00:00Bloomberg News cybersecurity and tech reporter Katrina Manson visited a farm in Maryland to get a first-hand look at
00:06how these swarms work.
00:07I started by asking her what she saw.
00:11Well, we drew up at this farm in Maryland.
00:13So imagine a field of young green corn.
00:17But the thing that immediately catches your eye is there's a Cold War-era tank in the middle of it.
00:23And at the other end, there's a khaki tent and an operator who demonstrated for me a drone swarm attack.
00:32And at the touch of a button, five quite small drones went up from the ground into the air.
00:39And you instantly get that buzzing sound, which for any of your viewers who have been following the war in
00:45Ukraine, that is the haunting sound of this huge land war.
00:51And very quickly, the operator chooses pixels on the side of the tank for where they want these drones to
00:59attack.
01:00And at one touch of a button, all five drones essentially turn into missiles and autonomously attack.
01:10And so very quickly, just from the side, we saw all five drones attack that tank.
01:15They were actually loaded with, not with plastic explosives, as they've done before in a live experiment, but with chalk.
01:22So red chalk then exploded on the side of this tank.
01:25To simulate, right, the explosion.
01:26To simulate that they were on target and that the five drones were talking to each other.
01:32Here's a tank.
01:34Yes.
01:34And we'll see.
01:35The company bought that for just over $100,000 and then trailered it from the Midwest.
01:42So the idea is that would be this coordinated attack and it would blow up the tank.
01:47Yes.
01:47And the technology, I mean, people have seen drones before.
01:50These drones have been around for a while.
01:51Yeah, what is it different from the drone shows that we see that are entertainment?
01:54So those entertainment ones, each drone is centrally controlled and given a precise GPS coordinate exactly where to go.
02:04And they're extraordinary feats of, imagine synchronized swimming.
02:07Right.
02:07Um, everyone is pre-programmed to do exactly the same thing.
02:12The technology about drone swarms has been hard because although you can put a lot of different drones up in
02:17the air at the same time,
02:19the thing that operators in Ukraine and elsewhere have been trying to work out is GPS jamming.
02:24Now, that means that the communication to the drone might be interrupted by the adversary, by the enemy.
02:31And so you lose control of your drone.
02:33In the Ukraine, what they did was they discovered, uh, actually keeping that connection to the drone with, with a,
02:41with a cable, with a fiber optic cable.
02:43So when the controller is controlling it, they have direct control over one drone.
02:47Now, in a scenario like a Chinese attack on Taiwan and defending that, cables aren't going to cut it.
02:54Right, right.
02:55Um, but there could easily be GPS jamming.
02:57So one of the things that people are trying to develop is autonomous drone swarming.
03:01So the operator would control multiple drones with one controller.
03:05And if that cuts, the drones can also talk to each other and attack either a preloaded target or go
03:12find a target using AI,
03:14which really is this very futuristic and highly unreliable tech at the moment.
03:19You know, there are a lot of concerns about that when it comes to autonomous drones.
03:24Um, you know, because what if they get the target wrong or what if there's a misfunction?
03:29How do, how are they figuring out that?
03:32I mean, that's got to be one of the problems or one of the obstacles they still have to figure
03:34out.
03:35I spoke to a U.S. defense official about exactly this.
03:38And they have this effort that they launched at the beginning of this year called Swarm Forge.
03:42So the company I visited, Orterian, and 26 others are competing now in the third heat in September.
03:48But at the previous heat, uh, you know, these are experiments that are expected to go wrong.
03:53They're learning from each one.
03:54But the defense official explained to me this key thing, which I think is giving them pause
03:58and everybody else, uh, the drone was sent out to look in, in what is called a boundary boxed area
04:05for targets, for military vehicles.
04:07And it was supposed to distinguish between military and non-military civilian vehicles.
04:12Instead, what happened is the AI on those drones started looking in the car park,
04:19far away from where they were supposed to be looking,
04:21and found white Chevy trucks, civilian, and suggested those as targets.
04:26Now, that's exactly not what should be happening.
04:29And so the defense official thought that what had happened is the AI has been trained previously
04:35on previous data of, uh, white Toyota Hiluxes in the desert, all the wars the U.S.
04:40has previously been fighting.
04:41And the AI is reading off that old data, doing pattern recognition, which is what it's meant to do,
04:48but then not sticking to the new rules.
04:50And so that is something those companies have to go back and work on.
04:53And I think it's key, you know, as people are so concerned about autonomous warfare,
04:58for me it was an insight that the defense department is spending time distinguishing
05:02between military and civilian vehicles and not being satisfied.
05:04We just have a couple minutes left, and I think about this company that you, um,
05:08write about, Arterion.
05:09I mean, they started out doing delivery drones for Walmart.
05:13Walmart pivoted, right, when it came to the Russian invasion in Ukraine.
05:17The, the, the, um, uh, the, the founder of the company, I believe it was.
05:21So it's like warfare has definitely shifted in terms of the type of vehicles people want
05:28to use or the type of weapons.
05:30Um, and it does sound like it's not just a U.S. thing of making them increasingly more autonomous.
05:36That's a global thing, though, and we've already seen it.
05:38Yeah, it's a global thing, um, Arterion says these strikes, um, have been used in Ukraine
05:44autonomously, um, the first swarms, the Pentagon is trying to get to, they're already experimenting
05:50with teens, uh, they hope to get to hundreds, but obviously the U.S. is concerned what China
05:55is able to do, what Russia is able to do.
05:57Israel is, many of the companies actually developing this tech are Israeli, so there are multiple
06:02countries that are ahead and experimenting with this tech.
06:05Like, Arterion was doing defense contracts right from the beginning, but they've really
06:09scaled up and shifted and, and no longer do, uh, deliveries for Walmart.
06:13So it is, it is a changing, uh, feature of war, but also a changing feature of, uh, how
06:18tech is used.
06:19Katrina, when you see this, what just really strikes you, this is what you do, this world,
06:23you, like, dig into whether it's artificial intelligence, generative AI, like, just how technology
06:29is advancing and how it's impacting how we fight wars.
06:33What struck you?
06:34I think really it's the mismatch.
06:35You have the secretary general of the United Nations saying machines that have the discretion,
06:42uh, to, to kill people without human control are morally repugnant.
06:46And then you have this technology essentially existing today.
06:49And so that debate, that discussion is happening often without an understanding of sometimes the
06:55proponents of it would argue the conditions of war and the campaigners against it would argue
06:59the real risks that this whole technology goes tremendously wrong.
07:04And watching that and watching the experiments always, for me, encourages me to look for the
07:09concrete examples of what goes right and what goes wrong.
07:12Would you say, though, bottom line, that, I mean, at this point, they, everyone seems to say there's
07:16going to be a human element to it?
07:18Yes.
07:19U.S. defense policy is the commander verifies the target.
07:22That is still part of U.S. policy.
07:24That is still the way these drones are working.
07:26Today.
07:26Today.
07:27But the same defense official I spoke to who explained how that process works said that if
07:32there are human lives at risk, they should carry on using human verification for a target.
07:37But there is a scenario, the official told me, where you would have drone-on-drone attacks
07:44and there will be too many targets for a single human to select.
07:48And at that point, the drones need to do the attacking.
07:50That's their view.
07:51As I said, new era of warfare in a big way.
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