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How to Conduct a Drone Attack
1.4k Plays11 months ago
In this episode, we speak with Dr. James Patton Rogers on how to conduct a drone attack.
Dr. James Patton Rogers is the Executive Director of the Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University. An expert on disruptive technologies and the history of weaponry and war, James currently advises the United Nations and NATO on the global proliferation of drones and 4IR systems. James also works with the BBC, Netflix, History Hit, PBS America, and the History Channel as a presenter, subject matter expert, and historical advisor. James' Warfare podcast has over 12 million listens in over 180 countries. Dr Rogers' new book, 'Precision: A History of American Warfare', is published by Manchester University Press, 2023.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/EncyclopediaGeopolitica
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Transcript
Introduction to Dangerous Activities Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to How to Get on a Watchlist, the new podcast series from Encyclopedia Geopolitica. In each episode, we'll sit down with leading experts to discuss dangerous activities. From assassinations and airliner shootdowns through to kidnappings and coups, we'll examine each of these threats through the lenses of both the Dangerous Act to seek and to conduct these operations, and the agencies around the world seeking to stop them. In the interest of operational security, certain tactical details will be omitted from these discussions.
00:00:34
Speaker
However, the cases and threats which we discuss here are very real.
Meet the Experts: Louis A. Prisant, Cormac McGarry, and Dr. James Patton Rogers
00:01:05
Speaker
I'm Louis A. Prisant, the founder and co-editor of Encyclopedia Geopolitica. I'm a researcher in the field of intelligence and espionage with a PhD in intelligence studies from Loughborough University. I'm an adjunct professor in intelligence at Science Pro Paris and in my day job I provide geopolitical analysis and security focused intelligence to private sector corporations.
00:01:26
Speaker
I'm Cormac McGarry. I'm an Associate Director at the Global Specialist Consultancy Control Risks, where I help companies from every sector understand the implications of global geopolitical issues on their business.
00:01:41
Speaker
So today we're discussing how to conduct a drone attack. And joining us to do this is Dr. James Patton Rogers. James is the executive director of the Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University. He's an expert on disruptive technologies and the history of weaponry and war. He currently advises the United Nations
How Did Drones Capture James' Interest?
00:01:59
Speaker
and NATO on the global proliferation of drones and fourth industrial revolution systems. He also works with numerous media outlets, the BBC, Netflix, and so on, as a presenter, subject matter expert, and historical advisor.
00:02:11
Speaker
James' Warfare podcast has over 12 million listens in over 180 countries. His new book, Precision, A History of American Warfare, is published by Manchester University Press, came out this year, and we'll put a link to it in the show notes. So James, thank you very much for joining us. It's great to be here, Lewis. And if I ever need anyone to do my epitaph, I think it's you. I mean, that's a perfect introduction.
00:02:32
Speaker
Well, it's a very great bio and it gives us a lot to work with. But I think that cues up the first question really nicely, which is, you know, you've got a fascinating area of focus that's very much kind of in the spotlight right now. So how did you get into this area of work? How did you start focusing on things like drones?
00:02:49
Speaker
Well, we're getting old now, Lewis. So we remember back when drones kind of first started to take off, if you'll excuse the pun, on the global stage.
Obama's Drone Warfare: A Safer Combat Alternative?
00:02:59
Speaker
And this is very much from 2008-2009 onwards under the Obama administration. After the cost-heavy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was public disquiet and discontent at the mounting
00:03:15
Speaker
death and destruction, the body bags coming home, and Obama was in part elected on the idea that he would remove the United States from the illegal war in Iraq and he would win the good war in Afghanistan, as you know all too well. And a part of trying to fulfill this promise to the American people was to reduce the amount of boots on the ground, reduce that risk of those IEDs that slowed everyone down to a snail's pace
00:03:42
Speaker
and to take the war to the skies and ideally to not have any humans on board so that if they were shot down, you wouldn't have those casualties. So drones were seen as this panacea weapon. Obama said at the time that they were part of a just war, a war waged proportionately. They are pinpoint precise and simply put, they save lives. And all of this fascinated me. It was around a time that I was starting my postgraduate studies, moving into my PhD.
00:04:10
Speaker
And for all of Obama's praise about these war-changing weapons, there was so much protest around the world of this idea of removing the human from the front line of killing, the idea that war was becoming a turkey shoot, that war was becoming too easy. And so how did you try to remedy this?
00:04:33
Speaker
How could you have something that is morally, ethically in line with just war theory, according to Obama, yet absolutely detested around the world? And that's what I wanted to find out. And I wanted to find out where this ambition to achieve pinpoint precision by remote control in war came from. And so I thought in my research, I'd be able to take it back maybe to the Gulf War.
00:04:54
Speaker
maybe to the Vietnam War, maybe there were some lessons there, but I just got dragged along in my research and kept on going further and further back until I found the first drones that were invented in reaction to the bloody, muddy, brutal battles of the First World War. And so my research took me back to 1917. It was from understanding all of that century
00:05:18
Speaker
of context that I begin to understand the world today. And of course, again, I've been dragged into the future because I thought I'd be analyzing the American use of drones for many years, but they are proliferating at a record pace
Strategic Advantages of Drones in Modern Warfare
00:05:31
Speaker
around the world. James, I want to ask you a little bit more about the use of drones in the First World War, because that's really interesting. But to a broader question, generally, let's say I'm an adversary, I'm considering the best way to
00:05:47
Speaker
attack a bridge, assassinate a general, sink a ship. What is it that the drone offers me as a tool of choice? Absolutely none of those things at that period in time. Instead, they were part of this idea that America would be better, more morally and ethically and religiously deeply entwined into a Christian ethic at this time than the brutal old world of Britain and Germany.
