“At approximately 10 a.m. local time, the amphibious ship USS Boxer was in international waters conducting a planned inbound transit of the Strait of Hormuz,” read the statement from Jonathan Hoffman, the chief Pentagon spokesperson. “A fixed wing unmanned aerial system (UAS) approached [USS] Boxer and closed within a threatening range. The ship took defensive action against the UAS to ensure the safety of the ship and its crew”

The Pentagon’s statement differs in language from the wording used by President Donald Trump, who claimed that “the drone was immediately destroyed” after receiving multiple calls to stand down. According to CNN, U.S. defense officials claim that the drone was disabled not by bullets or missiles (“kinetics,” in the jargon), but rather by jamming.

Specifically, it was almost certainly jamming via MRZR LMADIS, or a Polaris MRZR vehicle sporting a Light Marine Air Defense Integrated System. While a Corps official said as early as May that the deployment of the system to the Middle East was winding down, observers online noted that a MRZR LMADIS system was visible on the deck of the USS Boxer, an amphibious assault ship, for its transit through the Strait of Hormuz — a presence revealed in pictures uploaded earlier that day.

The incident is just 28 days after Iran shot down a Global Hawk over the Strait of Hormuz. While the drone jammed by the Boxer has yet to be identified, Iran has drone bases in the area (which is, again, a narrow body of water that borders Iran, and over one side of which Iran claims sovereignty). Non-state actors have also operated drones in the surrounding area, sometimes supplied by regional powers. The downing of the Global Hawk almost risked escalation, though the uncrewed nature of drones versus the certainty of human casualties in the event of a retaliation appears to have calmed tensions.

Instead, the recent exchange of attacks on drones hearkens back to an earlier era of tension in the Strait, invoking the attacks on commercial vessels during the Iran-Iraq war which ultimately involved US naval patrols and is recorded in history as the Tanker War. Jamming drones, in theory, poses less of a risk to other commercial or otherwise peopled aircraft, but the likely consequence of the exchange of drone destruction in the summer of 2019 is that commercial aircraft will steer clear of the area. After all, the greatest tragedy of the Tanker War involved a U.S. cruiser mistaking a civilian Iranian airliner for an attacking jet fighter, leading to the deaths of 290 people.

It is also worth noting that the immediate answer to a drone threat to ships appears to be simply parking a ground vehicle carrying a counterdrone system on the deck. The counterdrone field is full of possible solutions, but most have focused on either facilities or dismounted patrol protection, looking at handheld devices or larger installations at fixed points at bases. There is likely an underserved market in counterdrone solutions for ships, especially aimed at stopping mid- to low-end fixed-wing craft.

Modern life is millennia removed from proto-ethical debates over the dangers of collaborating on hunting technology with people who may someday turn it to violence, but dual-use tools are at the center of a major inter- and intra-national debate. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission held a hearing June 7 about China and technology, specifically the ways in which developments in the civilian sector could be exploited and weaponized by China’s military.

“China has been hyped as an AI superpower poised to overtake the U.S. in the strategic technology domain of AI,” said Jeffrey Ding, China lead for the Center for the Governance of AI, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford; D.Phil. Candidate, University of Oxford.

“Much of the research supporting this claim suffers from the ‘AI abstraction problem,’” Ding continued, “the concept of AI, which encompasses anything from fuzzy mathematics to drone swarms, becomes so slippery that it is no longer analytically coherent or useful.”

Into the fuzziness of that debate around AI, the commissioners probed and the witnesses testified, occasionally going into the weeds of specific data but largely moving back to questions of intent and capability. The big questions underlying the hearing were these: can China leapfrog development of AI to create useful military tools, and can the United States marshal an industrial policy to maintain a lead in AI without the same kind of integrated state apparatus that China has? Also, what will China do with AI once it develops it?

The degree to which China can expand on and leapfrog U.S. AI development hinges on everything from the respective countries immigration policies, a willingness of multinational corporations to share research, direct and passive funding, and the extent to which things like counter-intelligence operations can yield results or chill collaboration. It also depends on what purpose, exactly, the AI is being trained to do.

“AI appeals to the [People’s Liberation Army] in part because it has fewer legacy systems,” said Elsa Kania, adjunct senior fellow, Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security and research fellow at CSET. Building systems for the first time with AI in mind is a different and distinct proposition from adapting existing systems to draw on AI tools.

