.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1d4dyqi/
Comment: Although I found this on reddit, it was taken from an article in the Economist from last May. And a damned fine article it is. We’ve talked about the rise of computer vision in drones and how it is not a new concept. As the article points out, it was used on our Tomahawk cruise missiles. What’s different now is that this technology is small, light and cheap enough to use on kamikaze drones, drones cheap enough to take out single vehicles or single emplacements or even single soldiers. And it not the Raytheons of this world developing and producing these self-navigating drones.
The nerds and geeks are becoming more and more critical to this war. Young Ukrainians were dabbling in this stuff soon after Russia’s first invasion kicked off. Drones were used to take out a DNR mortar position that was targeting Ukrainian villages between the wars. That was the first instance I heard of their use in this war. Now drone operations are key to the defense of Ukraine. They are also of increasing importance to Russian operations. The rest of the world is watching, tearing up their field manuals and pondering on how they’ll catch up with Ukraine and Russia in drone warfare.
It’s not just militaries facing critical choices, the current industrial base is woefully unprepared for this revolution. The old defense giants and beltway bandits are just not going to cut it. I think units should start hooking up with engineering schools and encourage start ups to work directly with the units. Or perhaps some newly created DoD office chock full of geeks and nerds should make the connection with geeks and nerds in Ukraine to form joint ventures, provide capacity to their drone industry and to learn from the Ukrainian masters.
TTG
DSMAC for Tomahawk was developed by JHU-APL. The key was the degree of contrast in the images used for comparison. More compute power would be a game changer. The latest developments in ARM processors from eg Qualcomm makes it possible to deliver within the needed power budget. You still need the capability to timely obtain and process the base imagery that will be used as the reference, though I suppose with advanced AI you could just search for targets of opportunity with no prior knowledge of locations.
“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” – Serena Butler
It would be only minor evil, true evil is the other way around.
Hubris will doom us all, Barbara Ann was not enough suspicious.
jld,
True. Frank Herbert created a world where it was a crime to make a machine in the likeness of a human, so he made Mentats, human minds made in the likeness of machines. I ponder this sometimes when I watch CNN and FOX. It does not work out well in that world either.
TTG: “And it not the Raytheons of this world developing and producing these self-navigating drones”
I would not be so sure about that.
It is not beyond the realm of possibility that major US companies are responsible for the creation of this software with the credit given to “nerds and geeks” to provide the necessary plausible-deniability.
Yeah, right,
Those major companies would like nothing better than to be able to claim credit for this. They need no plausible deniability.
Yeah, they would if the Pentagon told them to do it on the QT.
Merchants of Death are not independent actors in this drama, TTG. At all times they must do as Darth Austin tells them to do.
Accept the money and keep quiet about it? Or blab about like they don’t have to listen to what Darth Austin is telling them?
They’ll do the former, and forego the latter.
That drone vision capability appears to be also used for idnetifying and taking down Russkii drones. Especially the large recon drones like the Orlan and similar ones.
Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Force has 3000 troops plus who knows how many civilian engineers, s/w developers, and factory workers. They’re looking for more. Job openings have recently been posted for Electronics Engineers, Project Manager, Back-End Developers, Decoders, Electricians, Mechanics, etc.
The Russians are complaining. The Ukrainians put into service FPVs that are immune to jamming, i.e. EW. CQFD.
For their part, the Russians are putting into service UAVs with no radio link but an optical fibre. There are limits to their use: no undergrowth, no ‘high’ altitude, 5 km distance after which the fibre optic coil is empty. The video quality is very good. The return to the nest must be quite acrobatic….
Prince Vandal of Novgorod is a FPV one.
No return.
TTG,
I have no doubt the Ukrainian engineers are more capable of building this optical navigation software system from scratch.
However, my wild guess is optical navigation software already exists in some US defense contractor UAV R&D projects for many years (perhaps at least a decade). And perhaps there have been joint ventures by US and the Ukraine working on this software for small drones that we don’t know about.