00:06:15
Speaker
And so as air power started to advance through the 1910s and the 1920s, Germany and Britain started to move towards this area bombing idea. And of course, we surmise this with terms like in order to destroy something, you have to destroy everything. You have to carpet bomb cities. You have to annihilate everything in its path.
00:06:38
Speaker
But when you look at American thinkers at the same time, people like Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, people who were the pioneers of American air power, General Edgar S. Gorel, who's become quite a forgotten figure in the history, well, they were looking at something very different. America was the new world. Ever since they stepped foot off onto Plymouth Rock, it was all about building a more progressive society. And so this is all caught up in that progressive movement.
00:07:03
Speaker
And so the early drones are a social construction of that moment in the United States. And they come up with this idea that if you want to actually blunt the enemy's ability to fight on the battlefield, if you want to avoid those entrenched wars that went on for months, if not years, with hundreds of thousands of casualties,
00:07:24
Speaker
Then what you could do was you could send these uncrewed aerial systems, they called them aerial torpedoes, and you could go and strike at the heart of the enemy's war-making capacity. They had quite a technical name for it, they called it industrial web theory. So if you could take out these munitions plants, rubber processing factories, oil refineries,
00:07:46
Speaker
the places where they make the teeth for battle, then you can degrade your enemy's offensive capabilities. And at the same time, if you can do that with pinpoint precision, if you can strike those targets with a precision missile, a bomb, or a drone, then you avoid the populace and their livelihood. There's no need to morale bomb them.
00:08:06
Speaker
And so this is where this idea of precision bombing doctrine came from. And that's what it was called at the time. Now, when it came down to the first drone, the Kettering bug, it was set on rails. It was invented by a mix of people like Charles Kettering, an engineer. Henry Ford was slightly involved in this.
00:08:28
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General H. H. Arnold, who was taught to fly by the Wright Brothers in 1912, was the second person in the US military who was taught to fly and would go on to lead the US, the first independent US Air Force from 1946 onwards.
00:08:44
Speaker
during a time of jet power and intercontinental ballistic missiles. And so their idea was this first uncrewed aerial system. Now, they said that it would soar in the sky like a falcon and swoop down onto the enemy. In reality, it was worse than useless and never fully deployed in battle. But it was that moment where you started to have the separation of the human from frontline warfare that inspired an entire generation of air power thinkers
00:09:12
Speaker
to try and come up with technological fixes that would make precision bombing doctrine possible.
Global Spread of Drone Technology: The New Combat Era
00:09:17
Speaker
And it was here that they started to invent the Norden bombsite, the first analog computer, a bombsite that if you put in the wind speed, the altitude, other variables, and when you're over the target, this analog computer would tell you exactly when to drop the bombs
00:09:32
Speaker
So you would hit that target with that pinpoint precision. They called it pickle barrel precision. They said that they could get a bomb in a pickle barrel from 20,000 feet. I don't know why they called it pickle barrel precision, but it's just the way it was. And that leads us into the Second World War, because the British and the Germans, well, they went with area bombing. The Americans, they went with precision bombing doctrine.
00:09:55
Speaker
The world of drone warfare and precision warfare has clearly evolved in the time since then. You've already touched on this evolution that's happening at the very beginning of its story. It seems to be going through this other period of rapid change now following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. What are some of the most interesting advancements in doctrine or deployment that you have seen make it to the battlefield, not just now, but throughout the history of drone warfare?
00:10:23
Speaker
Well, I think history tells us that the nation that pioneers the weapon doesn't have a monopoly over that weapon for very long. And we always forget this lesson throughout history. And so it came as a surprise to many US policymakers that drones started to proliferate at a record rate from around 2019, 2020 onwards.
00:10:44
Speaker
It shouldn't be a surprise. The world saw what the United States was doing with these seemingly incredibly effective hunt-to-kill drones that were hunting down the perpetrators of 9-11 or other terrorist groups around the world during the global war on terror. And a lot of nations thought, well, I want a slice of that. And allies tried to get drones from the United States. They tried to get predators and reapers. And some select allies did get those. So France got some weaponized versions. Britain got some weaponized versions.
00:11:14
Speaker
But a lot of other key allies such as Turkey or the UAE, well, they were refused these by Congress. And so they went down a very different path. You had Turkey that created its entire drone industry off the back of the US refusal to supply it with drones. And as a result, they can now pass these drones to whoever they want around the world or get involved in local conflicts in a proxy fashion
Drones in Covert Operations: Assassinations and Beyond
00:11:39
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with little cost to their own troops.
00:11:41
Speaker
the uae the emeritus well they started to do something maybe slightly more controversial they started to buy their drones off the chinese who saw that the us had left a bit of a gap in the market and the chinese made these wingland twos that were almost carbon copies of predator drones
00:11:56
Speaker
and they sold them to anyone who wanted them. Anyone who might even sign up to their Belt and Road Initiative and maybe start to cozying up to China a little bit more. And so back to your question, what's the thing that shocks me the most about how these drones have been used? Well, when it comes down to it, we have seen that drones have been used
00:12:18
Speaker
with very little restrictions. We have seen that they have been used for mass killings, for assassinations. They've been used in a covert fashion. So we don't really know too much about how many drones have been deployed around the world and how many drone strikes have taken place. And so we live in this deniable, distant, remote warfare world where it's becoming increasingly hard to track, to count the amount of strikes. And as is a perennial problem in war,
00:12:47
Speaker
to count the amount of dead. But these are the bigger drones, Louis. These are the medium altitude long endurance systems. I think the thing that probably caught everybody by surprise was the rise of the commercial systems, the quadcopter drones that meant that for the first time in a very long time, I think probably since 1953, I think was the last recorded death of a US military personnel by hostile enemy air power.