Looking for a hard metric in the recent past, Ding cited an unpublished manuscript by Jon Schmid, a doctoral candidate at Georgia Tech, that looked at military patents to see what was being developed.

“It’s not a perfect indicator because a lot of military hardware isn’t going to be patented open source,” said Ding, “but a crucial caveat I’ll add to that is a lot of these advanced military systems source components that are found in patents, so it’s a good indicator.”

Looking specifically at the abstracts of patents for military hardware or hardware components that cited autonomous or unmanned, the research found that from 2003 to 2015 the United States had a lead in cumulative military patents seven times that of China.

“We can think of AI as next wave of software improvements,” suggested Helen Toner, director of strategy at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Without a clear inflection point for when AI transitions from capable software to a unique capability, many of the changes will in nature and implementation resemble software upgrades.

AI can be trickier to quantify, because while end-products may make note of features, like autonomy, that are enabled by AI, AI itself is a process done to data and doesn’t always transfer easily or at all to other applications. Also, processes are limited to being only as good at the quality of data that goes into them.

“It’s not quite as simple as ‘data is the new oil,’ but the value of data is really application dependent, so we have seen strength in particular applications where massive data is an advantage,” said Kania. “The nature of AI is a general purpose technology that is enhancing and augmenting weapon systems across a vast array of weapon systems, drive dynamics hard to evaluate, make safety and stability.”

Ultimately, what matters most in AI is less about any specific development, and more about how that AI facilities and enables existing choices people were already prepared to make. Multiple members of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission asked specifically about the role of AI in China’s repressive policy towards the Uighur people of Xinjiang. That specific concern was cited by Sens. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, in introducing a bill to enhance U.S. funding of AI research.

“The reason Xinjiang is happening is not AI, it is that the government of China is willing to make it happen,” testified Toner, “and therefore our response, if we respond, should condemn or otherwise sanction that action, of which tech is only a small part.”

The extent to which tech is especially responsible for state-led repression was contested by the panel, with Kania testifying that surveillance technologies are at the heart of repression at Xinjiang.

It is hard for the technology sector to, on its own or through U.S. government encouragement, try to change the behavior of a government. There was somewhat more consensus on policy suggestions for companies and government to end relationships building AI tools used for repression in the name of internal security.

Military implications of AI competition are likely downstream from these tangible concerns over AI built for other purposes. An ecosystem built on top of open-source tools and massive collections of data could be rebuilt if major participants stopped collaborating with each other, but it would likely take a national initiative to coordinate such a break. In the meantime, an active Cold War in AI will remain a near future possibility, rather than an immediate course of action.

The question is a moral one, brought to the foreground by the techniques and incentives of modern technology. It is a question whose scope falls squarely under the auspices of international law, and one which nations have debated for years. Yet it’s also a collective action problem, one that requires not just states, but also companies and workers in companies to come to an agreement to forgo a perceived advantage. The danger is not so much in making a weapon, but in making a weapon that can choose targets independently of the human responsible initiating its action.

In a May 8 report from Pax — a nonprofit with the explicit goal of protecting civilians from violence, reducing armed conflict, and building a just peace — the agency looked at the existing state of artificial intelligence in weaponry and urged nations, companies and workers to think about how to prevent an AI arms race, instead of thinking about how to win one. Without corrective action, the report warned, the status quo could lead all participants into a no-win situation, with any advantage gained from developing an autonomous weapon temporary and limited.

“We see this emerging AI arms race and we think if nothing happens that that is a major threat to humanity,” said Frank Slijper, one of the authors on the report. “There is a window of opportunity to stop an AI arms race from happening. States should try to prevent an AI arms race and work toward international regulation. In the meantime, companies and research institutes have a major responsibility themselves to make sure that that work in AI and related fields is not contributing to potential lethal autonomous weapons.”

The report is written with a specific eye toward the seven leading AI powers. These include the five permanent members of the UN security council: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. In addition, the report details the artificial intelligence research of Israel and South Korea, both countries whose geographic and political postures have encouraged the development of military AI.

“We identified the main players in terms of use and research and development efforts on both AI and military use of AI in increasingly autonomous weapons. I couldn’t think of anyone, any state we would have missed out from these seven,” Slijper said. “Of course, there’s always a number eight and the number nine.”

