Maj. Jeffrey Entine, flying an F-16C with the 85th Flight Test Squadron, shot a rocket at a test drone near Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, Dec. 19, according to a statement from the service. The stated purpose of the test was to “demonstrate shooting a small drone at low altitudes,” and it appears to have been a success.

While “small drone” may call to mind hobbyist quadcopters or the tactical drones used by infantry, the target drone in question was a BQM-167, a kind of drone specifically designed as an aerial target. With a length of 20 feet tip-to-tail and a maximum gross takeoff weight of over 2,000 lbs, the BQM-167 is small only in relation to the jet fighter that shot it down.

Confusing target drones for hobbyist quadcopters is full circle for military terminology. For decades, the most popular use of drone in military circles was as a collective term for flying aerial targets. Training human pilots and gunners on simple moving targets is a long-standing practice; before she was Marilyn Monroe, Norma Jeane Dougherty assembled aerial targets for the Radioplane company during World War II.

What is novel about the recent shoot-down by Entine is that non-target drones, which date back at least as far as World War I, are now a regular part of military operations and civilian life. Air Force pilots shooting down drones outside of combat is an expected practice. While shooting down plane-sized drones in combat is expected, using a whole anti-air missile on a smaller, cheaper target would be overkill.

The weapon used against the drone was an AGR-20A Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) laser-guided rocket, guided by a targeting pod on the F-16.

And, while the F-16 demonstrated an anti-drone capacity with the test, the greater aim was to demonstrate that the laser-guided rocket could be used as an anti-cruise-missile weapon.

“Originally developed as a low cost, low collateral damage air-to-ground weapon for use in Afghanistan and Iraq, adapting the AGR-20A for counter-air use is momentous. The AGR-20A is a fraction of the cost of an AIM-120 missile commonly used for cruise missile defense,” said 53d Wing Office of Public Affairs in a statement. “Additionally, the AGR-20A can be loaded faster than an AIM-120 and an aircraft can carry two-to-three times the number weapons.”

Militaries have yet to settle on a common arsenal of counter-drone tools, and in the absence of such silver bullets, F-16s with laser-guided rockets could fit into a broader picture of layered defense against drones and missiles.

Drones, flying machines defined by a lack of human on board, could reduce the endurance problem to one of mechanical endurance, if only they could find a way to be consistently recharged.

Among its many tasks, the experimental X-47B demonstrated mid-air refueling in 2015, which bodes well for the future of plane-sized vehicles that run on traditional fuels. But what of electric engine drones?

Quadcopters, as ubiquitous as they are constrained by short flight times, are an ideal candidate for in-air recharging. Researchers at the High Performance Robotics Laboratory (HiPeRLab) at the University of California – Berkeley demonstrated an aerial recharging ability, one that almost doubled the flight time of the recharged drone.

Batteries are both essential for electric drone flight and also the heaviest component of the vehicle, reaching a point where increasing battery size will diminish flight time. With recharging, a hovering drone can instead sustain longer flight, so long as it can continuously be resupplied by the fresh batteries of smaller feeder craft.

As with most experimental research, the use cases are all early extrapolations from proofs of concept. Fortunately for military planners and designers, a large component of what quadcopters do is hover, so anything that extends hover time could add value to a drone.

With an average quadcopter flight time of around 20 minutes, troops have to be mindful of how to best use that limited window. If a patrol wants to place a scout over the corner of a building to catch potential movement, it has to hope that the drone sees what it needs to in that short flight time. With recharging, a drone could stay focused on a point for closer to 40 minutes, allowing more people to move into position.

A flight time of 40 minutes is long for a drone and short for a sensor mast, but the option for a temporary sensor tower, flown into place and then sustained through a small fleet of resupply batteries, is likely just the beginning.

The researchers, after all, just have to prove the concept. It’s up to the designers to find a use and the engineers to iterate it into being.

Watch a video of the drones recharging below:

The “Silent Arrow” autonomous glider is, in essence, a delivery drone and was on display at the Defense and Security Equipment International exposition in London earlier this month.

Made by Yates Electrospace Corporation for the MEL Group, the Silent Arrow comes in disposable and electric/reusable versions. The wings feature evalons for steering, and can be guided either by remote pilot (including through first-person-view cameras) or plot a path to the landing site autonomously. Autopilot is based around a modified COTS Pixhawk Cube, and it draws data from GPS, magnetometer, barometer, inertial measurement unit, LiDAR, and pitot.

