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11. Future Warfare And Swarm Drones | David Hambling

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The future of warfare is heading towards a battle between software engineers rather than soldiers and pilots World superpowers are pursuing an arms race to develop super swarm drones which some have identified as weapons of mass destruction WMD In this podcast technical consultant journalist and author David Hambling talks about the state of the art of military drones and distributed approaches in warfare The video podcast is available here https youtu be HHKvzVvt0ncDavid s book SWARM TROOPERS How small drones will conquer the world is available here https www swarm-troopers com Some extracts from the podcast David Hambling DH At the moment the drones are beginning to have quite significant impact on warfare At the moment the chief users are the US Air Force and the CIA who ve been using them for what are called counterinsurgency operations That s well short of an actual hot war But we ve also seen very recently in Nagorno Karabakh where there ve been drones making a significant impact on the battlefield on a full scale war And that s kind of likely to happen more in the future Now the big drones like the Reapers that the US Air Force us go for 20-30 million apiece whereas small drones like the consumer drones made by DJI the sort that you can buy over the internet those are only a few hundred dollars DH with mosaic warfare and distributed approaches The idea is that you can have your warfighting capability So that s the ability to see what s happening cameras and radar and other sensors and your communications and then your weapon systems Rather than having it all in one big box like say a single aircraft flying overhead you can have lots of different devices at different levels Like a mosaic you can build it up to match whatever the particular mission requirement is nbsp DH If you re a soldier one of the things you always want to know is what s happening on the other side of the hill because the last thing you want to do is actually stick your head up and go over and get shot out while trying to look Whereas drones give you the perfect way of seeing everything that s going on around you DH Yes I mean that s nuclear batteries ultimately that s one of the best ways of powering aircraft You ve to remember back at the time they were also looking at nuclear powered bombers and various other things Given that the military already have nuclear powered submarines and nuclear powered aircraft carriers It didn t seem quite so outlandish The nuclear powered drone would be a slightly different prospect though because there s a much greater chance of it crashing and problems However there is actually a company that s working on a similar concept at the moment who believe that by using betavoltaics which is a sort of power system driven by radioactive decay they can get enough power to have a compact power system to drive a drone DH A swarm is simply a large number of relatively simple units that are able to carry out complicated coordinated actions just by following a few rules Swarming technology is a lot of it draws from nature So this is from the way that flocks of birds fly or that shoals of fish swim so they can all move together without crashing into each other And the whole thing can change directions smoothly and seamlessly So it s that sort of approach The advantage of a swarm is that you can have 100 or 1000 or even more small drones all carrying out a task and they don t require hundreds or thousands of operators you just need one operator to say go over there and the entire swarm can then have a commands nbsp Click here to visit this podcast episode

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