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Role of Drone Technology in Sustainable Rural Development: Opportunities and Challenges

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• First Online: 16 March 2023
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• Venkata Ravibabu Mandla 11 ,
• Nagaveni Chokkavarapu 12 &
• Veerendra Satya Sylesh Peddinti 13  

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering ((LNCE,volume 304))

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• International Conference on Unmanned Aerial System in Geomatics

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Climate change and local weather conditions have caused several issues in the farming sector. The rapidly expanding global population is an issue that must be addressed to secure food and water supplies through the use of information technology in precision agriculture and smart farming. These technical advances in precision agriculture are represented by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). UAVs or DRONEs help in agriculture by counting the number of plants, visual inspection of the crop field, water management, erosion analysis, plant counting, soil moisture analysis, crop health assessment, irrigation scheduling, analyzing plant physiology, and yield forecasting. Drones can be used to facilitate development by reporting and collecting data in rural development in terms of agriculture land boundaries, water resources and their surface area, village boundaries, monitoring forest area, observation of hilly and tall plant regions, and soil condition in terms of water content, moisture, electrical conductivity, pH, and temperature. Repetitive collection of image and video data helps to analyze changes in rural development. Rural development aims to improve rural communities’ physical infrastructure and basic services. Delay in detecting problems associated with rural development may further deteriorate soil and water resources making them more vulnerable. This paper focuses on various opportunities and challenges in sustainable rural development and the application of UAVs in almost every aspect of human life, allowing people to make significant advances in human life support.

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Mandla, V.R., Chokkavarapu, N., Peddinti, V.S.S. (2023). Role of Drone Technology in Sustainable Rural Development: Opportunities and Challenges. In: Jain, K., Mishra, V., Pradhan, B. (eds) Proceedings of UASG 2021: Wings 4 Sustainability. UASG 2021. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering, vol 304. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19309-5_22

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Drones in Precision Agriculture: Corn Field Testing and Sampling Through Drone Mapping

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The Technology of Drones Essay

Introduction, military use, policing and public safety, safety and regulation, positive impact on civilian tasks, ethical concerns, works cited.

In the last two decades, the manufacture and use of drones have increased rapidly. Drones are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) used in military, search and rescue, commercial, and civilian operations (“Drones” 1). Advancements in computer technol0gy have contributed largely to the development of innovative applications for use in drones as well as their widespread use. Drones were forts used by military organizations for the purpose of aerial surveillance and airstrikes. Originally, they existed in the form of balloons and kites. However, as technology advancement occurred, they morphed into semi-independent, partly automated aerial vehicles. Drones are an emerging sector of the aviation industry that has been received differently by the public primarily due to the possibility of misuse, infringement of privacy, and military use in combat. Drones are important, innovative, and cost-effective technologies that are used for commercial, military, recreational, and civil purposes.

In the 19 th Century, drones in the form of balloons and kites were used by military organizations for surveillance. In contemporary society, they are used by military organizations to improve security by conducting surveillance on groups and organizations that pose threats to national security. Drones are used for this purpose because of their precision and accuracy (Bracken-Roche 167). In that regard, they are used to monitor people and groups without the possibility of being noticed. On the other hand, drones offer a bird’s eye view as opposed to a fixed, terrestrial gaze (Bracken-Roche 167). A bird’s eye view offers better surveillance with a three-dimensional view that is better for military activities and enhancement of security. The ethical advantages of drones include discriminatory attacks and precise targeting (Bracken-Roche 169).

In that regard, they enhance the safety of civilians during combat. The use of drones became a key element of America’s counterterrorism strategy owing to the security policy of President Barack Obama. The Obama administration used drones as a means of combat because it eradicated the need to rely on information from Pakistan’s intelligence services (Anderson 15). It was effective, convenient, and highly successful. Therefore, it has become a core component of the United States’ strategy on counterterrorism. The use of drones in counterinsurgency attacks in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan against terrorist groups is proof enough that drones are an important component of security-enhancement strategies because they target both individuals and groups (Anderson 16).

