COUNTER ROBOTIC WARFARE J. Croft http://freedomguide.wordpress.com http://freedomguide.blogspot.com
American military and law enforcement have murdered women and children with poison gas at Waco, shot nursing mothers with infants at Ruby Ridge, slammed elderly women on the ground after Katrina just for having a revolver to protect herself from the gangs. This same irresponsible, criminal government has raised a standing army of badge heavy enforcers-tin badge gods who get their life’s purpose out of dominating and abusing us. They in the coming government provoked and stoked Second American Revolution will use all the tools at their disposal to finish us off. Among the newest and most deadly are the combat robot. It’s important to understand just how dangerous these things can be, how a wicked government has the resources-our willingness to pay taxes and obey our oppressors-to use machines controlled by immoral cowards to impose its will on us. CURRENT GROUND THREATS On the ground, robot killing machines, like the current generation remote controlled SWORDS-essentially armed bomb disposal remote controlled robots-present a threat somewhat greater than an infantry patrol.
With the operators embedded with a infantry squad for protection, or with the newest versions remote operated from a satellite feed from anywhere, a group of two or three maneuverable remote operated machine guns with grenade launchers can cover each other and advance.
The controllers, viewing their enemy through cameras and computer screens-conditioned by a childhood spent blasting digital bad guys on video games-have no problem pressing the fire button.
They’re not armored-they’re vulnerable to rifle fire(if you’re accurate)and can be blinded, their power train damaged, or their weapons disabled, although they’re rugged enough to survive a moderate bomb blast. I’m certain body armor plates will be retrofitted that can turn a .30 AP round, protect the battery/fuel cell or motor, or ammo can. Provided materials are available improvised recoilless guns firing some kind of shell would certainly knock one out. They are remote controlled; so the control signal can be jammed and deactivate the device or it can be hacked and turned back on its former controllers as allegedly happened in Iraq recently. This will require the services of some good hackers and the proper equipment to hijack the control signal. They’re relatively slow so they can be maneuvered against-more importantly their controllers signal can be triangulated with the proper equipment or surveillance used to pinpoint them. Kill the controllers, stop the machines. Basic maneuver tactics can overcome anything but a full scale methodical offensive. Newer models like the MAARS robot are going to be a tougher opponent:
These are miniature robot tanks, purposefully designed instead of adapted from a bomb disposal robot. The weapon, electronics and motor are protected in a light armor casing; perhaps even .50 BMG armor piercing rounds might not be enough. The sensors can still be shot out but the robot has to sit still and expose it’s lenses… and if it exposes its lenses it is aiming its armament at you. The tracks require explosives. Certainly, this model will likely be controlled from a comfy air conditioned work station hundreds of miles away. You’d need heavier anti-armor weapons, and lure this robot into enclosed spaces like urban areas or densely packed forests, hilly terrain etc. Treat this design type and any other tracked, turrented robots like smaller tanks. A HESH squash warhead would be a better choice than a HEAT round, these robots aren’t looking to withstand 120mm tank cannon. More worrisome are the legged robots:
This four legged robot is designed to be a latter-day mule; carry the soldiers gear into battle, evacuate wounded soldiers, resupply, etc. It is run off a gas motor and looks goofybut look at the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww It is eerie just how it can negotiate hilly, difficult terrain; it can be knocked about and quickly recover. This is a threat? This model as is, no. What if a bipedal guided robot is developed? What if an improved fuel cell can be developed to make it run silent, extend operating time, the whole designed made rugged, carrying a thousand pounds of weaponry; that’s a machine gun, automatic grenade launcher and a large quantity of ammunition. We can be certain such developments will happen. A bipedal design, something out of a science fiction movie could run, leap, crawl, bust down doors and kill as long as the fuel cell can provide power. 300lb diabetic nerds sited hundreds of miles away in their air conditioned workstations can control their assigned machines like a video game, hunting Americans down trying to get their Freedom back. You would have to lure the machines into traps-and the operators would gain experience quickly about when and where a likely trap would be sprung.