For each covered AI power, the report examines the state of AI, the role of AI in the military, and what is known of cooperation between AI developers in the private sector or universities and the military. With countries like the United States, where military AI programs are named, governing policies can be pointed to, and debates over the relationship of commercial AI to military use is known, the report details that process. The thoroughness of the research is used to underscore Pax’s explicitly activist mission, though it also provides a valuable survey of the state of AI in the world.

As the report maintains throughout, this role of AI in weaponry isn’t just a question for governments. It’s a question for the people in charge of companies, and a question for the workers creating AI for companies.

“Much of it has to do with the rather unique character of AI-infused weapons technology,” Slijper said. “Traditionally, a lot of the companies now working on AI were working on it from a purely civilian perspective to do good and to help humanity. These companies weren’t traditionally military producers or dominant suppliers to the military. If you work for an arms company, you know what you’re working for.”

In the United States, there’s been expressed resistance to contributing to Pentagon contracts from laborers in the tech sector. Google workers complained after learning of the company’s commitment to Project Maven, which developed a drone-footage processing AI for the military,and then the company’s leadership agreed to sunset the project. (Project Maven is now managed by the Peter Thiel-backed Andruil.)

Microsoft, too, experienced worker resistance to military use of its augmented reality tool HoloLens, with some workers writing a letter stating that in the Pentagon’s hands, the sensors and processing of the headset made it dangerously close to a weapon component. The workers specifically noted that they had built HoloLens “to help teach people how to perform surgery or play the piano, to push the boundaries of gaming, and to connect with the Mars Rover,” all of which is a far cry from aiding the military in threat identification on patrol.

“It is, for a lot of people working in the tech sector, quite disturbing that, while initially, that company was mainly or only working on civilian applications of that technology, now more and more they see these technologies also been used for military projects or even lethal weaponry,” said Slijper.

Slijper points to the Protocol on Blind Weapons as a way the international community regulated a technology with both civilian and military applications to ensure its use fell within the laws of war.

In an April 25 hearing before the Defense Innovation Board, Pentagon general counsel tried pitching Silicon Valley on developing AI for the military as a way to make weapons more precise and more ethical. The argument received some public criticism, with one observer noting the difference between accuracy in hitting a target and accuracy in correctly identifying a lawful target of war before deciding to fire a weapon.

Slijper echoed that ethical concern, and used as an example the difference between a missile that hits a target five minutes after it is fired, versus a loitering munition that could stay aloft for two days before it selects a target.

“When you fire a missile, there is no unclarity about what the target will be,” said Slijper. “If there is a larger amount of time between the launch and the eventual impact, things can happen in between. Civilian targets may show up that are not recognized by that loitering munition as such. Other changes in the environment may take place to change the original target plan. The longer distance in time in this case makes human control insufficient to be in line with the requirements of international humanitarian law.”

The above scenario is ethically fraught in irregular warfare, and could have catastrophic implications if it involved competing weapons from multiple AI powers. Of the seven named AI-capable nations, only South Korea explicitly lacks a nuclear arsenal. Decisions made by machines that select targets without human involvement, and faster than humans can meaningfully oversee, could lead to catastrophic escalations.

Arms control treaties have been known to change the behavior, not just of the initial signatories, but of the nations that interact with them and shape the entire global arms availability. The ban on cluster munitions and treaties on landmines have led nations, including nations that that have not signed the treaties, to change how they employ weapons.

“In other arms control treaties that even where some states don’t cooperate, a stigma around those weapons develops,” says Slijper. “It has to start somewhere. It’s the only way to prevent the arms race.”

DARPA, the Department of Defense’s blue-sky agency, launched April 29 a program to use artificial intelligence to best match interventions for individuals. It is called “Teaching AI to Leverage Overlooked Residuals,” or TAILOR.

Specifically, DARPA is looking for submissions about how to use AI for “Human Performance Optimization,” or HPO. Crucially, DARPA is looking for alternatives to one-size-fits-all approaches, because universal recommendations based on group averages can work at cross-purposes to individual need.

“This approach frequently (mis)characterizes individual variance as statistical ‘noise,’ ‘residuals,’ or ‘error,’” reads the solicitation. “The resulting interventions (e.g., diet, physical training regimen, brain stimulation) are at best suboptimal and at worst deleterious for each person.”

