> For a few hundred dollars I can jam your communications channel(s) to the drones. Asymmetric warfare sucks.
The problem is that once we're talking tens of millions of dollars and up -- no, you can't.
We're talking the swarm is likely operating in a shared point-to-point link mode, either using highly directional antennas that are essentially deaf to below, optical links, or (more likely) a mixture of both modes.
At 10,000 drones, they likely can form a stable mesh network over the city covering a wide enough area at a few miles in the sky that you're talking about having to run power plants or detonate magnets with high explosives to generate the kind of wattage needed to shout in to the directional communications gear.
Jamming a few hobbyist drones is nothing like jamming thousands of military grade drones, and the techniques you think will stop their communications aren't all that effective.
However, scanning the area under your bot swarm of amateur attempts to jam the network is probably a great way to target RF engineers in preparation for a ground invasion, and minimize their ability to improvise communications gear once the main communications networks are knocked out.
tl;dr: Taking out a $10,000,000+ swarm of military grade weapons isn't the same as disabling a few hobbyist trinkets, and may get you seriously hurt in the process.
> The problem is that once we're talking tens of millions of dollars and up -- no, you can't.
Sure. If you're willing to build a new GPS system, because that's decently jammable for cheap.
Also are you proposing that all the drones will be individually piloted on missions as they are now? If so, I don't strictly have to jam the drones on the battlefield, I can just jam your satellite uplink or physically attack your operations centers. Add the cost of a plane ticket.
So far, we haven't used these weapons against any military that could be considered our peers. I wouldn't be so confident in our operational deployments without anything to base it on.
You've done an exceptional job of proving you have no idea what you're talking about. (Hint: I write software for a govt. contractor that builds drones and their control stations)
Can you point us to any public information about military systems' jamming resilience? E.g. here's a simple comm system, here's how you jam it, and here's a better comm system that can't be jammed that way?
I can't really get into the details, I apologize. I can tell you that the specific topic of jamming isn't a concern. Try and think about UAVs in the same way you might think about commercial planes. It would tend to make sense that the UAV model was most likely forked from there, at least initially.
Even with respect to radio interference in commercial planes, the public is subjected to more misinformation than information. How many planes have crashed due to cellphone use? Have there ever been any? Speaking specifically of commercial GPS use, was all the uproar about LightSquared just bullshit? They weren't on the GPS band, they were only near it. I recall lots of authorities confidently ordering us to just trust them, that LS was a dire threat to civil aviation. If LightSquared is a threat to UAVs too, our "enemies" might want to buy their old equipment off eBay. For that matter, if USA military radios are so robust, why do they have to reserve half the usable spectrum for their private pristine use? Wouldn't they be just as comfortable on the Wifi band?
There are reasons why civilians might be reluctant to simply trust the confident assurances of random anonymous defense contractors.
> There are reasons why civilians might be reluctant to simply trust the confident assurances of random anonymous defense contractors.
Which is absolutely your prerogative, and I don't blame you. You make some very good points. I would hope you might also be able to see my perspective: reading "facts" that are incorrect and not being able to add real value to the conversation. Sure, I chose my job, and the frustration comes with the territory.
> You've done an exceptional job of proving you have no idea what you're talking about. (Hint: I write software for a govt. contractor that builds drones and their control stations)
That's great, but you did not actually address the parent's point that GPS is jammable. Perhaps you are thinking of other methods of navigation that are accurate enough for long-term flying?
Enlighten us, please, rather than responding to people with your job description. Otherwise, you're not really adding anything to the conversation.
Drones don't need GPS they can look at the ground in the day or the stars at night. (ED: Both of these are 20+ year old approaches.) Note, I don't work with this stuff so I can make that comment. Unfortunately, anyone who has specific knowledge is likely unable to respond legally.
Also, jamming is far harder than you might think; anything you use becomes a really easy target.
Edit: After some thought, as long as your internal clock is accurate and you can keep an accurate orientation as to what's 'up', the stars should be able to give you arbitrary lat/long position. Weather + barometer + location + temperate gives you fairly accurate altitude.
I don't think it's even a question of jamming the GPS network.