00:13:12
Speaker
It meant for the first time that the US didn't have total air superiority. They did at a strategic level from 10,000 feet and above, but they'd lost tactical air superiority from 100 feet up to that 10,000 feet ceiling. And so you've had this massive change in war where for the first time in a generation or two,
00:13:33
Speaker
The US, Western powers, allies have faced this hostile air power threat. And because we didn't see it coming, we didn't bother to invest in air defense systems that could pick this up. And so we are all playing catch up with a massive detrimental cost as we're seeing at the moment. To that tactical question, James, and you've mentioned precision targeting of munitions factories, mass killings, assassinations, do you see
00:14:01
Speaker
in the limited data that is available, do you see particular target missions, you know, typically what takes the lead for generating a target for a drone?
Targeting with Drones: How Are Objectives Chosen?
00:14:15
Speaker
Does it tend to be, you know, hard military targets, intelligence agencies? Is there a preference that, you know, the tactic that is drone warfare, is there a preferred target that it's shifted onto?
00:14:28
Speaker
I would say that back in the past when I first started analyzing this, it was almost so much easier. We thought it was difficult at the time, but it was so much easier to analyze this because the Obama administration or the limited use of drones under the Bush administration, and then of course later on the Trump and the Biden administration, they would very much kind of publish some of the civilian casualty data, the amount of strikes that had taken place, who they were targeting. It was against high profile individuals.
00:14:57
Speaker
Now, when it comes to this proliferation of drones around the world, the drone is an incredibly versatile system and every nation state, but also every non-state actor has their own strategic culture. And that feeds into how they're going to use these systems. But I would say that there are some things that overlap. We know that non-state actors learn from each other and they learn lessons from states as well.
00:15:19
Speaker
And so, when you look, for example, at how Houthi rebels use drones, these are drones that were initially supplied by Iran, but I was out in the Middle East, I was given privileged access to analyze a number of these captured drones, and I was able to go through and see almost a kind of evolution of the human being. You know that chart when we go from apes to humans? Well, these drones were first
00:15:43
Speaker
put across as very much state design, state manufactured, state quality level systems with military technologies inside them. But as soon as they got over to Yemen, the Houthis started to make fiberglass shells of these. So they had the same aerodynamicism as these state level technologies, but they could make as many of them as they wanted. Now the trouble was they couldn't get hold of an endless amount of military technologies. So what did they do? Well, they went and got commercial technology. So when I was out there and I was
00:16:12
Speaker
pulling apart these different bits of drones with my blue rubber gloves on tied up and my phone taken off me and left somewhere else. I was looking at these and seeing the motors, the piston engines, the petrol motors. They were from Europe, from Ireland, from the Czech Republic, from Germany.
00:16:29
Speaker
And the electronics were from China or from various different consumer drones, the big consumer makers that you all know all too well, all around the world. Does this mean that the Houthis are being supplied by Germany or Ireland or the Czech Republic? No, of course not.
00:16:43
Speaker
They're just so easily and readily available to get hold of that it meant that the Houthis could have their entire indigenous locally produced industry producing as many of these drones as they wanted and giving them to other non-state proxies whenever they saw fit. So how did they use these once they'd made them? Well, here's where the Houthis had a clear target.
00:17:02
Speaker
They had targets to hit the oil making industry, the pipelines, the refineries. You remember Aramco in 2019 when everyone looked up as around 6% of the world's oil production was taken offline. Oil prices jumped by around $10, $11.
00:17:19
Speaker
Everyone thought, what is going on? This has never happened before, or at least it's not been reported on. And this means that all of these key energy infrastructure sites are incredibly vulnerable. So the Houthis kept doing this. They knew that they could get quite quick wins out of it and have a massive impact on the Emiratis in the UAE and in Saudi Arabia. And so what do they do next? Well, they started to target airports. Abu Dhabi airport struck on many occasions on the industry around that area.
00:17:47
Speaker
They also started to take out high profile targets, assassinating key members of the Yemeni state military. And then they started to expand this. As their range of the drone expanded, they started to take out international shipping. You'll remember that you had the targeting of the Mercer Street, the killing of its captain and of a British security guard that was on board. And this was a rudimentary swarm of drones, three drones all at once, targeting international shipping.
00:18:15
Speaker
And so that's how they started to use them. Now, there aren't many other non-state actors that have that sort of range. And so what they're using instead is much shorter range drones, perhaps up to a maximum of 100 kilometers to take out command post communications towers. I mean, we've seen this most tragically in the Hamas attacks on Israel. We now believe that the drones were used as a vanguard by Hamas to pretty much blind and death and
00:18:44
Speaker
the Israeli military so they couldn't report on the sheer scale of the attacks and respond accordingly. And so drones were used pretty much to open the gate for this attack. And that's how they've been used more often on the battlefield with these shorter range commercial systems or this kind of hybrid augmented mix of state and commercial technologies. You've seen the same when it comes to Russia and Ukraine. These have been used on the battlefield to take out artillery, to take out communications posts.