These machines could run 20, 30, 40mph or more; leap 30 or more feet; climb effortlessly up buildings and walls; smash through concrete walls and steel reinforced doors; be immune to small arms fire and continuously run and gun. I could see two operators running a machine-one drives, the other shoots with gyrostabilized machine guns, automatic grenade launchers, cannon, battlefield lasers. They could effortlessly engage Americans scrambling desperately to what cover’s about or into tunnels, lobbing homemade anti-tank weapons hoping they calculated the right amount of lead before firing, hoping they weren’t rushed. Such machines would like tank warfare be best employed en masse; twenty, fifty or a hundred robots assaulting a stronghold. A defense in depth would be required; traps, difficult and very crowded terrain to divide and ambush individual robots, tunnels to avoid being tracked, lots of small anti-armor weapons. An acceptance of heavy casualties.
Traps would have to be deep enough, wide enough into the ground to trap these kinds of robots until they can be destroyed in place-before they climb or hop out. Traps could also be made of buildings, with explosives in the ground or in the walls to collapse the building atop it. Booby traps could also be, ironically, crude robots with a motion sensor rigged to track those robots and a improvised anti-armor weapon, emplaced in an corridor. Quicksand would work better than pits at trapping these robots. When and where possible, these high performance robots must be lured into crowded, difficult terrain to maximize the difficulties they and their operators must face. Dense forests come to mind, as stated before, especially in hilly or mountainous terrain. If they have to climb, descend, are unable to hop, have to maneuver between trees then they lose much of their mobility and speed. Dense urban areas with lots of buildings offers literally a million opportunities to entrap and ambush these machines. You must have tunnels and hidden paths to move between fighting positions or enemy sensors will quickly pick you out. Whether in the dense forests or in the cities tunnels are essential for field counter-robotic operations to avoid the highly accurate heavy firepower the enemy will wield. Being caught out in the open is a death sentence. Anti-armor weapons suitable for man sized robots can be made smaller than models used on main battle tanks and other armored fighting vehicles. They must be cheap to make, accurate, easily operated, not disclose their firing position for other enemy weapons to lock on. Basically a miniaturized Armbrust-a German anti-armor missile that uses a counterweight that expands like a umbrella once it leaves the tube that balances out the
projectile being fired. This also eliminates backblast that would otherwise kill the operator and any companions in a enclosed setting.
This kind of warfare will produce heavy casualties no matter the precautions taken on the battlefield. Having to face advanced capability robots, or even the current generation SWORDS and Predator remote controlled drones, defeating them on the battlefield is no recipe for victory as the same operators gain more experience, the designers gain valuable experience and come up with upgrades and new models. A guerilla army just looking to combat enemy forces equipped with robot weaponry is asking to be ground up. To defeat such advanced combat robots will require more than sound tactics, a larger strategy is needed. More on that later… AIRBORNE COMBAT ROBOTS
The first generation Predator drones first fielded in Afghanistan and Iraq are slow, high flying craft controlled from a comfortable station hundreds or thousands of miles away. They carry two Hellfire anti-tank missiles; laser guided, fire and forget the target’s lased by a onboard designator or a soldier with a laser. Once fired, the missile guides itself. These small arms fire will not bring down as they fly way too high for small arms fire, present a troublesomely small heat signature to thwart a IR guided missile, and is also designed to be difficult to spot by radar.
Getting at the remote operator is problematic-he’s at a well protected base out of reach. The control signal is a encrypted, spread spectrum-hacking and jamming the signal is very difficult. So the only options are decoys and shooting it down. Decoying the drone means spoofing the operator, command authorities and any troops the drone is supporting, and would involve the use of dummies, tunnels and other escape routes not already covered by the enemy. Shooting it down would take either a high performance piston driven aircraft, which can be found and armed with machine guns, or anti-aircraft weapons. The .50 BMG is almost certainly out as it lacks the range to effectively hit. So heavier caliber automatic cannon, which are much bigger than any .50 BMG weapon and nearly impossible for Americans to procure, or some kind of constructed surface to air missile-or their own drones but that would require resources and manufacturing capacities of a nation to field. How to guide it if it’s got a low infrared and radar signature? Sound. Currently, all powered aerial threats use some form of piston or jet engine. They have one shared characteristic that is impossible to hide-they are loud. Below is a conceptual drawing for a cheap sound guided surface to air missile:
This is a conceptual schematic, not a hard design but I’m fairly certain once the software issues are hammered out the rest of the concept will sort itself out. The actual missile should be designed as large as possible to transport to be able to engage larger/higher flying targets. Some upcoming aerial threats ironically will fly low and slow enough to be engaged with by gunfire, and any opportunity that can be taken to take out a machine gun equipped drone that isn’t being used to reveal your position-take it. The drone pictured above is mainly for recon in urban areas, it’s a ducted fan with sensors and a fuel tank bolted onto it. Latter
versions of this type will undoubtedly have a light machine gun turrent and if engaged will automatically draw the fire of a much higher flying drone with missiles and bombs.
