Defeat, not destroy. The best way to defeat an enemy is to make them your friend. Destroying someone would not be very friendly (unless they want to be destroyed).
Some modern missiles can fly around to identify targets, but they can't return home. They can blow up harmlessly if nothing is a target, though. They can also dodge and weave the way FPV pilots do.
Obviously, "drone" has a much more expansive mission profile than "missile."
One can only wonder how small the "receivers" (routers, really) have gotten by now.
The most powerful weapons on earth already are immune to jamming. ICBMs use celestial navigation (pictures of the stars) to course-correct, which is a form of navigation you cannot jam.
Our ICBMs have no update mechanism at all. Once they're out of the silo, they're completely on their own.
Or am I over-interpreting the name?
Contrast hypervelocity weapons, which -- contrary to the name -- don't really go faster but they can maneuver in the atmosphere at that speed.
In the event that the position that it is in is not the position that it wasn't, the system has acquired a variation, the variation being the difference between where the missile is, and where it wasn't. If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it too may be corrected by the GEA. However, the missile must also know where it was.
The missile guidance computer scenario works as follows. Because a variation has modified some of the information the missile has obtained, it is not sure just where it is. However, it is sure where it isn't, within reason, and it knows where it was. It now subtracts where it should be from where it wasn't, or vice-versa, and by differentiating this from the algebraic sum of where it shouldn't be, and where it was, it is able to obtain the deviation and its variation, which is called error.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050514035446/http://www.afmiss...
All fission weapons are not necessarily also fusion weapons. But probably most are nowadays.
Most of the cost in a nuclear weapon is in the primary. It only makes sense to build pure fission weapons when you want very low-powered nukes for close range tactical use; the DoD has determined that don't see enough use for them to justify the upkeep of specific weapons.
https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...
So you could say the use would be increased certainty your enemies command and control and other bunkers would be destroyed increasing the odds of “winning” whatever happens afterwards.
And I would doubt image recognition for ground features would make it that accurate, too. Before reentry, you’re very high and fast and reentry isn’t that predictable to get you accurate enough to hit a house. And during reentry, you’re not going to see anything though plasma. And after reentry, you probably don’t have enough time and control authority to still guide into a specific house.
ICBM guidance is very different from cruise missiles.
Hypersonic glide ICBMs have been successfully tested by China, and are under development in the US, so it's entirely possible to maneuver, and optionally guide them in the terminal, though perhaps not advisable on a jammable channel, except perhaps as an anti-radiation weapon.
Nine Billion Names of God
…you know, for defense
At this point though, couldn’t you just blow up your own country and thus accelerate warming so much as to doom the rest of humanity in a dozen years? I might have read the wrong article on that though so don’t quote me.
Such communications can't be intercepted or triangulated.
They've probably had it for decades. Laser communication was being used by commercial TV stations in the U.S. in the 1990's. WNBC-TV in New York used a laser to transmit video from its Manhattan skyline camera in New Jersey back to 30 Rock.
I have a vague notion that it didn't work great in all weather conditions, but it was a long time ago.
But further, jamming is still doable, just not with a portable electronic device. Stir up some dust and all the sudden coms are down.
But if they were only receiving. Well, that's going to be pretty hard to confirm and even if you "jam" it, then so what?
You are assuming that the only source emitting at the specific wavelength is the laser you are targeting. This is not how it would work, the side using laser comms would also fly decoy drones that bathe the sky in the same wavelength as the comms channel.
This is also key part of how LPI radars on stealth aircraft work. Yes, in a spherical cow in vacuum environment you can in principle always trace a radar signal back to its source. But add a whole bunch MALDs radiating on the same band as the radars, and suddenly it becomes impossible to pinpoint the sources.
I’m a bit of two minds about this. Obviously jamming resistant high bandwidth communication enables some scarry possibilities.
But the lack of it is what drives and will drive militaries around the world to put more and more autonomy into weapons. It doesn’t matter what kind of treaties we write on paper to prohibit technologies. During a war if your drones/loitering munition are less effective than those of your enemies because your control signals are jammed you will give in and make your weapons find their target without that control signal. That leads to an arm race of ever more sophisticated autonomous weapons. That is scarry for many reasons, and probably a worse outcome for all of us.
On the other hand if communication is possible that puts a leash on this dynamic and ensurers that a human mind can remain in the loop. So… maybe being better at jamming resistant communication is actually better for humankind?
The movie was OK, but you can only get shocked once.
I can't comment on whether that's true, but the movie still haunts me. Odd, since as Wikipedia says "it received a mixed critical reception and failed at the box office". There was nothing mixed about my reception of it.
I'm a bit more pessimistic than that. I think the driver for autonomy will be that the speed at which things happen on the battlefield. People being attacked with automated weapons might not be able to make response related decisions fast enough. The automation will be in place to enable a rapid response. It will become an arms race involving speed of attack and response. It will be the military equivalent of high-frequency trading, involving things like swarms and directed energy weapons.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_(military_strategi...
[0] https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/03/12/... [1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/ukraines-future-vision-and-cur... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/11/07/ukrain...
Difficult to judge scale, maybe the size of a drinks can or food can? Fiber is pretty thin.
If you want something really cool, look up old fashioned TV guidance. We built weapons that guided based a TV signal, and edge detection in that signal. In 1958.
This capability is basically a reinvention of the walleye television bomb, which locked onto targets using edge detection on a signal from an internal television camera. 1960s technology.
They are not obvious to me. Care to explain?
Then the quadcopter/Atlas/Spot/a Terminator/a tank driven by AI starts rolling across the landscape, while humans flagged as suspicious by Google because we lack sufficient tracking data in our browsers fill out reCaptcha images that say "Select all images that contain [soldiers] in this set."
Nearby, a scared local child distracts themselves from the distant horrors by drawing a picture of the sun in the sky with their crayons.
Some time later, the robot is able to transmit back a few bytes of telemetry to base, which publishes a press release that describes the number of enemies slain.
This sounds like you would also be in favor of backdoored encryption. I disagree. It's a tool / improvement like any other, how you use it makes it scary. BTW this is nothing new, it's just packaged nicely and (I assume) massively improved technology. DIY and open source solutions were possible in 2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA (static ones tho)
I can assume that laser links work wonderfully in outer space.
On land or sea, I can imagine using tactical smoke generators to disrupt laser links and visual navigation, giving an advantage to to systems that use e.g. microwaves for "vision", and radio channels for communication.
Also, why are you afraid of this development?
Then all the military dramas will flip from "sniper acquired target" to "communication with friendlies reestablished"
Perhaps I misunderstand but that sounds like a scary failure mode.
There is no way these technologies won't be at least trialled for mil use, not when electronic warfare is employed to this degree.
https://thedefensepost.com/2025/01/08/ukraine-fiber-optic-dr...
Physically.
https://www.doncio.navy.mil/chips/ArticleDetails.aspx?ID=555...
It's really easy to blast an area with high power disruptive radiation (EFI, RFI, laser, etc.) to deny comms, though.
Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming. Its usage dots the sci books I've read over the years, but almost always for scary reasons.
Here's the Navy today announcing work on AirBorne System for Optical Relay and Broadcast (ABSORB), a (for now) low-cost prototype one-to-many (I maybe mis-inferring what multi-access means?) relayable free space system, https://defence-blog.com/us-navy-plans-to-revolutionize-nava...