The Drone Wars are Here
AI and VR find their killer app
You pull on your VR headset, and soon you’re flying over forests and fields. It’s nighttime, but that doesn’t matter — you’ve got infrared night vision. You’re looking for a target. When you see it, it’s moving away fast, zigzagging because you’ve been detected. But you circle closer and closer, finally flying straight into it. Game over.
But is it a game? No. This is real.
So-called Virtual Reality has been looking for a “killer app” for decades, in order to sell those expensive headsets. And I’ve been writing about it since the 1990s. Remote surgery? Videogames? Chatting in the “metaverse”? Gimme a break.
There’s more. You think generating text and images is the killer app for artificial intelligence? Wrong again.
The killer app for both of these technologies is here, and it’s made possible by a third technology: drones. Remember the “Clone Wars” of the Star Wars series? Well, the Drone Wars are here — they’re happening right now, and they’re already killing hundreds of people a day. Yes, my use of the term “killer app” is intentional.
Since I normally cover artistic applications of technology, this article is intended as a wake-up call for those readers who may not be aware of these developments. I share some of the latest developments in drone warfare. It’s evolving fast, in real-time, unregulated proving grounds in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere. And it’s big business. I’ll explain some of the latest tech, detail the value that VR and AI bring, and survey some of the companies involved. And I’ll tell you why there’s no stopping it.
What’s happening now
As I write this, Russia has been launching huge strikes on Ukraine, using a combination of drones and missiles. This comes after Ukraine carried out “one of the largest ever attempts to attack Moscow with drones” [source]. In one night, Russia and Ukraine each shot down around 50 drones. Both sides have conducted mass drone strikes like this before, and both sides also use drones of all sizes for reconnaissance, surveillance and targeting, as well as for “suicide” missions in which the drones carry explosive payloads and fly straight into a target, as above.
Those targets include infrastructure like energy facilities, command centers, vehicles (whether armored or not), troops (whole squadrons or individuals), and yes, civilian targets — 25 Russian drones attacked the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in July, for example.
It’s not difficult to find videos online of, for example, a small drone zeroing in on a single soldier, who’s frantically trying to get away, and the drone gets closer and closer until — contact — the screen turns to snow as the drone explodes.
Ukraine isn’t the only place this is going on. A “significant portion” of the 25,000 or so people killed so far in the Israel-Gaza conflict were killed by drones [source].
The groundwork for drone warfare was laid before that, in Iraq and Syria. It was cheap, Chinese-made drones that started to make a difference — particularly in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020, when Azerbaijani forces used drones effectively against Armenian tanks and bases situated well behind the front lines.
Ukraine, though, has become a real laboratory for the future of this type of warfare. Even before the Russian invasion, all sorts of interesting technological developments were taking place in the country — see the U.S. president’s son Hunter Biden, for just one example. But let’s stay on target.
“Celebration” drones
What’s not to like about using drones in combat? It’s the very definition of a dangerous job that can save human lives, is potentially cheaper and faster than training solders, and could avoid human errors and emotional responses. At the moment, humans still appear to be “in the loop,” making decisions about why and what to target. But this is changing fast.
There have been big, expensive military drones since the Vietnam War 50 years ago. But it’s the adaptation of cheap, off-the-shelf drones that’s been the most interesting, and effective. I remember buying a cheap little quad-copter made of foam and plastic — super lightweight — around 2010, and by that time, the possibilities were already being explored. Many of these cheap consumer drones come from China; Turkey also supplies some of the drones being used in Ukraine.
Add a GoPro camera, maybe a micro-computer like a Raspberry Pi. A slightly bigger drone, and you can attach a couple kilos of explosives, plus shrapnel if you like. In a little building near Ukraine’s front lines, a 3D printer is being used to make drones.
The Ukrainians call these modified, off-the-shelf drones “celebration drones” because, before the war, they were used to film weddings and parties. Now, if you hear one buzzing overhead, dowse the lights and keep quiet.
The Pentagon launched an initiative last year that funds companies to produce thousands of expendable drones per year. This has helped nimble, mostly US-based defense-tech startups bring innovation and mass production.
For example, the little Switchblade drone made by U.S. firm AeroVironment — you might even call it “cute”. It’s fired like a missile out of a tube no bigger than your arm. The wings swing open, and it can cruise up to six miles, for 15 minutes, sending video back to its operator. Unlike, say, a Javelin missile, its signal doesn’t give away its operator’s location. Its payload can take out a room or a small vehicle.