When released from an altitude of 25,000 feet, the Silent Arrow can glide up to 40 miles over 12 minutes and can be released from a range of aircraft, including planes like the C-17 and the C-130, tiltrotor craft like V-22s, and helicopters like the CH-53. If it’s can’t fit inside, it can be slung underneath helicopters inside.

The company said the goal is “to supply 1 rifle squad for 1 day of heavy direct-action combat” with a single Silent Arrow, with enough space inside to fit all the MREs, medicine, ammunition, water, batteries, and fuel the squad might need over that day.

Cheap and accurate resupply by glider is part of the broader picture of drone delivery, where low cost navigation systems, sensors and control surfaces make disposable (or at least expendable) vehicles possible. It also confounds the category of drone, as it is only lightly powered and, with the exception of the electric variant, is built for one way flight.

With the promise of greater accuracy and human control than parachute-dropped (and gravity guided alternatives), the Silent Arrow – and vehicles – like it are more akin to precision provisions than anything else.

“At approximately 10 a.m. local time, the amphibious ship USS Boxer was in international waters conducting a planned inbound transit of the Strait of Hormuz,” read the statement from Jonathan Hoffman, the chief Pentagon spokesperson. “A fixed wing unmanned aerial system (UAS) approached [USS] Boxer and closed within a threatening range. The ship took defensive action against the UAS to ensure the safety of the ship and its crew”

The Pentagon’s statement differs in language from the wording used by President Donald Trump, who claimed that “the drone was immediately destroyed” after receiving multiple calls to stand down. According to CNN, U.S. defense officials claim that the drone was disabled not by bullets or missiles (“kinetics,” in the jargon), but rather by jamming.

Specifically, it was almost certainly jamming via MRZR LMADIS, or a Polaris MRZR vehicle sporting a Light Marine Air Defense Integrated System. While a Corps official said as early as May that the deployment of the system to the Middle East was winding down, observers online noted that a MRZR LMADIS system was visible on the deck of the USS Boxer, an amphibious assault ship, for its transit through the Strait of Hormuz — a presence revealed in pictures uploaded earlier that day.

The incident is just 28 days after Iran shot down a Global Hawk over the Strait of Hormuz. While the drone jammed by the Boxer has yet to be identified, Iran has drone bases in the area (which is, again, a narrow body of water that borders Iran, and over one side of which Iran claims sovereignty). Non-state actors have also operated drones in the surrounding area, sometimes supplied by regional powers. The downing of the Global Hawk almost risked escalation, though the uncrewed nature of drones versus the certainty of human casualties in the event of a retaliation appears to have calmed tensions.

Instead, the recent exchange of attacks on drones hearkens back to an earlier era of tension in the Strait, invoking the attacks on commercial vessels during the Iran-Iraq war which ultimately involved US naval patrols and is recorded in history as the Tanker War. Jamming drones, in theory, poses less of a risk to other commercial or otherwise peopled aircraft, but the likely consequence of the exchange of drone destruction in the summer of 2019 is that commercial aircraft will steer clear of the area. After all, the greatest tragedy of the Tanker War involved a U.S. cruiser mistaking a civilian Iranian airliner for an attacking jet fighter, leading to the deaths of 290 people.

It is also worth noting that the immediate answer to a drone threat to ships appears to be simply parking a ground vehicle carrying a counterdrone system on the deck. The counterdrone field is full of possible solutions, but most have focused on either facilities or dismounted patrol protection, looking at handheld devices or larger installations at fixed points at bases. There is likely an underserved market in counterdrone solutions for ships, especially aimed at stopping mid- to low-end fixed-wing craft.

The “Adaptable Lighter Than Air” program, or ALTA, seeks to develop and demonstrate high-altitude lighter-than-air vehicles that can navigate by the wind over extended ranges. “High-altitude” here is defined as above 75,000 feet. The balloons will rely entirely on the varied winds above, and while they do not have propulsion of their own, they can adjust altitude to catch winds in different directions.

DARPA launched three ALTA balloons from Cumberland, Maryland, on June 18, 2019, and confirmed that it was, in fact, their balloons spotted above Kansas City June 20. Asked if DARPA was tracking the balloons, the agency said that the ALTA balloon flights are coordinated with the FAA starting weeks before launch and the ALTA team is in regular communication with the FAA.

