Suicide drone? Where I’m from we call those “missiles”
sounds a bit like the evil Iranian suicide drones, but not Iranian and being used by Ukraine, so therefore not evil. Double-plus-good.
I have been doing some reading on military drones over the past couple of weeks and have found it, maybe not surprising, but pretty interesting how well under wraps this has all been kept. We’re seeing the drones from Iran and Turkey and how they are turning out to be such huge game changers yet these are *primitive* compared to the kind of stuff the big western militaries have been working on. As usual it seems you need to find the ones where there is comparatively little information floating around. Israel have a whole line of shoulder-launched loitering munitions now for which there are really only stub articles to be found. You look at the wiki page for the [Switchblade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_Switchblade) and compared it to the [Phoenix Ghost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Ghost), you’d be forgiven for not realizing Ukraine has received far more Ghosts than Switchblades despite the prevalence of Switchblade footage vs I don’t think I’ve seen a single video or photo of a Ghost in action.
Long story short I think the future is already here on this. We see a major war going on with one of these western states where there is a need for more than a kind of arm flex of a deployment, what we are going to see is hundreds of smart drones that can hang around in an area for hours, days, some even for weeks, drones that can act as carriers for other drones (the GlobalHawk is already being adapted as a kind of carrier for loitering munitions for e.g.), all of which are fully capable of identifying targets, nailing down enemy strong points, and then blowing up anything that might be remotely dangerous or necessary for the enemy operation with a bare minimum of human input. All for a cost that compared to normal military spending is pennies on the pound.
[An old spoof TED talk from the previous decade](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK6IGG5zRU8) for those who want to scare themselves a bit. This is already here, this is already more than possible.
3 comments
Suicide drone? Where I’m from we call those “missiles”
sounds a bit like the evil Iranian suicide drones, but not Iranian and being used by Ukraine, so therefore not evil. Double-plus-good.
I have been doing some reading on military drones over the past couple of weeks and have found it, maybe not surprising, but pretty interesting how well under wraps this has all been kept. We’re seeing the drones from Iran and Turkey and how they are turning out to be such huge game changers yet these are *primitive* compared to the kind of stuff the big western militaries have been working on. As usual it seems you need to find the ones where there is comparatively little information floating around. Israel have a whole line of shoulder-launched loitering munitions now for which there are really only stub articles to be found. You look at the wiki page for the [Switchblade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_Switchblade) and compared it to the [Phoenix Ghost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Ghost), you’d be forgiven for not realizing Ukraine has received far more Ghosts than Switchblades despite the prevalence of Switchblade footage vs I don’t think I’ve seen a single video or photo of a Ghost in action.
Long story short I think the future is already here on this. We see a major war going on with one of these western states where there is a need for more than a kind of arm flex of a deployment, what we are going to see is hundreds of smart drones that can hang around in an area for hours, days, some even for weeks, drones that can act as carriers for other drones (the GlobalHawk is already being adapted as a kind of carrier for loitering munitions for e.g.), all of which are fully capable of identifying targets, nailing down enemy strong points, and then blowing up anything that might be remotely dangerous or necessary for the enemy operation with a bare minimum of human input. All for a cost that compared to normal military spending is pennies on the pound.
[An old spoof TED talk from the previous decade](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK6IGG5zRU8) for those who want to scare themselves a bit. This is already here, this is already more than possible.