Journal articles on the topic 'Drones, unmanned combat aerial vehicles, unmanned combat aerial systems'

The article discusses the features of small unmanned aerial vehicles, perspectives, directions for the development of unmanned aerial vehicles with integrated combat units. The development trends of unmanned aerial vehicles indicate the direction of the use of the unmanned aerial vehicle in the group of small unmanned aerial vehicles operating on the principle of autonomous management. The main problems are related to solving management and groupwork tasks in the group, which leads to the use of group intelligence methods. The possibilities of group use of unmanned aerial vehicles are analyzed. One of the main goals of small drone technology is to create energy sources with high energy capacity and power. The exchange of information within a group of unmanned aerial vehicles requires the use of group-based intelligent methods based on self-organized decentralized management. Such methods are based on the self-organization of movement and communication in a group of insects, fish or birds. The analysis shows that the development trends of small-scale drones are primarily driven by advances in micro and nano technology, new approaches to aerodynamics and management, the creation of high-capacity power supplies and engines, creating autonomous micro and nano systems for navigation and communication using agreed integrated concepts. The direction of new technologies for use in the group of small unmanned aerial vehicles based on the principle of autonomous control is revealed. An algorithm for organizing interaction in a group of unmanned aerial vehicles is presented and the relevant tasks are discussed.

In the past century, aviation has been one of the biggest technological advances that changed people’s lives. Especially in recent years in addition to being used in passenger transportation and war technologies, unmanned aerial vehicles have been carrying out important activities in many parts of life. These devices, which can be used as an integrated camera and weapon systems that can be controlled wirelessly and have superior mobility, have become one of the most important actors in defence. In addition to security services, unmanned aerial vehicles are used in many activities such as agriculture, search and rescue, cartography and fire. Unmanned aerial vehicles are also frequently used by law enforcement agencies due to their size and mobility, especially in areas such as monitoring and tracking. Unmanned aerial vehicles are used in many security needs such as traffic inspections, monitoring, social events and tracking around the world. Besides all these, unmanned aerial vehicles are frequently used for natural disasters, crime scene investigation studies and cargo transportation. However, in addition to all the advantages, these tools are also used by some malicious individuals and groups due to their low cost and easy accessibility. Many crimes such as smuggling, terrorist attacks, or illegal image recording have been committed using this technology. For this reason, while developing unmanned aircraft technologies, studies are carried out on anti-drone technologies in order to combat these crimes. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles worldwide is controlled by laws and penal sanctions are imposed in case of improper use.

A retrospective analysis of the use of unmanned aerial vehicles in the combat zone indicates a steady increase in the use of electronic warfare by the enemy, which reduces the effectiveness of reconnaissance flights of unmanned aerial vehicles, and in some cases leads to their loss. The article considers the prospects of creating and improving high-precision navigation systems, which is currently one of the priority areas for the development of unmanned aerial vehicles and relevant for ensuring high efficiency of unmanned aerial vehicles for both civil and military purposes. To develop and study methods and algorithms for localizing the position of unmanned aerial vehicles based on terrain images obtained by non-identical surveying means, taking into account the influence of electronic warfare on it, the article primarily considers approaches to comparing earth surface images as the main information component. The next step is to assess the correctness of the choice of informative parameters of the anchor points, where the mathematical model for their description and selection is the basis for the development of methods and algorithms for the formation of an autonomous navigation system for unmanned aerial vehicles. Taking into account the research conducted in the work, it was proposed to implement on board the drone intelligent information and calculation system of autonomous navigation, the algorithm of which is based on the logical basis of the SIFT descriptor. Thanks to the software implementation of the approaches proposed in the work and obtained on the basis of their experimental results, it is possible to develop and further improve methods of positioning unmanned aerial vehicles in space.

In October 2018, the Korean Army established a Dronebot unit. The future battleground is expected to be led by drones and robots. However, in order to utilize new weapons systems such as drones and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the Korean army, it is necessary to go through complicated and long-term defense acquisition procedures, which make it difficult to adopt and reflect the latest technologies immediately. The purpose of this study is to derive some implications for the efficient development and acquisition of UAVs in Korea through in-depth case analysis on the evolutionary development and acquisition of U.S. military UAVs. Accordingly, this study focused on the tactical/strategic U.S. fixed-wing UAVs which have been developed and mass-produced since 1990s, weighing more than 150kg. They include Shadow-200 as brigade/division-level UAV, Predator and Reaper as midium altitude UAVs, and Global Hawk as high altitude UAV. These must not only satisfy the required operational capability (ROC), but also receive strict airworthiness certification. Among them, Predator and Global Hawk were carried out as New Conceptual Technology Development Demonstration (ACTD), and prototypes under development were put into the Middle East battle. Although there were several accidents, flexible development processes such as system development or initial mass production were applied after ACTD. The initial target performance was set to be low and operability verification was prioritized, and the performance was improved through the evolutionary development of initial low rate mass production, subsequent mass production, and subsequent performance improvement. Despite the initial mass production phase, all required performance was not confirmed, and the required performance was presented in a range of flexibility. On the other hand, there have been large-scale changes such as engine replacement, aircraft change and communication systems upgrade to improve performance. Mission equipment was developed separately and applied to mass production when operability was confirmed. In the process of the development and acquisition of these UAVs, unforeseen accidents, huge losses and increased costs happened, but the U.S. government continued to pursue an evolutionary development policy for military drones. Therefore, in developing and acquiring new high-tech military unmanned aerial vehicles, it is necessary for Korea to develop and acquire them based on operability in the initial development stage, and to enhance its combat capabilities by improving its performance in the stages of initial mass production, follow-up mass production and performance improvement.

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAVs, Drones), initially known only for their military applications, are getting increasingly popular in the civil sector as well. Over the military canvas, drones have already proven themselves as a potent force multiplier through unmanned, round-the-clock, long-range and high-endurance missions for surveillance, reconnaissance, search and rescue, and even armed combat applications. With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), commercial deployments of drones are also growing exponentially, ranging from cargo and taxi services to agriculture, disaster relief, risk assessment and monitoring of critical infrastructures. Irrespective of the deployment sector, drones are often entrusted to conduct safety, time and liability critical tasks, thus requiring secure, robust and trustworthy operations. In contrast, the rise in UAVs’ demand, coupled with market pressure to reduce size, weight, power and cost (SwaP-C) parameters, has caused vendors to often ignore security aspects, thus inducing serious safety and security threats. As UAVs rely on Global Positioning System (GPS) for positioning and navigation, they can fall prey to GPS jamming and spoofing attacks. The vulnerability of GPS to spoofing has serious implications for UAVs, as victim drones using civil GPS can be misdirected or even completely hijacked for malicious intents, as already demonstrated in several academic research efforts using commercially available GPS spoofing hardware. Beside UAVs, GPS spoofing attacks are equally applicable to other GPS-dependent platforms, including manned aircraft, ground vehicles, and cellular systems. This paper conducts a comprehensive review of GPS spoofing threats, with a special focus on their applicability over UAVs and other GPS-dependent mobile platforms. It presents a novel taxonomy of GPS spoofing attacks and critically analyzes different spoofing techniques based upon placement of spoofing device, attack stealthiness, attack methodologies, and objectives of the attacker. We also discuss some of the recent experiments from open literature which utilized commercially available hardware for successfully conducting spoofing attacks.