The adoption of drones in the domestic realm has been highly criticized because critics argue that it infringes on the privacy of people. However, the technology is widely used by government and public agencies for surveillance and monitoring of the public for the purpose of enhancing national security (Bracken-Roche 168). The drone technology is primarily used in policing and public safety programs to collect data and conduct monitoring. Drones are effective surveillance tools because they lack an onboard pilot and the possession of remote vision (“Drones” 5). Their increased mobility and aerial capabilities make them superior surveillance technologies (Bracken-Roche 169). Moreover, they are less conspicuous when compared to other forms of aerial surveillance such as helicopters.

One of the main issues surrounding the development and use of drones is safety. In the domestic realm, drones are used for civil and commercial purposes such as photography and recreation. However, regulatory agencies and manufacturers are concerned that technology has the potential to infringe on people’s security and pose security threats (Bracken-Roche 167). The majority of policies and regulations enacted around drone technology are founded on safety. Opponents of drone technology argue that little focus has been placed on the issue of privacy and human rights. However, his argument is erroneous because industry stakeholders and public safety and transportation agencies are doing their best to develop and implement regulations to govern the use of UAVs (Bracken-Roche 168). It is important to evaluate the issue of privacy because regulating drone technology in order to enhance privacy could render it obsolete especially in the application of surveillance applications to enhance security.

Studies have shown that drones have significant socio-economic impacts that have contributed to the widespread acceptance and use of drone technology. They are beneficial in transportation, communication, agriculture, environment preservation, and disaster mitigation (Floreano and Wood 460). For instance, farmers use them to monitor crop growth and construction companies use them to assess the progress of their projects. In the mining industry, the drone technology can be used to monitor and collect volumetric data of excavations while energy companies can use it to monitor their pipelines, cables, and other infrastructure (Floreano and Wood 460). Humanitarian organizations can use drones to monitor their work in refugee camps and during rescue missions in order to enhance the delivery of medical supplies and aid (Floreano and Wood 460). Fire-fighting agencies can use drone technology to assess the safety and dangers of confined spaces during rescue missions. Drones are used by logistics, security, and disaster mitigation companies.

Opponents of drones argue that they are unethical because they infringe on the privacy of people. Moreover, they argue that their use involves large numbers of civilian casualties, and the argument that they conduct discriminatory attacks is wrong (Anderson 20). Some of the public concerns regarding the use of drones include military use, misuse of technology, and privacy (Clothier et al. 1167). The public is concerned that terrorist groups use drones to launch attacks. Despite their varied benefits, the public is concerned about the risks associated with their use. The aforementioned arguments are baseless because every technology has benefits and risks. In order to evaluate the viability of the technology, it is important to consider the pro and cons. Drones have a wide range of applications that include aerial photography, infrastructure inspection, crop spraying, surveillance for law enforcement agencies, military combat, and monitoring during rescue missions (Clothier et al. 1168). Therefore, the benefits of drones outweigh the risks. Studies have shown that the public has not fully accepted drone technology because of a lack of knowledge on how the technology works and its numerous benefits. Public perception of the technology is likely to change as knowledge about drones increases (Clothier et al. 1171).

Drones are widely used in different sectors for various purposes. They were first used by military organizations for surveillance during the 19 th Century. However, as technology advanced, they morphed in shape from kites and balloons to automated aerial vehicles. The technology has not been accepted fully by the public because of the lack of knowledge regarding drones, their benefits, and risks. Opponents argue that they infringe on the privacy of people and that they are a form of exaggerated technology that causes more harm than good. However, studies have shown that drones have numerous benefits that include military combat, aerial photography, infrastructure inspection, crop spraying, and commercial use such as recreation.

Anderson, Kenneth. “The Case for Drones.” Commentary , vol. 135, no. 6, 2013, pp. 14-23.

Bracken-Roche, Ciara. “Domestic Drones: The Politics of Verticality and the Surveillance Industrial Complex.” Geographica Helvetica , vol. 71, 2016, pp. 167-172.

“Drones”. EBSCO Information Services, Inc . 2016. Web.

Floreano, Dario, and Robert, Wood. “Science, Technology and the Future of Small Autonomous Drones.” Nature , vol. 521, 2015, pp. 460-466.

Clothier, Reece, et al. “Risk Perception and the Public Acceptance of Drones.” Risk Analysis , vol. 35, no. 6, 2015, pp. 1167-1183.

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IvyPanda. (2020, October 19). The Technology of Drones. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-technology-of-drones/

"The Technology of Drones." IvyPanda , 19 Oct. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/the-technology-of-drones/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'The Technology of Drones'. 19 October.