Diet, physical training, and brain stimulation aren’t the flashiest parts of the military, but they’re fundamental to how everything else operates. DARPA specifically cites an interest from Special Operations Command’s “Close Combat Lethality Task Force” in getting this optimization right, tailoring interventions to individuals and teams into an advantage.

To get there, DARPA is asking proposers to come up with “third wave AI approaches,” to demonstrate contextual reasoning and transfer learning, meaning a solution is capable of adapting to changed circumstances, environments, and can use related knowledge for abstraction. DARPA also wants teams to move away from traditional AI that trains on large data sets, has opaque processes, and are hard to adapt to new contexts. Proposers will be expected to focus on at least on area of human performance, with DARPA aiming to have a full portfolio of research on physical cognitive, and social performance data.

It’s a lot of technical build-up, but the final outcome is relatively straightforward: after given the data and goal for a specific individual or team, the tool needs to evaluate how much that individual or team would benefit from a given intervention (such as a change in diet or exercise or brain stimulation.) The systems will also be evaluated on how well they can explain or accommodate counterfactuals. Phase II is much the same process, but with datasets from other teams, and with evaluation from subject matter experts in government.

Should the research prove fruitful, the military will be one step closer to specific responses for every individual, a personalized tool that’s general issue.

Formally a “scalable effects net warhead,” the net grenade could finally provide a countermeasure to cheap drones that’s almost as inexpensive as the drones themselves.

Ensnaring a robot in a net is perhaps the opposite of lethality, but here that’s a selling point — stopping the drone means immediately disabling it and possibly doing a forensic investigation on the drone’s innards afterwards. Bullets can stop drones, but it’s a hard task even at sport shooting competitions and in a real-life application bullets still have to fall somewhere, risking injury to friendly forces and bystanders. Anti-air missiles like the Patriot can also intercept drones, but drones can be as cheap as a few hundred dollars and missiles like the Patriot can cost a few million dollars. Both more-kinetic options can ruin the drone’s circuitry, obliterating any useful clues as to who may have launched the drone.

Nets also hold an advantage over directional jammers in that they only have to hit the drone once to work. Directional jammers, while often portable and rifle-sized, have to stay focused on the target drone until the drone is brought down, or else risk the drone being able to receive signals from its remote pilot and detonate or fly away.

Nets are so popular a counterdrone tool that we’ve seen existing net-guns used to stop wildlife re-purposed to catch UAVs, drones carrying nets, drones carrying net-guns, and custom dedicated net-launching bazooka-like weapons. All of these require dedicated training of varying degrees, especially in the case of piloting drones as counterdrone weapons. A net-containing package that fits into a launcher already familiar to soldiers could provide a simpler, easier to adopt way to shoot down drones.

This counterdrone net grenade would open when sensors indicate it is close to a target, and then the net inside the grenade would be launched onto the drone.

“The results of initial testing show that the warhead of this invention can be launched (currently in a 40 mm configuration) and can successfully engage a UAS threat,” reads the patent. “The performance of this invention goes further than any previous system proposed which merely launches a net directly at a UAS.”

In addition to stopping drones, the patent bills the launched nets as useful against boats, boat propellers, moving land vehicles and stationary land vehicles. If a net could conceivably stop it, then a grenade-launched net is a way to make that happen faster.

With cheap drones comes a great opportunity for countering cheap drones. On the battlefield of the future, the answer to drones may just be net-slingers.

While it isn’t as flashy as dazzle paint or as iconic as juggalo makeup, camouflage netting has a long history of success in concealing people, buildings and vehicles from aerial surveillance. Swedish defense giant Saab has a camouflage netting just for individuals, designed to keep them hidden from the special cameras carried by drones.

Earlier this year, Marines tested the Barracuda Individual Warfighter Net, according to remarks Steve Simmerer of Saab Defense and Security gave at the Modern Day Marine event in late September. The tests took place at the East Coast School of Infantry.

The net, which weighs 6 pounds and packs up into a pouch, is designed to mitigate certain kinds of radar and thermal imaging, as well as the general visual obfuscation that comes with a mess of netting thrown over a person.

Like all netting, it works best when the person using it isn’t moving. That, combined with a design focus on applying the camouflage netting in the field when a threat is detected, make it somewhat more of a niche item, and one dependent on how well other forces can detect a drone to signal the change. With drones designed to fly silently and resemble wildlife, even troops equipped to hide could be caught unaware.