“The balloons are controlled from fixed and mobile ground stations, with consistent point-to-point links and satellite relays,” said Dr. Alexander M.G. Walan, ALTA program manager, noting that the craft have sensors on board used to assess flight performance. In addition, the vehicles are distinct from weather balloons because they are larger and capable of navigation.

As part of ALTA, the agency is also developing a sensor to provide real-time stratospheric wind measurements. Outside scientific curiosity, the real test of an entirely wind-borne vessel will be what kinds of payloads can fit on it, and what information they can meaningfully transmit back.

Fitting cheap and useful sensors to expendable vehicles is something the military is already working on, though it’s easy to imagine that the weight constraints on a buoyant balloon will be greater than on a descending glider or a powered drone.

The utility of such a platform hinges greatly on cost and payload. Sensors that could be launched into the wind and reach across the globe could prove useful for providing information of places too dangerous for crewed or unmanned aircraft, and also in areas where satellite coverage is for some reason unavailable.

Wind and balloons are also responsible for one of the strangest intercontinental attacks in history. During World War II, Japan built balloons that carried firebombs and lofted them into the jet stream, where they traveled across the Pacific ocean, sparking the occasional forest fire and in at least one instance reportedly killed a family of civilians.

Nothing about DARPA’s program suggests it will borrow from this history of aggressive ballooning. Instead, the ALTA platform looks like a new way to explore what, exactly, the wind can deliver.

Modern life is millennia removed from proto-ethical debates over the dangers of collaborating on hunting technology with people who may someday turn it to violence, but dual-use tools are at the center of a major inter- and intra-national debate. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission held a hearing June 7 about China and technology, specifically the ways in which developments in the civilian sector could be exploited and weaponized by China’s military.

“China has been hyped as an AI superpower poised to overtake the U.S. in the strategic technology domain of AI,” said Jeffrey Ding, China lead for the Center for the Governance of AI, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford; D.Phil. Candidate, University of Oxford.

“Much of the research supporting this claim suffers from the ‘AI abstraction problem,’” Ding continued, “the concept of AI, which encompasses anything from fuzzy mathematics to drone swarms, becomes so slippery that it is no longer analytically coherent or useful.”

Into the fuzziness of that debate around AI, the commissioners probed and the witnesses testified, occasionally going into the weeds of specific data but largely moving back to questions of intent and capability. The big questions underlying the hearing were these: can China leapfrog development of AI to create useful military tools, and can the United States marshal an industrial policy to maintain a lead in AI without the same kind of integrated state apparatus that China has? Also, what will China do with AI once it develops it?

The degree to which China can expand on and leapfrog U.S. AI development hinges on everything from the respective countries immigration policies, a willingness of multinational corporations to share research, direct and passive funding, and the extent to which things like counter-intelligence operations can yield results or chill collaboration. It also depends on what purpose, exactly, the AI is being trained to do.

“AI appeals to the [People’s Liberation Army] in part because it has fewer legacy systems,” said Elsa Kania, adjunct senior fellow, Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security and research fellow at CSET. Building systems for the first time with AI in mind is a different and distinct proposition from adapting existing systems to draw on AI tools.

Looking for a hard metric in the recent past, Ding cited an unpublished manuscript by Jon Schmid, a doctoral candidate at Georgia Tech, that looked at military patents to see what was being developed.

“It’s not a perfect indicator because a lot of military hardware isn’t going to be patented open source,” said Ding, “but a crucial caveat I’ll add to that is a lot of these advanced military systems source components that are found in patents, so it’s a good indicator.”

Looking specifically at the abstracts of patents for military hardware or hardware components that cited autonomous or unmanned, the research found that from 2003 to 2015 the United States had a lead in cumulative military patents seven times that of China.

“We can think of AI as next wave of software improvements,” suggested Helen Toner, director of strategy at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Without a clear inflection point for when AI transitions from capable software to a unique capability, many of the changes will in nature and implementation resemble software upgrades.

AI can be trickier to quantify, because while end-products may make note of features, like autonomy, that are enabled by AI, AI itself is a process done to data and doesn’t always transfer easily or at all to other applications. Also, processes are limited to being only as good at the quality of data that goes into them.

“It’s not quite as simple as ‘data is the new oil,’ but the value of data is really application dependent, so we have seen strength in particular applications where massive data is an advantage,” said Kania. “The nature of AI is a general purpose technology that is enhancing and augmenting weapon systems across a vast array of weapon systems, drive dynamics hard to evaluate, make safety and stability.”