IvyPanda . 2020. "The Technology of Drones." October 19, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-technology-of-drones/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Technology of Drones." October 19, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-technology-of-drones/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Technology of Drones." October 19, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-technology-of-drones/.

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In Ukraine, New American Technology Won the Day. Until It Was Overwhelmed.

Project Maven was meant to revolutionize modern warfare. But the conflict in Ukraine has underscored how difficult it is to get 21st-century data into 19th-century trenches.

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By David E. Sanger

David E. Sanger is a White House and national security reporter. He is the author, with Mary K. Brooks, of “New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion and America’s Struggle to Save the West,” from which this article is adapted.

The idea triggered a full-scale revolt on the Google campus.

Six years ago, the Silicon Valley giant signed a small, $9 million contract to put the skills of a few of its most innovative developers to the task of building an artificial intelligence tool that would help the military detect potential targets on the battlefield using drone footage.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

Engineers and other Google employees argued that the company should have nothing to do with Project Maven, even if it was designed to help the military discern between civilians and militants.

The uproar forced the company to back out, but Project Maven didn’t die — it just moved to other contractors. Now, it has grown into an ambitious experiment being tested on the front lines in Ukraine, forming a key component of the U.S. military’s effort to funnel timely information to the soldiers fighting Russian invaders.

So far the results are mixed: Generals and commanders have a new way to put a full picture of Russia’s movements and communications into one big, user-friendly picture, employing algorithms to predict where troops are moving and where attacks might happen.

But the American experience in Ukraine has underscored how difficult it is to get 21st-century data into 19th-century trenches. Even with Congress on the brink of providing tens of billions of dollars in aid to Kyiv, mostly in the form of ammunition and long-range artillery, the question remains whether the new technology will be enough to help turn the tide of the war at a moment when the Russians appear to have regained momentum.

‘This Became Our Laboratory’

The war in Ukraine has, in the minds of many American officials, been a bonanza for the U.S. military, a testing ground for Project Maven and other rapidly evolving technologies. The American-made drones that were shipped into Ukraine last year were blown out of the sky with ease. And Pentagon officials now understand, in a way they never did before, that America’s system of military satellites has to be built and set up entirely differently, with configurations that look more like Elon Musk’s Starlink constellations of small satellites.

Meanwhile, American, British and Ukrainian officers, along with some of Silicon Valley’s top military contractors, are exploring new ways of finding and exploiting Russian vulnerabilities, even while U.S. officials try to navigate legal restraints about how deeply they can become involved in targeting and killing Russian troops.

“At the end of the day this became our laboratory,” said Lt. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, commander of the 18th Airborne Division, who is known as “the last man in Afghanistan” because he ran the evacuation of the airport in Kabul in August 2021, before resuming his work infusing the military with new technology.

And despite the early concerns at Google over participation in Project Maven, some of the industry’s most prominent figures are at work on national security issues, underscoring how the United States is harnessing its competitive advantage in technology to maintain superiority over Russia and China in an era of renewed superpower rivalries.

Tellingly, those figures now include Eric Schmidt, who spent 16 years as Google’s chief executive and is now drawing on lessons from Ukraine to develop a new generation of autonomous drones that could revolutionize warfare.

But if Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine has been a testing ground for the Pentagon’s drive to embrace advanced technology, it has also been a bracing reminder of the limits of technology to turn the war.

Ukraine’s ability to repel the invasion arguably hinges more on renewed deliveries of basic weapons and ammunition, especially artillery shells.

The first two years of the conflict have also shown that Russia is adapting, much more quickly than anticipated, to the technology that gave Ukraine an initial edge.

In the first year of the war, Russia barely used its electronic warfare capabilities. Today it has made full use of them, confusing the waves of drones the United States has helped provide. Even the fearsome HIMARS missiles that President Biden agonized over giving to Kyiv, which were supposed to make a huge difference on the battlefield, have been misdirected at times as the Russians learned how to interfere with guidance systems.

Not surprisingly, all these discoveries are pouring into a series of “lessons learned” studies, conducted at the Pentagon and NATO headquarters in Brussels, in case NATO troops ever find themselves in direct combat with President Vladimir V. Putin’s forces. Among them is the discovery that when new technology meets the brutality of old-fashioned trench warfare, the results are rarely what Pentagon planners expected.

