Isegoria

Anduril Australia’s Ghost Shark “extra-large” underwater autonomous sub has been delivered one year early and on budget. The official name was revealed a couple years ago:

In a nod to the Ghost Bat unmanned aircraft developed by Boeing Australia for the Royal Australian Air Force, the new autonomous and unmanned weapon will be known as Ghost Shark.

On top of showing off the prototype, to be used for testing and concept definition, Rear Adm. Peter Quinn made clear the still-to-come larger, schoolbus-sized system may carry warheads.

“Due to their range, stealth and persistence Ghost Shark will be able to operate throughout the Indo-Pacific. Due to its modular and multi-role nature, our adversaries will need to assume that their every move in the maritime domain is subject to our surveillance and that every XL-UV (drone) is capable of deploying a wide range of effects — including lethal ones,” Quinn told a small audience of government officials, officers and journalists. “Once your potential adversaries understand what a Ghost Shark is — not that we’re going to give them any specifics at all — we expect they will generate doubt and uncertainty.”

Then he delivered the best line of the day, greeted with appreciative laughter from the crowd: “Hopefully, they’ll even start hearing the Jaws theme in their head if they suspect one is about.”

Annie Jacobsen paints a not-so-flattering portrait of LBJ in Area 51:

Before he became president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson liked to ride through rural Texas in his convertible Lincoln Continental with the top down. According to his biographer Randall B. Woods, Johnson also liked to keep a loaded shotgun in the seat next to him, which allowed him to pull over and shoot deer easily. On the night of October 4, 1957, the then senator was entertaining a group of fellow hunting enthusiasts at his rural retreat, in the dining room of his forty-foot-tall, glass-enclosed, air-conditioned hunting blind that Johnson called his “deer tower.” All around the edge of the lair were powerful spotlights that could be turned on with the flip of a switch, blinding unsuspecting deer that had come to graze and making it easier to kill them.

It was an important night for Johnson, one that would set the rest of his life on a certain path. October 4, 1957, was the night the Russians launched Sputnik, and the senator began an exuberant anti-Communist crusade. That very night, once the guests had gone home and the staff of black waiters had cleaned up, Johnson retired to his bedroom with newfound conviction. “I’ll be dammed if I sleep by the light of a Red Moon,” he told his wife, Lady Bird.

[…]

“Soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from Freeway overpasses.”

[…]

The orb was seen as ominous and foreboding, a visual portent of more bad things to come from the skies, with 4 percent of Americans claiming to have seen Sputnik with their own eyes. In reality, explained historian Matthew Brzezinski, “What most actually saw was the one-hundred-foot-long R-7 rocket casing that [Sputnik’s designer Sergei] Korolev had craftily outfitted with reflective prisms. It trailed some 600 miles behind the twenty-two-inch satellite,” which in reality could only be seen by a person using a high-powered optical device.

When he became President, after JFK’s assassination, Johnson received a briefing on Oxcart:

Johnson loved the idea of the Agency’s secret spy plane, but not for the reasons anyone expected. Johnson seized on one detail in particular: the aircraft’s speed. At the time, the world was under the impression that the Russians held the record for airspeed, which was 1,665 miles per hour. When Johnson learned the men at Area 51 had repeatedly beaten that record, he wanted to make that fact publicly known. What better way to begin a presidency than by one-upping the Russians?

[…]

Through a veil of half-truths, he would out the Air Force’s interceptor version of the Oxcart, the YF-12, as the speed-breaker. The YF-12 would be given a false cover, the fictitious name A-11. Respecting McCone’s national security concerns, the actual A-12 Oxcart program—its true speed, operational ceiling, and near invisibility to radar—would remain classified top secret until the CIA declassified the Oxcart program, in 2007.

[…]

Three months later, on February 29, 1964, Johnson held a press conference in the International Treaty Room at the State Department. “The world record for aircraft speed, currently held by the Soviets, has been repeatedly broken in secrecy by the… A-11,” President Johnson declared from the podium, thrilled to give the Russians a poke in the ribs.