Currently, in the field of military modernization, tactical networks using advanced unmanned aerial vehicle systems, such as drones, place an emphasis on proactively preventing operational limiting factors produced by cyber-electronic warfare threats and responding to them. This characteristic has recently been highlighted as a key concern in the functioning of modern network-based combat systems in research on combat effect analysis. In this paper, a novel discrete-event-system-specification-based cyber-electronic warfare M&S (D-CEWS) was first proposed as an integrated framework for analyzing communication effects and engagement effects on cyber-electronic warfare threats and related countermeasures that may occur within drones. Accordingly, for the first time, based on communication metrics in tactical ad hoc networks, an analysis was conducted on the engagement effect of blue forces by major wireless threats, such as multi-layered jamming, routing attacks, and network worms. In addition, the correlations and response logics between competitive agents were also analyzed in order to recognize the efficiency of mutual engagements between them based on the communication system incapacitation scenarios for diverse wireless threats. As a result, the damage effect by the cyber-electronic warfare threat, which could not be considered in the existing military M&S, could be calculated according to the PDR (packet delivery ratio) and related malicious pool rate change in the combat area, and the relevance with various threats by a quantifiable mission attribute given to swarming drones could also be additionally secured.

AbstractThis article presents an initial discussion of the political and legal challenges associated with weaponised technologies in three interconnected areas that may impinge upon the ability to protect civilian populations during peace and war and imperil international security: armed unmanned combat aerial vehicles (commonly known as drones); autonomous weapons systems (known as ‘killer robots’); and the potential militarisation of cyberspace, or its use as a weapon, and the operation of drones and killer robots in the cyber domain. Supporting the argument that the world is ‘facing new methods of warfare’ and that international security governance and law are not keeping up, the article provides an overview and interpretation of three technologies in connection with aspects of five branches of law: state responsibility, use of force, international humanitarian law, human rights law, and law of the commons. I argue therefore that ‘preventive security governance’ could be a strategy to curtail uncertainty in the preservation of stability and international order. I define ‘preventive security governance’ as the codification of specific or new global norms, arising from existing international law that will clarify expectations and universally agreed behaviour on a given issue-area. This is essential for a peaceful future for humanity and for international order and stability.

In a period of 2015-2020, Lithuanian Armed Forces (LAF) military spending increased twice, thus it enabled to initiate and to arrange significant critical projects that eventually allowed armed forces to upgrade military equipment and tactics. New artillery units, armoured personnel vehicles, air defence systems, anti-tank weapons, radars, anti-drone systems boosted military power of LAF. Tactics switched from anti green men to conventional tactics, where fire and manoeuvre dominates again. Meanwhile, in the same period of time in Kaliningrad the Russian armed forces boosted the number of military personnel, upgraded equipment (most of it to offensive one) and increased military exercises. In order to be prepared, LAF must look for the most efficient ways of defence towards a potential foe. In a near future LAF must decentralize a central military storage thus critical assets could be secured and used by battalions at any time. Moreover, LAF capabilities could be improved by cyber conscripts and non-conventional tactics which could bring extra dividends when a small state fights against technologically advanced adversary. Eventually, with an additional military spending LAF could obtain MLRS artillery, the coastal defence systems and unmanned combat aerial vehicles that could deal with enemy from a safer distance.

A special kind of use of UAVs as transport is their use to deliver the destruction means to the target on the battlefield, i.e. as strike unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), capable to inflict missile and bomb strikes on the enemy. Of particular interest are such drones, which do not require constant aiming at the target by the flight operator (ground pilot) with the help of a video transmitting system, but are targeted independently. Such UAVs have onboard a target sighting sensor (coordinator), with which the onboard control system determines the angular position of the target relative to the UAV. It is necessary to determine the most optimal targeting algorithms to be used in onboard control systems. UAVs due to the successful combination of cheap goods, technological availability and availability of other technical indicators (load capacity, efficiency and duration of flight, maneuverability) can be used as vehicles for cargo delivery. For example, UAVs are used to deliver ammunition and medicine to victims. The mechanism of the primary notification to the on-board control system of the UAV of the coordinates of the target to be hit, ie the task of "primary targeting", remains not completely solved by the technical and organizational task when using strike UAVs. Targeting methods using the on-board video broadcast system and direct commands of the ground pilot require, firstly, the installation of appropriate payload on board with an understanding of the loss of this equipment in combat use of UAVs, and secondly, effective avoidance of radio suppression by the enemy. The article presents the results of modeling with the help of Simulink models of the processes of guidance of a strike UAV with targeting on a moving aim by two methods: direct guidance and dynamic bias. The trajectories of UAV flights during diving to the target were obtained. The changes in the main working parameters during the guidance process were obtained as well. The conclusion about the advantage of the method of dynamic bias is made.

The article presents the analysis of unmanned aerial vehicles that were created during the conduct of the anti-terrorist operation in eastern Ukraine. The article is based on the description of the features of the use of unmanned aerial vehicles in eastern Ukraine. The article also discusses the advantages of using unmanned aerial vehicles when performing combat missions. The leading concepts of creating unmanned aerial vehicles and a set of factors that determine the success of providing unmanned aerial vehicles with the Armed Forces of Ukraine are defined. The experience of using and providing unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned aviation complexes during anti-terrorist operation in eastern Ukraine was generalized. Ways to improve the traditional methods of creating unmanned aerial vehicles and identify for which tasks unmanned aerial vehicles were used during the anti-terrorist operation. The article describes the types of unmanned aerial complexes used in the area of anti-terrorist operation by Ukrainian military, special forces and guards. As a result of the research the peculiarities of determining operational-tactical requirements for unmanned aerial vehicles for their effective use in the east of Ukraine are revealed. The rational ways of creation of unmanned aerial vehicles for their use in the interests of combat use are offered. The starting point for the analysis was some recent publications on the creation and use of drones for military purposes and guidance documents. The source materials were checked for compliance with the criteria set out in the guidance documents.

The following study is devoted to the phenomenon of unmanned aerial vehicles used throughout known history on the battlefield or for military purposes. The purpose of the following text is to familiarise the reader with an overview with the contemporary and historical employment of the unmanned vehicles on the battlefield. The study also aims to show that the concept of unmanned combat vehicles, also unmanned aerial combat vehicles, is far more ancient than is it is widely known. The article is based on theoretical research methods, mostly multinational academic literature. The author starts with an introduction on the role of limiting soldiers’ fatalities and the concept of removing military men from the battleground. Then, the author presents known examples of using unmanned ships in battles from Thucydides’ times to the invention of the Hell-burner of Antwerp. Further, the case of first unmanned combat aerial vehicle is presented, the bombing balloons from the nineteenth century, followed by a more contemporary study of the military use of unmanned aircrafts. The article is concluded with an analysis of the present employment of drones when they tend to substitute manned aircrafts on various occasions, especially when a mission is deemed “dull, dirty or dangerous”.

Unmanned aerial vehicles represent an indispensable segment in the range of weapons of both military and police units. The expansion in development of unmanned aerial vehicles for both commercial and military purposes has created a need for constant improvement of drones and anti-drone means. A wide range of possibilities opens up a wide range of uses for them. The paper presents the choice of an unmanned aerial vehicle as an important combat system for the needs of tactical units of the army and police. The complexity of the problem is conditioned by various tactical-technical and economic characteristics of unmanned aerial vehicles, it has conditioned the use of different methods of multicriteria decision making. A hybrid model of multicriteria decision making fuzzy AHP-VIKOR was used to select the unmanned aerial vehicle for the needs of tactical units. Criteria of importance for the selection of an unmanned aerial vehicle for the needs of tactical units have been defined on the basis of which the most optimal solution (unmanned aerial vehicle) has been selected. The criteria are defined on the basis of tactical-technical and economic characteristics of unmanned aerial vehicles. The calculation of the weight coefficients of the defined criteria was performed using the fuzzy AHP method, while the selection of the drone (the most favorable alternative) based on the defined criteria was performed using the VIKOR method. The obtained result represents the starting point for further research and implementation of unmanned aerial vehicles in tactical units of the army and police.