00:19:14
Speaker
to take out air defense systems when they're powered down for a bit to try and fix them to take out key tactical targets and of course other people flying drones. So you've got this at the moment, this first person view drones, you've got your first person view headset on and you've got drone pilots hunting down other drone pilots on the battlefield. It's almost strange to be saying it out loud because when I first started talking about this,
00:19:39
Speaker
You know, drones are part of a just war, a war waged proportionately. Simply put, they save lives. But we live in this massively uncontrolled world of drone warfare now where everybody is potentially vulnerable to this death from above.
00:19:56
Speaker
James, you noted the association of drones with the covert. And this is something that really fascinates me as an intelligence scholar. For years, drone warfare was the purview of the intelligence and special operations community. And it was a somewhat exotic weapon. It was used for taking, as you noted, terrorist leaders off the battlefield. But what you've described there is a transition of drones away from a special high shelf capability to a regular tool of military warfare. What happened there? What made that happen?
00:20:26
Speaker
So from around 2015 onwards, we started to see more advanced commercial drone systems on the market. And these were put forward by advanced Chinese manufacturers, some French manufacturers, and it meant that anybody who wanted a drone could have a drone.
00:20:45
Speaker
And so one that sticks out for me at the time that saw, I guess you could call it this democratization of air power, couldn't
The Democratization of Air Power Through Commercial Drones
00:20:52
Speaker
you? The idea that anybody who wants to be able to deploy a strike from above can now do so by simply going online and buying their own drone system.
00:21:01
Speaker
What happened in one particular circumstance that made me realise that this is a really worrying period that we're going into? We call the period that came before it the first drone age, and very cleverly, because we're also smart academics, we now call this period we live in the second drone age.
00:21:18
Speaker
And this second drone is defined by that proliferation, proliferation that I would say started in 2015 and really took hold from 2019, 2020. And so that one attack that stuck out for me was when a self-proclaimed environmental terrorist called Mr. Yamamoto went and bought a drone off the Internet. He was incredibly upset that the Japanese government were reopening their nuclear power stations after those terrible events at Fukushima in 2011.
00:21:44
Speaker
And so he went online, bought this drone, painted it black so you could cover up all of those lights and it was almost impossible to detect in the night sky. Then he went down to Fukushima and got a shed load of radioactive waste, put it in a container, went back to his home
00:21:59
Speaker
put that container onto the drone, went down to the Japanese Prime Minister's office in downtown Tokyo, went to the car park at dead of night, and flew that drone onto the roof of that Japanese Prime Minister's residence, the office there. It sat there for two weeks without anybody noticing. In fact,
00:22:19
Speaker
Mr Yamamoto was pretty annoyed. He's a self-proclaimed environmental terrorist. He was writing about this on his blog. He wanted the world to take notice of what he was doing and what was happening. He wanted to spread terror. And so he readied a second drone. But just by chance, security officials were sweeping the roof on a two-weekly basis. I can only assume. I think there might have been a helicopter coming into land at some point.
00:22:41
Speaker
And they found this system. And then they found the person that did it. I mean, in terms of intelligence, it didn't take much. He was promoting it on the Internet. And then they stopped him doing so. Japan has a long history of this. The first attempts by terrorists to use drones on mass to cause terror and panic were by Umshirikyo back in the 1990s, when they were experimenting with high tech systems to try and spread sarin liquid or biological agents all over the city. They couldn't do it because they had to make their own drones or use hobbyist planes.
00:23:11
Speaker
The reason why Mr. Yamamoto could do it was because the drones were already there. The drones had a high spec and a low entry level. They were easy to use. I have my drone pilot's license, that should worry anybody. I have my own drone, it's sat beside me now. These systems can be used by anybody, they can be weaponized by anybody, and they have been. There's many other incidences that I can go into that make me specifically worried about the future, but maybe we'll get into that.
00:23:41
Speaker
James, on that note, you know, Jones have obviously proliferated into the amateur space as well, as you just mentioned. What about other domains? My background is in maritime security, so I'm very interested to hear how is this happening on the surface and underwater? Because it seems to me like the amateur space hasn't quite gone in there yet, am I wrong?
00:24:04
Speaker
I think that's certainly the case. I don't think it'll be long before they will have commercial systems that will be readily available. But this is very much a military domain at the moment. You have drones that are used on the ground, so these uncrewed ground vehicles, these UGVs. You have drones that are used underwater, these uncrewed submarines. You have drones that are used on the surface of the water. We know that famously, recently, it's reported that
00:24:32
Speaker
Elon Musk decided to cut off Starlink and to stop such an attack. And so when you deploy warfare by remote control, you now have these leaders and titans of industry who can shut off a switch and stop a drone attack from happening. Maybe that's the
00:24:49
Speaker
for another podcast, but it's one thing that worries me quite greatly. But these are having a massive impact on war. We've seen that it's meant that Ukraine has been able to have quite a viable and powerful maritime capacity to take out key elements of the Russian
00:25:06
Speaker
fleet. This is worrying stuff. Now, do I think enough work's been done on this? No, I don't think so. I'm very grateful and very lucky that NATO have just funded our new project that I've termed Full Spectrum Drone Warfare. That's how I describe this. How these drone systems won't just be used on their own, but they will be coordinated attacks.