[…]

Two YF-12s belonging to the Air Force but being tested at Area 51 were quickly flown in from Groom Lake and driven into a special hangar at Edwards. The airplanes’ titanium surfaces were so hot they set off the hangar’s sprinkler system, which mistook the high-temperature metal for a fire. When the press junket began, the aircraft were still dripping wet. Never mind; no one noticed.

David Hambling notes that drone tactics in Ukraine are evolving:

With so many drones from both sides at the front it is inevitable that encounters will occur; since 2022 there have been occasional ‘dogfights’ with operators using their unarmed machines to knock opponents out of the sky. Now, however, we are seeing a different pattern. Rather than random encounters, there are deliberate intercepts, with small quadcopters attacking bigger bombers.

This is similar to the pattern in WW1, as early biplanes evolved from scouts to light attack craft and then fighters whose main task was bring down attacking bombers and gain aerial supremacy. This was necessary because the only thing that could effectively take on an aircraft was another aircraft. Almost a hundred years later the same sort of action is playing out in miniature in a struggle to gain control of low-level drone airspace.

[…]

Drone operators have little situational awareness. Their view is generally limited to seeing ahead and downwards. Successful attacks usually come from above and behind to achieve surprise.

As well as FPVs, Russians are also taking on Baba Yagas with standard quadcopters. In this case the preferred tactic is for the unarmed attacker is to drop on to the Baba Yaga from above, so the Baba Yaga’s rotors are broken by contact with the attacking drone’s body. The attacking drone may still be lost, but it is a good trade for one of the larger Ukrainian drones.

[…]

In March one Russian group displayed a new drone known as “Ram” a quadcopter fitted with metal spokes to damage enemy rotor blades with impunity. This type of modification may be inspired by the annual DroneClash competition held in the Netherlands, a capture-the-flag game in which teams needed to eliminate each others drones in air-to-air combat and drones were fitted with lances, chains and other such weapons.

[…]

The logic of these intercepts is obvious: air defence missiles are rare and precious assets costing hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, and are reserved for major threats like cruise missiles. FPV drones costing a few hundred dollars are plentiful and it makes sense to use them wherever possible.

[…]

Now the Russians have started to intercept Baba Yagas, the Ukrainians are giving their bombers fighter escorts. This Ukrainian video appears to show a Ukrainian quadcopter covering a Baba Yaga and taking out the Russian drone attempting to intercept it, suggesting that drone tactics are already looking more like WWII than WW1.

Back in 2012, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers), a study out of the Naval Postgraduate School predicted what would happen if a Destroyer (DDG) came under attack from simple drones, or “flying IEDs”:

The destroyer is protected by a system called Aegis, named after the legendary shield of Athena. Aegis is a sophisticated arrangement that coordinates various radars, guns, and missile launchers into a tightly integrated defense grid. It can detect, identify, track, and intercept incoming aircraft, missiles, and other threats in seconds, with minimal oversight from its human operators.

[…]

After running a computer simulation five hundred times, the researchers concluded that with eight drones approaching simultaneously, four could be expected to get through and hit the destroyer.

[…]

Worse, if the attacking drones targeted vulnerable points like radar or missile launchers, they might leave the destroyer defenseless so that it could be sunk by larger weapons.

The study went on to look at various ways of improving the defenses, by having better radar or greater accuracy or longer range weapons. These improvements reduced the number of hits, but only up to a point. Even with all the improvements in place, the average number of hits was reduced from four to 1.3.

The researchers also found that the number of incoming drones made a bigger difference to the outcome. Even the baseline destroyer with no improvements could beat off an attack by five drones; ten would tend to overwhelm even the best defenses and score at least one hit.

A 2014 RAND study concluded that “two or three smaller RPAs [Remotely Piloted Aircraft, drones] with less-capable sensor packages were often able to equal or exceed the performance of the larger RPAs employed singly.”

The use of drones in warfare has its origins in World War II, Annie Jacobsen reminds us (in Area 51):

Joseph Kennedy Jr., President Kennedy’s older brother, died in a secret U.S. Navy drone operation against the Germans. The covert mission, dubbed Operation Aphrodite, targeted a highly fortified Nazi missile site inside Germany. The plan was for the older Kennedy to pilot a modified B-24 bomber from England and over the English Channel while his crew armed 22,000 pounds of explosives piled high in the cargo hold. Once the explosives were wired, the crew and pilot needed to quickly bail out. Flying not far away, a mother ship would begin remotely controlling the unmanned aircraft as soon as the crew bailed out. Inside the bomber’s nose cone were two cameras that would help guide the drone into its Nazi target.