“For a while we thought this would be a cyberwar,’’ Gen. Mark A. Milley, who retired last year as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last summer. “Then we thought it was looking like an old-fashioned World War II tank war.”

Then, he said, there were days when it seemed as though they were fighting World War I.

More than a thousand miles west of Ukraine, deep inside an American base in the heart of Europe, is the intelligence-gathering center that has become the focal point of the effort to bring the allies and the new technology together to target Russian forces.

Visitors are discouraged in “the Pit,” as the center is known. American officials rarely discuss its existence, in part because of security concerns, but mostly because the operation raises questions about how deeply involved the United States is in the day-to-day business of finding and killing Russian troops.

The technology in use there evolved from Project Maven. But a version provided to Ukraine was designed in a way that does not rely on the input of the most sensitive American intelligence or advanced systems.

The goals have come a long way since the outcry at Google six years ago.

“In those early days, it was pretty simple,” said Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, who was the first director of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. “It was as basic as you could get. Identifying vehicles, people, buildings, and then trying to work our way to something more sophisticated.”

Google’s exit, he said, may have slowed progress toward what the Pentagon now called “algorithmic warfare.” But “we just kept going.”

By the time the Ukraine war was brewing, Project Maven’s elements were being designed and built by nearly five dozen firms, from Virginia to California.

Yet there was one commercial company that proved most successful in putting it all together on what the Pentagon calls a “single pane of glass”: Palantir, a company co-founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, the billionaire conservative-libertarian, and Alex Karp, its chief executive.

Palantir focuses on organizing, and visualizing, masses of data. But it has often found itself at the center of a swirling debate about when building a picture of the battlefield could contribute to overly automated decisions to kill.

Early versions of Project Maven, relying on Palantir’s technology, had been deployed by the U.S. government during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Kabul evacuation operation, to coordinate resources and track readiness. “We had this torrent of data but humans couldn’t process it all,” General Shanahan said.

Project Maven quickly became the standout success among the Pentagon’s many efforts to tiptoe into algorithmic warfare, and soon incorporated feeds from nearly two dozen other Defense Department programs and commercial sources into an unprecedented common operating picture for the U.S. military.

But it had never been to war.

A Meeting on the Polish Border

Early one morning after the Russian invasion, a top American military official and one of Ukraine’s most senior generals met on the Polish border to talk about a new technology that might help the Ukrainians repel the Russians.

The American had a computer tablet in his car, operating Project Maven through Palantir’s software and connected to a Starlink terminal.

His tablet’s display showed many of the same intelligence feeds that the operators in the Pit were seeing, including the movement of Russian armored units and the chatter among the Russian forces as they fumbled their way to Kyiv.

As the two men talked, it became evident that the Americans knew more about where Ukraine’s own troops were than the Ukrainian general did. The Ukrainian was quite certain his forces had taken a city back from the Russians; the American intelligence suggested otherwise. When the American official suggested he call one of his field commanders, the Ukrainian general discovered that the American was right.

The Ukrainian was impressed — and angry. American forces should be fighting alongside the Ukrainians, he said.

“We can’t do that,” the American responded, explaining that Mr. Biden forbade it. What the United States can provide, he said, is an evolving picture of the battlefield.

Today a similar tension continues to play out inside the Pit, where each day a careful dance is underway. The military has taken seriously Mr. Biden’s mandate that the United States should not directly target Russians. The president has said that Russia must not be allowed to win, but that the United States must also “avoid World War III.”

So, the Americans point the Ukrainians in the right direction but stop short of giving them precise targeting data.

The Ukrainians quickly improved, and they built a sort of shadow Project Maven, using commercial satellite firms like Maxar and Planet Labs and data scraped from Twitter and Telegram channels.

Instagram shots, taken by Russians or nearby Ukrainians, often showed dug-in positions or camouflaged rocket launchers. Drone imagery soon became a crucial source of precise targeting data, as did geolocation data from Russian soldiers who did not have the discipline to turn off their cellphones.

This flow of information helped Ukraine target Russia’s artillery. But the initial hope that the picture of the battlefield would flow to soldiers in the trenches, connected to phones or tablets, has never been realized, field commanders say.