00:25:27
Speaker
of air, land, sea, and underwater. And all of this needs to come together and we need to understand it both as a powerful offensive capability for NATO allies and Western allies around the world, but also as a terribly worrying offensive capability for those enemies of the West. And that's really interesting to see that effectively Russia's Black Sea fleet has almost been sullied into a corner
00:25:55
Speaker
by relatively basic technology that is drones. Just on what you mentioned around someone like Elon Musk with the power to flick a switch and turn off the capability, do you think that that may lead to an evolution towards the autonomous, particularly towards autonomous running and decision making? Already happened. I mean, I would say automated right now as opposed to autonomous.
00:26:23
Speaker
Automated being that a human sets the GPS, it sets the coordinates, and the drone heads off in a fire and forget capacity towards that target will move towards autonomous.
The Future of Autonomous Drone Systems
00:26:37
Speaker
We already are. And then you'll have the ability for these drone systems to have their own brain on board, powered by an AI infused algorithm that will mean that
00:26:45
Speaker
as an air defense system or perhaps a maritime defense system tries to intercept them, they will be smart drones to the point they can make a decision about how to evade them. So we find drones dangerous enough now as it is being sent in these rudimentary swarms. What if they're smart swarms? Think of a flock of birds in the sky or a school of fish in the sea. As you see that hawk come in to take out some starlings, they move, they evade, they twist as one. That is how you're going to see the drone wars of the future.
00:27:15
Speaker
I'd like to ask you about that specific question, the future of this. Where do you see us heading? What do you think the drone threat looks like in, let's say, 10 years? I think within 10 years you will have completely autonomous drone systems. You've already seen them deployed in a select few areas of conflict.
00:27:34
Speaker
Now, during my work with the United Nations, I've been advising the UN Security Council on the proliferation of these drone systems to violent non-state actors. I do think that you will have violent non-state actor groups, terrorists, and criminal gangs that will have access to the autonomous level of drones in a decade's time. But before that, states are and will pioneer them. So let me take you to an example in Libya during the Second Libyan Civil War. Now, to give a bit of context,
00:28:04
Speaker
for this conflict, you had Field Marshal Haftar's forces of the Libyan National Army that were supported by an Emirati alliance that had access to Chinese Wing Lung II drones on the one side, and then you had the Libyan Government of National Accord, the UN approved government that was supported by Turkey on the other that were deploying their own drone systems. Now, on the same side as that for the Government of National Accord, they also have access to some
00:28:33
Speaker
American air defense systems. And for the Libyan National Army, for Field Marshal Hafta, they had some access to Russian and Chinese air defense systems. And so you had this drone proxy war, the ability for these states to send in an air power capability to aid these proxy actors, these local partners on the ground. It's an incredibly costly conflict that is just
00:28:57
Speaker
sent endless amounts of turmoil. I mean, you just got to look at the terrible floods in Libya recently that I relate back to the start of the war in 2011, the fact that you haven't had any government in place, you haven't had the upkeep of civil infrastructure. I mean, these are the sort of things that wars do. They impact every level of the lives in that country. But back to drones.
00:29:17
Speaker
What did Turkey do? Well, they sent in these new drones that they had invented, these Kargutu drones. You'll know about the Bayrak tier, the TB2 drones that were used in the war in Ukraine have been used around the world. They're much larger, kind of medium altitude, long endurance systems that have missiles on board. These Kargutu drones are more like the kind of drones that you would buy off the internet. They're like quadcopters and they are suicide systems. So they go in and they will explode.
00:29:46
Speaker
Now, the key thing about the Cargoo 2 was it has that algorithm on board that means that once it's been launched by a human, once a human has pressed a button, the human is outside the loop of control of that drone. And so the drone can be sent off with its preset algorithm on board that means that it can pick out targets autonomously. So it knows what a tank looks like. It uses its machine vision. It knows, at least it thinks, it knows what an armed combatant looks like.
00:30:15
Speaker
And in this conflict, back in 2020 and 2021, these drones were used to take out retreating troops. So these troops had turned their back and they were fleeing from the battlefield. These autonomous drones were used to take out those human targets. And so, for the first time in war that we know, a machine got to make the decision about whether or not a human lives or dies.
00:30:43
Speaker
We're discussing how to conduct a drone strike with Dr. James Patton Rogers. After the break, we'll discuss how to defend against drones. You have been listening to How to Get on a Watchlist, the podcast series from Encyclopedia Geopolitica.
00:31:06
Speaker
If you like this show, don't forget to check out our other content at Encyclopedia Geopolitica, which you can find at howtogettontowatchlist.com, where you can find our analysis on various geopolitical issues, as well as reading lists covering topics like those discussed in the podcast. Please also consider subscribing to the podcast on your streaming platform of choice, giving us a rating, and joining our Patreon.
00:31:39
Speaker
James, we left the discussion talking about the terrifying cargo too.
Defending Against Future Drone Threats
00:31:45
Speaker
And you said, for the first time in history, a machine made a decision on whether a human lives or dies. And that's a terrifying future we're looking at. I want to now switch to what defensive measures are in place for that kind of future. What might 2040 or 2030 drone defense look like, if that's the future we're talking about?