Technological innovations in the 􀏐ield of informatics, rapid developments in subjects such as arti􀏐icial intelligence and robotic engineering have put Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UCAV) into the battle􀏐ield of the 21st century. At this point, states whose common concerns are security have taken the path of both obtaining intelligence and developing unmanned aerial systems, whose use is rapidly increasing in the 􀏐ield of war-defense. It is known that many countries are currently working on developing and producing UAVs, beside United States of America (USA) and Israel which both have advanced unmanned aerial systems. Because states that are developing and manufacturing their own unmanned aerial systems are aware that this situation will provide a strategic advantage in terms of their military, political and economic interests. In this context, Turkey didn’t stay indifferent to the developments of unmanned aerial systems emerging in each passing day, it has made considerable momentum towards the last 􀏐ifteen years to develop national and indigenous UAV systems. Especially since mid-2010, these systems have been used ef􀏐iciently in both intra border operations and crossborder operations The main question of this article is how Turkey’s UAV/UCAV power is re􀏐lected in global politics and in this direction, world press will be scanned. In this context, this study will primarily explained by Turkey’s domestic and national development of unmanned aerial systems adventure in general terms; then Turkey’s use of these vehicles in where and for what purpose will be evaluated. Afterward it will be evaluated that how Turkey’s power of UAV/UCAV is perceived by other states in economic and military-political aspects by examining the relevant state press and publishing organizations Keywords: Turkey, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles, Press- Publishing Organizations.

At the present stage of development of unmanned aircraft systems work continues at a rapid pace to further improve their capabilities in the direction of more effective combat and special tasks. This is especially noticeable in two key areas: increasing the range and flight duration; reducing the physical size of the unmanned aerial vehicles. The combination of increasing flight duration and decreasing design characteristics significantly affects the requirements for unmanned aircraft system communication equipment and the development of a beyond line of sight satellite communication channel, which is currently considered as the main channel for transmitting intelligence, telemetry information in real time. Under existent warfighting conditions, the development of communication lines on the principle of a beyond line of sight with the use of ground or airborne relay stations, or through the introduction of additional ground control stations is virtually unjustified, due to the high dynamics of operational conditions and time constraints for decision making. In this context, the unmanned aerial vehicles' satellite communication channels are subject to strict requirements to ensure the combat missions are carried out successfully and safely. The article examines current approaches to the implementation of satellite communication channels with unmanned aerial vehicles in the context of the requirements for both on–board equipment and directly to the development of a satellite communication channel. Recommendations are given for the basic requirements for the organization of satellite duplex communication beyond line–of–sight with unmanned aerial vehicles based on geostationary (medium-altitude) high throughput satellites in the Ka frequency range.

Abstract One of the most important problems associated with the combat use of unmanned aerial vehicles remains to ensure their high survivability in conditions of deliberate countermeasures, the source of which can be both ground-based air defence systems and fighter aircraft. For this reason, the study and optimization of evasive manoeuvres of an unmanned aerial vehicle from an enemy aircraft attack remains relevant. Based on the game approach, the authors of this paper propose an algorithm for guaranteeing control of the trajectory of an unmanned aerial vehicle, which ensures its evasion from an enemy air attack. The study of the influence of tactically significant indicators of the manoeuvrability of an unmanned aerial vehicle on the effectiveness of the evasion manoeuvre was carried out. The model predictions are presented, reflecting the degree of influence of unmanned aerial vehicle manoeuvring capabilities on achieving a positional advantage when solving the problem of evading air enemy attack.

Unmanned aerial vehicle in surveillance and reconnaissance operations are well known with its flight operations confining to the lateral and longitudinal plane where the altitude is maintained constant. The objective in these operations is to have a wide field of view when camera is mounted underneath the aircraft. However, in obstacle detection algorithms as well as in weapon-target assignments by an unmanned combat air vehicle, the sensors such as cameras and radars are mounted along the X direction of the body fixed frame. The unmanned vehicles with such sensor locations are expected to offer obstacle-camera and weapon-target line-of-sight engagements. These operations by the unmanned vehicles are referred as targeting tasks. In this paper, a procedure to use unmanned vehicles as targeting systems in pitch plane is presented with respect to a fixed order controller at the inner loop. The remote pilot's inputs at the outer loop is disengaged and to mimic these inputs, various flight path angles are scheduled thus depicting autonomous characteristics. Illustrations to depict targeting tasks are provided.

Considering that there are promising ways to combat unmanned licensed vehicles for other field warehouses stored in combat situations. The experience of conducting the Joint Forces Operation (ATO) in eastern Ukraine, as well as the negative cases that have recently occurred in the field artillery depots and stationary arsenals (bases) of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, shows that the system of storage of missiles and ammunition in the field artillery depots of The Ukrainian forces are outdated and need major upgrading and modernization. Based on the analysis of the provision of troops with missiles and ammunition, for the period from 2015 to 2016 for the destruction of ammunition storage facilities, both stationary (arsenals, ammunition storage bases of the Armed Forces of Ukraine) and field depots of the units of Incorporated Forces effectively uses unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The most illustrative examples of UAVs are: fire and explosion at the field warehouse of ammunition storage at the combined RAW field warehouses (Svatovo, Lugansk region) on October 29, 2015; attempt to carry out a diversion at the arsenal of storage of missiles and ammunition (Balakley) with the help of UAV December 26, 2015 (dropping packages with incendiary mixture that could not be extinguished by ordinary fire extinguishing means); fire on the territory of the munitions field warehouse on February 18, 2016 of a military unit located near the settlement of Grodivka of Donetsk region (use by a UAV enemy, who in turn dropped the packet with incendiary mixture on the ammunition stack); the fire that occurred on February 17, 2016 as a result of the dropping of incendiary and fragmentation ammunition from the UAV over the rear control post of the military unit (Zaporizhzhia region, Kuibyshevsky district, Vershina village); fire that resulted from dropping explosive devices from UAVs on February 18, 2016 (Cherkasy village, Dnipropetrovsk region). The enemy still uses unmanned aerial vehicles to destroy the ammunition of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The system of storage of missiles and ammunition in field artillery depots is a set of forces and means, as well as measures of organizational, economic, legal, social and scientific-technical character, aimed at maintaining stable functioning and preventing explosions and fires and losses from them in storage sites and explosives.

Abstract Based on the theoretical frameworks of Carl Schmitt (hostis and inimicus), Giorgio Agamben (field and homo sacer), and Grégoire Chamayou (hunter-states and kill boxes), and being seen through the theoretical lens of post-structuralism in International Relations, this article aims to analyse the use of drones, especially Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs), in the ‘War on Terror’ led by the USA. In this context, we seek to demonstrate how the use of drones has affected the logic of current warfare scenarios in three different, but related aspects. First of all (Act One), the use of drones makes the construction of political otherness of the enemy impossible, and thus identity construction by counterpoint impracticable. Then (Act Two), this paper demonstrates how there is an attempt to move the enemy to the externality of the International Community, relegating their status to banishment and marginalisation. Finally (Act Three), the authors analyse the role of kill boxes and how the solution given by this phenomenon subverts the traditional notions of sovereignty, challenging the very raison d’être of politics.

