Warplanes: Militarizing the Swarm

[Valin]

StrategyPage

April 7, 2022: A new French firm, Dronisos, has developed software that allows centralized control of hundreds of quad-copters to carry different colored lights and perform intricate and popular light shows for clients like Disneyland Paris and other large events. This attracted the attention of the French military seeking to use the Dronisos software for military applications.

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These quadcopters have short endurance, typically from 30-60 minutes depending on payload. The Dronisos would include landing and recharging quadcopters for recharging after others go aloft to maintain the size and performance of the swarm. The French Navy wants to operate smaller swarms from wrships at sea while the army could operate larger swarms on land.

This use of quadcopter swarms has been proposed before, and a Chinese firm has developed similar software for military swarms. Dronisos is the first Western firm to develop such software for, French and other NATO members seeking to make practical use of these swarms.

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The Future?

Oct 17 2019

In a dystopian world a new form of A.I. weaponry has been created. All these drone bots need is a profile: age, sex, fitness, uniform, and ethnicity. Nuclear is obsolete. Take out your entire enemy virtually risk free. Just characterize him, release the swarm, and rest easy.

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The 7 minute film opens with a Silicon Valley CEO-type delivering a product presentation to a live audience a la Steve Jobs. The presentation seems innocuous enough at first—the presenter seems to be unveiling some new drone technology—but takes a dark turn when he demonstrates how these autonomous drones can slaughter humans like cattle by delivering “a shaped explosive” to the skull.The audience eats it up, clapping and laughing along with the CEO as if they hadn’t witnessed anything more dangerous than the unveiling of the iPhone X. The CEO goes further, showing videos of the tiny killer drone in action. “Let’s watch what happens when the weapons make the decisions,” the CEO says, as the bot executes a number of people on the massive screen behind him. “Now trust me, these are all bad guys.” What follows is a deeply unsettling portrait of a dystopian world where these small weaponised drones use their onboard technologies—“cameras like you use for your social media apps, facial recognition like you have on your phones!”—to make autonomous decisions about who lives and who dies.