Could Micro-Drones Be Weaponised?

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Micro-drones are an emergent trend in the world of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). There are several models currently in production, with a prominent example being the US Navy’s Cicada (Close-In Covert Autonomous Disposable Aircraft). It was designed to deployed out of a moving aeroplane, and a recent AFP article described it as a “paper airplane with a circuit board.”

For the time being, Cicadas are little more than remote microphones that can fly. “You equip these with a microphone or a seismic detector, drop them on that road, and it will tell you ‘I heard a truck or a car travel along that road.’ You know how fast and which direction they’re traveling,” Aaron Kahn of the Naval Research Laboratory told AFP.

It now costs $1,000 per pop, but could drop to as little as $250 a unit. The military envisions using them in swarms, but these swarms could prove deadly in the not-so-distant future. The official description of the Cicada is an “an unmanned glider, nearly undetectable, that delivers payloads to precise waypoints.” Payload can stand for a variety of things, depending on context, but one of the more relevant meanings has a lot to do with deadly force.

The carrying capacity of any drone this size is miniscule. However, the combined carrying capacity of a large enough swarm of these tiny flying machines can potentially be quite large. As they’re equipped with precise guidance systems and telemetry equipment, guiding a whole lot of them to a very specific location is entirely within the realm of possibility. Coupled with a distributed explosive-carrying capacity, they could make for a cheap, hard to detect yet easy to deliver killing swarm.