The US Army is currently fielding glorified remote controlled airplanes equipped with light cameras for squad and platoon level recon. If one of these is buzzing around then contact is iminent, but fortunately the machine itself isn’t the threat, it’s the information it transmits about your position that is lethal. Perhaps if the thing flies close enough a shotgun blast or well aimed rifle rounds can break it up, but that should be done after contact is initiated, but by then perhaps the operator has gathered enough information about your position to call in reinforcements to cover your escape routes. Act very quickly before you’re trapped! Another counter would be acquiring aircraft, outfitting them with machine guns and shooting down the drones. Gyrocopters; a helicopter with a propeller in the back for forward thrust can land in a few hundred feet, can incorporate a gunner for taking on the lower, slower flying drones. For the Predators, a World War Two fighter plane could shoot one down provided its position known. Eventually, some sort of counter airborne drone system will have to be developed-it would have to be autonomous because the enemy is guaranteed to be able to hack any remote controlled drone Patriots could eventually field. Inspiration for this weapon system comes from the World War Two Me 163 Komet rocket interceptor; liquid fuel rocket, with wings, pilot and a pair of 30mm cannon it was a point defense fighter. It took off, rocketed to combat altitude in a few minutes-so fast it’s climb rate was only matched by the F-15 fighter in the 70’s. It’s weakness was that it burnt through the propellant in ten minutes allowing only a couple passes through the massed bomber formations. The concept is sound but it needs updated, but first some prerequisite conditions need to be met.
Building robot weapons requires holding territory and being able to shield the production facilities and guarding transportation to and from resource sources and combat formations, but by the time Americans can build such drones a good part of the country would have been liberated anyway. Then our robo-Komet can be built to begin challenging the enemy for control of the skies. This will require manufacturing facilities, access to raw materials and adapting current commonly available electronics into new configurations that allow on-board fully automated decision making. A beowulf is several processors or computers cross-linked into a neural net. This overcomes the linear, serial limitations of processor design by linking each processor with all others in the network, like neurons are in the brain. This would allow older, slower, more commonly available processors to be used-this does not however overcome the programming that would be needed but motion detection, target discrimination and flight monitoring programs are already out and can be adapted. The good news on that is aerial combat is in many ways simpler than ground combat as far as targeting and engaging. A fully automated drone may be necessary anyway as working electronic components could be too scarce to throw away on surface to air missiles. Potential problems will be detection of stealth craft but a visual and sound based sensor suite and a simple program to engage any intact craft within computed combat range would be a workable solution. The drone would have to be fast-jet engines but turbine blades require titanium or ceramics precision engineered, which requires a huge manufacturing base. A ramjet would work, being basically a tube with a fuel sprayer and ignitor, but a ramjet cannot work below 200mph or so. So a rocket booster has to be strapped to the drone that can be ejected; this can also be used to extend flight time and range. The aircraft design should allow both low speed maneuverability and high speed at both low and high altitudes. It should be made of commonly available, light materials allowing mass production and expendability if shotdown. Basic stealth characteristics such as low metal content, recessed engines, minimized sharp edges should be incorporated. The design should be as small as possible while allowing good short range performance and an adequate payload. As for armament, a single .50 machine gun with a combat load of ammunition would work. They’re common and Raufoss rounds incorporate a small explosive charge that can shred aircraft materials. Since this is purely an anti-aircraft design(and a true autonomous robot as opposed to a remote-operated robot) the overall craft can be made much smaller than its projected opponents. Larger craft like strategic bombers will need a automatic cannon. THE FUTURE-THE TERMINATORS REALLY ARE COMING