One key to the system was Starlink, the Elon Musk-provided mesh of satellites, which was often the only thing connecting soldiers to headquarters, or to one another. That reinforced what was already becoming blindingly obvious: Starlink’s network of 4,700 satellites proved nearly as good as — and sometimes better than — the United States’ billion-dollar systems, one White House official said.

Dreams of Drone Fleets

For a while, it seemed as if this technological edge might allow Ukraine to push the Russians out of the country entirely.

In a suburb of Kyiv, Ukrainian high school students spent the summer of 2023 working in a long-neglected factory, soldering together Chinese-supplied components for small drones, which were then mounted onto carbon-fiber frames. The contraptions were light and cheap, costing about $350 each.

Soldiers on the front lines would then strap each one to a two-or-three pound explosive charge designed to immobilize an armored vehicle or kill the operators of a Russian artillery brigade. The drones were designed for what amounted to crewless kamikaze missions, intended for one-time use, like disposable razors.

The broken-down factory near Kyiv encapsulated all the complications and contradictions of the Ukraine war. From the start, the Ukrainians understood that to win, or even to stay in the game, they had to reinvent drone warfare. But they could barely keep enough parts coming in to sustain the effort.

The mission of remaking Ukraine’s drone fleet has captivated Mr. Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google.

“Ukraine,” he said in October, between trips to the country, “has become the laboratory in the world on drones.” He described the sudden appearance of several hundred drone start-ups in Ukraine of “every conceivable kind.”

But by the fall of 2023 he began to worry that Ukraine’s innovative edge alone would not be enough. Russia’s population was too big and too willing to sacrifice, oil prices remained high, China was still supplying the Russians with key technologies and parts — while they also sold to the Ukrainians.

And while Ukrainian pop-up factories churned out increasingly cheap drones, he feared they would quickly be outmatched.

So Mr. Schmidt began funding a different vision, one that is now, after the Ukraine experience, gaining adherents in the Pentagon: far more inexpensive, autonomous drones, which would launch in swarms and talk to each other even if they lost their connection to human operators on the ground. The idea is a generation of new weapons that would learn to evade Russian air defenses and reconfigure themselves if some drones in the swarm were shot down.

It is far from clear that the United States, accustomed to building exquisite, $10 million drones, can make the shift to disposable models. Or that it is ready to bring on the targeting questions that come with fleets driven by A.I.

“There’s an awful lot of moral issues here,” Mr. Schmidt acknowledged, noting that these systems would create another round of the long-running debates about targeting based on artificial intelligence, even as the Pentagon insists that it will maintain “appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.”

He also came to a harsh conclusion: This new version of warfare would likely be awful.

“Ground troops, with drones circling overhead, know they’re constantly under the watchful eyes of unseen pilots a few kilometers away,” Mr. Schmidt wrote last year. “And those pilots know they are potentially in opposing cross hairs watching back. … This feeling of exposure and lethal voyeurism is everywhere in Ukraine.”

Read by David E. Sanger

Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst .

David E. Sanger covers the Biden administration and national security. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written several books on challenges to American national security. More about David E. Sanger

World War I Tactics Make A Comeback As A Ukrainian Gunner In The Back Of A Propeller Plane Shoots Down A Russian Drone

This method of destroying drones is cheap—but it’s not easy

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A Russian Yakovlev Yak-52.

The first aerial dogfights during World War I were slow, almost comical affairs. In the early years of the war, propeller-driven observation planes lacked forward-firing machine guns. So the pilots—or, more often, the observers in the second seats—aimed their pistols or rifles at enemy planes.

More than a century later, aerial observers are still firing small arms from the back seats of propeller-driven planes. Last week, a gunner in a 1970s-vintage Yakovlev Yak-52 training plane belonging to a Ukrainian volunteer flying club engaged a Russian Orlan drone over southern Ukraine, reportedly shooting down the $100,000 drone.

It’s not the first time the combatants in Russia’s wider war on Ukraine have revived tactics and technology from World War I. Trench warfare is back. So are “turtle tanks” and Maxim machine guns. But the aerial gunner-versus-drone dogfight might be the most dramatic example of modern warfare devolving in the brutal conditions of the Ukraine conflict.

