The real answer to killer drones is a CIWS that can cover 2pi steradians and attack multiple drones at the same time, because otherwise it will be just swarmed by drones that quietly glide towards it, engines off, from several directions before entering the final dive.
Remember, in WWII Carrots were the secret weapon used to defeat the night fighters.
[Todo: Add link to Poe's Law]
A military system is being launched at an area to destroy a target that is presumed to be trying to hide (hence AI).
Absolutely nothing stops a secondary, much simpler identifier system of "home on bright flickering lights".
Any system where you try to confuse an image recognition model by loudly doing something unexpected suffers from the fact that regular tracking systems have been good at finding those for a long time.
No AI model confusion tech is worthwhile if it otherwise makes something much more visible by other means - it's a scifi trope that people want something "obvious" to be invisible to the machine. It's not how reality works though.
"Counter-blinkenlights" are well-known as thermal flares, and more similar but as crude, [dazzlers] that blind the incoming rockets' sensors.
[dazzlers]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzler_(weapon)
"No target" by AI but "target" by the "engage light sources" recognizer is still successful targeting.
"No target" versus "aim at anything not green or blue" is as well.
It's also a question of the speeds involved: a dazzler on high speed jet versus a high speed missile might cause a near miss which means hundreds of meters of actual separation. Diving drone vs. truck? Not so much.
The Phalanx defense systems you see on naval vessels.
I do not actually suggest watching those videos, they are NSFL.
Incidentally, modern drone footage is actually not nearly as bad as stuff from earlier in the war. Increased lethality of the FPVs means much fewer conscripts deciding to take a 5.45mm retirement plan.
Also can't use CIWS near troops and fpvs.
P1-SUN and equivalent are the answer there.
For @YurgenJurgensen above:
You're thinking on a ship, which is great, but these need to be able to provide front line coverage where I becomes an expensive target for cheap munitions. It is not a great solution. It's a fine layer against other threat classes.
Terrain clutter quickly becomes a problem on the battlefield.
Great on ships or for a base defense layer.
CIWS is just best for a different threat model.
We're moving into the "waves of drones with orchestration" phase and expensive directional systems won't survive that, and cost on the drone swarms is still drastically lower. Won't matter if you added ten ciws and ten fire-finding radars.
[1] https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/ukraine-s-drone-chief-reveal...
The relative financial cost to the enemy is almost irrelevant if they are much wealthier than you are.
What matters most is the intangible military value of the item.
In too many situations people think simplistically about dollars, when what matters is invisible or intangible values. The hyperfocus on money is especially egregious among people that don't have much.
https://www.science.org/content/article/zebra-stripes-confus...
You can't hide from drones. Attach quadrf to your drone and now you can see through walls.
Now, a squad of soldiers, or even just one experienced rifleman, would prob. dispatch of such a threat quickly. But against (at most poorly armed) civilians it would be an all too effective terror/area denial weapon.
Another interesting piece of fiction: Horizon Zero Dawn. AI robots armed to the teeth, fueled by biomass, capable of reproduction via onboard factories. They had to reset the planet.
I guess things like fire-and-forget anti-tank missiles led the way. The future is Skynet.
> It's important to note that the risk of misuse is significantly lower for individuals who have never had typical speech patterns
How to Hide from Killer Drones:
It's important to note that that the risk of being riddled with drone bullets is significantly lower for individuals who have never had human physical characteristics.
[0] https://research.google/blog/restoring-speaker-voices-with-z...
/r/CombatFootage (NSFL)
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/ukraines-one-time-test-us...
See it for yourselves: https://x.com/RALee85/status/2071537561059692956
Some object detection and (human triggered) terminal guidance. It's essentially there to solve latency and control issues for a fixed wing platform with a spotty data link.
the drones are used in groups. That is for example how we have a lot of footage of the drones hitting targets. The drone observers or especially the intelligence drone guiding the group would frequently carry much better camera than the actual kamikaze drones (especially when it comes to high-resolution IR cameras which are expensive). In the fully autonomous AI mode the drone is usually given small target area where to operate (in particular because they aren't yet smart enough to differentiate Ukranians from Russians, so you'd like to confine their operations to a limited area and not letting it into the totally free hunt) and regular 4K camera is sufficient there. Again, there is a lot of footage on YT an TG.
Most kamikaze drones are FPVs. They can not do anything autonomously because at $300 a pop in a totally GNSS denied environment, after 10 seconds past takeoff none of them have the faintest clue where they are. That's why you see all that footage, they just skip the part where for the first 20 minutes some guy with goggles is navigating them. The bigger fixed wing kamikaze drones like the Hornet above might have better onboard options like VO or triangulating radio beacons, but by all the evidence they are still guided by operators and triggered to dive manually. The biggest issue for all these systems is maintaining their video data link; if they were truly totally autonomous, nobody would bother.
The night time hunt using IR is widely practiced today in Ukraine and even was widely practiced by US and USSR in Afghanistan and Iraq as surroundings gets cooled down and cars, people and say donkeys used to transport weapons in mountains become highly contrast against the surroundings and thus easy to spot visually and to lock IR seeker of a weapon. Saddam used USSR anti-ship missiles, old even then, to attack Iran oil storage tanks at night as the missiles were easily able to lock on that large bright IR emission of the tanks still hot from the day against the cold night desert.
FPV drones are a thing. In, fact, I suspect most drones in the NATO-Russia war are FPV rather than fully autonomous.
You can call it NATO-Iran, or NATO-NKorea war as well.
Ukraine-Nkorea war? At least there were direct contacts between their forces.
