US Army Tests Swarms of Drones In Major Exercise (itworld.com)

itwbennett writes: The U.S. Army, curious about the potential threat and usefulness of off-the-shelf drones, brought consumer quadcopters and octocopters to the Network Integration Evaluation war games that concluded earlier this month at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, and Fort Bliss, Texas. "During the exercise, which is used by the Army to help evaluate new technology, the drones were deployed as a swarm to simulate a threat,' writes Martyn Williams. 'Later, the Army expanded the trials to discover whether it might be able to make use of the same technology." The results are pretty much what you'd expect: "It has been proved that consumer [drones] can be used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, distraction tactics and, in the future, the ability to drop small munitions," said Barry Hatchett with the Army's Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation.

Comments

Re:taking out power grids

[perpenso]

As has been demonstrated by a wayward military blimp recently, if you hang a long cables from drones and fly them into high voltage power lines, you have a pretty good chance of taking down part of the power grid.

Such weapons already exist. Aerial bombs that release long strings of conductive material above ground, the material then drifts down onto power lines and power stations and shorts things out. NATO used such weapons in the Balkans in the 1990s to avoid casualties and permanent infrastructure damage.