The drone swarms and subterfuge on the 1st of June 2025 by Ukraine special forces deep in the Russian rear will be commented on for months, and will no doubt, as President Zelensky said, be ‘one for the history books.’
In this article I take the core concept of hiding and launching drones from shipping containers and extrapolate it further. As many of you know I’ve been writing fiction under the Reepaman name for several years now. I regularly comment on the use of both drone swarms and AI by criminals in unconventional ways. Thus, the use of drones in the real world for war-fighting in this manner is not a surprise. Of course, the scale that comes with the resources available for military use is breath-taking.
Consider, the packaging of attack drones as payloads from a mother ship aircraft. – That’s already in use in the Russia Ukraine war. Or how about drone swarms launched from military ships? Well, China is ahead there already with tailor made ‘drone carriers’ already afloat.
Let’s take both those concepts a step further and add some subterfuge.
Drone Swarms and Subterfuge
A roll on roll off car ferry departs the Far East but its cargo isn’t cars for the hungry western market. Inside, tens of thousands of small quadcopters all primed, charged and on quick release cables are ready to go. The ship, on its normal delivery route churns its way along the English Channel towards Rotterdam. But then it opens some hatches and starts vomiting swarms of tiny flying explosives. They are preprogrammed to hit oil and gas hubs, storage tanks, power transformers, and key data nodes. Perhaps its one of many first moves on the chessboard of World War 3.
You might wonder about drone countermeasures? RF jammers, GPS spoofing, and kinetic solutions? They don’t exist at the scale needed for localised defence over wide areas. While the UK’s strategic defence review is published and amended (again), perhaps we could persuade the British gentry to stand on the white cliffs of Dover with their shotguns?
Fibre Optics
Or perhaps some of the unmanned arial vehicles that are launched are larger and have longer range? They use fibre-optic cables that spool out of the back end and are not easily disrupted. However they are too small to be targeted and destroyed by the majority of the air-defence systems that exist. And there are not very many of those that do have the capability. In Ukraine there are reports of UAV’s that have a forty-one kilometre fibre optic cable range. That’s a staggering distance. To put that into context, you could sail between Portsmouth and Cherbourg and destroy the majority of the British and French Navies in one pass. No jammers would help you there. Even if a couple of ships were alert with their point defence systems online, the majority would get through.
Drone Motherships
But let’s pan out a little, and go back to the concept of a flying mothership. You don’t need a fancy specialist aircraft there. A Globe-master obviously has a ramp that can be lowered in flight, but then so do lots of civilian aircraft. Consider; hundreds of unmanned land platforms dropping by parachute and deploying from the back of a civilian registered aircraft. Perhaps it’s something like those very impressive robo-dogs by Boston Dynamics.
Again in Ukraine we are seeing platforms with heavy calibre weapons mounted on them. Can you imagine the carnage if several hundred of them landed and started walking their way through the main streets of our cities? Of course, populations would work it out eventually and ram them with cars or trucks, or the limited number of armed police would respond. The point is that the subterfuge of the delivery method means the impact would be horrific before any effective response even started.
Drone Command and Control
And how are these vicious hosts commanded and controlled? Well obviously each drone has a British of French telephone sim card in it. The 5G connection only has to work for about twenty minutes while the platform hits its target. That’s well within anyones ability to react and hit a kill switch at the telecoms company. Or perhaps it communicates through a Starlink system? There is truly global coverage there now.
And then there is the scary thought. Do the drones even need a connection once launched? With rudimentary on-board AI, are they now at the stage of ‘fire and forget’? Image processing has come on leaps and bounds and I am told the targeting systems are really not that difficult, if you don’t particularly care who you hit. Are we perhaps even at the point where these technological terrors can use racial profiling before they pull the trigger?
Drone Defences
On the defensive side, from laser based defensive weapons to multi-frequency jammers, EMP’s and localised point defence systems, they all exist. They just don’t exist at the scale needed to protect key points. Note I don’t say a complete shield, that’s not proportionate to the risk. But even with the identified risk, there are not enough defensive systems to go around. That needs to change.
There is a lot to think about here, and to unpack. For once, in this article, there is no fiction in any of the technology described. I literally have made nothing up. It’s all here and now, the question is who is going to use it first.
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I do not use AI to write my articles or novels. I do use AI for research and to help create images that support my online content
