I’ve seen a few articles now that US fighter jets have kill switches in them, so the US could just render them useless for anyone they’ve sold them to.
Is this true? It sounds insane to me, I’ve always assumed that countries that buy these jets have full control over them. It’s a gaping hole in your defence if you don’t.
Tanks and fighter jets are becoming less relevant. The war in Ukraine underlines how drones are changing everything. They’re cheaper to manufacture (or buy/retrofit) and just about everybody can make or reverse-engineer them.
The barrier to entry is so low in fact that I worry about the day when terrorist groups begin to deploy them in major cities.
We already have auto-tracking drones. They can lock onto a person and follow them around. The intended use is to allow live streamers and YouTubers to be able to stream/record video by simply sending the drone out. But if it can automatically track and follow a person, it can likely be reprogrammed to automatically home in on a person. And at that point, it’s just a matter of strapping some C4 to it. It would be the ultimate fire-and-forget weapon. Program it to ignore anyone with your military uniform (or find some other anti-tracking feature, like an IR reflector that the drone can see,) and you could surgically strike an entire neighborhood with a swarm of them.
The game changer will be swarm capable drones.
A few smart drones can be used to guide a swarm of cheaper drones on target. Additional sensor drones can feed back info to improve this.
Currently, defensive systems can cope with a drone attack. However, if you have 20 coming in from all directions, in perfect coordination, they will be overwhelmed. You don’t even need all of them to be armed, just a couple, protected by the rest.
Current drone usage is akin to the first tanks in WWI. The WWII equivalent will be terrifying.
Their tracking capability sucks though, what you see in the promotional vids is now what they’re capable of.
The struggle to keep up with someone lightly jogging