Autonomous Weapons report

Summary of report from Ukraine

These are my notes from an interview of an observer to the front in Ukraine a couple months ago. This part was about current experience with drones and novel autonomous weapons. Autonomy means full autonomy from launch to strike. Cruise missiles are not fully autonomous. Javelins are not autonomous. They are human targeted. Fire and forget is not considered fully autonomous.

The TL;DR - Electronic Warfare (EW) dominates the battlefield and any discussion that ignores it is badly mistaken. Support, logistics, and maintenance activities cannot be ignored. The final dive into the target makes good video, but the repair depot, parts supply, shipping, etc. dominate the actual practical operation. The rapid pace of EW changes make the current procurement practices counter-productive.

• Full autonomy was not observed, other than the barely qualifying land mine. Land mines are very heavily used.

  • There is a lot of talk, prediction, etc. But nothing is ready to try in the field.

  • The well known First Person View (FPV) drone requires 4 people to operate. These are the pilot, co-pilot/navigator, weapons man, and maintenance man. If the use will be at a large distance, there will be more people and relay drones involved to provide communications and surveillance support.

  • A Russian UGV (a tank on a wire) requires a team of 14 plus a support APC. These have been observed in limited quantities.

  • Bomber drones need a minimum of 4 staff. The larger ones and more distant missions require more.

  • Drone line of sight is only a few km past the front line. Relay drones are needed when the mission goes further. EW is heavily used, and line of sight is usually needed to break through jamming. Going further involves using relay drones in support of the attack drone so that there is jam resistant line of sight all the way.

• Practical autonomy in the field has to address how the machines will be maintained and repaired.

  • A tank crew of 3-4 people spends most of their time maintaining their tank. That's above and beyond the regular depot service and combat operations.

  • How will broken machines be retrieved? Cheap drones can be abandoned. How will more expensive drones be retrieved for repair? Retrieving a damaged drone will involve people.

• Remote control by wire or optical fiber is often needed in frontline areas with heavy EW.

  • Ukrainian remote machine guns are wire controlled.

• FPVs are getting bigger and more expensive. They need more power.

  • EW countermeasures results in needing to replace 2W radios with 30W radios.

  • EW electronics is power hungry

  • Longer range, heavier drones consume more power.

• EW is everywhere and a major consideration. EW and EW countermeasures change frequently.

  • An EW jamming "brick" will jam a single band for a short distance.

  • Many vehicles have a collection of bricks on their sides to cover all the commonly used bands.

  • Jammer range is short enough that every vehicle needs its own jammer bricks.

• Typical drone sizes and uses

  • FPV typical .5 - 8kg weapon, 10-20km range

  • Multicopter (e.g., baba yaga), 10-20kg, 20-40 km, re-usable bomber

    • Mostly remote mine delivery

    • Sometimes used to attack fortifications

    • Delivery of supplies to troops

    • on occasion to Attack Vehicles (which is what the popular videos show)

• EW continues to expand and change

  • Local heavy noise missions, e.g., jam 5GHz band, are common

  • Swappable band equipment can swap antenna and some band specific electronics to swap bands. This enables adaptation of EW equipment in the field.

• Lithium ion batteries are used widely, but behave badly above 500-1000 m altitude. Higher altitude requires lithium polymer batteries. (expensive and harder to get)

• People are using home on jam and target location by locating jammers

  • Below 1Ghz it is very hard to direction find, which inhibits location finding

  • The Ukrainians are putting antennas at about 5km intervals along the front to get line of sight and clean signals for jammer detection. These antennas are visible to the enemy. They take time to install and use. They work well at reporting where and how many enemy jammers they see.

• FPVs currently use 100-600 MHz. It's very short range but hardest to jam.

• Current FPV vs ISR drone tactics are evolving

  • The FPV must attack from behind. It can't see the ISR drone until very close due to camera limits. It can’t react fast enough to attack from the front or sides.

  • Ground based radars are being used when possible because they are much better at finding ISR drones.

• Chinese export controls are introducing parts shortages and costs on Ukraine.

• US manufacturers are not making drone parts

  • The quantities don't justify setting up a manufacturing line

  • Cheap drones are not an interesting US commercial market. China dominates that market.

• Drones go obsolete within 1 year due to improvements in EW and anti-drone defenses.

  • Inventory is useless junk within months because it’s not able to withstand new improved EW.

  • New models are introduced every few months

  • A build fast, use fast, abandon quarterly is the typical product cycle. The US procurement system cannot operate at this speed.