The explosive being used was called Torpex, a relatively new and extremely volatile chemical compound. Just moments before Joseph Kennedy Jr. and his crew bailed out, the Torpex caught fire, and the aircraft exploded midair, killing everyone on board. The Navy ended its drone program, but the idea of a pilotless aircraft caught the eye of general of the Army Henry “Hap” Arnold. On Victory over Japan Day, General Arnold made a bold assertion. “The next war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all,” he said. He was off by four wars, but otherwise he was right.

David Hambling covered the same incident in Swarm Troopers.

Well before World War 2, Jacobsen notes, a few visionaries saw the potential of drones:

Nikola Tesla mastered wireless communication in 1893, years before any of his fellow scientists were even considering such a thing. At the Electrical Exhibition in Madison Square Garden in 1898, Tesla gave a demonstration in which he directed a four-foot-long steel boat using radio remote control. Audiences were flabbergasted. Tesla’s pilotless boat seemed to many to be more a magic act than the scientific breakthrough it was. Ever a visionary, Tesla also foresaw a military application for his invention. “I called an official in Washington with a view of offering him the information to the government and he burst out laughing upon telling him what I had accomplished,” Tesla wrote. This made unfortunate sense—the military was still using horses for transport at the time. Tesla’s friend writer Mark Twain also envisioned a military future in remote control and offered to act as Tesla’s agent in peddling the “destructive terror which you have been inventing.” Twain suggested the Germans might be good clients, considering that, at the time, they were the most scientifically advanced country in the world. In the end, no government bought Tesla’s invention or paid for his patents. The great inventor died penniless in a New York hotel room in 1943, and by then, the Germans had developed remote control on their own and were wreaking havoc on ground forces across Europe. The Germans’ first war robot was a remote-controlled minitank called Goliath, and it was about the size of a bobsled. Goliath carried 132 pounds of explosives, which the Nazis drove into enemy bunkers and tanks using remote control. Eight thousand Goliaths were built and used in battle by the Germans, mostly on the Eastern Front, where Russian soldiers outnumbered German soldiers nearly three to one. With no soldiers to spare, the Germans needed to keep the ones they had out of harm’s way.

In America, the Army Air Forces developed its first official drone wing after the war, for use during Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll in 1946. There, drones were sent through the mushroom cloud, their operators flying them by remote control from an airborne mother ship called Marmalade flying nearby. To collect radioactive samples, the drones had been equipped with air-collection bags and boxlike filter-paper holders. Controlling the drones in such conditions was difficult. Inside the mushroom cloud, one drone, code-named Fox, was blasted “sixty feet higher than its flight path,” according to declassified memos about the drone wing’s performance there. Fox’s “bomb doors warped, all the cushions inside the aircraft burst and its inspection plates and escape hatch blew off.” Remarkably, the drone pilot maintained control from several miles away. Had he witnessed such a thing, Nikola Tesla might have smiled.

During the second set of atomic tests, called Operation Sandstone, in April of 1948, the drones were again used in a job deemed too dangerous for airmen. During an eighteen-kiloton atomic blast called Zebra, however, a manned aircraft accidentally flew through a mushroom cloud, and after this, the Air Force made the decision that because the pilot and crew inside the aircraft had “suffered no ill effects,” pilots should be flying atomic-sampling missions, not drones.

Again, Hambling goes over some of the same history.

Most forms of radar are blocked by walls and other solid objects, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers), but there are also through-the-wall “life detection” radars:

These use ultra-wideband radio waves, which can go through solid walls as easily as air. Life detection radar works on the Doppler principle and only detects movement, in particular the movements associated with human life — breathing and heartbeats. First responders use portable units in rescue operations to detect if there are people alive in a building. It is imprecise but will give the number and approximate location of any people inside. The technology is also used by the military and police.