I should say “”Ukrainian engineers are more than capable …”
Meanwhile, in the background,
“With AI warning, Nobel winner joins ranks of laureates who’ve cautioned about the risks of their own work”
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/13/health/nobel-laureate-warnings-ai/index.html
“When computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for his work on machine learning, he immediately issued a warning about the power of the technology that his research helped propel: artificial intelligence.
“It will be comparable with the Industrial Revolution,” he said just after the announcement. “But instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us.” “
Thinking of post-war, those drones look easy to hide, TTG. A shed or an attic. Targeting and routing will be easy to obtain from some NATO source or other. Both the Germans and the US have the capability for routing and NATO ISR can easily identify vulnerable targets. Or maybe the Ukrainians themselves will be able to manage that side of things. The drones won’t necessarily require pinpoint accuracy. Any large urban area would do.
That means that after the war Russia will be under permanent threat from drone attacks from remnant Ukraine.
If we look at this in practical terms, the US would not accept a similar permanent threat from an adjoining country. Even were the US government reluctant to act it would be forced to by the American people – they would not accept that at any time a drone could fly over and drop explosives on them. They would demand that the threat be neutralised,
So would the Russians. They don’t want to live under a a permanent state of threat of attack either. Therefore, as was clear from that Lavrov interview in Newsweek the other day, they will be forced to neutralise the threat from remnant Ukraine.
How they’ll do that we don’t yet know. I’d guess the Russians are anxious to avoid having to occupy remnant Ukraine. They’ll be hoping for a neutral government in remnant Ukraine from which such threats will not emerge.
Have to wait and see whether they get that or whether they’ll have to occupy remnant Ukraine to preclude that and similar threats.
EO,
Russia, or remnant Soviet Union if you please, is currently under constant threat of drone attacks from Ukraine and will remain so as long as this war continues. If the shooting war ends, the drone attacks will end. The permanent threat will remain, just as the permanent threat to Ukraine from missile and drone attacks from remnant Soviet Union will remain. It’s the same threat made more than once to the cities of Europe by the Kremlin and its media mouthpieces.
The Ukrainians are perfectly capable of identifying targets and routing drones to those targets deep within Russian territory. She does not need US or NATO assistance in that regard. Nor does she need assistance in developing and producing those drones. As this capability proliferates to many other countries, the state of regional threats will change dramatically. It won’t be mutually assured destruction, but it will be mutually assured damage.
You often use the question of what would the US do if Mexico or Canada posed a threat. Given the history of the Cuban missile crisis, it’s not an unreasonable question. However, this new threat from deep drone strikes is not limited to countries. Non-state actors can easily play this game as well. Do you really believe we would seek to neutralize the threat posed by the development of drones by Canada or Mexico. Langley AFB was recently subject to multiple drone swarm overflights by an unknown actor. There was nothing the US military could do to end that threat. There was no enemy to neutralize. There will be arrests if possible, but that’s no guarantee. This is a threat that the US, NATO, Russia and Taiwan will have to learn to deal (at least the drone overflights) with without resorting to war.
Re identifying the owners of the drones.
It seems the goal is to develop a radar capable of tracking them, from their launch to their eventual disposition.
I have no idea how difficult that is.
Just looking at the practicalities, TTG, no more than that.
If they have any sense many of the hard core “neo-Nazis”, or “ultras” which is the term I prefer, will have left remnant Ukraine for Germany or Canada. The Azov, or the Aidar, or C14, will no longer be around. Nor will their monuments. But the population mix in the old Galicia/Volhynia is such that as far as I can make out, a majority in that part of the old Ukraine is and will remain decidedly anti-Russian.
Possibly more so than at present: as the Russian front line inches forward we’re seeing a drift westward in the Ukraine of the Ukrainian loyalist element in the population mix of eastern Ukraine. I recollect that before the Kherson retreat there was contrary movement out of the Kiev controlled area as those who wanted to be Russian flooded the other way. How significant that population shift is we don’t know, but to whatever extent it occurs it will leave remnant Ukraine more anti-Russian than before.