Robotic warfare is sustainable only by advanced industrial economies. As described earlier, the fully autonomous heavily armed hunter-killer machines depicted in the Terminator series of motion pictures will in the coming decade start to become terrifyingly real battlefield threats. Coupled with next generation weapons like the Active Denial System, battlefield lasers and integrated in a literal Skynet-like communications and surveillance network an army allowed to equip and field unmerciful killing machines capable of sustained high speed, maneuverability and endurance will have a decisive advantage. Also touched on, it is not enough to counter the machines. You must counter the enemy’s ability to design, produce, field and control them. You have to politically, economically and militarily defeat the government fielding them. Some principles of a counter-robotic army strategy: Denial of innovation The enemy’s scientists and engineers are flesh and blood just like us. They have desires, fears, hopes-just like us. Many will see what they have wrought as they too are enslaved by the beast; their challenge will be to summon the courage to SACRIFICE their comfortable lifestyle and risk death to fight for Freedom. Many however will just want their weekend barbecues and ball games. They must be eliminated, but they will be among the most heavily defended personnel, deep in the cities and military bases. So the cities must have pre-existing intelligence networks with operatives ready to turn or kill them. Denial of production Robot weapons systems will be made in factories; these require huge amounts of electrical power, constant supply of parts and raw materials, and highly trained workers and management to run things. Blow their electrical grid; cut the wires, shoot out the transformers, sabotage the power plants, cut off the fuel pipelines. Avoid taking on nuclear power plants, they will be heavily guarded-always go for the weak links. Hijack their supply trucks. Blow the trains off their tracks, blow the bridges. Infiltrate the facilities themselves and sabotage the machinery, or turn workers to do the same, or get the design specs so that the machine can be studied for its weak points. If the people working at the assembly plants won’t turn they must be considered as enemy soldiers. Eventually territory will have to be gained and held, and the cities isolated from each other through incessant sabotage and expanding political, economic, and social initiatives as Americans take their nation back. Taking the rural areas and cutting off the cities will deny far flung factories the resources and parts needed to build the robots and other war materials and resupply of lost units. This is not as fanciful as it sounds if Americans don’t follow the Germans, Russians, Chinese and British fully into slavery and accept it.
Denial of the ability to field the robots The robots still have to be transported to their bases; sabotage the rail and road networks out of the production facility. Explosives will work well enough and are much cheaper to make than the robot killing machines. The enemy will adapt but they cannot protect every square mile of American infrastructure even with their robots. The robots can be stolen if transported by truck by hijacking, or if escorted by convoy by ambush and then destroyed or turned on the traitors who have ruined this country. Denial of the ability to control them As detailed earlier, battlefield robots currently are controlled from nearby by operators embedded in combat formations so they must be flanked and engaged. Remote operated aerial drones however are controlled hundreds or thousands of miles away so the origin of the signal must be found. Forget about doing something to the satellites, hit the ground stations if the forces are available-otherwise use assassins and hunt down the controllers and command staff. Denying the enemy the ability to design, produce, ship out and employ the coming generation of battlefield robots is the best option Free Americans have. Engaging the coming fully automated killing machines will be problematic to guerilla fighters equipped with light weapons. As stated, you have to think of these things as reusable, maneuvering mines, as potentially infantry sized armor, as reusable missiles. The above denial strategy is but part of the only long term viable option for Americans; the rest involves retaking local communities in rural areas, and spreading the Second American Revolution in the countryside and smaller cities until continuously held territory can be taken. Only then will a industrial economy be able to be constructed and weapons systems produced to counter the threat. What is the best counter? To politically stop them-now. We need to start taking back our government; the national and much of the state governments have been systematically hardened politically, but the local governments are still vulnerable. We the People need a political machine anyway and those have to be built up from the ground up. The ball has to start getting rolled. Start with one town and get all the Patriots in range to concentrate their efforts; stage a emergency recall election. Select a town that is obviously corrupt and the People ready for change. Run a full slate of candidates to sweep the town clean. Once you win the election, make your town an example of what living in Freedom is likebecause Americans only think they’re free, they don’t know what true Freedom is. You make that town an example, the buzz will develop and your people will go to surrounding towns and counties. The Second American Revolution will grow exponentially like a virus
as people find out there is a way to fight back. Eventually whole states will be regained and influence on the federal government will be possible. Will this strategy be entirely successful? Probably not, but getting politically active while we still have a representative government we can peacefully take back rather than unaccountable totalitarianism, we can gain territory we can produce what we need to survive. And win.