00:32:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's it's one of those questions if I knew all the answers to that I'm sure I'd be a very rich person because I'll be able to invent and invest in Really important air defense systems that would stop all of this from taking place I don't think that there are quick measures to be able to counter this we see the problems at the moment
00:32:27
Speaker
Our current generation defense systems are designed to pick up intercontinental ballistic missiles. They're designed to pick up cruise missiles like Tomahawks. Super fast systems that come in from a high altitude over a long distance. Whereas the drone, especially those adopted and used by non-state actors, they are specifically designed
00:32:48
Speaker
to quite literally fly below the radar. So they use the terrain to their benefit. They fly super low, and they fly super slow. And so you'll see something like, I don't know, you've got some of the cassettes or the samads that are used by the Houthis. Or if we go to state use of these, if you look at the Ukrainians and their beaver drones or their UJ-22s, the question is always, how on earth
00:33:17
Speaker
is Ukraine that you could optimistically call a medium power, able to launch strikes deep into Russian territory to bomb the Kremlin. How is that possible? Well, it's possible because, like I said, you don't have vast amounts of air defense systems in key strategic places to stop these from being taken through to their targets.
00:33:42
Speaker
But also, these drones are deliberately designed. The UJ-22, I think, has something like a max speed of between 100 and 150 kilometers an hour. That's pretty slow. It has a lower ceiling of flight of 50 meters. So this means the radar trying to pick these up, well, they can't see them. They blend in with the tree line. They blend in with the hills, the mountains. And that's the same when it comes down to the maritime drones as well. How do these maritime drones get through? How are they striking?
00:34:12
Speaker
advanced Russian ships? Well, once again, you'll see that these are streamlined drone boats. They go along the surface of the water and they're shielded by the waves going up and down.
00:34:27
Speaker
It's a simple way of deploying a drone strike effectively. Use nature to your advantage and use your rudimentary lower tech drone system so that there's massive electronic signature on board as well to get through and to penetrate key state targets. I guess you could only really make it tantamount to the IED. I always relate the evolution of the drone to the IED.
00:34:50
Speaker
Because the IED were these cheap $5 systems or, in some cases, much larger systems that would take on these multimillion dollar enemy apparatus of the Western forces. Well, drones are kind of IEDs that fly. As we remove Western forces from these conflicts on the ground,
00:35:10
Speaker
We simply saw terrorist groups take the IEDs and strap them to drones. And in many cases, literally making improvised explosive devices with drones like we saw with ISIS back in 2015, 2016. And they used them to go and to take out these targets, doing a massive offensive damage. But in those cases, you'll find that it's the defense that costs more. So what's the most effective way to counter these? Well, you send up some sort of Patriot missile that's hundreds of thousands of dollars
00:35:40
Speaker
and you take out this $100 drone. You see drones taking out those Russian transport planes. The IL-76s off the top of my head. Someone will correct me. They're $50 million apiece. The drone that destroyed them, $50,000. Now, I'm going off on a tangent here, but I'm just trying to show you just how difficult it is to defend from these. How will we do it in the future? Well, if the drones themselves
00:36:07
Speaker
are going to be autonomous, and they're going to have these machine brains that react quicker than a human can that reduce that OODA loop of decision making, well, then the air defense systems will do the same as well. And you've seen this moving forward for a generation. So could we see, you know, as you described, pilots hunting or the pilots, do we see drone on drone dogfights in the future, the people on the cliffs of Dover watching drones and this guy knock each other out?
00:36:34
Speaker
Well, you'd hope that you wouldn't be watching it over the cliffs of Dover. That would be a very different virulent song, wouldn't it? But I think that when it comes down to the future of offensive air power and defensive air power, you will most certainly see machine versus machine because if a machine can make a decision to kill,
00:36:53
Speaker
quicker than a human can, then you need a machine to counter that. So you're on machine time now. You need to be able to have these systems that can respond quickly to each other. How do you advance that? Well, you need supercomputers.
00:37:05
Speaker
And so you're going to have advancements in microtrips, in semiconductors. You're going to have the advancement of gallium and gallium oxide for more transistors that can make these systems more powerful so they can have more computing capabilities, so they can take all the intelligence faster and they can counter or offensively strike a target as quickly as possible. Now, one thing that no one ever mentions at the moment is the advent of quantum computers.
00:37:30
Speaker
Because that's when things start to get ridiculously fast. The ability to compute so much data, it's almost impossible to think of and to make these decisions as quickly as possible. Now, that's a tactical level. Will these computers, these AI systems powered by quantum computers, then start to be put in at a strategic level? Will you have an AI cloud set?
00:37:53
Speaker
that looks at the battlefield and like a giant chessboard makes the move that it sees best to win the battle. And then will your adversary have that same capability? Will you have the complete removal of the human from war on one side, at least? You're going to always have the human that has that cost in the trenches, those thousands of lives that are lost, those civilians that are killed because the machines get the decision wrong.
00:38:21
Speaker
So let's stay on this topic of humans leaving the decision loop for drone activity. What safeguards are being considered to ensure that unmanned vehicles don't cause unintended mayhem? What safeguards are being considered to try and control chat GPT or anything like that, Lewis? AI is a surprise, a massive surprise. I mean, these things are being discussed at a United Nations level.
00:38:50
Speaker
You've got big advocacy groups trying to push, human rights groups trying to push, amnesty have projects on this, the campaign to ban killer robots have programs on this. There has been speeches by the UN Secretary General that says that this is completely against any sort of moral and ethical understanding of how humans should act on Earth and that there should be measures in place to control this by 2026.