Switchblade came out of a fairly secret U.S. Air Force program in the 2000s. It was first used in Afghanistan against “high value targets”, then subsequently in Syria. Now Switchblades can be launched from the air or the sea, and a bigger version can take out an armoured vehicle. The Ukrainians now have their own version called Vampire (the Russians call it “Bogeyman”).
Almost none of this tech was in Ukraine a couple of years ago. Now the country is going through some 10,000 drones a month in battle. A “drone coalition” has pledged a million drones to Ukraine this year. But for every Ukrainian one, there are six Russian ones.
There are now Drone Commanders. One Ukrainian soldier said drones now kill around 100 Russians a day, and that drones are fighting half of the war. “The doctrine of war is changing. Drones that cost hundreds of dollars are destroying machines costing millions of dollars” [source].
Indeed, those cheap foam-and-plastic drones can evade Russia’s most sophisticated electronic warfare systems. And so a secondary industry in drone detection has arisen. And off the back of that, another effort in jamming those detection systems. Russia has asked its military and law enforcement personnel in some regions not use dating apps, nor to upload video that might give away operational details.
Strap on those goggles
The weapon of choice for Ukrainian fighters is First-Person View (FPV) drones. The Chinese company DJI is a major manufacturer, and Israeli firm Xtend is supplying that country’s military (before the Gaza conflict, its biggest client was the US Department of Defense).
Ukraine held the first public demonstration of an FPV suicide drone two years ago. The last thing you see in the video is the surprised faces of some Russian soldiers.
You can still sit in front of a bank of screens in a command center somewhere, old-school military-style. But in order to evade enemy drones, you’re more likely to be sitting in a truck speeding down a dark forest road. And you’re either wearing a VR headset or operating the drone by phone. VR is much better, operators tell me, for obvious reasons — you can see a lot better than on a little phone screen, and bouncing around on that dirt road, you might drop your phone.
Games were supposed to be the killer app for VR. And the military has been using videogames for training for decades. In fact, both VR and videogames came directly out of military tech. Ivan Sutherland developed the first VR head-mounted display in the 1960s using tech developed for military pilots, that let them see video from a camera mounted on their helicopters.
But the military has been thrown on the back foot by the drone revolution, which was in turn driven by bottom-up developments in Iraq and elsewhere, along with all that cheap Chinese tech.
Enter Palmer Luckey, the poster boy of the new defense-tech industry. Tinkering with old VR headsets in his parents’ garage, and reading the research of Sutherland and others, he invented the Oculus headset. Then he sold it to Facebook for $2 billion. That was 10 years ago; he was 21.
Being a die-hard conservative and Trump supporter, he poured those profits into Anduril, his defense-tech startup now worth another $2 billion, which is taking on the big, entrenched old-school “primes” like Raytheon and Northrup-Grumman.
My colleague Alan Blackwell writes in his forthcoming book that a lot of the tech we have today was developed by socially-challenged young men who were into science fiction and fantasy. Indeed, Anduril is the name of a sword from Lord of the Rings. Another defense company, Palantir, also takes its name from that saga; and Peter Thiel, its founder, was one of Anduril’s early funders.
Luckey is also a fan of the game Metal Gear Solid, in which you discover an AI-controlled nuclear weapon, whose creator believed that AI would make better decisions than humans. Anduril makes AI-powered weapons.
Full autonomy
The most basic use of AI in drone warfare uses the same tech that recognizes people on your phone, or your “smart” home security camera. That scenario of a drone chasing an individual soldier is one example. Since this functionality is built into many small cameras (such as GoPro) and drones (DJI offers an add-on), it’s easy to use, and already in use in combat.
More advanced uses come with more sophisticated drones. The Russian Zala Lancet drone is fully autonomous once a target is identified. This gets close to the “killer robots” scenario wherein autonomous weapons make their own decisions without human intervention.
The next level is coordination — swarming behaviour, or “collaborative combat aircraft”. You’ve probably seen demonstrations of synchronized aerial drone ballet. Beautiful and impressive, right? Raytheon has used game engines to simulate coordinated swarms of autonomous drones in dense urban environments. And if you know games, you know that they’ve used AI for decades.
Swedish defense startup Helsing uses AI to process data from sensors and various weapons systems, to provide real-time “battlefield intelligence” and support decision-making. US defense company Auterion makes software to coordinate swarms of Ukrainian drones — they communicate with each other, and so can avoid collisions with each other, gather together to jointly attack a particular target, change their behaviour and flight paths in response to real-time feedback.
Having built wireless sensor networks for a decade or so, I’ve seen how the tech has gone from a fairly heavy phone-sized package to a single chip, at the same time increasing in range. So this capability is lightweight, easy to configure, integrate and work with.