This study introduces the technique of Genetic Fuzzy Trees (GFTs) through novel application to an air combat control problem of an autonomous squadron of Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) equipped with next-generation defensive systems. GFTs are a natural evolution to Genetic Fuzzy Systems, in which multiple cascading fuzzy systems are optimized by genetic methods. In this problem a team of UCAV's must traverse through a battle space and counter enemy threats, utilize imperfect systems, cope with uncertainty, and successfully destroy critical targets. Enemy threats take the form of Air Interceptors (AIs), Surface to Air Missile (SAM) sites, and Electronic WARfare (EWAR) stations. Simultaneous training and tuning a multitude of Fuzzy Inference Systems (FISs), with varying degrees of connectivity, is performed through the use of an optimized Genetic Algorithm (GA). The GFT presented in this study, the Learning Enhanced Tactical Handling Algorithm (LETHA), is able to create controllers with the presence of deep learning, resilience to uncertainties, and adaptability to changing scenarios. These resulting deterministic fuzzy controllers are easily understandable by operators, are of very high performance and efficiency, and are consistently capable of completing new and different missions not trained for.

Within the last decade, Swarm Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAVs) are booming and growing at a surprisingly rapid pace. From military combat, environmental surveillance, and air transport to the blossoming public entertainment sector, there is a wide range of UAV applications. For these above use cases, the accurate location of the target of interest can be requested/queried, which is very important for their mission accomplishment. In the case of GPS-armed SUAVs, this is an easy task. However, the GPS signal can be obscured, affected by environmental conditions, or suppressive jamming. Therefore, location information needs to be improved/assisted by some other localization techniques, which constitutes the main scope of this article. Besides, with the advancements in localization, guidance, and communication technologies; future SUAVs will be operating autonomously by distributing tasks and coordinating the operation of many UAVs. Thus, UAV to UAV communication is presented as it constitutes the SUAV’s autonomous coordination ability. In addition, future research directions and open challenges that need to be addressed, including autonomous SUAVs, are also discussed.

The usage of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been becoming one of the factors of the armed conflicts development and also the regulation of them. It means that readiness and ability to use UAVs effectively and the scale of equipping the armed forces with UAVs are rather important criteria of the legal capacity of the state armed forces. The article tries to explore the development of this process on the example of German armed forces which traditionally has had rather developed and high-tech industrial base.The Bundeswehr`s equipping with drones allows not only to decide some military-tactical problems but also to fill the shortage of personnel. It is too important in the context of the planned growth of all parameters of German armed forces for long-term perspective. The article presents the types of the Bundeswehr non-combat, especially recon drones, the features of their usage in zones of the armed conflicts. The Bundeswehr faces some difficulties in the question of equipping by non-combat drones. The article also pays attention to German cooperation with the USA and the EU member states in the sphere of the creating and production of military robots. The author pays special attention to question of the Bundeswehr`s equipping by combat UAVs. This idea actively and at the same time smoothly is promoted by CDU/CSU leaders for a decade. The discussion in the Bundestag is shown (its active phases were in spring and especially autumn of 2020). The article also issues the consequences of possible positive decision of the question of Bundeswehr`s equipping by armed drones. It will mean gradual departure from commitment of “strategic restraint” that is historically determined by Germany’s responsibility for starting World War II.

Recently, interest in mission autonomy related to Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles(UCAVs) for performing highly dangerous Air-to-Surface Missions(ASMs) has been increasing. Regarding autonomous mission planners, studies currently being conducted in this field have been mainly focused on creating a path from a macroscopic 2D environment to a dense target area or proposing a route for intercepting a target. For further improvement, this paper treats a mission planning algorithm on an ASM which can plan the path to the target dense area in consideration of threats spread in a 3D terrain environment while planning the shortest path to intercept multiple targets. To do so, ASMs are considered three sequential mission elements: ingress, intercept, and egress. The ingress and egress elements require a terrain flight path to penetrate deep into the enemy territory. Thus, the proposed terrain flight path planner generates a nap-of-the-earth path to avoid detection by enemy radar while avoiding enemy air defense threats. In the intercept element, the shortest intercept path planner based on the Dubins path concept combined with nonlinear programming is developed to minimize exposure time for survivability. Finally, the integrated ASM planner is applied to several mission scenarios and validated by simulations using a rotorcraft model.

The end of the world bipolar division has reduced the likelihood of a threat of an atomic conflict, but at the same time it has released dormant conflicts. From that time, the phenomena that are not new, but their frequency, intensity, impact on human society have caused a change in the way they are perceived. In this context it is clear, that to ensure the sovereignty of the European airspace and specifically the one of the Slovak Republic, as a member of NATO, is the first priority task of the Air Force missions. To accomplish this, there will be significantly increased the requirements for processes automatization within Air C2 systems, in order to keep the necessary level of interoperability and to utilize and exploit both combat and reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicles.

The subject of this research is the trends and prospects for the development and implementation of artificial intelligence in the military sphere of one of the BRICS member-states – South Africa in the context of national acts (for example, the Law of 2008 “On the Right of Intellectual Property for State-Funded Research and Development”), the potential and needs of this country, as well as achievements in design and manufacturing of unmanned aerial vehicles by the competitor companies (Seeker 400, MA 380, etc.). The relevance of this topic is substantiated by timely consideration of the legal perspective of the approaches of South Africa towards the implementation of artificial intelligence. The scientific novelty of this article is defined by the focus of research and the acquired results. It is determined that South Africa takes the path of institutional, legal and practical consolidation of the development of artificial intelligence in form of creation of designated infrastructure (on the premises of the universities, for example, Intelligent Systems Group at the University of Pretoria), as startups, scientific network structures (Center for Artificial Intelligence Research), etc. It is demonstrated that South Africa is the manufacturer and seller of the line of unmanned aerial vehicles that are controlled by the artificial intelligence and capable of performing various civil or military tasks –  from moving cargo (including laser-guided bombs) to monitoring the territory (search and rescue or reconnaissance operations, damage assessment from natural disasters or combat operations, control conduct of fire at enemy positions, etc.).

Autonomous maneuver decision making is the core of intelligent warfare, which has become the main research direction to enable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to independently generate control commands and complete air combat tasks according to environmental situation information. In this paper, an autonomous maneuver decision making method is proposed for air combat by two cooperative UAVs, which is showcased by using the typical olive formation strategy as a practical example. First, a UAV situation assessment model based on the relative situation is proposed, which uses the real-time target and UAV location information to assess the current situation or threat. Second, the continuous air combat state space is discretized into a 13 dimensional space for dimension reduction and quantitative description, and 15 typical action commands instead of a continuous control space are designed to reduce the difficulty of UAV training. Third, a reward function is designed based on the situation assessment which includes the real-time gain due to maneuver and the final combat winning/losing gain. Fourth, an improved training data sampling strategy is proposed, which samples the data in the experience pool based on priority to accelerate the training convergence. Fifth, a hybrid autonomous maneuver decision strategy for dual-UAV olive formation air combat is proposed which realizes the UAV capability of obstacle avoidance, formation and confrontation. Finally, the air combat task of dual-UAV olive formation is simulated and the results show that the proposed method can help the UAVs defeat the enemy effectively and outperforms the deep Q network (DQN) method without priority sampling in terms of the convergence speed.