Except the Ukraine kind of went out and built it.
People in this thread keep talking about DJI, and off the shelf US drones.
Ukraine has move so far beyond commercial products (but still in use) that it's laughable.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/ukraines-drones-can-n...
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/60152
A drone isnt terribly hard, or costly. It is a solved problem. The interesting bits are the software and even those are "easy" -- more so with "ai" in the aid of development. Ukraine isn't paying for "testing" either, they just send things to the front and try them against Russians.
This film predated the Ukraine war, and it felt like fiction six years ago.
This is absolutely coming.
The government is concerned about who might print a 3D gun, but this is the real danger.
These [1][2] are the websites for Ukraine's military.
[1] - https://mod.gov.ua/en
It's a Ukrainian site with English selected. You couldn't figure that out?
Who is that? What is their official page under gov.ua?
Listed as official website. As a Ukrainian I can also confirm this is the website used on recruitment ads outside and it is legit. Why does it have to be under gov.ua?
That is just a wikipedia page. Russia could have easily set that up. But now that we discussed it people can choose what to verify and what to believe. You know what they say, "Chem men'she znaesh,' tem loocheh"
If all this is clear and you go ahead, all the power to ya, fighting evil in this world is highly commendable.
Except more often than not it is fighting not evil but sleeping civilians who don't support this war, which is not even war in the strict sense of the word, but a deliberate meatgrinder set up to devour as much human beings on both sides as its orchestrators can get away with, for as long as possible.
And what 'orchestrators' exactly do you think benefit from sending their soldiers through a meat grinder? Yes, Russia (not Ukraine) has done a lot of that, but you seem to think that getting their own soldiers killed was their goal..?
Don't you know that big bad Ukraine forced innocent little Russia into this war?! (Do I need to add the sarcasm mark?)
> but you seem to think that getting their own soldiers killed was their goal..?
Actually, to some extent, that is the case. Russia has been conscripting violent criminals (generally murderers and rapists), who, unlike normal prisoners getting conscripted, don't have a way to "earn" their freedom and are instead sent into the proverbial meat grinder.
I don't have any hard evidence that drones that hit Russian civilian buildings are even launched from Ukraine. What is known for a fact, is that they often belong to the same waves of attacks that hit industrial and military facilities. And for a fact, certain remote operators are responsible for that.
See, most will find my POV heavily tinfoil-headed, but try to understand it: I don't consider Russians and Ukrainians as two sides of the conflict. The real sides are some third party in control of military forces and narratives of both sides vs the populace of both countries. This is a war of false flag operations that are always blamed by that 3rd party on either Russian or Ukrainian side. A war of psychological terror, resource and manpower exhaustion.
For example, I don't see any plausible explanation how drones with a radar cross-section of a Cessna are able to fly from Ukraine 1500-2000 km deep into Russia, other than either being turned the blind eye to by the Russian air defense, or straight up launched and controlled by entities within the country.
That it is pretty possible, can be understood by in depth reading on 1999 explosions in Moscow and Volgodonsk which inaugurated Putin's rule, and peculiar details like that slip when Zhirinovsky spoke about the Volgodonsk explosion before the event proper. Also, the prevented explosion in Ryazan (look up "Ryazan sugar"). And by mere living in Russia and noticing things around.
There is always an SMS warning in advance of every wave of attacks, but drones fly unimpeded and it is only in the vicinity of towns and cities that the air defense kicks in, often sending "the debris" neatly into residential buildings.
No attacks on key infrastructure were ever made that would cut war logistics on both sides, both sides never attempted to attack any key (like, really key, not some sacrifice rooks or bishops) figure of its "enemy" Khomeini or Maduro style, in fact, nothing is ever made that should have been made in a real war. Only slow, deliberate, controlled smoldering. Fighting over strategically meaningless villages and towns with losses in many tens of thousands, only to back down and then try to recapture with same losses multiple times.
All in all it takes living here and boiling in it, nothing I wrote could be obvious or even entertained as possible to a foreigner who doesn't follow the news daily and only sees the broadest strokes presented by foreign mass media.
As to what the orchestrators benefit - it's multifaceted, but goes along the lines of slaughtering the battle-worthy passionaries who would otherwise prove dangerous to the globalist plans for CBDC, total digital control and surveillance in slavic countries, displacing them with meek migrant workers, terrorizing the remaining populace into complete apathy and acceptance of whatever new normals those plans set, training military AI on real-world bloody datasets, limiting the freedom of movement by deliberately created fuel shortages, which makes well for 15-minute cities, etc, etc per WEF, IMF, World Bank, Blackrock and whatever scum there is still in the shadow.
Also don't forget russians executed 22k Polish prisoners of war in 1940 and lied about it for decades.
Germans killed millions of Polish citizens - but they are good people now, not like Ukrainians who are holding back russians? Russians who are casually invade neighbors once in a while and committing atrocities
I’m so fucking embarrassed to be Polish and hear this populism bullshit from Nawrocki and any other compromised russian shill.
You know who killed our people? The fucking russians. Remember when the bad guys came from Berlin? The other bad guys came from Moscow. Don’t forget that.
———
For anyone unsure what this throwaway account is talking about: when he says “not too long ago” in a discussion about a war that is happening literally today, he’s talking about 1943. If this isn’t a bad faith argument from an antagonist, then I don’t know what is.
I sincerely hope you'll be able to, thus proving that the people of the West are not as asleep at the wheel as Russians.
AI army leadership will set a target of 5% of victims being combatants, and press go, and the result will be as expected from that.
https://www.972mag.com/israeli-intelligence-database-83-perc...