00:39:15
Speaker
So how's that going? Well, there's a stalemate at the UN about how any of this is going to work. We can agree, and this is where I'm working on, that we should try and stop these systems spreading into the hands of violent non-state actor groups that have no interest in abiding by any level of international law. We passed the Delhi Declaration back in October 2022, and we're working towards a binding resolution on this. But when it comes to nation states, it's the old security dilemma, isn't it? It's back to when me and you were undergraduates, Lewis, sitting there,
00:39:45
Speaker
in the classroom looking at the fact that nation A looks at nation B who has acquired its autonomous systems and thinks, well, I should probably get hold of those because if they have them, then they're going to use them and have the advantage over me. So I'm going to develop these just for defensive purposes. And then you have that spiral up and up and up as these systems get faster and more advanced. And right now you can see that playing out because no nation
00:40:10
Speaker
no great power. You have a lot of smaller and medium powers that want to control these, but no great power wants to put massive limitations on these because they might want to use them in the future. It's kind of, I think it's Novaleoa Harari who makes the point that we should kind of treat artificial intelligence as if it were the arrival of an alien species, which effectively what it is, you're introducing a wholly new intelligence onto the planet that we have.
00:40:38
Speaker
And then it's terrifying to think that that new intelligence, if you think of it as an alien life form, we would just give it access to these terrifying systems you're speaking about. Although, that's not even just a battlefield question. You've got to think of all the other uses that not just armies and militants could use that technology for. Absolutely. Think about it. Let's say a non-state group did want to use these, or an environmental terrorist, or any other kind of terrorist.
00:41:08
Speaker
Let's say you had a advanced quadcopter drone that could hoover up metadata over an office block, or a major industrial campus, or a university campus. We saw this in the film Slaughter Bots, if you've ever seen it. And I encourage your listeners to go out and to watch this. Maybe not just before bed. Maybe you don't want to listen to it, to watch it then. But what they were envisioning was a future where a non-state group
00:41:37
Speaker
have the drone, hoover up the metadata of people, and to use that metadata to show their political leanings, and then to use facial recognition and the database of photographs and line of key individuals, and then to go and hunt down those key individuals and to take them out with suicide drone strikes. And so that's a possible future as well.
00:42:00
Speaker
I want to focus on something tangentially related to what you said there. We focus on the battlefield use of drones, but what about those off-battlefield uses? What about defenses against activism and other, let's call it mischief with drones? We've seen repeated incursions of small drones into airports causing havoc with flights. Is there anything we can learn from these? Are there any defenses that we're going to need against these risks?
Drone Chaos: Incidents and Management Challenges
00:42:27
Speaker
There is a report of an airport being violated by a drone on an almost weekly basis. Dublin Airport was shut down a couple of months ago repeatedly over a prolonged period. You remember Gatwick back in 2018 when it was shut over Christmas. Hundreds of thousands of people grounded as a result of that as part of the UK Parliament's inquiry into that. And if I'm perfectly honest, I don't think that anybody's come to a clear answer about what happened there.
00:42:57
Speaker
I mean there's one theory that there was no drone at all in the first place and that someone thought they saw a drone and then the police sent up their drones to hunt down the drone that they thought they saw and then there were 60 sightings of a drone in the sky because it was the police drone that was in the sky over that period of time.
00:43:11
Speaker
The drone is a remote and deniable technology for a reason. You don't know the intention behind its use, and you don't know who is operating it. And so it gets incredibly difficult to counter it, especially in those unique environments, those ecosystems like airports. You can't just down it, you don't know what's on board it. If you down it and it flies into the runway, you could completely and at least scupper all your flights for weeks.
00:43:38
Speaker
And often, as we saw with ISIS actually, they would booby trap their drones so that when they were brought down or taken inside to be inspected, they would blow up. They killed two Kurdish special forces and severely injured French special forces doing that. And so there's many tactical ways in which drones can be used that will fool our counter drone systems. When it comes to cities, that gets even harder because we're rolling towards a future right now where we're going to have thousands of drones over our cities.
Drones in Urban Logistics and Emergency Response
00:44:08
Speaker
They will fly back and forth from rural distribution centers to inner city delivery hubs. We've seen it trialed in Cambridgeshire in the UK, trialed in Finland. It was trialed during COVID to take medicines to old people's homes, to retirement homes, to try and separate the diseased human from vulnerable people. It was the drone that was put in place there. And so we're already tiptoeing into this future. You see the company's very prominent
00:44:36
Speaker
ride-sharing apps and taxi companies are trying to develop drones that weigh a few tons that are autonomous systems that you hail your drone from the sky and if you're too drunk at the pub at the end of the night it's going to come pick you up and take you home. So you're going to have these drones, some that weigh a few pounds, some that weigh a few tons, that will be flying all over the urban landscape. That's one side of it. The other side of this, of course, is that you're going to have first responders, police,
00:45:02
Speaker
ambulance crews. You're going to have firefighters that send drones in first to assess the situation. If there's been a shooting, the police are going to send in a drone to do a complete 3D scan of the area before you have anyone tampering with the evidence, creating an entire virtual crime scene. But you're also going to have hospitals that need to transport bloods or organs across cities or across the country to save lives. And so people often think, right, well, how do you take out a drone if it's above the Olympics or a coronation?
00:45:32
Speaker
In the future, drones are going to be a vital national infrastructure. They will be the way in which we transport things. They will be our logistical hub, and they will be key to the movement of our economy. Now, let's think about that for a second. Think about that future.
00:45:52
Speaker
What if a hostile non-state group or a belligerent state actor? We're going through a point where many people are saying we're in Cold War 2.0. Who is it that has the most advanced commercial drones in the world? Where are they sold? Where are they sent? Well, these are the Chinese systems. To the point, by the way, that a number of US agencies have said, do not use certain Chinese manufactured drones because they send data straight back to Beijing. There are US government reports on this that you can go out and read.