As combat missions become increasingly complex in both space and time, cross-regional joint operations (CRJO) is becoming an overwhelming trend in modern air warfare. How to allocate resources and missions prior to the operation becomes a central issue to improve the combat efficiency. In this paper, we focus on the cooperative mission planning of multiple heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in a CRJO. A multi-objective optimization problem is presented with the aim of minimizing the makespan while maximizing the value expectation obtained. Moreover, it is not mandatory for each UAV to return exactly to the base which it takes off. Furthermore, in addition to the constraints commonly found in UAV mission assignment problems, the ammunition inventory at each base is also taken into account. To solve such a problem, we developed an improved genetic algorithm (IGA) with a novel chromosome encoding format. It can determine the number of attacks on a given target based on the expectations obtained, rather than being predetermined. Specifically, an efficient logic-based unlocking mechanism is designed for the crossover and mutation operations in the algorithm. Simulation results show that the developed IGA can efficiently solve the considered problem. Through numerical experimental comparisons, the algorithm proposed in this work is superior to other existing IGA-like algorithms in terms of computational efficiency.

Conceptual design of automated control systems (ACS) is an important stage in their development and creation. The miscalculations made here, as a rule, cannot be compensated in the subsequent project stages. Despite this, at the moment there is no sufficiently developed theory of conceptual design of promising ACS. As a rule, when forming the concept (control space) of a new ACS, either use a proto-type, or fundamentally new conceptual solutions are developed. The paper presents an attempt to develop a methodology for the conceptual design of an automated control system, which expands the designer’s creative capabilities, streamlining his reasoning and reducing the dimension of the synthesis problem. A template is proposed for creating a parametric concept of ACS with its subsequent detailing through the use of the categorical analysis method. The method is demonstrated on the development example of ACS concept by a group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). A constructive scheme of management information, including data groups and relationships between them is considered. Data groups are formed taking into account the multidimensionality of the management process, where aspects (points of view) are generated using the categorical analysis apparatus. The interpretation of 32 categorical subsets is proposed, revealing 32 aspects of the UAV groups usage. On the example of the UAV functioning aspect, concerning the fire and electronic suppression of the enemy’s air defense, performed as an element of combat support for the process of solving the main tasks, the data on the state of the UAV group was detailed. For the formed metric system, groups of information transformation procedures are defined. It is advisable to use the presented results to create adaptive polyaspect special software for ACS by a UAV group.

In this work, aiming at the problem of cooperative task assignment for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in actual combat, battlefield tasks are divided into reconnaissance tasks, strike tasks and evaluation tasks, and a cooperative task-assignment model for multiple UAVs is built. Meanwhile, heterogeneous UAV-load constraints and mission-cost constraints are introduced, the UAVs and their constraints are analyzed and the mathematical model is established. The exploration performance and convergence performance of the harmony search algorithm are analyzed theoretically, and the more general formulas of exploration performance and convergence performance are proved. Based on theoretical analysis, an algorithm called opposition-based learning parameter-adjusting harmony search is proposed. Using the algorithm to test the functions of different properties, the value range of key control parameters of the algorithm is given. Finally, four algorithms are used to simulate and solve the assignment problem, which verifies the effectiveness of the task-assignment model and the excellence of the designed algorithm. Simulation results show that while ensuring proper assignment, the proposed algorithm is very effective for the multi-objective optimization of heterogeneous UAV-cooperation mission planning with multiple constraints.

Recently, a combination of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and free-space optics (FSO) has been investigated as a potential method for high data-rate front-haul communication links. The aim of this work was to address the performance of UAV-to-ground station-based FSO communications in terms of the symbol error rate (SER). The system proposes utilizing subcarrier intensity modulation and an avalanche photo-diode (APD) to combat the joint effects of atmospheric turbulence conditions and pointing error due to the UAV’s fluctuations. In the proposed system model, the FSO transmitter (Tx) is mounted on the UAV flying over the monitoring area, whereas the FSO receiver (Rx) is placed on either the ground or top of a high building. Unlike previous works related to this topic, we considered combined channel parameters that affect the system performance such as transmitted power, link loss, various atmospheric turbulence conditions, pointing error loss, and the total noise at the APD receiver. Numerical results have shown that, for the best system SER performance, the value of an average APD gain at the Rx can be selected, varying from 18 to 30, whereas the equivalent beam waist radius at the Tx should be in a range from 2 to 2.2 cm in order to decrease the effects from the UAV’s fluctuations.

SUMMARYThe increased use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is coincidentally accompanied by a notable lack of sensors suitable for enabling further improvement in levels of autonomy and, consequently, integration into the National Airspace System (NAS). The majority of available sensors suitable for UAV integration into the NAS are based on infrared detectors, focal plane arrays, optical and ultrasonic rangefinders, etc. These sensors are generally not able to detect or identify other UAV-sized targets and, when detection is possible, considerable computational power is typically required for successful identification. Furthermore, the performance of visual-range optical sensor systems may suffer when operating under conditions that are typically encountered during search and rescue, surveillance, combat, and most other common UAV applications. However, the addition of a miniature RADAR sensor can, in consort with other sensors, provide comprehensive target detection and identification capabilities for UAVs. This trend is observed in manned aviation where RADAR sensors are the primary on-board detection and identification sensors. In this paper, a miniature, lightweight X-band RADAR sensor for use on a miniature (710-mm rotor diameter) rotorcraft is described. We present an analysis of the performance of the RADAR sensor in a realistic scenario with two UAVs. Additionally, an analysis of UAV navigation and collision avoidance behaviors is performed to determine the effect of integrating RADAR sensors into UAVs. Further study is also performed to demonstrate the scalability of the RADAR for use with larger UAV classes.

AbstractThis paper presents related literature review on drones or unmanned aerial vehicles that are controlled in real-time. Systems in real-time control create more deterministic response such that tasks are guaranteed to be completed within a specified time. This system characteristic is very much desirable for drones that are now required to perform more sophisticated tasks. The reviewed materials presented were chosen to highlight drones that are controlled in real time, and to include technologies used in different applications of drones. Progress has been made in the development of highly maneuverable drones for applications such as monitoring, aerial mapping, military combat, agriculture, etc. The control of such highly maneuverable vehicles presents challenges such as real-time response, workload management, and complex control. This paper endeavours to discuss real-time aspects of drones control as well as possible implementation of real-time flight control system to enhance drones performance.

The development of technologies for the development and use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for military purposes is especially notable. Modern UAV are used as one of the most important means increasing combat capabilities of the Armed Forces. Their combat use is desirable when performing tasks characterized by a long flight duration, increased danger and complexity. The use of UAV to ensure the safety of civilian objects and critical infrastructure facilities is also highlighted, forcing more attention to be paid to new methods of monitoring and monitoring the earth's surface. The analysis showed that there are potential threats of the emergence news power electromagnetic means of influence on unmanned aerial vehicles using ultrashort electromagnetic pulses. The article analyzes the characteristics of existing means generating ultrashort electromagnetic pulses and the trivial characteristics of aviation data exchange protocols. The necessity of testing telecommunication control systems for unmanned aerial vehicles based on the influence of ultrashort electromagnetic pulses is shown, and the experimental method is the most promising method for assessing their impact.