To counter the harmful effects of directed energy, the Vision Science Lab at the Naval Medical Research Unit Dayton is looking at ways to protect eyeballs from low-intensity lasers, while still allowing pilots to see clearly enough to fly. This evaluation is done at the behest of the Coast Guard’s Office of Aviation Forces, which wants a way to mitigate the threat handheld lasers post to safety and search and rescue missions.

Lasers, even and especially hand-held laser-pointers, are bright enough and powerful enough to interfere with eyeballs, even ones at altitudes far above the person waving the pointer. The FAA has guidelines for how people should responsibly use lasers outdoors, and where they should keep them pointed (down, away from planes or other aircraft).

“Handheld lasers can produce levels of solar radiant energy that exceed the maximum FAA exposure recommendations. Non-lethal continuous wave (CW) laser exposures can produce veiling glare, obscuring a significant portion of an aircraft windscreen while reliably reducing speed and accuracy of responses to aviation-relevant visual tasks during critical phases of flight,” write Dr. Michael Reddix and Lt. Cmdr. Micah Kinney, the researchers leading this project. “These factors are also capable of producing visual impairments such as temporary scotoma or a temporary disturbance in vision.”

The work was done in partnership with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, specifically the branch that works on photonic materials. The goal was to develop low-cost laser eye protection glasses, to mitigate the flight safety risk lasers pose to planes and rotary-wing craft.

“In short, there is no good and complete defense against the wide variety of laser wavelengths and powers out there,” says Phil Broughton, certified laser safety officer. “That said it isn’t hopeless, as there’s only so many good deployable lasers for the field.”

To meet those threats, there are to go-to options: glasses with reflective coatings or plastic with absorptive dyes. But reflective coatings have three drawbacks: the coating is easy to scratch and useless one scratched, which is a hard sell for a military use. They are also heavy, since they need to be on glass, and the reflective coating is only useful for a narrow band of wavelengths, a range a few nanometers wide. Within that, and unscratched, the reflective coating is incredible, but unless it’s fielded against a specific laser with a known frequency, it’s unlikely to be the most effective option here.

“Absorptive are dye based, tinting plastic. Plastic is light & comfortable, you can form them in any shape you like for eyewear. The dyes can be broad spectrum but not necessarily great. Their real problem is that they always tend to work at half of the wavelengths you need,” says Boughton, “So, if there’s a 1064nm beam, it’s only half the optical density you need to block the other beam that’s at 532nm. Also, depending on how the laser is operating, the dyes can saturate and stop working.”

There is also the not-insignificant matter that absorptive glasses, in blocking a range of laser wavelength, also block a significant amount of the visible spectrum, which replaces temporary vision obscurity for permanently decreased vision. Not super great when flying a plane.

One way future planes plan to mitigate the risk to pilot eyeballs is to feed information through cameras on the plane into a heads-up display on the pilot’s helmet, but that’s still a future solution, and doesn’t address the needs of pilots encountering lasers now.

Whatever method Reddix and Kinney picked for their solution, they recommended that the new laser-mitigating goggles receive flight acceptance training in the next few months. If the Coast Guard’s experience with the goggles is successful, it’s possible the other services could adopt them for protection, too. Which means the next time Airmen fly near the gulf of Aden, it may be safe to check out Djibouti without risking temporary blindness.

Specifically, the parade will feature two ground robots, the Uran-9 combat robot, the Uran-6 mine-clearing robot, and Korsar drones, according to Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu. As the National Security world again turns its attention to possible conflict with a near-peer competitor, the robots that competitor showcases will have implications beyond simple counter-insurgency curios.

“Unmanned aerial vehicles have seen extensive use in Russian operations. A growing number of unarmed ground vehicles handle de-mining and surveillance missions,” writes Samuel Bendett, a research analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses. Bendett continues, “That’s why Russia’s decision to display these particular unmanned systems is so interesting. Of the three vehicles Shoigu named, only the unarmed Uran-6 has seen actual operational use, most notably in Syria.”

