#Kamikaze

My friend Brian’s neighbor is a relative of Thurston Shinn. Shinn was in the Navy during WWII and was assigned to a PT boat in the Aleutian Islands. Shinn was in the area when the US discovered the famous Akutan Zero. The Zero pilot tried to land the plane in a field but unbeknownst to him what looked like a nice flat field was really just a thin layer of dried mud. Underneath that layer was thick mud which caused the plane to flip over. The pilot died instantly.

At the 2017 Association of the United States Army annual meeting, Korean optics maker DI Optical was showing off many of their familiar products, but also had on display an interesting looking rifle attachment from a company called Jammer Korea. The attachment, named the “DRONE SNIPER”, is a familiar multi-frequency radio jammer, but in a slick underbarrel package that weighs much less than current standalone launchers.

It’s no secret that the field of war is changing, and that fact is just as true for the infantryman as it is the F-35 Lightning II pilot. Increasingly, small, inexpensive, expendable drones are being used as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets, as well as delivery platforms for light ordnance as well as kamikaze weapons. Today, the use of drones in this manner is in its infancy, but the next generation of purpose-built light combat drones is being designed and built right now. Israeli firms like Duke Robotics and UVision have already created armed and kamikaze (respectively) drone systems, and combatants in the Iraqi and Syrian Civil Wars famously used drones as delivery platforms for 40mm grenades. The use of civilian light drones as “snooping” devices has already spurred the development of anti-drone weapons for security forces, including both electromagnetic “rifles” that zap drones to take control of them, as well as more crude (but still effective) anti-drone shotgun payloads.