drones work because of their elegant control mechanisms. Those require a nice clean radio environment. I suspect, but I do not know, a big spark would mess with the video stream coming from the drone, and probably the real time controls going to the drone. So, like, an arc welder or Tesla coil sparking continuously would do unpleasant things to the drone - no remote control.

You could, of course, make the drone smarter, use AI to detect targets. but that would hurt performance, and make the drone more expensive. I'd point to Iran faking gps signals to ground the us drone, like a while ago.

It's a bunch of tradeoffs. Preprogrammed doesn't have versatility, but is cheap. Dynamic is versatile, but expensive. Remote control is vulnerable to other stuff.

Also - if you do jamming - it makes you a big target broadcasting "I'm HERE!". There are missiles that are designed to guide themselves towards jamming/radar stations like HARM.

So with combined arms you can: - launch a decoy - watch for radar/air defence/jamming stations - launch HARM missiles to destroy them - launch drones to guide artillery - destroy undefended bases with cheap and accurate drone-adjusted artillery fire

Also - military drones are usually controlled differently from the civilians ones. It feels more like playing RTS (click on the target, wait for the drone to get there) instead of a flying simulator (control the engines constantly). So if you're jammed for 5 minutes while going from point A to point B - it doesn't matter.

Also military drones often use satellite communication which is much harder to disrupt than direct radio connection.

You can cover a lot of small errors with a bigger explosion. but that means more payload, and more expensive.

denying that elegant control of small explosive in a precise location seems like a winner. yeah, you can go to position X but maybe I'm a little to the left of that. of course it's not free, but me picking up my shit and moving 10 feet is pretty cheap. cheaper than a drone for sure.

Maybe it doesn't matter, maybe tensor flow says that's a person near the target, adjust location to drop the explosive on the person.

from the point of a know nothing observer, it sure seems like there is some wiggle room. I'm not convinced an inexpensive drone has the capacity to solve these problems. (but you could send like 36 and drop grenades in a 6x6 grid, but that seems expensive).

Screwing around with RF seems like step 1.

[0] https://discuss.ardupilot.org/t/indoor-mission-plan-no-gps/7...

Same argument made against Israel's Iron Dome against Hamas's more or less crude rockets.

Said argument misses the point. The question isn't whether an Iron Dome missile is more expensive than a Hamas rocket (it is). It's whether an Iron Dome missile is more valuable than the lives and property lost by letting that Hamas rocket through.

I think the hunter drones would be first to get autonomous operations. The cost of errors/bugs is less for them than say for a ground attack drone hitting your own tank or unrelated civilian truck.

One option is radio antennas in a gun shaped thing. And it just scales up from there. You can use very powerful antennas on the ground or in a plane to interfere with the control system or GPS.

It's not quite "drones HATE this one weird trick". Yes, jamming is a thing, but so are FHSS, ARMs and any number of other countermeasure-counters. No GPS/GNSS/whatever? Inertial navigation systems. No comms at all? All kinds of flavors of automation.

Simple countermeasures may be effective against consumer drones, but the overall problem is an iterative metagame where flawless countermeasures are pretty rare and there's usually a way to adapt or fight back.

That said - GPS jamming is the main RF attack that will stop sufficiently autonomous drones.

Wouldn't that just take out the remote drone controller?

But of course ARMs work fine against a drone's controller, too - assuming it isn't using FHSS, though that itself assumes no crazy-advanced anti-FHSS RDF. That's kind of my point regarding how this stuff cuts both ways, how even if a countermeasure works in one instance that's no guarantee it'll continue working, and how countermeasures themselves generally have weaknesses.

Naval engineering provides a lot of examples of this dynamic. Check out what the introduction and development of the torpedo did to the meta.

Are you spending a $500,000 cruise missle to take out a $200 transmitter mounted to a tree? To allow your $20,000 drone to not get shot down?

What happens when you add 1,000 jammers?

It pretty quickly becomes not super effecient to deal with this.