Why display the robots in the parade now, and those robots in particular? Bendett suggests the inclusion of the Uran-9 may be because of its conventional appearance: it looks like a tank in miniature. With a squat body that’s longer than it is wide, a visible set of tracks on each side, and a turret mounting a large gun on top, Uran-9 is as familiar as it is alien, a constant form easing the viewer an acceptance of the robot. Sure, there’s no person inside directing the vehicle, but people roughly know what a tank does.

What does the Uran-9 do? That’s harder to say. Promotional video shows it driving through walls and rings of fire. It is controlled remotely, which implies some degree of human input into how the little robot tank operates, but the degree of that input is unclear. Is the Uran-9 aiming its weapons automatically? Is it selecting targets? Is it tracking targets and then waiting for a human to give the go-ahead to shoot, or is the human monitoring it while the robot makes those decisions on its own?

“The director of the company that makes Uran unmanned ground vehicles recently stated that humans will have final decision on when and how to fire weapons,” Bendett wrote in 2017, “thereby preventing “robots rebelling against operators due to programming errors.”

Autonomy may not be on display in the parade; it is, after all, hard to show code working under the hood, and given the problems unarmed self-driving vehicles have had in the civilian world, safe to bet that Uran-9s on parade will be remotely piloted. But that autonomy could very well be part of the capability suggested, and eventually deployed in the vehicle. When the Uran-9 rolls down the route, it will be a reminder that the questions of autonomous weapon systems, the place of the human in the decision process and the degrees of autonomy, are hardly questions for the Pentagon alone.

A new report published today by the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard University found that in the president’s new budget request, the Department of Defense is asking for three times as many uncrewed vehicles for 2019 as it did in 2018.

That’s 3,447 new drones, to be exact, but don’t expect the skies to go dark with Reapers anytime soon. Despite the numbers requested, the drone budget itself is up by only 26 percent. The Pentagon isn’t just buying more drones, it’s acquiring a whole range of new systems, for everything from undersea surveillance to cheap scouting quadcopters to lasers designed to shoot down the cheap quadcopters of adversaries. The drone century is only just beginning.

“This is the biggest we’ve seen in years that we’ve tracked it,” said Dan Gettinger. Gettinger is co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone, and its report on drone spending, published today, tracked everything unmanned in the Pentagon budget, as the center has done since 2013. This year, adding up programs across services, the Center found that the Pentagon is asking for $9.39 billion in drone spending. “We’ve seen budget hover in the 4-6 billion annual range since fiscal year 2013,” Gettinger said.“A budget for just over 9 billion for unmanned systems, that’s a pretty substantial increase.”

That $9.39 billion breaks down into $2.6 billion for the Air Force, $3.7 billion for the Navy and the Marines, $1.7 billion for the Army, and almost $1.3 billion across the rest of the Pentagon.

“This year the Navy has just skyrocketed past the Air Force,” said Gettinger. Part of that is a $982 million request for maritime systems, though last year Congress delivered over $200 million less on sea drones than the Navy asked for. “Congress has taken a dim view of unmanned maritime projects in the past and has cut funding for some of those.“

The rise of the underwater drone

Part of the shift in spending from Air Force to Navy is the nature of the drones purchased. When it comes to the iconic drones of the last administration, long-endurance machines like the MQ-9 Reaper and the RQ-4 Global Hawk, the Air Force is simply buying fewer than it used it, and what units it does buy are mostly replacements for aging or lost models. These legacy systems still dominate the budget: maintaining and operating existing machines still costs a pretty penny. In the margins around those big-ticket items, there’s a quiet shift taking place: a new emphasis on cheap, small drones.

Quadcopters show up in every service except the Air Force, as well as Special Operations Command and the generic overall Pentagon budget. There’s $140,000 to buy 100 quadcopters for CTEF, or the Counter-ISIS Train and Equip Fund. The Navy and Marine Corps is asking for 200 InstantEye quadcopters, likely part of a “quads for squads” program. SOCOM wants 50 quadcopters listed as just “quadcopter,” as well as over 500 NANO VTOL drones (which are likely to be quadcopters) and 160 Micro VTOL drones (also almost certainly quadcopters). And the Army’s asking for 1084 drones as part of the Soldier-Borne Sensor program, which wants to put palm-sized quadcopters at the disposal of infantry. Altogether, that’s over 2,000 quadcopters of various models. Excluding the ones requested by SOCOM, which are grouped together with multiple varieties of larger drones, the Pentagon is asking to spend about $30 million on small 1,400 drones, for about the same price as two MQ-9 Reapers.