So it’s a safe assumption that anywhere outside the old Party of Regions area is majority anti-Russian and often fiercely so.
A simplistic view, no doubt. The Bloodlands, as Snyder called them, are layer upon layer of historical grievance. The recent Zelensky/Sikorsky spat showed one fault line emerging and there’s a whole raft of others. But I reckon most of the people in remnant Ukraine will be averse to absorption into the RF or to Russian occupation. If Russian troops are there they won’t be regarded as “liberators”, as we saw most in Mariupol or Bakhmut regarding them. They will be regarded as “occupiers” by the majority.
We can forget Putin’s history lesson to Tucker, or Medvedev’s nonsense about the Russkiy Mir extending to that bit of land. It’s an area the Russians would be dumb to occupy just as we’d be dumb to occupy Ireland again. There’d be flare-ups of resistance all over the place. Remnant Ukraine would be a pig to occupy and pacify. Costly in troops and money both.
But the Russians would also be dumb not to neutralise it somehow. Remnant Ukraine won’t be tucked away in NATO. Nor, if the Polish and French farmers have anything to do with it, in the EU. It’ll be a formally unaffiliated bit of territory that, as said before, will be a Tom Tiddler’s playground for NATO to mount “look no hands” attacks from into Russia proper. Gehlen rides again, is the hope of our western politicians.
That was their hope in ’22. All were expecting a swift Russian victory followed, when the shooting war ended, by a guerilla war type resistance. “Russia’s Afghanistan” was what they hoped for from Ukraine. That term was used widely at the time. The interminable Western discussions on how to get some sort of “ceasefire” that will leave remnant Ukraine in the Western camp show that that is still their hope.
That’s the Russian dilemma as has been apparent since ’22. Neutralise remnant Ukraine and it’s trouble. Nor forgetting that the Brics countries, as discussed, are averse to border changes and won’t want to see a precedent set here. But don’t neutralise it and there’s still trouble.
My guess is that the Russians are hoping for a less troublesome solution. Let the Ukrainians of remnant Ukraine deal with the problem themselves. If they can shake off the “ultra” dominated Kiev puppet regime, and also tell NATO to go pound sand, a solution will be arrived at that leaves remnant Ukraine peaceful and no threat. Looks to be an impossible solution at present but there’s always hope!
If that hope were to be realised then those wicked little AI drones you describe will be left unused in the attic. Remnant Ukraine will cease to be a NATO proxy tool. And the Ukrainian people themselves might get a look in when it comes to the government of their own country.
……………………..
But those drones are fearsome. If the Irish Nationalists or the Loyalists had had them during the Troubles there’d have been hell to pay. Any civil disorder in any Western country, and there’s plenty of that around waiting to bubble over, and life would be impossible. What with that and bio-warfare and AI, aren’t we opening Pandora’s box a little too wide?
TTG, perfect retort on whoever’s remnants. Might even release us for while of OE’s wider remnant expertise. 😉
LeaNder – go to Sleboda or Ischenko for remnant expertise. Not that they’re that free with the information. Go to Martyanov for the big picture. These are people who know their way around a region that’s a closed book to you and me. Though decidedly not a closed book to the BND.
But we have google! If I’ve got time I’ll set out a few current references for you on that part of the world. Can’t promise to do it at once! The days are drawing in and SWMBO doesn’t like it if I go chain sawing in the dark.
LeaNder – Ishchenko, of course. Spelled it wrong. He knows a whole heap of stuff about the people and parties there. A lefty but don’t let that put you off. Lefties are people too. They say.
Since remnant “expertise” was irony, I am not interested in your experts, E.O. Not Sleboda’s, and surely not Smoothie’s. Both are not my cup of tea. They invented the term? Completely without your help?
Ishchenko? Volodymyr?
https://x.com/Volod_Ishchenko/status/1836721037951578402
Not your cup? Too much of a lefty?
LeaNder – Really can’t agree. Andrei Martyanov is the American commentator I find myself most in sympathy with. He loves his adopted country, the US, and is appalled by what is happening to it. As an Englishman, I feel the same about my own country.
