https://doi.org/10.37815/rte.v35n1.1018

Original articles

Technological developments and implications of autonomous
military drones: prospects in global geopolitics

Desarrollos tecnológicos e implicaciones de los drones
autónomos militares: perspectivas en la geopolítica
mundial

Jairo Eduardo
Márquez Díaz1 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6118-3865 1Universidad de Cundinamarca, Chía,
Colombia

[email-masked]

Sent:

2022/12/21

Accepted:

2023/06/21

Published:

2023/05/22

Resumen

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo
caracterizar los drones no tripulados empleados en las nuevas estrategias de defensa
militar mundial, tomando
en cuenta los desarrollos tecnológicos asociados a la inteligencia artificial y robótica. En tal sentido,
se procedió a realizar un estudio
de carácter documental, conducente a identificar los desarrollos más representativos existentes
en el mercado de drones
autónomos militares, contemplando sus implicaciones en el escenario bélico presente y
futuro. El estudio estableció las implicaciones que está tomando
las armas autónomas en la geopolítica mundial, suponiendo cambios en la manera de incorporar tecnologías
inteligentes en busca
de mejorar la autonomía de los drones
para afrontar los requerimientos de defensa y ataque, que demanda los nuevos escenarios del campo de
batalla. Este panorama da a entrever para los próximos
años el incremento de drones como armas letales
de bajo costo y alta precisión, cuyo despliegue en diversos escenarios será más efectivo en operaciones militares
de diversa índole.

Palabras clave:
armas autónomas, enjambres
de drones, geopolítica, inteligencia artificial,

tecnologías disruptivas.

Abstract

This article aims to characterize the unmanned drones
used in the new global
military defense strategies, considering the technological developments associated with artificial intelligence and

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138  Jairo Eduardo Márquez Díaz

robotics. In this sense,
a documentary study
was carried out to identify
the most representative developments in the market
of autonomous military drones, observing their implications in present and
future war scenarios. The study established the implications that autonomous
weapons are taking in global geopolitics, assuming changes in the way of
incorporating intelligent technologies to improve the autonomy of drones to face the requirements of defense
and attack demanded by the new battlefield scenarios. This scenario gives a
glimpse of the coming years of the increase
of drones as lethal weapons
of low cost and high precision, whose deployment in various scenarios
will be more effective in military operations of various kinds.

Keywords: Autonomous weapons, drone swarms,
geopolitics, artificial intelligence, disruptive

technologies.

Introduction

Drones,
or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have been used in the military field for
years. These vehicles have become
increasingly popular in the military
field due to their ability to carry out surveillance, reconnaissance, and attack
missions without endangering the soldiers’
lives. These drones can be controlled remotely,
flying for long hours, which makes them ideal
for surveillance and reconnaissance missions, proving to be a valuable tool for
their ability to reach areas that could be dangerous or inaccessible to the
soldier.

Military
drones have unique features that differentiate them from civilian drones. For
example, they can be equipped with high-resolution cameras and other advanced
surveillance equipment to gather
information about the terrain and the enemy.
Some are also equipped with smart weapons that allow them to
attack specific targets with a high degree of accuracy.

While
drones have many advantages in the military field, they have also generated
controversy due to concerns about the privacy
and ethics of their use in military
attacks without the assistance
of a human controller (Asaro, 2020; Waxman, 2019). In
addition, there are concerns about the safety of these drones, as they can be
shot down or hacked by the enemy.

Research objectives

General objective

Characterize the
unmanned drones used in the new global military defense strategies, considering the technological developments associated with artificial intelligence and robotics.

Specific objectives

•
Identify the most representative developments existing in the market
of autonomous military
drones.

•
Establish
the implications of autonomous weapons in world geopolitics and their impact on
the present and future war scenarios.