“There’s not a lot of quadcopter action in prior budgets,” Gettinger said. “Last year was the first year we saw some substantial movement on that front, with some funding for quadcopters for CTEF, but it was nothing compared to what we see in FY 19.”

Besides putting small drones into the sky, the Pentagon is also looking to spend more on tools to shoot drones down. In this space, the Navy is also looking to fund multiple counter-drone laser projects, but somehow real-life lasers aren’t even the biggest ticket item. The Department of Defense is asking for $1.07 billion on counter-drone tools in this budget, up from $453.9 million last year Much of that increase is in the Army’s “Low-slow-small Integrated Defense System” (LIDS), which appear to be some form of guided missile.

“The military is taking a lot of different approaches to solving counter-drone issue,” Gettinger said. “Some of that involves outfitting existing defense systems with [counter-drone] capability and some of it involves thinking about how UAS threat can evolve in the future.”

Speaking of guided missiles, the Center report notes that the Army and Navy are asking for a combined total of 1,618 Switchblade loitering munitions. Related to both cruise missiles and drones, they don’t quite fit in either category. Gettinger noted that technically the Switchblades are included in the budget for missiles, making them closer to Hellfires than Reapers. Complicating it further, the Navy’s submarine-launched Blackwing drone is based on the Switchblade body, though it’s formally billed as an ISR platform, rather than a weapon.

“There’s new funding for Army combat ground vehicle program,” says Gettinger, “It’s not a huge amount of funding but it’s definitely part of the project that we’re going to keep an eye on in the future. They’re going to field test a system, remotely operated M119 armored personnel carrier.”

Specifically, that’s $40 million under the “Robotic Combat Vehicle Experimental Unit Prototypes project,” which wants to see robots accompany human-containing vehicles into battle.

It’s hard to say how much of this request will make it through Congress. Yet as a statement of where the Pentagon wants to go, it’s an invaluable guide. By piecing together the whole of the drone budget, the Center finds a pivotal moment, where drones are smaller and more numerous and better dispersed, and distributed too among boats and in submarines and driving on the ground and carried in backpacks. Drones are a big part of how every service sees war in the future playing out, and from cheap scouts in the field to elaborate lasers built to shoot down hostile drones, the notion that drone war is a separable part of warfighting can largely be laid to rest. Drones are an evergreen part of war, now.

Begun, the drone wars have.

Paratrooper jumps stick in the popular imagination as a fixture of past war, from a messy, if successful, use as part of D-Day to a messy and less successful attempt in Operation Market Garden, but we’ve seen airborne jumps in the 21st century, with jumps into both Afghanistan and Iraq taking place early in the respective wars, and continuing as a feature of some special operations forces missions.

With parachute jumps continuing right up to the present day, it should then be a little unsurprising that there’s now an app for paratroopers.

But is it an essential download?

Here’s how research firm Draper describes their app for parachutists:

The system operates as a plug-in to a smartphone — the first version is for the Android platform. Parachutists can use the app to see the terrain below them, the location of the jump team around them and the designated landing point. The app can also track the parachutists by sensing the moment they leave the plane. The app automatically switches navigation modes at that point, leaving the parachutist free to focus on maneuvering their parachute rather than adjusting the app.

It is, in a way, a Waze for paratroopers, tracking movement by GPS and noticing the changed states from “sitting in a plane” to “freefall” to “under a parachute.” As designed, it works with the gloves worn by the parachutist, and it can accept new data from the person in charge of the map. The research was funded by the U.S. Army, and will likely find a home there.

Will an app guarantee a future for parachute troops? Military observers and commentators periodically debate if paratroopers are a capability worth keeping, noting the rarity of large-scale jumps since World War II, highlighting the strategic rather than tactical utility of forces jumping from planes rather than carried by helicopter, and decrying the lack of a suitable air-dropped armored vehicle to really live up to airborne’s potential. While an app can’t solve the problem of a lack of armor, it can mitigate one of the greatest risks from air-dropping troops: landing zone dispersal, where a potent fighting force is instead scattered over a vast area, and able to be stopped piecemeal.

If there is a future for the airborne, it is likely a future with apps. The surprise gained is invaluable, provided, of course, that no jogging apps give the jumpers away.