Ultimately, what matters most in AI is less about any specific development, and more about how that AI facilities and enables existing choices people were already prepared to make. Multiple members of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission asked specifically about the role of AI in China’s repressive policy towards the Uighur people of Xinjiang. That specific concern was cited by Sens. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, in introducing a bill to enhance U.S. funding of AI research.

“The reason Xinjiang is happening is not AI, it is that the government of China is willing to make it happen,” testified Toner, “and therefore our response, if we respond, should condemn or otherwise sanction that action, of which tech is only a small part.”

The extent to which tech is especially responsible for state-led repression was contested by the panel, with Kania testifying that surveillance technologies are at the heart of repression at Xinjiang.

It is hard for the technology sector to, on its own or through U.S. government encouragement, try to change the behavior of a government. There was somewhat more consensus on policy suggestions for companies and government to end relationships building AI tools used for repression in the name of internal security.

Military implications of AI competition are likely downstream from these tangible concerns over AI built for other purposes. An ecosystem built on top of open-source tools and massive collections of data could be rebuilt if major participants stopped collaborating with each other, but it would likely take a national initiative to coordinate such a break. In the meantime, an active Cold War in AI will remain a near future possibility, rather than an immediate course of action.

DARPA, the Department of Defense’s blue-sky agency, launched April 29 a program to use artificial intelligence to best match interventions for individuals. It is called “Teaching AI to Leverage Overlooked Residuals,” or TAILOR.

Specifically, DARPA is looking for submissions about how to use AI for “Human Performance Optimization,” or HPO. Crucially, DARPA is looking for alternatives to one-size-fits-all approaches, because universal recommendations based on group averages can work at cross-purposes to individual need.

“This approach frequently (mis)characterizes individual variance as statistical ‘noise,’ ‘residuals,’ or ‘error,’” reads the solicitation. “The resulting interventions (e.g., diet, physical training regimen, brain stimulation) are at best suboptimal and at worst deleterious for each person.”

Diet, physical training, and brain stimulation aren’t the flashiest parts of the military, but they’re fundamental to how everything else operates. DARPA specifically cites an interest from Special Operations Command’s “Close Combat Lethality Task Force” in getting this optimization right, tailoring interventions to individuals and teams into an advantage.

To get there, DARPA is asking proposers to come up with “third wave AI approaches,” to demonstrate contextual reasoning and transfer learning, meaning a solution is capable of adapting to changed circumstances, environments, and can use related knowledge for abstraction. DARPA also wants teams to move away from traditional AI that trains on large data sets, has opaque processes, and are hard to adapt to new contexts. Proposers will be expected to focus on at least on area of human performance, with DARPA aiming to have a full portfolio of research on physical cognitive, and social performance data.

It’s a lot of technical build-up, but the final outcome is relatively straightforward: after given the data and goal for a specific individual or team, the tool needs to evaluate how much that individual or team would benefit from a given intervention (such as a change in diet or exercise or brain stimulation.) The systems will also be evaluated on how well they can explain or accommodate counterfactuals. Phase II is much the same process, but with datasets from other teams, and with evaluation from subject matter experts in government.

Should the research prove fruitful, the military will be one step closer to specific responses for every individual, a personalized tool that’s general issue.

The competition, put on Feb. 4 by the Brain Drone Racing League at the University of South Florida, awarded its winner a trophy and a take-home quadcopter. Despite the modest scale of the event, the Brain Drone Racing League offers insights into the potential and limitations of brain-control interfaces for controlling vehicles.

February’s race was the fourth for the league, which bills the sport as a level playing field across ability distinctions. There’s an esport version, which served as the trial for piloting the drones in physical space. In the virtual and real versions, players wearing an electroencephalogram, or EEG, headset look at the image of a block on a screen. As players concentrate on moving the block, the EEG interprets that electrical activity and translates it into movement, guiding a simulated drone in the virtual competitions or a real one in the live competitions.

Brain Control Interfaces have seen use for decades in various tasks, assisting with everything from prosthetic limbs to communication and mobility. The use of similar interfaces to not just restore ability, but to enable people to operate in new ways, has attracted the interest of DARPA, which in 2015 showed off a brain-control interface used to pilot an F-35 in virtual reality.

The chief advantage of hands-free drone piloting is, well, the hands-free part, but the technology has a way to go before that can turn into a tangible benefit. The concentration of piloting is likely taxing enough, regardless of the control scheme used. If one future role for pilots is commanding drones in addition to piloting aircraft, it’s possible that a hands-free controller could allow simple direction of a craft or even a swarm, with autonomous systems filling in the gaps.