Let’s go back to Anduril. As in Metal Gear, all of the company’s weapons systems can operate completely autonomously, making decisions without human intervention. The company leaves the decision to go full auto to its users and to the policymakers in the countries it sells to. I’ll leave it to you to speculate which decisions are being made in which countries.
When the company started out, its first big contract was with the Trump administration, to supply AI-powered surveillance towers on the Mexican border. The project was featured in Wired magazine at the time, and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy got in touch, wanting to put the same tech on its border with Russia. That was three years before Russia invaded, and the US government (this was still during the Trump administration) blocked the sale. Fast-forward a few years. Russia invaded, Luckey flew to Ukraine to meet Zelenskyy again, and a year ago, the US approved the sale.
Also delivered at the same time were hundreds of Anduril ALTIUS-600M drones. Like the Switchblade, it’s shot from a tube, with wings that telescope outward. But it’s bigger and can fly higher, with a range of 280 miles and four hours flying time, and equipped with AI. The “M” stands for munitions: it’s a suicide drone. Ukraine quickly went through all of them.
Your phone vs. a fighter jet
Anduril is now one of the contractors building a fleet of drones for the US Air Force, along with General Atomics, an old-school defense contractor that, as the name suggests, also develops nuclear technologies for weapons systems; its well-known Predator drone dates back to the 1990s.
That points to one of the big issues. Defense contracting moves very slowly. The Predator is still in service, and the current F-22 fighter jet also uses software from the 90s — it’s not due to be replaced until 2030. America’s nuclear arsenal operated on floppy disks until 2019. 2019! By contrast, as Anduril correctly points out, there’s more AI in a Tesla, and your iPhone has more computing power than many US defense systems.
Since the startup world moves so much faster, governments are trying to adapt. As ever, it’s a balance between urgent needs and ensuring that the big ethical issues are addressed. An active war obviously tips the balance towards urgency, and governments at war can more easily suspend civil liberties and push ethics aside.
For their part, companies inevitably see opportunities in conflicts like this. It’s no secret that war is big business, even to the extent that defense spending drives a lot of innovation. Who funded the internet, for example? AI, GPS, various transportation technologies — all made possible by defense spending.
Both nimble startups and the big, entrenched players stand to profit. Anduril has just raised another $1.5 billion. Helsing just tripled its valuation to $4.5 billion, making it one of Europe’s most valuable AI startups. Xtend recently raised another $40 million.
And it’s not just pure defense companies that profit. Investors in Helsing include Saab and Airbus. OpenAI quietly changed its terms of service a few months ago, to allow military applications of its tech. Do you use ChatGPT?
So what?
If you’re inclined to join a protest in support of Palestine, where do you draw the line? Do you still use that dual-use military tech that’s in your phone and laptop? Give up your car, give up flying? Aren’t you complicit in all of this just by playing your role in capitalist society?
As long as there’s conflict, someone will profit from it. Now that autonomous “killer robots” are possible, they’re inevitable. No regulations, guardrails or public outcry will stop them.
Sorry for the pessimism, but I do draw the line at the Terminator scenario — that machines will become “sentient” enough to “want” to eliminate all humans. You can read my other articles on how AI is a sociotechnical system — it can make decisions autonomously, but in general, it doesn’t operate without humans in the loop somewhere. The question is who is in control, and for what reasons.
If you take away one thing from this article, think about that fuzzy border between engineering and entertainment. Blackwell notes in his book that there are two types of AI: the functional use of machine learning techniques to solve practical problems; and the imitation of what humans make, say and do. This second kind, Blackwell contends, should be regarded purely as entertainment.
AI and VR straddle this divide, riding on drones that know nothing of borders. Will generative AI make us question what we see on screens? We’ve already crossed that line. Will we all live in the metaverse with VR goggles on? No, but such digital tech — games, AI, VR — increasingly impact the real world, perhaps to the extent that the physical world becomes just an extension of the digital. Whether we’re talking about building, or destroying.
I’ve inserted some references, but this article was informed by the following sources — some of these are behind paywalls. I also had conversations with drone pilots and other personnel who prefer to remain anonymous.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/22/can-the-world-be-simulated
https://www.rebuildthearsenal.com
https://www.ft.com/content/ce6f96f8-6ab8-4089-b7db-f99db22c2071?shareType=nongift
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cne4vl9gy2wo
https://www.ft.com/content/e09f813b-e568-4afe-8e07-940a707595ca?shareType=nongift
