Swarming killer microdrones entirely automated by artificial intelligence (AI) are the stuff of nightmares and are on the verge of reality — but an SA company has come up with a way to shoot them down.
A video that’s taken YouTube by storm shows a man demonstrating the devastating efficacy of microdrones. Armed with facial recognition software, they swarm up to the foreheads of designated “bad guys” and detonate tiny, high-explosive charges that blow their heads off.
Horrifying in the implications that drone operators can assassinate whoever they target, the presentation was scarily convincing — though it was just the trailer for a short arms-control advocacy film, Slaughterbots. But the challenge highlighted by that clip is that AI and other technology required to make that dystopian world true is already here.
In SA, Centurion-based vehicle manufacturer SVI has developed a new six-wheeled armoured personnel carrier armed with a computer-targeted automatic grenade launcher specifically to shoot down drones. A grenade explodes close enough to the drone to disable, but not destroy it, then a dirt-bike on the back of the vehicle is used to recover the crippled drone, enabling analysis of its origins and target programming.
Back in 2006, I stood at a graveside in Ghazieh, south Lebanon covering the funeral of children killed in an Israeli air strike the previous day, listening anxiously as a targeting drone flew overhead, which was swiftly followed by bomber aircraft. It made me realise that far away some 19-year-old operator was looking down on my head and deciding, like a Roman emperor, whether I should live or die.
Drones have come a long way since then, and it is far less comforting. So much so that Slaughterbots, the brainchild of a University of California Berkley professor, was screened for UN arms controllers in 2017.
This year’s Africa Aerospace & Defence arms show near Pretoria had on display hunter-killer drones that we have seen before, in particular General Atomics’ MQ9 Reaper, operated by the air forces of the US, France, and Italy in the Sahara and Sahel, and SA’s Denel Dynamics Seeker 400 reportedly to be flown by the SA Air Force’s reactivated 10 Squadron.
The global military drone market is expected to grow from $11.73bn today to $30.86bn by 2027, according to Fortune Business Insights.
Regular-style offerings at the SA arms expo were Turkish Aerospace’s Aksungur fixed-wing ground-attack drone, which can carry 750kg of ordinance for 12 hours, and SA’s Milkor 380 reconnaissance-and-assault drone able to carry 220kg of rockets or bombs for 35 hours.
Uncrewed helicopter
But more unusual offerings were on show.
The China Shipbuilding Trading Company touted a broad range of drones: a 20-tonne multipurpose uncrewed surface combat vessel the size of a small harbour patrol boat with a 20mm canon and two torpedoes, a long-endurance fixed-wing drone, an uncrewed submarine drone, an uncrewed helicopter and an automated reconnaissance-and-assault tank. The applications seem endless.
The first such battles are more likely to play out in Africa rather than America — and with heavier tolls.
— US Africa Command chief Gen Stephen Townsend
Removing humans from the kill-decision chain in the automation of warfare has long provoked ethical debates, but has dramatically escalated as miniaturisation and better payload and endurance capabilities have seen drones become increasingly affordable and adaptable.
The advent of fully AI-commanded drones heralds a new watershed in asymmetrical warfare, argues US global affairs journal Foreign Policy.
It warns that “endowing drones with human-like cognitive abilities — for instance, by combining rapidly improving facial recognition with artificial intelligence — will make powerful targeted weapons available to tin-pot despots, terrorists and rampaging teenagers at a fraction of the cost of the fancy drones flown by the US military”.
But at the moment facial recognition systems enabling microdrones to target individual “terrorists” and other “enemies” are woefully inaccurate, vulnerable to poor weather or even bright sunlight and subject to misidentification, for example, mistakenly determining that an apple with a sticker on it saying “iPod” is that device and not the fruit.
The journal’s authors worry that a rogue operator not concerned with “collateral” civilian damage may not bother about accuracy, however.
The UK’s Bureau for Investigative Journalism estimates between 2004 and 2020, US drone strikes including in Somalia killed up to 20,823 people — perhaps 2,200 of them civilians. Advocates nevertheless argue that drone-strikes cause far less collateral damage than conventional military bombardments.
Africa
But the days of large hunter-killer drones may be numbered: a US Reaper was shot down by Libyan forces in August, while Military Africa reports the US Air Force’s drastically reduced requirements for large drones because of their vulnerability to air defence systems, had effectively shut down the Reaper production line. But US Africa Command chief Gen Stephen Townsend argues that it is still required in the African theatre.
Foreign Policy says: “Though all countries are at risk of killer-drone attacks, the most likely victims of the first wave of these weapons are poorer countries with porous borders and weak law enforcement ... The first such battles are more likely to play out in Africa rather than America — and with heavier tolls.”
Cheap miniature off-the-shelf leisure drones adapted to a military role — especially in hard-to-down swarming formations — are likely to prove the bane of both military and civilian airspace in years to come.
Islamic State has used swarms of drones to attack Iraqi soldiers by dropping small explosives — though between 2018 and last year, Russian air defence shot down over a hundred drones sent in swarm attacks against its facilities in Syria.
Foreign Policy argues that it is not too late to campaign for a global ban on fully AI-driven killer drones, but warns that “the battle to contain AI to constructive uses will be ... never-ending”.
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