•
Analyze the
expected changes in incorporating intelligent technologies to improve the
autonomy of drones to face the defense and attack requirements in the new
battlefield scenarios.

phases:

Methodology

The research methodology was documentary in nature, which is summarized in three

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Technological developments and implications of autonomous military
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1.      Selection: 50 relevant documents spanning ten years,
from 2013 to 2023, were selected for this study. These documents included
academic journals, news articles,
and reports from government agencies and industry. The documents were selected based on their relevance to the
topic under study.

2.      Collection: An initial
search was conducted using keywords related
to the research objectives in databases and online search engines.
Relevant documents were then examined for relevance, credibility, and date of
publication.

3.      Analysis and interpretation: The data was interpreted
considering the research questions and the theoretical framework. The findings
were used to answer the research questions and develop a deeper understanding
of the object of study.

Literature review

Unmanned combat
aerial vehicles (UCAVs)

Drone
technology is advancing daily, as well as its applications in different areas
(Márquez, 2017), with exponential growth in the military field in the last decade.
In this sense, there are reconnaissance and combat drones, known as
unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAV), with action radii in the order of 3000
km and altitude ceilings exceeding 6 km. The speed of this generation of drones can easily exceed
300 km/h, as is the case of the Kratos XQ- 58A
Valkyrie drone (Harper,
2023), which, apart from being difficult to detect by radar, can act
as a support system for aircraft such as the F-15EX or the F-35, either to
assist in an attack or defense, having sufficient payload capacity to carry
air-to-ground and air-to-air missiles.

Given
the particularity of the Valkyrie, it has been taken as a reference point for
new technological developments that work in conjunction with fleets of manned aircraft, where joint
communication allows coordinated attacks and defense
without any interference, whose shared
information is encrypted.

In
the short term, it is expected that UCAVs will act as support on the battlefield
with a greater deployment, where programming sponsored by artificial
intelligence (AI) will be a determining point of success when these aircraft go into action, since apart from attacking targets,
they can act as an early warning system for pilots, and even deciding to
sacrifice themselves protecting their aircraft.

T
tanker-type UCAVs are used to fuel fighter aircraft, resulting in reduced costs
and personnel risk. For example, Boeing’s MQ-25 Stingray drone (Naval
Base Ventura County, 2020) has an advanced communications system for intelligence tasks, which is very useful when small,
agile and difficult to detect by enemy radar is
required.

Table 1 shows some types of military drones in service. Note that this is not an exhaustive list and that there may be other types of drones with different specifications. Also, capabilities and specifications are constantly evolving and improving, so the information in this table
may become outdated over time.

With the notorious ease of development and the consequent production of drones, the drone industry has been boosted
worldwide, facilitating missions
equivalent to those of
a conventional fighter plane at a fraction of the operational cost, such as
patrolling, tactical reconnaissance and even individual or coordinated attacks.
Drones of this type are the CH and
Wing
Loong series that China has begun to commercialize outside its borders, making it possible
for other countries to join this new arms race of low cost and high
lethality.

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Table 1

Some different types of military
drones, their flight range, armament, monitoring and spying technologies

Drone

Flight range (miles)

Weapons

Monitoring and Espionage Technologies

MQ-1 Gray Eagle

1,000

Hellfire missiles, laser-

guided
bombs

EO/IR sensors, Synthetic Aperture
Radar (SAR), Communications Intelligence (COMINT)

MQ-9 Reaper

1,100

Hellfire missiles, GBU- 12 Paveway
II, laser guided bombs

EO/IR sensors, SAR,
COMINT, Electronic Intelligence (ELINT)

RQ-4

9,000

None

EO/IR sensors, SAR, Signals

Intelligence (SIGINT)

RQ-21

100

None

EO/IR sensors, laser
designators

X-47B

2,000

None

EO/IR sensors, Synthetic Aperture

Sonar (SAS)

Wing Loon II

2610

Laser-guided
bombs, air-to-surface missiles

Synthetic aperture radar, electro- optical
payloads

Beast of Kandahar

5,000

None

EO/IR sensors, SAR, Signals Intelligence (SIGINT). top secret stealth
technologies

