It was a case of "drones with everything" at the recent Association of the US Army exhibition in Washington: unmanned aerial vehicles were everywhere to be found, reflecting the revolution in warfare that has happened over the past three and a half years in Ukraine.
For European countries, that means both new security headaches – and new industrial opportunities.
Both themes are part of the leaders discussions in Brussels this week at the EU summit, as EU states scramble to catch up with the changed reality.
Its the same for the Americans, who are now trying to reconfigure all of their military branches to adapt to the new world of lightweight, cheap ubiquitous drone technologies.
One blue skies thinker has even suggested that the US military could replace its heavy armoured brigades in Europe with a few warehouses of drones and a small staff to operate them. Benjamin Jensen of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a DC based think tank, told Defense News: "Imagine that instead of a 1,000 person battalion there was a 250 person battalion with a mix of FPV (first person view) and Octocopter drones."
In this vision of a lightweight US commitment to European defence, the Europeans would have to provide the heavy metal in the shape of tanks and armoured formations – and soldiers. The US would stick with the low cost/high tech/low risk end of the equation.
European governments are thinking about capturing some of that low cost/high tech/low risk action for themselves, rather than relying on an increasingly unreliable US partner. Ever since the founding to the European Defence Agency a quarter of a century ago, much of the work has been about fostering technology development in the software, computing and communications space – not so much about bashing metal into guns.
European companies from France, Germany, Italy, the UK and Greece were prominent in the DC exhibition, offering mostly technology solutions. Leonardo of Italy makes armoured vehicles and aircraft, but was exhibiting communications masts, drones, robot vehicles and command and control computers. It showed two remotely controlled six wheel vehicles that launch drones, tote radar trackers and carried remotely operated machineguns and rocket launchers.
Airbus had a remote control cargo helicopter. What, after all, is a drone but a miniature helicopter? Why not scale up and fly a big drone in the shape of a remote control chopper? Surveillance drones that launch from ships are a more recent development, as are miniature drones that can be launched from cannisters on the side of speeding four wheel drive pickup trucks.
Sikorsky, a division of Lockheed Martin, also showed a pilotless helicopter experiment, an out of service Blackhawk that has had all the crew area removed, allowing the makers to fit a clamshell front cargo doors and a ramp. The display version had a remote control six wheel drive vehicle that could deliver supplies/and or collect wounded from a battlefield, operating in very hazardous conditions without crew risk. Sikorsky told us it was cheaper to make than normal helicopters because there was no cockpit or crew area, and it could carry much bigger cargoes than a regular Blackhawk.
What was striking about that military exhibition in DC was how few guns there were on display: mostly it was drones, robots, computers, batteries (of the electric variety), optics and computers. And masts – forests of them – portable communications and radar towers, some for tracking drones, some for monitoring military sites using high tech detection systems against intruders, and some for communications.
The talk at a panel discussion hosted by Amazon Web Services was about "autonomous systems, cloud based AI, assured control, edge computing and how distributed systems will shape future military operations". A US Army Colonel told the discussion he wanted "a lot more bandwidth" for battlespace applications.
Various salespeople from various telecoms equipment makers spoke about how fast their military spec communications devices would work, how many milliseconds it would take to transmit data. A number of companies showed bullet proof vests with flip down screens so soldiers can read electronic maps or see pictures from reconnaissance drones overhead. Like all computer salesfolk, they spoke of "open architecture" and "futureproof software upgrades".
So where does Ireland fit into this? The recent multiple drone incursions into Denmark seem to have rattled the authorities in western Europe, threatening as they did the security surrounding several EU presidency meetings hosted by Denmark, the current President in office of the Council of Ministers. The Danes had to call on their neighbours to help out securing the airspace, such is the shortage of anti-drone equipment to deal with this newfangled way of war and its ever shifting hybrid tactics. The Irish Times reported that Ireland, which takes over the presidency next July, is also looking for help from other EU states to secure the several meeting that will take place in Ireland (and possibly the Irish Open, being played at the Trump Doonbeg course: a potential window for an EU-US summit).
I started asking a few exhibitors – European or European owned companies – if they could sell radar, fire control and anti drone systems with delivery by next summer. Of course they said yes, but equivocated a bit on price. Still the numbers were not beg, where they would give them. A Danish made doppler radar, that its maker claims can "see" the rotors of a drone whirring on the ground before it even takes off sells for $2 million per unit. They can be fixed or mobile, and two should cover most of Dublin and well out to sea.