This paper is aimed to provide medical assistance to people through the delivery of medical supplies by unmanned drones. The use of unmanned drones’ benefits people in distant areas around the world. The paper gives attentionto the design of a biocompatible payload and a drone to accomplish medical supply delivery. Design of the drone healthcare delivery network isfacilitatingstructured and low-cost delivery of healthcare to save lives. Dronesare capable of sustainable flight, which need not human presence on board, and have enough control for performingnecessary functions. This paper utilizes a range of hardware components and software platforms that were integrated into the overall design of the medical drone. Hardware components includes IMU enabled GPS, ArduCopter 2.6 Flight Controller, Data Transmission and Receiving module, Electronic Speed Control Circuits, DC Motors, Propellers, LiPo battery, Servo Connectors. GPS is used for navigation in betweenground stations that are automated, to deliver necessary medications in locations that lack enough roads. Unmanned aerial vehicle is remotely or automatically controlled. Software platform used is ArduPilot Mission Planner and mobile phone or tabletapps can be used to track and navigate. Network is managed by drone operating system to monitor weather data from every ground stationand it optimizes the drone routes in this proposed approach we are designing a paper which is effective in many applications like transporting blood and small emergency medicines such as first-aid kits. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles can be used in future to provide medical help in field of surveillance and at the time of earthquake, drones help rescuers to locate survivors.The military in combat can use drones, and it can also be used for humanitarian aid.

AbstractLaser wireless power transmission technology avoids the traditional cable transmission requirements regarding the territory and environment, and facilitates vehicle-mounted laser wireless power transmission to provide accompanying power supplies to multi-target unmanned clusters. This can reduce the dependence of unmanned equipment (especially unmanned aerial vehicles) on power storage batteries, providing broad application prospects for the battlefield. However, the current laser wireless power transmission technology lacks a standardized technical index system and mature test and evaluation method; this is not conducive to the application of this technology in diverse combat scenarios. Accordingly, this paper proposes specific indicators for the component-level and system-level performance testing of laser wireless power transmission technology and constructs a corresponding test system and evaluation method, providing a yardstick for selecting laser wireless power transmission systems adapted to the battlefield.

Growing reliance on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in the effort to combat militant groups has led to considerable debate about the consequences of this new mode of warfare. While critics have focused on the impact of civilian casualties on militant recruitment and the resulting use of terrorism, evidence suggests that ‘drones’ are paradoxically more effective in limiting civilian deaths compared to other forms of military force. This article demonstrates a different causal pathway connecting militant use of force to terrorist attacks. Drone strikes encourage militants to displace operations to urban centers. Confronted with unfamiliar terrain and greater government capacity, militants emphasize terrorist attacks against civilians. The article explores these dynamics in the longest running drone campaign, in Pakistan. While civilian casualties from drone strikes have no discernible effect on terrorism, strikes that kill militants increase terrorist attacks against civilians in urban settings, while failing to reduce attacks on government targets.

AbstractMilitary drones (unmanned combat aerial vehicles) combine surveillance technology with missile equipment in a far-reaching way. In this article, I argue that military drones could and should be object for a philosophical investigation, referring in particular on Chamayou’s theory of the drone, who also coined the term “an eye turned into a weapon.” Focusing on issues of human self-understanding, agency, and alterity, I examine the intricate human-technology relations in the context of designing and deploying military drones. For that purpose, I am drawing on the postphenomenological approach developed by Don Ihde in order to systematize the manifold aspects of human-technology relations in a four-level model (embodiment relations, hermeneutic relations, alterity relations, and background relations). This inquiry also includes a critical reflection on the (often hidden) normative implications of this technology. In doing so, I do not intent to offer an exhaustive relational ontology of military drones. I rather aim at providing a framework that is able to capture the core dimensions of this technology and their complex interrelations in a systematic way that has been missing in the philosophical debate so far.