He has a Russian background and served in the Russian armed forces. Has kept up his Russian contacts since. That gives him an unrivalled understanding of “both sides of the fence”. At a time when that fence is getting very high indeed that is most valuable.
His assessment of current American diplomatic and military capability is indeed scathing, but if you look at what Chas Freeman and other old-style diplomats say I’m afraid it’s accurate. Also in line with the Colonel’s judgement on the deterioration in American Intel capability. The US is by far the most powerful country in the West and for me, to see American diplomats and military blundering around without the faintest idea what they are doing is plain scary.
His expertise in military matters, and his ability to explain those matters to the layman, needs no discussion here. Here’s an instance of it taken from the Colonel’s site:-
https://turcopolier.com/underwater-currents-of-naval-strategy/
On the deterioration of American diplomatic skill you’ll find some confirmation here. Chas Freeman is a man the Colonel thought highly of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZXq1B4Qp7w&ab_channel=DialogueWorks
………………………..
The reason you and I don’t get on as well as we used to, LeaNder, is that I tend to focus on an aspect of the current conflict that most in the States tend to ignore: the part the EU and in particular German politicians played in bringing it about.
Your politics in Germany isn’t as shoddy as ours in the UK, but it runs it close! That matters more than you’d think because Germany pretty well runs the EU and of course we don’t. You do not find it agreeable that I refer to your country as a “Whited sepulchre” but backing and promoting neo-Nazis in Ukraine while pretending to abhor them in Germany – something you can get prosecuted in Germany for stating! – makes that description a fair one.
Let alone being a major supporter of the Gaza atrocities – while of course deploring them at the same time. “Whited sepulchre” fits only too well.
And in fact German foreign policy for many decades has been characterised by similar hypocrisy. Causing mayhem abroad to an extent few realise, whilst presenting a “holier than thou” front to the outside world. Not good, LeaNder, and we can’t evade the issue by looking away and focusing solely on the foreign policy errors of the United States.
As promised, I did a bit of googling around when I came in from the logging. Nothing much that anyone can’t get at who has twenty minutes or so to spare, certainly nothing we don’t already know. Except there was some source material I hadn’t seen before. This is the start of the long BND relationship with Ukrainian “ultras”.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp87m01152r000100090001-6
“Bandera, too, obtained a post with a Western intelligence agency-the West German BND, run by the former Nazi Abwehr chief Reinhard Gehlen, who re- cruited scores of ex-Nazis and collabora- tors for his network. In his memoirs, Gehlen identifies Benders (sic) as one of his men.”
Further source material:-
https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/hitlers-shadow.pdf
“Meanwhile, Bandera searched for new sponsors. For a brief time in early 1956, Italian Military Intelligence (SIFAR) sponsored him, surely not understanding that his lines were compromised.70 The BND, the West German intelligence service under former Wehrmacht Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, formed a new relationship with Bandera. It was a natural union. During the war, Gehlen’s senior officers argued that the USSR could be broken up if only Germany wooed the various nationalities properly. Bandera had continued lines into the Ukraine, and in March 1956 he offered these in return for money and weapons.71 The CIA warned the West Germans that “against any [operative] relationship with Bandera,” noting that, “we [are] convinced [that] all alleged Bandera assets in CSR, Poland, and Ukraine [are] non-existent or non-effective. We also note rapidity and thoroughness of [Soviet] rollups [of] his past ops indicate weak OUN/B security.”72 The Bavarian state government and Munich police wanted to crack down on Bandera’s organization for crimes ranging from counterfeiting to kidnapping. Von Mende, now a West German government official, protected him. Bandera gave von Mende political reports, which von Mende relayed to the West German 84 | Collaborators Foreign Office. Von Mende routinely intervened with the Bavarian government on Bandera’s behalf for residency permits and the like, and now intervened with the Bavarian authorities for “false passports and other documentation.”73 The exact results of von Mende’s help are not clear, but Bandera was left alone”
“During the war, Gehlen’s senior officers argued that the USSR could be broken up if only Germany wooed the various nationalities properly.”
