New Delhi. The modern battlefield is no longer about guns, tanks or missiles. It is made of human-less hunter machines. Drones are no longer just a weapon but have become the new definition of warfare – fast, cheap, silent and deadly. On the Ukrainian front, this technology is proving every day that death no longer comes from distance, but from digital precision, but the real earthquake is yet to come.
Micro drone: terror that fits in the hand
Defense designers around the world have now moved in the direction where weapons can be placed in the palm, and death at the tip of the finger. These ‘micro drones’ are as light as petals, as small as insects and as silent… but with cameras, sensors and micro-explosives. Sometimes their weight can be as much as that of a small bird, and sometimes as much as that of a mosquito. They are difficult to see, impossible to hear and almost impossible to stop.
small size, big destruction
CSIS weapons expert Zachary Callenborn warned that their main drawback right now is the weakness of the battery, which means their range is short. But when these weaknesses are removed, these ‘flying killers’ will become the most fearsome face of war.
Callenborn believes that micro-drone swarms can: distribute chemical or biological weapons, carry out stealthy assassinations, spread chaos in any busy city, attack by ‘disappearing’ among the crowd, and if hundreds of thousands of micro-drones are launched at once, no defense system can stop them.
Drone swarm: hundreds of tiny attackers, one target
American defense technology companies are engaged in creating such swarms that can select their targets, change direction in the air, collide with enemy UAVs and launch suicide attacks. Along with this, surround the soldiers, missiles and vehicles and destroy them in the blink of an eye. The expert said that a day will come when ‘you will be able to shoot down a missile worth 5 million dollars with a 50 dollar drone.’ This is a change that shakes the foundation of the defense budget.
AI Challenge: Self-thinking ‘digital enemy’
Today’s biggest race is to create such swarm algorithms that can read the battlefield without human instruction, change the path on their own after seeing obstacles, prioritize targets and change their strategy immediately if necessary and this will be the real birth of ‘automated warfare’.
Law helpless, diplomats helpless
When weapons that fit on palms start being used for biological attacks, murder or infiltration inside the coasts, international laws will be broken. Drone laws are still unclear. The world is almost without a protective shield for micro or nanodrones.
Legal expert William C. Banks told Popular Mechanics, “The size doesn’t matter. It can do huge damage, the moment the law comes after you. But there are no rules on surveillance. Every country is spying. It’s a gray-zone war.” Russia’s drone incursions into Estonia and Sweden are recent examples of this, where the law proved to be only ‘on paper’.
The new face of war will not be big but small, invisible and automatic. Where the enemy will not come across the border… he will come through the air, through the window, through the cracks, from the top of the mobile tower, even in the form of a ‘mosquito-like machine’. War will no longer be seen, but will be felt.