During the War on Terror, the United States military has been conducting an increasing number of foreign campaigns by remote control using drones—also called unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs)—to extend the reach of military power and augment the technical precision of targeted strikes while minimizing bodily risk to American combatants. Stationed on bases throughout the southwest, operators fly weaponized drones over the Middle East. Viewing the battle zone through a computer screen that presents them with imagery captured from a drone-mounted camera, these combatants participate in war from a safe distance via an interface that resembles a video game. Increasingly, this participation takes the form of targeted killing. Despite their relative physical safety, in 2008 reports began mounting that like boots-on-the-ground combatants, many drone operators seek the services of chaplains or other mental health professionals to deal with the emotional toll of their work (Associated Press; Schachtman). Questions about the nature of the stress or trauma that drone operators experience have become a trope in news coverage of drone warfare (see Bumiller; Bowden; Saleton; Axe). This was exemplified in May 2013, when former Air Force drone pilot Brandon Bryant became a public figure after speaking to National Public Radio about his remorse for participating in targeted killing strikes and his subsequent struggle with post-traumatic stress (PTS) (Greene and McEvers). Stories like Bryant’s express American culture’s struggle to understand the role screen-mediated, remotely controlled killing plays in shifting the location of combatants’s sense of moral agency. That is, their sense of their ability to act based on their own understanding of right and wrong. Historically, one of the primary ways that psychiatry has conceptualized combat trauma has been as combatants’s psychological response losing their sense of moral agency on the battlefield (Lifton).This articleuses the popular science fiction novel Ender's Game as an analytic lens through which to examine the ways that screen-mediated warfare may result in combat trauma by investigating the ways in which it may compromise moral agency. The goal of this analysis is not to describe the present state of drone operators’s experience (see Asaro), but rather to compare and contrast contemporary public discourses on the psychological impact of screen-mediated war with the way it is represented in one of the most influential science fiction novels of all times (The book won the Nebula Award in 1985, the Hugo Award in 1986, and appears on both the Modern Library 100 Best Novels and American Library Association’s “100 Best Books for Teens” lists). In so doing, the paper aims to counter prevalent modes of critical analysis of screen-mediated war that cannot account for drone operators’s trauma. For decades, critics of postmodern warfare have denounced how fighting from inside tanks, the cockpits of planes, or at office desks has removed combatants from the experiences of risk and endangerment that historically characterized war (see Gray; Levidow & Robins). They suggest that screen-mediation enables not only physical but also cognitive and emotional distance from the violence of war-fighting by circumscribing it in a “magic circle.” Virtual worlds scholars adopted the term “magic circle” from cultural historian Johan Huizinga, who described it as the membrane that separates the time and space of game-play from those of real life (Salen and Zimmerman). While military scholars have long recognized that only 2% of soldiers can kill without hesitation (Grossman), critics of “video game wars” suggest that screen-mediation puts war in a magic circle, thereby creating cyborg human-machine assemblages capable of killing in cold blood. In other words, these critics argue that screen-mediated war distributes agency between humans and machines in such a way that human combatants do not feel morally responsible for killing. In contrast, Ender’s Game suggests that even when militaries utilize video game aesthetics to create weapons control interfaces, screen-mediation alone ultimately cannot blur the line between war and play and thereby psychically shield cyborg soldiers from combat trauma.Orson Scott Card’s 1985 novel Ender’s Game—and the 2013 film adaptation—tells the story of a young boy at an elite military academy. Set several decades after a terrible war between humans and an alien race called the buggers, the novel follows the life of a boy named Ender. At age 6, recruiters take Andrew “Ender” Wiggin from his family to begin military training. He excels in all areas and eventually enters officer training. There he encounters a new video game-like simulator in which he commands space ship battalions against increasingly complex configurations of bugger ships. At the novel’s climax, Ender's mentor, war hero Mazer Rackham, brings him to a room crowded with high-ranking military personnel in order to take his final test on the simulator. In order to win Ender opts to launch a massive bomb, nicknamed “Little Doctor”, at the bugger home world. The image on his screen of a ball of space dust where once sat the enemy planet is met by victory cheers. Mazer then informs Ender that since he began officer training, he has been remotely controlling real ships. The video game war was, "Real. Not a game" (Card 297); Ender has exterminated the bugger species. But rather than join the celebration, Ender is devastated to learn he has committed "xenocide." Screen-mediation, the novel shows, can enable people to commit acts that they would otherwise find heinous.US military advisors have used the story to set an agenda for research and development in augmented media. For example, Dr. Michael Macedonia, Chief Technology Officer of the Army Office for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation told a reporter for the New York Times that Ender's Game "has had a lot of influence on our thinking" about how to use video game-like technologies in military operations (Harmon; Silberman; Mead). Many recent programs to develop and study video game-like military training simulators have been directly inspired by the book and its promise of being able to turn even a six-year-old into a competent combatant through well-structured human-computer interaction (Mead). However, it would appear that the novel’s moral regarding the psychological impact of actual screen-mediated combat did not dissuade military investment in drone warfare. The Air Force began using drones for surveillance during the Gulf War, but during the Global War on Terror they began to be equipped with weapons. By 2010, the US military operated over 7,000 drones, including over 200 weapons-ready Predator and Reaper drones. It now invests upwards of three-billion dollars a year into the drone program (Zucchino). While there are significant differences between contemporary drone warfare and the plot of Ender's Game—including the fact that Ender is a child, that he alone commands a fleet, that he thinks he is playing a game, and that, except for a single weapon of mass destruction, he and his enemies are equally well equipped—for this analysis, I will focus on their most important similarities: both Ender and actual drone operators work on teams for long shifts using video game-like technology to remotely control vehicles in aerial combat against an enemy. After he uses the Little Doctor, Mazer and Graff, Ender's long-time training supervisors, first work to circumvent his guilt by reframing his actions as heroic. “You're a hero, Ender. They've seen what you did, you and the others. I don't think there's a government on Earth that hasn't voted you their highest metal.” “I killed them all, didn't I?” Ender asked. “All who?” asked Graff. “The buggers? That was the idea.” Mazer leaned in close. “That's what the war was for.” “All their queens. So I killed all their children, all of everything.” “They decided that when they attacked us. It wasn't your fault. It's what had to happen.” Ender grabbed Mazer's uniform and hung onto it, pulling him down so they were face to face. “I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! […] but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!” He was crying. He was out of control. (Card 297–8)The novel up to this point has led us to believe that Ender at the very least understands that what he does in the game will be asked of him in real life. But his traumatic response to learning the truth reveals that he was in the magic circle. When he thinks he is playing a game, succeeding is a matter of ego: he wants to be the best, to live up to the expectations of his trainers that he is humanity’s last hope. When the magic circle is broken, Ender reconsiders his decision to use the Little Doctor. Tactics he could justify to win the game, reframed as real military tactics, threaten his sense of himself as a moral agent. Being told he is a hero provides no solace.Card wrote the novel during the Cold War, when computers were coming to play an increasingly large role in military operations. Historians of military technology have shown that during this time human behavior began to be defined in machine-like, functionalist terms by scientists working on cybernetic systems (see Edwards; Galison; Orr). Human skills were defined as components of large technological systems, such as tanks and anti-aircraft weaponry: a human skill was treated as functionally the same as a machine one. The only issue of importance was how all the components could work together in order to meet strategic goals—a cybernetic problem. The reasons that Mazer and Graff have for lying to Ender suggest that the author believed that as a form of technical augmentation, screen-mediation can be used to evacuate individual moral agency and submit human will to the command of the larger cybernetic system. Issues of displaced agency in the military cyborg assemblage are apparent in the following quote, in which Mazer compares Ender himself to the bomb he used to destroy the bugger home world: “You had to be a weapon, Ender. Like a gun, like the Little Doctor, functioning perfectly but not knowing what you were aimed at. We aimed you. We're responsible. If there was something wrong, we did it” (298). Questions of distributed agency have also surfaced in the drone debates. Government and military leaders have attempted to depersonalize drone warfare by assuring the American public that the list of targets is meticulously researched: drones kill those who we need killed. Drone warfare, media theorist Peter Asaro argues, has “created new and complex forms of human-machine subjectivity” that cannot be understood by considering the agency of the technology alone because it is distributed between humans and machines (25). While our leaders’s decisions about who to kill are central to this new cyborg subjectivity, the operators who fire the weapons nevertheless experience at least a retrospective sense of agency. As phenomenologist John Protevi notes, in the wake of wars fought by modern military networks, many veterans diagnosed with PTS still express guilt and personal responsibility for the outcomes of their participation in killing (Protevi). Mazer and Graff explain that the two qualities that make Ender such a good weapon also create an imperative to lie to him: his compassion and his innocence. For his trainers, compassion means a capacity to truly think like others, friend or foe, and understand their motivations. Graff explains that while his trainers recognized Ender's compassion as an invaluable tool, they also recognized that it would preclude his willingness to kill.It had to be a trick or you couldn't have done it. It's the bind we were in. We had to have a commander with so much empathy that he would think like the buggers, understand them and anticipate them. So much compassion that he could win the love of his underlings and work with them like a perfect machine, as perfect as the buggers. But somebody with that much compassion could never be the killer we needed. Could never go into battle willing to win at all costs. If you knew, you couldn't do it. If you were the kind of person who would do it even if you knew, you could never have understood the buggers well enough. (298)In learning that the game was real, Ender learns that he was not merely coming to understand a programmed simulation of bugger behavior, but their actual psychology. Therefore, his compassion has not only helped him understand the buggers’ military strategy, but also to identify with them.Like Ender, drone operators spend weeks or months following their targets, getting to know them and their routines from a God’s eye perspective. They both also watch the repercussions of their missions on screen. Unlike fighter pilots who drop bombs and fly away, drone operators use high-resolution cameras and fly much closer to the ground both when flying and assessing the results of their strikes. As one drone operator interviewed by the Los Angeles Times explained, "When I flew the B-52, it was at 30,000 to 40,000 feet, and you don't even see the bombs falling … Here, you're a lot closer to the actual fight, or that's the way it seems" (Zucchino). Brookings Institute scholar Peter Singer has argued that in this way screen mediation actually enables a more intimate experience of violence for drone operators than airplane pilots (Singer).The second reason Ender’s trainers give for lying is that they need someone not only compassionate, but also innocent of the horrors of war. The war veteran Mazer explains: “And it had to be a child, Ender,” said Mazer. “You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure you didn't know" (298). When Ender discovers what he has done, he loses not only his innocence but his sense of himself as a moral agent. After such a trauma, his heart is no longer whole.Actual drone operators are, of course, not kept in a magic circle, innocent of the repercussions of their actions. Nor do they otherwise feel as though they are playing, as several have publicly stated. Instead, they report finding drone work tedious, and some even play video games for fun (Asaro). However, Air Force recruitment advertising makes clear analogies between the skills they desire and those of video game play (Brown). Though the first generations of drone operators were pulled from the ranks of flight pilots, in 2009 the Air Force began training them from the ground. Many drone operators, then, enter the role having no other military service and may come into it believing, on some level, that their work will be play.Recent military studies of drone operators have raised doubts about whether drone operators really experience high rates of trauma, suggesting that the stresses they experience are seated instead in occupational issues like long shifts (Ouma, Chappelle, and Salinas; Chappelle, Psy, and Salinas). But several critics of these studies have pointed out that there is a taboo against speaking about feelings of regret and trauma in the military in general and among drone operators in particular. A PTS diagnosis can end a military career; given the Air Force’s career-focused recruiting emphasis, it makes sense that few would come forward (Dao). Therefore, it is still important to take drone operator PTS seriously and try to understand how screen-mediation augments their experience of killing.While critics worry that warfare mediated by a screen and joystick leads to a “‘Playstation’ mentality towards killing” (Alston 25), Ender's Game presents a theory of remote-control war wherein this technological redistribution of the act of killing does not, in itself, create emotional distance or evacuate the killer’s sense of moral agency. In order to kill, Ender must be distanced from reality as well. While drone operators do not work shielded by the magic circle—and therefore do not experience the trauma of its dissolution—every day when they leave the cyborg assemblage of their work stations and rejoin their families they still have to confront themselves as individual moral agents and bear their responsibility for ending lives. In both these scenarios, a human agent’s combat trauma serves to remind us that even when their bodies are physically safe, war is hell for those who fight. This paper has illustrated how a science fiction story can be used as an analytic lens for thinking through contemporary discourses about human-technology relationships. However, the US military is currently investing in drones that are increasingly autonomous from human operators. This redistribution of agency may reduce incidence of PTS among operators by decreasing their role in, and therefore sense of moral responsibility for, killing (Axe). Reducing mental illness may seem to be a worthwhile goal, but in a world wherein militaries distribute the agency for killing to machines in order to reduce the burden on humans, societies will have to confront the fact that combatants’s trauma cannot be a compass by which to measure the morality of wars. Too often in the US media, the primary stories that Americans are told about the violence of their country’s wars are those of their own combatants—not only about their deaths and physical injuries, but their suicide and PTS. To understand war in such a world, we will need new, post-humanist stories where the cyborg assemblage and not the individual is held accountable for killing and morality is measured in lives taken, not rates of mental illness. ReferencesAlston, Phillip. “Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, Addendum: Study on Targeted Killings.” United Nations Human Rights Council (2010). Asaro, Peter M. “The Labor of Surveillance and Bureaucratized Killing: New Subjectivities of Military Drone Operators”. Social Semiotics 23.2 (2013): 196-22. Associated Press. “Predator Pilots Suffering War Stress.” Military.com 2008. Axe, David. “How to Prevent Drone Pilot PTSD: Blame the ’Bot.” Wired June 2012.Bowden, Mark. “The Killing Machines: How to Think about Drones.” The Atlantic Sep. 2013.Brown, Melissa T. Enlisting Masculinity: The Construction of Gender in US Military Recruiting Advertising during the All-Volunteer Force. London: Oxford University Press, 2012. Bumiller, Elisabeth. “Air Force Drone Operators Report High Levels of Stress.” New York Times 18 Dec. 2011: n. pag. Card, Orson Scott. Ender’s Game. Tom Doherty Associates, Inc., 1985. Chappelle, Wayne, D. Psy, and Amber Salinas. “Psychological Health Screening of Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Operators and Supporting Units.” Paper presented at the Symposium on Mental Health and Well-Being across the Military Spectrum, Bergen, Norway, 12 April 2011: 1–12. Dao, James. “Drone Pilots Are Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do.” New York Times 22 Feb. 2013: n. pag. Edwards, Paul N. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.Galison, Peter. “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision.” Critical Inquiry 21.1 (1994): 228.Gray, Chris Hables “Posthuman Soldiers in Postmodern War.” Body & Society 9.4 (2003): 215–226. 27 Nov. 2010.Greene, David, and Kelly McEvers. “Former Air Force Pilot Has Cautionary Tales about Drones.” National Public Radio 10 May 2013.Grossman, David. On Killing. Revised. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2009. Harmon, Amy. “More than Just a Game, But How Close to Reality?” New York Times 3 Apr. 2003: n. pag. Levidow, Les, and Robins. Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society. London: Free Association Books, 1989. Lifton, Robert Jay. Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims nor Executioners. New York: Random House, 1973. Mead, Corey. War Play: Video Games and the Future of Armed Conflict. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Orr, Jackie. Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.Ouma, J.A., W.L. Chappelle, and A. Salinas. Facets of Occupational Burnout among US Air Force Active Duty and National Guard/Reserve MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper Operators. Air Force Research Labs Technical Report AFRL-SA-WP-TR-2011-0003. Wright-Patterson AFB, OH: Air Force Research Laboratory. 2011.Protevi, John. “Affect, Agency and Responsibility: The Act of Killing in the Age of Cyborgs.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7.3 (2008): 405–413. Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Saleton, William. “Ghosts in the Machine: Do Remote-Control War Pilots Get Combat Stress?” Slate.com Aug. 2008. Schachtman, Nathan. “Shrinks Help Drone Pilots Cope with Robo-Violence.” Wired Aug. 2008.Silberman, Steve. “The War Room.” Wired Sep. 2004: 1–5.Singer, P.W. Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. Zucchino, David. “Drone Pilots Have Front-Row Seat on War, from Half a World Away.” Los Angeles Times 21 Feb. 2010: n. pag.