Rheinmetall's American division was showing its automated anti-drone gun. It comes in a turret to fit onto an armoured vehicle like the Mowag Piranha the Irish Defence Forces use (they had a picture of one on the US army’s version of the vehicle, the Stryker). The Rheinmetall gun fires an astounding 1,000 rounds a minute of a 30mm ammunition that explodes close to the drone, showering a metre wide radius with bits of metal. Each round is programmed to burst at a particular distance as it is loaded into the firing breach, according to the company.
Other companies showed capture drones, that drop nets onto other rotor-copter type drones. But bigger pilotless vehicles, such as cruise missiles, need bigger, faster anti drone missiles, though again, the emphasis from manufacturers was on low cost solutions – no point in spending more to shoot something down than that something costs.
Drones are more classically used for surveillance. The Irish Army have used small aircraft for several decades to see the near battlefield. French Police special forces used tiny surveillance drones in Paris during the rampage by an Islamic State cell in the city ten years ago. Big drones can also be deployed for long range, long duration surveillance. Canada has been using Reaper drones to patrol its vast arctic air and sea space, loading up extra fuel tanks to keep the drones in the air for several days.
We had a look at General Atomics latest surveillance drone, that can stay airborne for up to 40 hours, and requires just one crew member on the ground to operate (working shifts, of course). They cost around $12 million new and can be loaded up with all sorts of surveillance kit and/or missiles to use against ships or ground targets. The Airbus Casa C295 planes the Aer Corps use for maritime patrols cost €100 million each, need a crew of six and typically fly six hour missions. Four or five large drones could give 24/7 coverage of Ireland's very large Exclusive Economic Zone at sea, as well as monitoring the coastline.
The current state of military technology suggests that the generation that grew up playing the x-box rather than hiking or going to the gym is ideally suited to modern war. Sure, there is still room for Rambo and his sort, but achieving military advantage now relies on brains as much as brawn. Maybe even more so. Software, AI, power supply systems, chip design – these are the things that give advantage now. They are also areas where Ireland has industrial strengths (though those industrial strengths can also become targets, especially for hybrid attack).
The newest EU defence initiative is something called the 'Drone Wall'. It is just a name and is certainly not a physical wall of any kind. It is a concept to sell a continent wide approach to drone defence, using layers of different types of anti-drone systems, radars to detect them and fire control computers to manage the operation. Money is going to be directed to this end to protect air and seaports, power stations and other critical infrastructure in the first instance, building up to city-wide defences over time. It would fit into the broader European Sky Shield Initiative, which aims to give some of the benefits seen in Israel's Iron Dome to European population centres.
The Americans are looking at something similar, called the "Golden Dome", as the current president likes gold. But America is far less densely populated than Europe, which makes for more challenging economics for a project like this – protecting the big cities is easier done, but invites political blowback.
Max Enders of German Drone company Tytan told Reuters that Europe most needs politicians to agree on common standards for drone defence, which the many small players in this new market can produce for, building up a layered series of interoperable anti-drone defenses.
"We need a large number of these systems, and that's where traditional missile-based systems have failed us, because even if you had all the money in the world, these systems are so complicated that it's really hard to scale production," he said.
"And for us, we present kind of a paradigm shift: we want very simple, very basic hardware that's cheap and easy to mass produce, and then combat-enhance it with a sophisticated AI. So it's kind of a new approach where you put the software and the AI part first, and then you just use easily scalable cheap hardware."
Some companies have displayed robot "dogs" being used to retrieve drones that have been downed by other drones. As AI increases in power, more and more battlespace operations – on land sea and air – will be automated.
On the one hand the removal of humans from hazardous work on battlefields is a good thing. Maybe the future will see robots fighting robots. Wandering through the exhibits and seeing the amount of robots, remote control vehicles, hardened communications systems and hearing people talking about hooking them all up to Artificial Intelligence, the thought occurred that the only role for humans on the battlefield is to reload the machines with ammunition, and automating that task is surely a coming development.
But if self-learning Artificial intelligences become heavily armed, as it seems they are becoming, what, eventually, will they need us for? The dystopian world envisioned by director James Cameron in the movie "The Terminator" was science fiction four decades ago.
Looking at the science and engineering on display in Washington left me thinking there is not much fiction left in the current rise of the machines.