Once you start doing the math on "I'm going to keep 1,000+ nodes in a mesh network from operating a phased array capable of keeping a lock on the signal from a constellation of satellites", things like jamming become extremely non-trivial, and only operate over relatively short timeframes or with hugely vulnerable base stations.
Most people are thinking about the capabilities of a single drone -- that's really not the way to think about drone swarms. In much the way that it doesn't make sense to talk about the capabilities of cloud services like AWS in terms of the limitations of single computers or switches of hardware, but in terms of the ability of the system as a whole to emulate high(er) performance equipment.
Similarly, once we talk about real drone swarms acting as a locally networked, single functional unit, presenting itself as single emulated devices or functions that the drones carry out, the whole game changes from what's effective techniques against single, standalone drones.
So to recap, drone swarm's GPS downlink is probably a phased array or something like that distributed over the mesh network of drones (using the local radio gear as localized timing and positioning information between mesh nodes), and nowhere near as easy to jam as it is for a standalone drone (at least, for approximate location; then using cameras and local sensors for say, fine bomb placement).
tl;dr: The power of friendship works for drones too, not just comic book heroes.
As was said by irishcoffee upthread, jamming GPS is not a concern. If you think carefully about that statement for a minute or two, you'll probably figure out why: the incredibly weak, trivially-noise-jammed-into-oblivion GPS signal isn't used as a primary source of position data in battlefield conditions.
I expect that military GPS signals do have some crypto to help prevent spoofing, but that doesn't do any good when you can't hear the signal over the enemy's noise.
Celestial navigation can get you to within optical range of a target, so can inertial. Neither celestial nor inertial nav systems are jammable for cheap, if at all. Celestial navigation is well understood mature missile guidance tech.
For a few hundred dollars, someone will make the drones self aware with pre planned routings along optically recognizable waypoints. No more need for a comms channel.
Tomahawk missiles were doing exactly this and more back in the 1990's. Shoot off a few and they would communicate amongst themselves, detect (or get blown up by) threats, and alert the other Tomahawks in the swarm who would then reroute to avoid that threat. Additionally, the missiles shared weighted target lists and knew if a missile on the way to a target was destroyed or disabled, and so would reroute in-flight missiles -if needed- in order to hit the highest-priority targets.
Tomahawks can operate fully autonomously with no substantial loss of functionality. Indeed, picture a swarm of one, and you're operating in this mode. The missile commlinks serve to enhance the missile's effectiveness; they are not the sole source of its effectiveness.
Here's something for you to puzzle over:
Your missile has up-to-date topographical maps of an area, and as-up-to-date-as-possible maps of all known anti-missile sites in the area. Thing is that you're not going to know about all of the anti-missile sites: many sites are portable (thus they move around), and some remain offline and nearly impossible to detect until enemy command determines that that site can kill a missile.
If your missile doesn't have commlinks, how do you tell it to avoid anti-missile sites discovered after the missile was launched?
Additionally, a careful reading of the comment that you replied to will reveal that the Tomahawk has -since the 1990's- been a fully autonomous missile fully capable of flying a pre-determined path to a target. Indeed, that is the least interesting part of the missile's capabilities. In short, we've had "self aware" warhead-tipped "drones" since at least the 1990's.
Thanks for all the insights about the Tomahawks. What OP is refering to is cheaper, smaller and therefore in much more numbers deployable fighting drones. Each and every anti-missile site, be it fixed or portable has it's limits on what they can defend against.
I also assume that OP was refering to drones that could go through current missile defence systems because they can't be easily identified, neither visually nor with radar.
Yes, we (or at least you guys in the US) had them in the form of expensive, capable systems, but not at a smaller, cheaper or whatnot scale.
Also, can't Tomahawk launches not be detected by a some signatures they emit? I assume that modern mil space radar systems are able to do that.
> For a few hundred dollars I can jam your communications channel(s) to the drones.
The same could be said for manned fighters. Granted, you still have a pilot who's there and capable of making decisions independently of communications.
But, I imagine if you threw up enough interference to screw with a drone, you'd probably make some very pretty lights happen on an F-35's radar.
There are some ways to communicate that are significantly harder to jam than others, plus the degree of autonomy these systems have will only increase over time.
For a few hundred dollars I can jam your communications channel(s) to the drones. Asymmetric warfare sucks.