BREAKING THE DRONE PHALANX

Drones are, fundamentally, electronic and vehicular devices that are intended to accomplish a task with either a degree of involvement with a human operator or by themselves due to programming.  There are many kinds.  Drone aircraft that are used for gathering information, serving as airborne targets, or high-risk operations in hostile airspace, have been with us for some time. Land or sea-based drones that sail, or submerge, or travel on tracks or on wheels are also common, if less flashy, and static systems are also used.

Drones can do anything they can be programmed and equipped for—to include industrial, communications, surveillance, hazardous environment or rescue operations, or any other application, to include military ones.  They are force multipliers; standing in for humans or helping humans.

Due to quantum leaps in drone technology, affordability, and size, the drone is having an increasingly heavy impact on our world.

For our purposes today, we will focus on military and law enforcement applications of these devices.  They have already changed the battlefield in the Ukraine and in the Arab-Israeli (or perhaps, with Iran, throw in the Persians) conflicts.

Drones can attack vehicles, or critical parts of them.

They can seek out and attack individual soldiers (or citizens) in cover.

They can provide perennial surveillance for other, heavier assets, such as missiles and artillery.

Broadly, the small drone—perhaps, very small—is proving to be lethal to the bigger, traditional weapons.   This is upending the battlefield order and is forcing adaptations across the spectrum.

For those of us who are “Generation X” and older, we can remember the foreshadowing of the “killer robot” in movies like The Terminator, the M-5 computer run amok in Star Trek, and creations such as the rogue Russian “Death Probe” from the Six Million Dollar Man.

Even back then, people were noticing the increasing capabilities of computers and automation, and asking the question—what happens when they are used against humans?

But what was science fiction then is not so anymore—in fact, the reality is worse.

All militaries world-wide are investing in these robotics as the technology becomes cheaper, and their ability boosted by global technological cabals.

Another incentive for their use will be in the demographics of major powers such as the European nations, the U.S., and China (longer term).

There is a shortage of young people overall, and more still, a shortage of young people with the desire or ability to enlist.

In the West, with every military decision spray-painted in rainbow colors and the attendant politics, along with the intolerance of Americans for casualties in wars, more drones also mean more capability with fewer human losses.

That aside, the U.S. will have to keep up with the rest.

With the power of computers increasing, as well as the power of communications technologies that are very closely tied to them, the drone is transforming warfare and every area of law enforcement and security operations.

We can expect drones to become more capable in the following areas as technology continues to advance and is applied:

1.   The operator will be given more situational awareness for longer periods of time under adverse conditions, with a corresponding ability to direct the drone better.
2. Materials science continues to advance, with an example being increasingly lighter and stronger body armor for police officers.
3. Range and endurance. The fury to build bigger and better batteries and alternative drive systems for vehicles will probably show up in improvements with drones, with larger ones still able to use more conventional power sources.
4. Nearly thirty years ago, I talked with an (overenthusiastic) security salesman who told me he’d be happy to sell me a FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared Radar – a thermal sensor) for the bargain price of $10,000 dollars. The instrument would be mounted on a helicopter, due to its size, power, and other needs.

Today, there are uncooled sensor thermal sights available in sporting goods stores for under $1000, and they will fit atop your “sporting rifle” and work with commonly available batteries.

Any wild hog hunter will confirm for you that a warm-blooded target running around at night without thermal camouflage or appropriate fieldcraft skills when faced with one of these is little more than a target waiting to die.

Human ones, as seen in practically every war this century, fare no better than the hogs.  We can expect these sensors to get better, lighter, cheaper, and smaller.

5. Autonomous capability. You could say the effort to develop a drone that could close with and kill (or otherwise act upon) a target was one of the first modern efforts the global electronics industry undertook in the development of video games, which needed increasingly tricky and aggressive computer programs to take on teenage human opponents in video arcades and home consoles.

Today, with artificial intelligence (AI) present and increasing, it is not a question of what a drone will be able to do—rather, what can they not potentially do?

There would seem to be no area of human activity that the drone will be unable to augment or act in place of.

Drones will be able to watch and follow people, attack people, deliver things (Amazon packages, or bombs), go into buildings or hazardous environments, and gather information—more of it, and more kinds of it—that can then, through sensor and analysis fusion, be translated into all sorts of operationally useful information for the humans behind the curtain.

This will occur in sync with other technologies, such as wide area motion imagery—that can monitor everything happening in a large area all at once in real time.

In addition, there will be no human activity that they cannot observe—or interdict.  Some wags, possibly the ones who think felons obey gun laws, imagine that humans will not allow these systems to kill people on their own.

Governments absolutely will allow them to, for the following reasons:

1. Speeding the kill chain. The fewer decisions the humans have to make for the drone, the better.
2. Humans have a natural aversion to killing other humans that societies have taken great pains to social-engineer out of military recruits. Drones will have no such inhibitions.
3. When an autonomous drone, programmed by an unknown person, kills a politician or burns down a village, there is no way to find, much less prosecute the perpetrator(s).

The negative implications of this for human freedom are obvious.   In the West, we are not yet at the point where the government is fully weaponizing drones and AI against their populations.

In places like China, however, this is happening and is getting worse, and I personally have no confidence that the American Deep State will not abuse power just as badly if it can.

On a personal note, in over two decades in law enforcement, I have found most law enforcement leaders to be reactionary yes-men and -women far too distracted by political micro-concerns to create moral barriers against abuses of power, including intrusive laws.

They are expert functionaries at rationalizing why it is safer and more comfortable to go along with the flow and keep collecting their salaries and benefits, and not a lot of deep thinking is occurring.

How do we begin to fix this threat?

I believe the effort needs to occur on three levels.

First, an immediate, continuous, and in-depth discussion needs to commence across the pro-freedom social and political spectrum in the United States and the rest of the world on the growth of this technology and the need to control it and the persons operating it.

I will go as far to say that against these forces most of our traditional methods to preserve liberty—including the Second Amendment’s traditional Industrial Age armaments—will not be enough to save us from malevolent automation.

The very definitions of “weapons” and “defenses” are being re-defined.

Second, an equally aggressive effort to guard against hostile AI and drone technologies needs to commence, with supportive industry and tech partners as well as military planners and veterans working with civilian stakeholders closely.

Third, an effort to educate the population on these new threats is important, along with countermeasures people can implement.

These include limiting the use and funding of statist institutions like Google and breaking the addiction of the smart phone; becoming educated on technical countermeasures to this technology such as signal blockers, thermal camouflage, and electronic and information security discipline; and decreasing dependence on convenience technology overall.

At the same time, we will also need to be more engaged with the sociopolitical environment and not withdraw to a place of imagined safety.  There is none.

Even in the remotest jungle or mountain range, the threat will find us if we do not address it, and by that point, it will be very hard to fight back effectively.

If we get this wrong, we could very easily find ourselves in a Chinese-style surveillance state where the very worst goals of the global Left could be pursued and realized against us.

Mark Deuce has had a life-long career in community law enforcement. He is the author of Deuces Wild for TTP.