Luna

5000

Naval cruise missiles

Radar, optical, electronic intelligence sensors

Heron TP

9320

None

Ground moving target indication radar, electronic intelligence pods

Source: Author

Another line of action
of drones is the of the kamikaze
type (Kovačević & Vulić, 2021;
Liao, 2020), which hits other drones or fixed or mobile military
targets to minimize
the risk of them
attacking first. With this modality,
the risk of neutralizing a target without
using weapons that can be dangerous in an urban environment or in critical
facilities is simplified (Mair, 2020; Sauer,
2020). his task is effective by
providing drones with a LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) radar that maps information in 3D, complemented by electro-optical systems,
sensors (infrared, chemical, optical and geomagnetic), artificial vision and electronic jamming systems for
early detection; in addition, they have blocked an attack of one or several
UCAVs, either day or night (Song, 2021).

Another
feature of this type of drone is that they have a detection range that varies
between 10 and 20 km, excluding human intervention in decision-making. As a particular case is the Guard drone technology, which, as Navarro (2020)
points out, “has radars designed for short-range air defense and a
communications intelligence module that detects, classifies and identifies a
threat based on the analysis of frequencies and communication protocols used by
the target drone” (n.p).

The
development of this technology continues as drones on the market pursue human
targets and set ambushes, as is the case of Lanius, ideal for urban warfare.
This Israeli-made drone is transported in a mother ship that can fly in closed
enclosures, such as buildings or tunnels, searching for its target
regardless of the obstacles it encounters on its way, thanks to its
AI system integrated into a specific chip. It also incorporates a SLAM algorithm
(Diaz, 2022), which allows it
to simultaneously locate and map its environment using image processing to
identify points of interest, generating relevant identification information
(friend or foe) for its

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operator, or acting autonomously by coordinating an ambush with other drones.

A recent DARPA ground autonomous robotics initiative called the RACER (Robotic
Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resilience) program (Ackerman, 2022b)
aims to develop new autonomous drone technologies (Marquez, 2021) for all-terrain combat vehicles,
allowing them to maneuver out of a two-dimensional field into a
three-dimensional one. The idea of this system is to emulate human’s
driving, taking into account speed and endurance in
simulation patterns and advanced platforms, which must be superior to those
used in civilian autonomous vehicles. Additionally, the vehicle is prepared for
battle operations, whose displacement must be fast and, in the process,
activate its defenses if necessary.

Another
advanced drone project belongs to Australia,
with Boeing’s Loyal Wingman, equipped with AI-controlled systems to
perform multiple tasks on the battlefield, such as surveillance, aerial
reconnaissance, and intelligence, with a range of close to 4000 km provided by its jet engines.

One
aspect to mention, based on Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine, is the
role of these two nations’ massive use of drones. In the case of Ukraine,
it employed the Turkish- built Bayraktar TB2
drone (Rodriguez, 2022), proving to be an invaluable piece in increasing
resistance against Russian troops. The
drone has the capability to conduct short and medium- range missile strikes,
whose advanced electronics allow it to coordinate its attack with two ground
control stations. This drone has proven its worth in other latitudes, such as
Libya, Karabakh and Syria, which is why several
nations have purchased
it due to its effectiveness on the battlefield.

Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs)

The
autonomous drone developed by Northrop Grumman and Martin Defense Group, called
Manta Ray, performs underwater and surface tasks. This device can operate for
long periods without any maintenance or human support,
performing long-duration civil or military missions without assistance even transporting payloads. Other recently operational underwater drones belonging to the U.S. Navy include
functions equivalent to the Manta Ray, the Orca and the
Snakehead classified as extra-large UUV
(Mapson,
2022), which have advanced technologies in stealth and attack on various
types of vessels (Coiras & Ridao,
2020; Brierley et al., 2018).