The apparent drone shoot-down was captured in videos shot from the ground as well as inside the two-seat Yak-52. In the videos, the 1.5-ton trainer—which cruises a little faster than 100 miles per hour—circles around the 33-pound Orlan. Gunfire can be heard. The seemingly damaged drone descends under its automatically-deployed parachute.

Slow-flying aircraft carrying gunners are an obvious choice for engaging slow-flying unmanned aerial vehicles without spending a lot of money.

One of the very first shoot-downs of a modern drone happened this way—in Bosnia in the early 1990s. “One innovative Serbian anti-UAV tactic was to launch a military Mi-8 Hip helicopter to fly alongside a [U.S. Army] Hunter UAV and then have the door gunner blast the UAV with his 7.62-millimeter machine gun,” JD R. Dixon, then a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander, wrote in a 2000 thesis .

More recently, a French helicopter crew gunned down a Houthi drone over the Red Sea.

Machine-gunning drones from the back of a helicopter or plane saves valuable air-defense missiles. “Expending many thousands (if not millions) of dollars on each missile to eliminate an inexpensive UAV is an economically losing affair,” wrote Paul Maxwell, the deputy director of the Army Cyber Institute at the United States Military Academy in New York.

It’s especially important for the Ukrainians to save their best air-defense munitions as the wider war grinds into its third year. Ukraine still gets most of its missiles from its foreign allies, and the six-month interruption in supplies from the United States—the result of Russia-friendly Republicans in the U.S. Congress slow-walking aid legislation—means missile stocks are desperately low right now.

But the cheap anti-drone tactic isn’t necessarily easy . Consider one of the first dogfights over the European front line in World War I. “We met a German aeroplane at about the same altitude as ourselves, and about the same speed, so that we couldn’t get any closer than 600 yards,” Royal Flying Corps observer Archibald James recalled .

“I put up my sights on the service rifle to 600 yards and fired six deliberate shots, and was miserable that I didn’t apparently hit him at all,” he said. “I’ve no doubt I was miles away. We had no conception then at what close ranges it was necessary to shoot to have any effect at all.”

In other words, sniping a drone from the back of a plane requires the pilot to get really close—and the shooter to take careful aim.

1. U.S. Naval War College: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA378573.pdf

2. West Point: https://mwi.westpoint.edu/dont-bring-a-patriot-to-a-drone-fight-bring-fighter-uavs-instead/

3. EUNAVFOR: https://twitter.com/EUNAVFORASPIDES/status/1770415949235015968

4. Imperial War Museum: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/voices-of-the-first-world-war-war-in-the-air

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London’s first defense tech hackathon brings Ukraine war closer to the city’s startups

Last week, the U.K. announced its largest ever military support package for Ukraine. The bill brings the U.K.’s total support for this financial year to £3 billion — not quite the $50 billion the U.S. pledged recently, but still substantial.

But while most of those funds will be spent on very traditional military hardware, a new tech initiative launched last weekend was aimed at enhancing Ukraine’s asymmetric warfare capabilities against Russia. In fact, the London Defense Tech Hackathon was the first-ever event to bring together some of the U.K.’s brightest minds in technology, venture capital, and national security in a military setting. The idea was to hack together ideas to both assist Ukraine and create a far more porous layer between the worlds of fast-paced civilian tech and the very different world of the military.

The event was put together by Alex Fitzgerald of Skyral  and Richard Pass of Future Forces , and the two were joined by co-organizers that included the Honourable Artillery Company,  Apollo Defense , Lambda Automata and D3 VC among others.

The event brought together developers skilled in both hardware and software to foster innovation in defense, national security, and deep tech. There was a key focus on drones and their applications on the battlefield, both the hardware and the electronic systems needed to fly them to their targets and counter-drone systems.

As most observers of the war have pointed out, this war has taken on a completely new dimension compared to previous wars. Today, drones and electronic countermeasures are the order of the day, as Ukraine has endeavored to fight off Russia, a much larger aggressor, with asymmetric methods.

Fitzgerald told me: “There are three groups of people coming to these events. There’s the builders, investors, and the military. I think for everyone, it’s trying to convince their colleagues to think more about defense technology as an option to either build or invest in.”

He explained that there were two main tracks of work: electronic warfare and drone or aerial systems: “There’s an acronym I learned from someone cleverer than me, which is that the future of defense technologies comes small, cheap and uncrewed.”

