Are Drones a Threat? | Breakthrough

Hey, hello, hi! Can you see me now? We have communication at last. Chris Anderson believes drones will be a force for good; military technology journalist David Hamling has his doubts. So you've now got your own drone company. Um, so what's the big challenge now at the moment for you and for the drone industry generally for moving it forward?

So the first phase was sort of like the DIY phase. The second phase was the consumer phase, and we're now entering the commercial phase where these things are now a tool that does something useful. I mean, the way that small consumer drones get used is that now we're increasingly hearing reports that militias like the Ukrainians fighting the Russians, like the Kurds fighting ISIS, are actually using them for military reconnaissance.

Yeah, um, are you aware of your products being used that way? And then how do you feel about it? If you told me that our drones are being used by terrorists, I'd feel really bad about that. One of the interesting things about drone technology is the autonomy is moving so quickly; it's software-based, and it's very diffused and accessible.

You can actually buy online for under $1,000 a drone that has more autonomy than a US Air Force Reaper drone. You can go buy something online, relatively inexpensive, that not only can take off and land on its own; they can fly point to point with GPS coordinates, but some of them can track and follow objects. Some of the more state-of-the-art ones have object avoidance, so if it's about to fly into a tree, it'll move around and not hit it. That's much more sophisticated autonomy than the military actually has in their drones.

When you look at the IED, it's been a huge problem for US troops in Afghanistan in the last 15 years, but those were things that were there in place that would go run into the IED. Now we're looking at a world where the IEDs come for us, and that certainly is a problem not just for troops on the battlefield but also for homeland defense issues.

A flying IED is exactly where we're coming to. We saw this in Japan: the Prime Minister's residence had a drone with radiological material flown onto the residence. The Japanese officials had no response; they couldn't respond to it. Imagine someone flying a drone to the White House with radiological material.

If you're jamming it, you make it fall from the sky; the radiological material disperses. If you shoot it down, it falls from the sky; the radiological material disperses. There are a lot of events in the world that we've seen where bad guys are using these in ways we've never imagined before. How do we stop these things? It may be only a matter of time before terrorists mount an attack using commercial drones.

So the armies of the world, especially the US Department of Defense, are racing to find ways to stop drone attacks in their tracks.