The war in Ukraine has exposed that widely available, inexpensive drones are being used not just for targeted killings but for wholesale slaughter:
When the United States first fired a missile from an armed Predator drone at suspected Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan on November 14, 2001, it was clear that warfare had permanently changed. During the two decades that followed, drones became the most iconic instrument of the war on terror. Highly sophisticated, multimillion-dollar US drones were repeatedly deployed in targeted killing campaigns. But their use worldwide was limited to powerful nations.
Then, as the navigation systems and wireless technologies in hobbyist drones and consumer electronics improved, a second style of military drone appeared—not in Washington, but in Istanbul. And it caught the world's attention in Ukraine in 2022, when it proved itself capable of holding back one of the most formidable militaries on the planet.
[...] The TB2 is built in Turkey from a mix of domestically made parts and parts sourced from international commercial markets. Investigations of downed Bayraktars have revealed components sourced from US companies, including a GPS receiver made by Trimble, an airborne modem/transceiver made by Viasat, and a Garmin GNC 255 navigation radio. Garmin, which makes consumer GPS products, released a statement noting that its navigation unit found in TB2s "is not designed or intended for military use, and it is not even designed or intended for use in drones." But it's there.
Commercial technology makes the TB2 appealing for another reason: while the US-made Reaper drone costs $28 million, the TB2 only costs about $5 million. Since its development in 2014, the TB2 has shown up in conflicts in Azerbaijan, Libya, Ethiopia, and now Ukraine. The drone is so much more affordable than traditional weaponry that Lithuanians have run crowdfunding campaigns to help buy them for Ukrainian forces.
[...] These cheap, good-enough drones that are free of export restrictions have given smaller nations the kind of air capabilities previously limited to great military powers. While that proliferation may bring some small degree of parity, it comes with terrible human costs. Drone attacks can be described in sterile language, framed as missiles stopping vehicles. But what happens when that explosive force hits human bodies is visceral, tragic. It encompasses all the horrors of war, with the added voyeurism of an unblinking camera whose video feed is monitored by a participant in the attack who is often dozens, if not thousands, of miles away.
[...] In April 2022, China's hobbyist drone maker DJI announced it was suspending all sales in Ukraine and Russia. But its quadcopters, especially the popular and affordable Mavic family, still find their way into military use, as soldiers buy and deploy the drones themselves. Sometimes regional governments even pitch in.
Even if these drones don't release bombs, soldiers have learned to fear the buzzing of quadcopter engines overhead as the flights often presage an incoming artillery barrage. In one moment, a squad is a flicker of light, visible in thermal imaging, captured by a drone camera and shared with the tablet of an enemy hiding nearby. In the next, the soldiers' execution is filmed from above, captured in 4K resolution by a weapon available for sale at any Best Buy.
(Score: 5, Informative) by richtopia on Thursday February 02, @07:18AM (1 child)
The article covers the different types of drones in use well. One type they don't discuss is FPV drones. They strap explosives on a quad copter and can navigate it directly into doorways. It is a minor player on the scale of drones in the conflict but it is killing troops.
https://dronedj.com/2023/01/23/ukraine-seeks-1000-fpv-kamikaze-drones-in-new-funding-drive/ [dronedj.com]
As an aside, with everyone rooting for Ukraine, using drones in combat has lost the negative stigma. DroneDJ from my link used to avoid discussing military drones. While they don't discuss the airforce style drones, articles about smaller drones are posted all the time now.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday February 02, @09:52PM
You do get a bit more moral leeway when you have literally been invaded.
The non-cynical drone criticism was more about the "most powerful nation on earth" using what were effectively terrorist tactics of their own via remote control from across the world.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by janrinok on Thursday February 02, @08:08AM (6 children)
This is true of all aspects of war. I feel that the writer believes that some aspects are clean and acceptable - they are not. But war is a necessary and, regrettably all too often, the only way of defending oneself from an aggressor.
I believe that the relative precision that drones are able to achieve when targetting something are preferable to the flattening of cities, towns and villages by indiscriminate fire.
I also think that the huge majority of those who have found themselves fighting in a war would much prefer that wars did not exist at all. But that is a problem for the politicians to resolve, not those who are tasked with carrying out the politicians' orders.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday February 02, @01:45PM (5 children)
Problem for the politicians? I have come to believe that thinking of politicians as leaders is wrong and irresponsible. It excuses the general public for their essential participation, however reluctant. No war can go forward without public support. Politicians and media organizations can be responsible for ginning up that support with lies and propaganda, yet the people too easily buy into it, and why? The lies are obvious enough they ought to know better, but they still cling to the lies. Because, deep down, they're afraid. They want to believe it. The worst don't even care about facts, they know it's bull, but they don't care, just lap up excuses that change their bigotry from deplorable and evil to necessary and justified, and even virtuous.
Every war has a character of its own, and this Russian invasion of Ukraine is sheer bullying powered by the thinking that because Russia is much, much bigger than the Ukraine, the bullying will work. It will be easy. They didn't count on the victim receiving so much support, nor making such effective use of that support. In the American Civil War, the Confederacy was never formally recognized by any foreign power, and it didn't enjoy decades of independence between the split and the start of the war. Indeed, they were the ones that started the war. Chechnya rebelled in the 1990s, but that the Russians were able to stop. Perhaps the best comparison is the breakup of Yugoslavia. The Serbs tried to keep it together with force, which only made clearer to everyone else why they didn't want to stay together. Then there's the Czechoslovakian "velvet divorce". No fighting, just a mutually agreed upon split.
So far, the total death toll of the Russo-Ukrainian War is very roughly a quarter million.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday February 02, @06:50PM
I think that the direction of force here may be backward.
I think a war CAN go forward without public support.
However, sufficient public outrage, protesting, and outright mass rebellion might be able to stop an ongoing war. We will see, I suppose.
I think it even works that way in the US. Try to finish daddy's unfinished war in Iraq. It was not popular. There simply wasn't enough outrage to stop it.
I don't disagree, but I would add that lack of critical thinking may contribute greatly to this. If the American populace is happy, fat and can watch crap TV, they don't need to worry about what happens with the other 96 % of the world population. They just need more soma.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Thursday February 02, @06:53PM (3 children)
Another aspect is that politicians (and the electorate) are not yet thinking in 21st century abundance paradigms. See my essay on that (which I just tweeted a link to the author, Kelsey D. Atherton): https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net]
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ...
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...
The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). "
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Friday February 03, @07:14PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Friday February 03, @08:56PM (1 child)
The title of the article says "Mass-market Military Drones...". How more common can stuff get than mass market (as a trend)?
I agree with you about political and legal systems creating artificial scarcity. That's a big part of the issue.
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Friday February 03, @11:21PM
Orders of magnitude. Mass market is a pretty loose label. Consider if the ratio had been switched so that there were 100 drones for every soldier. At that point, you'd have more drones there than human beings.