00:46:20
Speaker
or I did a TEDx talk on it where you can read my article on the dark side of our drone future. Go and have a look at all of this. And so what if you have drones that are mimicking?
00:46:30
Speaker
legitimate drones like a police drone and they get into a sensitive site or what if you have a signal that is spoofed and by that we mean you have a powerful signal sent up to a legitimate drone in the sky and someone is able to take control of that drone because your signal is more powerful than the signal that is further away controlling that drone in the sky or perhaps it's autonomous and you can take control of it.
00:46:54
Speaker
So what if those drones are sent in to Hoover at metadata of a major company on the 16th floor of a tower block? Or they fly through an open window because we don't really think too much about corporate espionage in the third dimension, and they're sent through to take out a key individual. And here I mean assassinations. Or what if they are used to take a drone that's been hacked
00:47:17
Speaker
and then to fly it into a sensitive site, a nuclear power plant. Loads of nuclear power plants and energy infrastructure have been buzzed by drones very recently. We've seen the largest nuclear power station in the world in the United States and Arizona was buzzed over a week repeatedly. There aren't the laws in place because you don't know the intention behind it to take these drones down. You've got nuclear power stations in Sweden that have been buzzed by these, ones in the UK. You've had oil refineries in the North Sea that have been buzzed by drones. All of this is happening
00:47:47
Speaker
right now. In a world where you have thousands of drones in the sky, what do you do? Well, you have to down that entire vital national infrastructure that will bring cities to a halt.
00:48:00
Speaker
And so we don't have a world yet where we've remedied these. And we need to, you know, I'm not a Luddite. I want to see a world where we have drones for the betterment of society, but we're just not quite there yet. And we need a lot more investment in these countering and detection measures. So that brings us to the final question we like to leave our guests with, which is what keeps you up at night? What is the worst case scenario for the future of drones as a threat? I think personally, and I'm writing a new book on this. So my current book is called Precision.
00:48:29
Speaker
a history of American warfare, and so it tracks this evolution of precision and drone technologies in the American experience all the way up to this point of the second drone age where I write about how it's spreading around the world. My next book, which is provisionally called Death from a Distance, it'll be available in all the usual places. You buy books in Barnes and Noble, in WH Smith, in Waterstones, and that looks at how over the long dure of human history, so we're talking 200,000, 300,000 years,
00:48:58
Speaker
Humans have used their intelligence, their intellect, to invent weapons that increasingly distance themselves from that brutal, dirty act of killing. What worries me about the future? Well, exactly as I'm talking about. Right now, you have humans, majoritivly, who are in control of these drones, or at least they set the targets. In the future, you'll have these machines making the decisions themselves, and you'll have that human removing from the loop of control.
00:49:27
Speaker
So that's the thing that keeps me up at night. But I want to leave you with another thing that's kept me up at night, more of a kind of contemporary issue as opposed to a future one. Now, you may remember back in 2020, in March 2020, that the world shut down. Something called COVID came along. But just before that, in January 2020, you had the spread of African swine flu across China.
Biological Threats: Chinese Gangs and African Swine Flu
00:49:52
Speaker
Why is that important? Well, it turns out
00:49:55
Speaker
that Chinese criminal gangs had a monopoly over frozen pig meat that was not infected with African swine flu. Stay with me. This is worth it. All right. I never thought I'd be talking about pig meat this much in my career, but it is important. And so what did they do? Well, they took infected pig meat and they strapped it to drones that they bought online.
00:50:17
Speaker
they flew them eight kilometers into these vast Chinese pork farms and then crashed them there so that the pigs would eat the infected pig meat and the infection would spread across the country very, very quickly. January 2020, January every year in China, is Chinese New Year and so it's a time when pork meat is most consumed. So this would drive up the price of that frozen pork meat that the criminal gangs had.
00:50:41
Speaker
It also meant they could then go to the farmers and say, we'll buy your diseased pork meat and we'll sell it over the other side of China as non-diseased pork meat. Now, the state was really slow to react to this. So the farmers acted themselves. They bought industrial level GPS and radio signal jammers that they put onto their farms that were used to try and stop these drones from infiltrating their vast pig farms.
00:51:07
Speaker
What happened? Well, they started to interfere with civil aviation. And it's here that you have a Chinese government step in and to actually prosecute the farmers while trying to solve the problem because the farmers were fed up and they wanted to try and find a way to stop this. But the key bit there, I suppose, when I was researching this in January 2020 that kept me up all night was this these criminal gangs use drones.
00:51:33
Speaker
to spread an infection across an entire country, a virus. And so as we're still reeling off COVID, I had my fourth jab yesterday and, you know, I encourage anyone to go and keep themselves updated, but I certainly feel like trash. Well, in the future and any pandemics that come forward, will you have non-state groups that will use these drones for biological ends?
00:51:59
Speaker
We have been listening to how to conduct a drone strike with Dr. James Patton Rogers, whose new book, Precision, is out this year. A link to the book can be found in the show notes. James, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you both. Our producer for this episode was Edwin Tran. Our researchers were Alex Smith, Simon Schofield, Colin Reed, and Edwin Tran, along with help from other members of the Encyclopedia Geopolitica team. To our audience, as always, thank you very much for listening.
00:52:26
Speaker
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