Jamming is useless against AI drones: Could this be the next step in the conflict?
After two years of drone warfare in Ukraine, 2024 could be the year the drones take on a new role on the battlefield.
Jamming of radio communication between drone and operator is starting to become such an effective defence against drones that one option could be to cut the wireless radio connection—and let the drones fly autonomously and select and attack targets themselves.
If the connection to a human on base is eliminated and the drone is made autonomous, so that it can detect, identify, and attack a target by itself, then jamming loses its effect.
“Generally speaking, there are no technical barriers to making drones autonomous. There are good algorithms for image recognition, and software based on artificial intelligence is generally faster than a human in assessing the situation and making a decision. Today, humans are often the bottleneck when it comes to the speed of a kill chain,” says Andreas Graae, assistant professor at the Institute for Military Technology of the Royal Danish Defence College, where he researches artificial intelligence, drones, and autonomous weapons systems.
A kill chain is the chain of actions and decisions from when a target is identified until it is defeated. And drones’ perhaps most significant impact on the war in Ukraine is their ability to increase the speed of a kill chain.
“Here, drones have contributed to shortening the decision-making process in all stages of a kill chain, from detecting and identifying a target, assessing the threat, tracking, and finally neutralising and analysing debris,” Andreas Graae explains.
In addition to bringing shells close to the enemy, the drones also contribute to a rapid collection of information about the battlefield, just as the numerous drone videos are used for PR purposes to control the narrative of the war.
Hardware is the bottleneck
Although the software industry has been dominated by new AI algorithms in recent years, artificial intelligence has so far not reached the drones, neither on the Ukrainian nor Russian side.
“While tactical innovation abounds and drones offer some new capabilities, this falls short of the truly disruptive change that constitutes a revolution. For the most part, Russian and Ukrainian drones remain piloted by humans, are not broadly networked together, and are small, which means that their effects tend to be localized.,” Stacie Pettyjohn, senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at American think thank CNAS, writes in an analysis.
The challenge is particularly linked to the hardware that drones use. They are currently not ready to run complex and heavy AI algorithms in the air.
“Such complex digital decision-making requires sophisticated software, which needs to run on high-speed chips, which in turn need power, cooling, protection from vibration and electronic interference, and more. None of that is easy for engineers to cram into the kind of small drones being used widely by both sides in Ukraine. Even the upgraded Lancet-3 fits less than seven pounds (3 kg) of explosive warhead, leaving little room for a big computer brain,” Stacie Pettyjohn writes.
Tanks are not obsolete—and neither are the old drones
In addition to hardware limitations, there are also ethical and moral challenges with autonomous weapons systems.
So far, there is broad agreement in NATO, among others, to maintain human control and an element of human-in-the-loop when attacks are carried out. And so far, no significant use of autonomous drones has been registered in the war between Ukraine and Russia.
There were otherwise many analysts who expected it in the wake of the just two day long drone war between Armenia and Azerbaijan back in 2020.
“There were also many who declared the tank obsolete in the aftermath of the short conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. That is far from the case, and today large parts of the war in Ukraine are fought as a conventional land war with tanks and trenches,” Andreas Graae says.
Problematic decision-making
If all human involvement is removed from the picture, so are the ethical and moral considerations that soldiers also draw on in combat.
Ingvild Bode, who researches autonomous weapons systems at the University of Southern Denmark, has previously told Ingeniøren why she does not believe in war scenarios where killer robots on land, at sea, or in the air carry out combat operations completely without human involvement.
“I think we’ll see humans and machines work more closely together, but war will never be left to machines alone,” Ingvild Bode told Ingeniøren.
There are also organisational challenges in letting go of the reins on weapons systems. It is difficult to integrate 100 percent autonomous systems into existing decision-making structures in, for example, NATO.
Ingvild Bode points out that military decision-making structures are often characterised by being deterministic and predictable. These are conditions that do not always align with algorithms based on machine learning.
“Initially, artificial intelligence will be used for decision support and not in 100 percent autonomous systems. This requires building up the weapons platforms’ software capacity, so they can handle and process the necessary amounts of data, for example for image recognition,” Andreas Graae says.
Swarms of drones challenge human oversight
Although drones have been used for military purposes for many years, it was only last year that NATO developed a real doctrine for drone defence. It now needs to be implemented in the individual NATO countries. While Denmark generally does not have a particularly effective air defence—against neither drones, missiles, nor fighter planes—the USA has embarked on a major transition to drones.
This includes the major new Replicator program, which will enable the USA to deploy swarms of up to a thousand unmanned drones across all domains.
By moving from individual drones to large swarms of drones, it may become difficult for the USA and the rest of NATO countries to uphold the human-in-the-loop principle, i.e. to have humans always make the final decision when launching an attack with a swarm of up to a thousand drones.
