Hopefully that will mean it is less skew and less rotten than old posts. I thought I’d write about AI. No, no… not about them replacing writers and artists. They’re kindly freeing us up to do important work… like wash the dishes and clean the floors (yes, I have a story in the works about that too). I was in fact thinking about Military SF and the rapid evolution of drone warfare. Part of being a Science Fiction writer is trying to look into the future and getting it wrong. (One of the joys of writing Regency Romance like CECILY was I was at least writing from real history.)
There can be little doubt that drones have changed the Ukraine war – and the Houthi terrorism menace to shipping. These trends will only continue: many things we took as accepted facts of warfare, probably won’t be.
I’m fairly sure too that many things we take as facts about drone warfare ALSO probably won’t be. For a start, it’s always a race between weapons. So: people predicting today’s off-the-shelf FPV drones becoming a major factor in future wars are probably the equivalent of predicting that muzzle-loaders would endure unchanging. Jamming will become much more sophisticated, and of course, so will jamming-evasion, and then vice versa catchup.
The trouble with catchup like that is that it rapidly hits a root-problem – the race starts becoming more and more expensive, and the big factor NOW where a $400 drone takes out a $2 million tank, and both sides can afford a lot of $400 drones… starts to change where the side with $1000 drones can succeed, but $400 don’t. So: both sides up the ante to $1000 drones that hop frequencies – and then the next trick comes along, costing $10 000… rinse, repeat.
One of the things that has been talked about a lot is swarming to overcome defenses – especially expensive defenses – when it costs $200 000 to take down a $400 drone it starts being very hard to win – which is why there is a lot of chatter about old-fashioned metal-storm type fire, and even things like shotguns, possibly lasers. But as the jamming techniques get better drones will start costing more and more IMO. Saturation starts becoming something that costs.
At the moment, anyway, many drones are disposable ‘suicide’ bombs – the cost of the drone being small and worth the harm they do. As they get more expensive, that will change to weapons on drones. This is already underway. The weapons at first anyway, can be fairly ‘dumb’ (as in dumb bombs) and cheap, but as it all gets more and more sophisticated, they too will have to become ‘smart’ to be at all effective.
With increased signal jamming, drones are going to become much more autonomous – enter AI (Fred Saberhagen predictivity…) Absolute guarantee IMO it will happen. Drones making kills with no communication back and forth from their senders (If you write sf, you can see where this can go so very, very wrong.)
My next prediction is we’re going to see the rapid rise of ‘sleeper’ drones – either left in territory evacuated or drifted in on currents, or rivers or even the wind. Some will be small enough to evade most detection. They may lie passive until signal-activated (quite a lot harder to block than FPV – just a brief, single signal.) or have some kind of sensor that gets triggered by say a person’s body heat, or mass or metals. Or just a timer. Once again, an sf author’s nightmare scenario.
We will start seeing more drone-to-drone warfare – where the purpose of the ‘fighter’ drones is to stop the enemy ‘bomber’ drones getting to valuable targets – human or otherwise.
And the next prediction is mimic drones – made to look and behave like birds or animals. Or possibly remora-drones – hitching undetected lifts on birds or animals – say turtles. Directing animals is possible too. Once again, we head into nasty shoot every possibly living thing.
Interesting times. I do not want to live in interesting times or even write about them.
Mad Genius Club 
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