Breaking up the RF was the prize Scholz and Merz sought in 2022. To achieve it they were prepared to take the massive gamble of putting Germany’s prosperity on the line in the sanctions war.
The other links are more or less the standard material. Wiki has a brief section on the war crimes of a Ukrainian SS division here:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS_(1st_Galician)
Stetsko, a key figure, gets a mention here:-
https://mronline.org/2022/06/13/how-monsters-who-beat-jews-to-death-in-1944-became-americas-favorite-freedom-fighters-in-1945/
“Stetsko was a close friend of OUN-B founder Stepan Bandera. Like Bandera he was a militant anti-Semite equating Marxism with Judaism, while calling for the extermination of both. Even after the war, when his American bosses forced him to soften his public statements, he still called for an “ethnically pure” Ukraine, purged of Jews, Poles and Russians.
“Stetsko believed that his own Galician Ukrainians were the direct descendants of the Rus, the Norse conquerors who eventually became the first Tsars under Rurik. These Nordic people were Stetsko’s master race, imbued with all the qualities you would expect.
“On the other hand, Stetsko considered Russians to be Asiatic rather than European. Russians were seen as the descendants of the Mongols and Huns, making them naturally tyrannical, cruel and deceitful. Stetsko’s ideology would become the foundation on which modern Ukrainian fascists have built their movements. The parallels to Nazism are obvious enough that it is surprising to see this ideology find a home in the Wall Street Journal today.
“In 1944, sensing the imminent demise of Nazi Germany, the OUN reached out to British intelligence. The two sides met at the Vatican, not long after which OUN’s leadership surrendered to the Americans. Spirited away to Munich, their Western patrons provided them luxury apartments and SS bodyguards. In the immediate aftermath of Nazi Germany’s defeat, many of OUN’s soldiers worked as hitmen in the vast network of “displaced persons” camps under the command of MI6.”
“Stetsko’s ideology would become the foundation on which modern Ukrainian fascists have built their movements.” The ideology sometimes surfacing in the broadcasts put out from Kiev until quite recently. Also seen in the videos of the Biletsky summer camps and in many TV interviews seen from Kiev.
We in the West never see those but the people in the Donbass do and this accounts for the fact that the LDNR fighters, now absorbed in the Russian army but still distinct units and until recently taking the brunt of the war, fight like wildcats.
More from my 20 minutes on google:-
https://www.reuters.com/article/opinion/commentary-ukraines-neo-nazi-problem-idUSKBN1GV2TC/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S14_(Ukrainian_group)
https://civic-nation.org/ukraine/society/radical_right-wing_political_parties_and_groups/
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/meet-the-head-of-bidens-new-disinformation-governing-board/
https://www.conservapedia.com/Azov_Battalion
Even Bellingcat!
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2019/08/09/yes-its-still-ok-to-call-ukraines-c14-neo-nazi/
https://www.codepink.org/the_usa_caused_the_war_in_ukraine_and_only_the_usa_can_end_it
But that last is, I believe, incorrect. Without the enthusiastic collaboration of the Europeans, in pursuance of a foreign policy dating back to before you and I were born, Biden’s venture in Ukraine would never have got off the ground.
…………………………
More links, if you want ’em, submitted in my previous comments on the Colonel’s site. Some of those links now dead or “private”. A great deal of this material got memory holed after 2022, but there’s still enough around to show the true nature of the conflict.
You’re so vain, E.O. Amazing that you feel you need to educate me on issues I am obviously much more familiar with, than you will ever be. Yes, I obviously remember too who smoothie is.
Ukraine and everyone with enough time and engineers can create packages. If you look at Yandex Maps, you have since 2004 a full set of satellite then street view imagery that covered first only Ukraine and Russian Federation, and while currently the street view function only yields 2010 pictures from inside Donetsk, I believe to remember when the OSCE mission was there that they had recent pictures up in the public domain. In any case the imagery available allows to create pretty good visual flight paths right now as the picture points (almost each with four directions) are about 20m apart from each other. The same even better is offered by Google for the US and much of Europe.
