We’re doomed! - on the bright side, though, he’s doomed first. 
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Incendiary drones:
Fiber-optic drones:
Drone jammers:
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The company “Geoscan” and the publishing house “Prosveshchenie” have released the first educational manual for school students on unmanned aerial systems (UAS). This was reported by the press service of “Geoscan.”
The publication states that the educational manual is intended for students in grades 8-9 and will be taught as part of the subject “Technology.” The material is designed for 34 hours.
The textbook consists of six chapters: a general introduction to unmanned aviation, classification and structure of drones, the electronic components of unmanned aerial vehicles, the basics of manual piloting, programming autonomous flights, and trends and professions in the world of drones.
It is noted that the educational manual was created as part of the federal project “Personnel for UAS.”
“It is important to guide students towards a conscious choice of engineering professions. All the necessary conditions have been created for this. Already today, most schools in the Russian Federation are equipped with modern teaching methods, advanced material and technical equipment, including classrooms for conducting lessons on the study of unmanned aerial vehicles,” said Victoria Kopylova, Vice President for Publishing Activities of JSC “Prosveshchenie.”
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Fascinating. Reads a lot like something from the USSR in the 50s.
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It could be a recognition that the nature of warfare has irreversibly changed, in a development as far reaching as the introduction of the tank in WWI or the aircraft carrier in WWII.
Maybe introducing UAV technology into Russian schools is a good educational gambit to catch the attention of all those tech-savvy Russian students who are getting bored with computers? Or maybe it is a recognition that future wars may need very large numbers of UAV personnel? Some governments think years ahead … but only some.
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I’m thinking more the tone and framing. The Commies were big on conditioning people to do whatever, and the central planning State picked what you would actually do for a living. The constraints are different now, but it feels similar.
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“Scheduling” is a bug-a-boo in any task where shifts rotate. So, naval watches, airplane trips of extended duration (like over-water flights to Europe and Asia - OR the Falklands War, where the distances flown were equally long but north-south, not east-west. On the civilian side, ED’s have rotating shifts, because usually no one likes working nights, so everyone gets to “share”. Or, alternatively, there is a “night guy” but he can’t work ALL the night shifts, so some must be covered by people who do not normally work nights.
In the ED, the concept of “anchor sleep” has been developed, which appears to be somewhat akin to the “protected sleep” noted in one of the articles. Anchor sleep is a segment of time you ALWAYS get to sleep. So, 7-midnight, for instance. No matter what shift you work, you ALWAYS have 7-midnight to sleep. That helps stabilize circadian rhythms and allows one to operate more “normally” when having a relative lack of sleep.
It isn’t always quite that simple, but it ALWAYS is an issue in effectiveness of the watch-stander. Without disrupting one’s circadian rhythms, one will serve on a watch much more effriciently. Pay no attention to CR;s and you get disruption in efficiency, generally seen as “mistakes made” by personnel.
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Life imitates art:
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One of John Walker’s sayings was to the effect that a battery with the energy density we keep being promised is a bomb.
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The pagers that exploded had apparently been acquired by Hezbollah after the group’s leader ordered members in February to stop using cellphones, warning they could be tracked by Israeli intelligence. A Hezbollah official told The Associated Press the pagers were a new brand, but declined to say how long they had been in use.
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Some Ukraine guys are using this. For a while there was export restriction on passive radar sdr software. Apparently the war has lifted that.
I happen on this fact because I bought one of these systems for a physics experiment I’m doing.
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video of one of these pagers exploding
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According to this, someone figured out the pagers were rigged so Israel had to move.
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“Thousands of Hezbollah terrorists were injured on Tuesday”
This reminded me of my volunteer firefighter days. Our radios were not-very-good hand-me-downs from professional departments. And then the County gave us an inadequate number of shiny new radios – leaving the Chief with the delicate task of how to apportion them among the volunteers. The reasonable answer was to give the new radios to the most active responders.
Since no organization ever has enough resources, it would have been quite rational for Hezbollah similarly to have given its shiny new pagers to its most dedicated terrorists – in which case, the blow to the organization might be more significant than at first sight it might seem.
The other recollection is sitting in Purchasing Committees. We can just imagine the scene – Hey! This new supplier is trying to get into the market and is offering us a terrific deal! Within the budget, we can get pagers for thousands more Hezbollah members than we were expecting!
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Ironically, just last night I was at a county-wide volunteer fire fighter meeting where the guys were saying how pagers were ineffective due to coverage that is inferior to cell phone coverage.
Of course, cell phones have a built-in explosive charge – or at least one that can be made to look like a battery.
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Dropping radio repeaters? It is an interesting idea – but a radio repeater on the opponent’s territory will be a stationary source of radio waves, making it easy to find. Once found, it is only a matter of time until the opponent finds a way to hack the repeater’s communications and send the attack drones back to where they came from. Back to the drawing board!
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Our core jamming platforms, such as the EA-18G Growler and antiradiation missiles, are effective but expensive and difficult to build at speed and scale. Using a $1 million missile to destroy a $10,000 jammer and clear the way for a $1,000 drone is absurd. With our current platforms, it will be the norm.
The Ukrainians outside Mykolaiv solved their electronic-warfare woes, however temporarily, without seven-figure munitions. Their marines dangled direction-finding antennas inside PVC piping from a first-person view drone for rough triangulations of Russian jammers using tested, decades-old signals techniques, before using artillery to strike the locations. When we asked why a marine unit, which doesn’t typically specialize in electronic warfare, was running improvised hunter-killer missions on jamming sites, the Ukrainians reacted with surprise. Their electronic intelligence expert explained, “You can’t do anything in this war without first figuring out the jamming.”
A military that can’t build a dynamic electronic shield around its own forces will likewise be unable to maneuver in the coming drone wars. Modern electronic-warfare systems mounted on low-cost drones are now as necessary as munitions. New companies are in the early stages of building the right weapons but need the Pentagon to recognize the same future—and spend accordingly.
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The effectiveness of repeaters is the net they create. Think of the NTDS or MTDS systems used for air control and naval combat control. They consist of a network of stations all interconnected, so you take out one, the signal is routed around that to other stations, so it is not lost. HARD to knock out because of redundancy.
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