This study proposes a multi-period facility location formulation to maximize coverage while meeting a coverage reliability constraint. The coverage reliability constraint is a chance constraint limiting the probability of failure to maintain the desired service standard, commonly followed by emergency medical services and fire departments. Further, uncertainties in the failure probabilities are incorporated by utilizing robust optimization using polyhedral uncertainty sets, which results in a compact mixed-integer linear program. A case study in the Portland, OR metropolitan area is analyzed for employing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones to deliver defibrillators in the region to combat out-of-hospital cardiac arrests. In the context of this study, multiple periods represent periods with different wind speed and direction distributions. The results show that extending to a multi-period formulation, rather than using average information in a single period, is particularly beneficial when either response time is short or uncertainty in failure probabilities is not accounted for. Accounting for uncertainty in decision-making improves coverage significantly while also reducing variability in simulated coverage, especially when response times are longer. Going from a single-period deterministic formulation to a multi-period robust formulation boosts the simulated coverage values by 57%, on average. The effect of considering a distance-based equity metric in decision-making is also explored.

AbstractDeinterleaving or radar pulse separation is a very important goal in terms of radar sources for identifying and implementing electronic warfare systems. In order to separate radar pulses, parameters measured by electronic warfare receivers such as electronic warfare support measures (ESM) and electronic signals intelligence (ELINT) are used in pulse separation. This paper presents a multi-parameter improved method for separating the pulse sequence of radar signals based on time of arrival (TOA) processing with sorting the other pulse descriptor words (PDW) parameters. In the proposed method, after extracting all the pulse repetition intervals (PRIs) based on TOA, the parameters of the angle of arrival, pulse width and carrier frequency (RF) are being used in pulse sorting to separate the received interleaved pulse sequences. The sequential difference histogram (SDIF) algorithm or cumulative difference histogram (CDIF) algorithm is used to extract all pulse repetition intervals. Also, in order to separate the sequence of the received pulses from all surroundings emitters, in addition to matching the potential PRI among the TOAs of the pulses and the similarity measurement in the other parameters of the pulse sequence (pulse sorting) have been used. This proposed algorithm is implemented in the integrated and complete design for deinterleaving of the radar pulses. The proposed method by considering low-cost computing sources considers a fast and low-complexity solution that can be used for edge-enabled distributed processors in aerial radar platforms as edge devices for military/combat unmanned aerial vehicles or networked missiles. The simulation results show that our method is completely effective.