While capabilities are important, the main factor in the attribution of likelihood is intent. Even if smaller and non-state actors would love the capability to deliver “mutually assured damage” they run the risk of being identified by the great power they attack and then be dealt with. Drones are fairly easy to attribute to producers and even users as in individuals and companies. The US military has experience how to deal with this, see experience with JIEDDO wich brought the non-military tools to bear that addressed this.
Wunduk –
JIEDDO now also focuses on small unmanned aerial systems in addition to IEDs and other improvised threats. Their name is JIDO. I would hope they are investigating the Langley AFB drone overflights.
Sounds like nice technology, however I find it hard to believe that this technology is a game changer or anything other than a gimmick or deliberate misinformation. This is not to denigrate Ukrainian engineers but a recognition of how eyes work and how nature defeats them.
I say “eyes” because there are a variety of eye models in nature ranging from simple to highly complex and the human eye is not the most effective either. Furthermore in nature eyes scan bandwidths and frequencies human eyes don’t use. For example mouse urine fluoresces under ultraviolet light. Falcons eyes can see ultraviolet and voila! Hunting falcons are looking for mouse urine puddles. They can see them, we can’t.
Then we have our old friends: camouflage and mimicry. How hard is it going to be to produce dummy tanks and Iskanders, or even dummy soldiers? Not very. Russia will simply channel Jasper Maskelyne.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Maskelyne
Please note that if there is any truth in Masskelynes assertions then having a bad reputation is perfect cover, therefore we can’t take any assertions at face value.
As for misinformation, during WWII, naval Enigma information was disguised as coming from a source that didn’t exist “HF DF” – High frequency direction finding. The technology certainly existed but it was not the real source of U boat position reports. “Visual pattern matching” could be camouflage for something else.
walrus,
Dummy tanks, dummy Patriots and dummy HIMARS have been in wide use already. I’m sure dummy Iskanders are also there. They regularly fool FPV kamikaze and recon drones. I’m sure they’ll continue to fool these newer self-targeting drones as well.
Adding IR vision to drones is already common. Adding additional sensors to drones such as UV is no problem as long as those additional sensors are small and light enough. The next step will be developing a kind of EW that will interfere with these newer machine vision autonomous drones.
TTG,
Other than by frying the circuit board I don’t know how you would do that. If the drone isn’t using it GPS or other radio link any tool that could stop it would, in my humble opinion, be in the class of directed energy weapon.
Typically you wouldn’t need to add “additional sensors” to work in the UV spectrum.
The existing sensors work in the visible spectrum by having UV cut-off filters (why process stuff the operator can’t see anyway?), so all that needs to be done is to remove those filters and then work out how to process the additional information.
What stands out to me is:
“Eagle Eyes has also been trained to recognise specific ground-based targets, including tanks, troop carriers, missile launchers and attack helicopters. The software can then release bombs, or crash-dive, without a human operator’s command.”
Fully autonomous hunter killer robots is a pretty big development. Up until now the “ethicists” have been insisting that there must be a human in the loop to sign off on any strikes that kill other humans. Once we dispense with this rule (and according to this article we have already) it is going to get real interesting real fast.
I had not realized that our overlords at The Atlantic Council had already signed off on full autonomous weapons.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/autonomous-weapons-are-the-moral-choice/
The people who think that the US can stay ahead of China in AI because our semiconductors (for now) have a few more transistors are … how can I put this politely … they have never written any actual code.
Regarding the drone swarm over Langley AFB, the following is intriguing, if unverified:
“Drone swarms targeting US military bases are operated by ‘mother ship’ UFO, claims [former ] top Pentagon official”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13958541/ufo-mother-ship-military-bases-drone-swarms-pentagon.html
One has to wonder, with all the advanced technology at our disposal,
why a drone swarm over the AFB containing some of that technology
cannot be traced back to the location to which those drones return.
Keith Harbaugh,
Perhaps our technology isn’t as advanced or widespread as many believe.