Still, the existence of a Brain Drone Racing League suggests that the possibilities from piloting drones in this way are barely being realized. There are depths to explore. Augmented with autonomy and with EEG-like controllers subtly built into helmets, we might see future robots commanded in battle without words spoken or hands moved. Robots simply flying at the direction of thought.

Here’s a short video about the league:

But in 2018, that total doubled, with 11 domestic missions flown by military drones.

On Jan. 11, the Department of Defense published its 2018 statistics. The drones involved include everything from MQ-9 Reapers down to DJI Phantoms, and involvement in missions ranging from training exercises to border security and emergency response. (Notably, drones operations by the Department of Homeland Security are excluded from these statistics). These numbers are helpfully collected and contrasted with domestic drone use by by the military from 2011 to 2017 by Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard University.

In 2018, military MQ-9 Reapers flew five missions over the United States, four of which were in support of forest firefighting in California and Oregon. One Reaper mission, flown from May 7 to May 10, was described as incident and awareness exercise in the state of New York. RQ-11B Ravens flew two missions, one a base installation in Bangor, Kitsap, Washington, and the other was a Defense Support of Civil Authorities mission in response to Hurricane Florence and requested by the South Carolina National Guard.

In addition, DJI Phantoms flew two missions stateside for the military in 2018: installation support at Camp Pendelton and air show support on behalf of DoD public affairs at Cherry Point in North Carolina. An MQ-1C Gray Eagle was on call throughout 2018 in support of southern border security missions, and an RQ-21 Blackjack was requested by Customs and Border Patrol for counterdrug operations from November 2017 through to March 2018.

Those use cases roughly match up to how the Pentagon used drones at home between 2011-2017, with the exception that 2018 saw far more border monitoring. The Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA used DJI Phantoms and NOVA III drones for flooding-related missions in South Carolina in 2015. The Corps of Engineers additionally used those drones after flooding Mississippi in 2015-2016, and for Civil Works operations from 2016-2017.

While using military drones for border monitoring took on a prominence in 2018 that it lacked earlier this decade, it’s not entirely unprecedented. The Marine Corps deployed RQ-2 Pioneer drones on the border in 1990, 1998, 1999, 2001, and 2002.

These missions all feature drones used exclusively as surveillance platforms. The trend upwards in use suggests that we may see more drone flights carried out by the military in support of local authorities, especially along the border, in the years to come.

This owl-shaped drone comes from the Zhukovsky/Gagarin Air Force Academy. It’s not the first such bird-imitating drone from the Academy, which also made a falcon-shaped drone. For greater realism, that falcon drone can play prerecorded falcon sounds. (Beyond Russia, there’s a rich field of drones that look like birds, used for everything from advertising sunscreen to scaring birds away from airports and even spy drones for other militaries.)

“What’s interesting is that Russian designers are thinking creatively about UAV applications,” says Samuel Bendett, a research analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses. “Biomimicry allows UAVs to operate in areas where a ‘regular’-looking UAV would have been sighted and eliminated.”

As advertised, this Russian owl-drone uses an electric motor for quiet flight and carries a laser targeter to illuminate targets. The intended function of the owl drone is to track tanks, vehicles and other heavy equipment, spotting and then directing fire under the cover of its animal shape. Designed for use in the northern reaches of Russia, the drone is made to resemble a Snowy Owl, or possibly a Ural Owl, though neither has a face quite as cartoonish as this robot.

“In Russia’s part of Eurasia where hunting birds like owls, falcons and eagles are very common, a UAV that looks like a bird can become an invaluable ISR asset — it can basically ‘hide’ in plain sight,” says Bendett. “It’s logical that more designs like that may follow, until Russian MOD settles on those it thinks are best suited for various military missions.”

It’s also worth noting that the materials for a pretty-good bird-like airframe are relatively cheap. Drones that propel themselves through the air by flapping are doable, but tricky and complicated. Making a bird-shaped body out of foam and then putting sensors and an electrical engine inside it is much easier, and with birds that glide long distances, likely effective enough at the range where the drone intends to operate.

While the advent of small drones means that radar systems and other sensors are better at distinguishing drones from birds, most of those counter systems have short detection ranges. If the owl drone’s sensors can operate beyond that, the only easy way to detect it will be an eagle-eyed observer on the ground. Or an actual eagle.