He explained that one main aim was to get people who had traditionally not been involved in defense either building for or investing in defense: “We’ve got people like the NATO Innovation Fund, the UK National Security Strategic Investment Fund. So yeah, it’s a mix of people who already invest in defense or who haven’t thought about investing before.”

He chose the hackathon format because “the focus is on getting stuff done. Get actual builders, not to just talk about building, because that’s actually where most of the innovation is happening.”

Interceptor done design at the London Defence Tech Hackathon (Image credit: Sebastian Völkl @basti_vkl )

One of the inspirations for the event was the recent El Segundo, California, defense tech hackathon in February of this year.

“I think the key thing with military technology is making it as easy to use and as powerful as some of the consumer technology that’s been built,” said Fitzgerald. “There’s the classic line, ‘There’s more AI in a snap in Snapchat than there is often some most modern military systems.'”

Also attending the event was Catarina Buchatskiy, representing Apollo Defense . As engineers pored over cameras, Starlinks, and drones, she told me: “Defense tech is a difficult industry to enter. And it’s a difficult market to break into, for obvious reasons. We’ve found hackathons an extremely exciting way for people to get involved because defense technology can seem like a giant black box of contracts that take 10 years, and technologies that are built [are often] hidden from the public eye. At a hackathon, you have 24 hours. Make something really cool.”

She said the firm had seen “a lot of success” with the El Segundo event.

“We just realized that if people think it’s something that’s accessible to them [and] can do something quickly and make an impact, they want to participate,” she told me.

Buchatskiy, who is Ukrainian, also spoke powerfully about Ukraine: “These are very real things to me. When I say that I need a drone detector, it’s because I’m looking at one outside my window that we didn’t detect in time and it is going to kill my neighbor. That is the reality that we face.”

She added that it’s important for hackathon attendees to know “that they’re building for someone and this could actually save my family’s life.”

Despite the controversy surrounding defense technology in some quarters, she added, “To be involved in technology is to be interested in a better future. And I really, truly can’t think of a more interesting and better future than one that’s safe and one where we can guarantee peace.”

NATO, in the shape of the NATO Investment Fund, a fund with a billion euros to invest in defense tech over the next few years, was also represented.

Fund partner Patrick Schneider-Sikorsky told me the fund was set up to back startups “that bolster our collective defense security and resilience. We invest in dual-use deep tech, but the fund was conceived before the war in Ukraine. The conflict has now very much impacted our investment thesis and we’re keen to invest in defense technologies that can make Europe safer and more secure.”

But why was NATO funding a hackathon?

“I think defense tech is new to a lot of founders and a lot of developers,” Schneider-Sikorsky said. “It’s not that easy for them to understand the problem statements and the challenges and also to get access to the end users.”

He said the hackathon format particularly lends itself to that: “It would normally, for many founders, take them months if not years to get in touch with the right people at defense ministries, and a lot of them are here today. So hopefully it will accelerate things substantially.”

Another attending investor, Alex Flamant from HCVC , told me: “There was a need for people in Europe to invest in proper defense technologies. It seemed from the investor standpoint, there’s restrictions around certain investors investing. One of the goals of this is to demystify what a lot of this is amongst young builders, and really to get people more aligned with the big mission that we’re all on.”

Rula Awad , a machine learning specialist, was there to focus on drone detection: “That’s in our machine vision and object detection knowledge. Ukraine are fighting for the whole of Europe at the moment and obviously the U.K. is pivotal to that. It’s essential that we ally with them and utilize what we have to help.”

The hackathon came at a time of increased tension around the use of technologies in defense.

Google recently fired 28 employees after their sit-in protest over the controversial Project Nimbus contract with Israel, for instance.

However, defense is clearly rising up the tech agenda.

Anduril recently moved ahead in a Pentagon program to develop unmanned fighter jets, and more broadly as we learned last year, venture capital is opening the gates for defense tech.

And in the U.K., there is much talk about how high-powered lasers could be among the next wave of weapons. The DragonFire weapon is said to be precise enough to hit a £1 coin from a kilometer away, according to the MoD, and cost barely $15 to fire.

The projects to emerge from the hackathon may not have been quite so sci-fi, but they were pretty damn close. How about a “High Speed Interceptor to take down Orlan Drones”? And at least they are likely to be deployed a lot sooner than a laser gun.