China has its own biomimetic UUV that has been operating for some years, demonstrating that there is competition among the
great powers to create underwater drones for various purposes, considering that
stealth is more significant than other currently operational vessels, making
them ideal for autonomous operations and stealth, as is the case of the Chinese
drone “Robo-Shark”, designed to hunt submarines.

One result of the conflict between
Ukraine and Russia is a military UUV called Kronos, which can operate piloted
or remotely, carrying
up to six torpedoes, operating
underwater or at sea level with great versatility, added
to the composite materials with which it is built, which gives it a manta ray
shape and stealth, adsorbing the acoustic waves of any sonar.

A recent two-in-one drone development for
civilian and military purposes is the Sea- Air integrated Drone and the KDDI
flying drone, which carries the FIFISH Pro V6 Plus underwater drone. The flying drone can hover on the surface
and land vertically, safely releasing
the underwater drone. These devices can be operated by remote control or
autonomously. In principle, these drones
have been created
for underwater inspection (Liu & Zhang,
2019).

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However, their
potential in military
applications, especially those
operating in swarms,
is worth mentioning, aimed at nullifying any anti-submarine capability, either for detection or destruction.

From
the above, it can be inferred that autonomous weapons can be considered as
emerging cybertechnologies, with well-established purposes
in the military field, where one of them
is the reduction of war costs. Therefore, evaluating how AI is increasingly integrated into these cybertechnologies drives new advances in
intelligent strategic systems whose dependence on humans is decreasing.
In this regard, significant ethical and moral concerns surround the development and use of autonomous weapons,
as they raise questions of responsibility and the
possibility of unintended consequences such as the violation of international
law.

Autonomous Weapons
and Artificial Intelligence

Autonomous
weapons are systems that can select and attack targets without human
intervention. These weapons rely on
artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to identify and engage
targets, with the potential to revolutionize modern warfare by increasing the
speed and accuracy of attacks. Examples of autonomous weapons include drones,
armed robots and missile systems.

AI
gained momentum in recent years, all thanks to increased computational power.
In the case of the latest generation of UCAVs used for various targeted and
coordinated attacks, it demands intelligent software to perform such actions.
Such is the case of the Turkish STM Kargu-2 drones, which in 2020 carried out
an autonomous attack against the Libyan national army (Sierra, 2021). A particularity
of this attack lay in the fact that it was with autonomous systems, technically called Slaughter Bot. Drones
operating under this modality are characterized by facial recognition
algorithms and spatial algorithms that allow them to form swarms, even if the
radio and GPS links were blocked, all this autonomously.

A reference
of Slaughter Bot drones is the Turkish-made Aksungur, which can operate over long distances with a flight
altitude of 6 km above
sea level. The most important functions of this aircraft are intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and day and night air attack with a
diverse armament capacity of close to one ton, such as anti-tank missiles and
smart missiles for destruction of static and moving targets.

Currently,
no legislation regulates the development of Slaughter Bot and/or similar
weapons, whose primary targets are human beings. The truth of this scenario is
that this technology quickly went from science fiction to reality because its
development was easier due to its low investment, demonstrating its versatility
and high effectiveness in espionage, monitoring and attack operations. China
leads the list of Slaughter Bot technologies exported to several countries with a wide portfolio of unmanned systems.
Similarly, Israel, Iran, Russia,
the
United States and the United Kingdom, among other countries, have their own Slaughterbot- type
technology development initiatives.

The programming of these drones
is based on AI, which
allows, apart from performing
biometric analysis in situ, to form swarms, whose coordination makes them more
assertive when carrying out selective attacks, all thanks to the scalability of
intelligent algorithms that evolve permanently in each mission.
Although the technology of Slaughterbots is not new, the
algorithms and weaponry are where AI, robotics and advanced communication network systems
facilitate new developments.

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Nanodrones

Another potential applications and development of autonomous systems
are nanodrones
whose purpose is focused on one or a swarm
of them accompanying a soldier on reconnaissance
missions, literally becoming his eyes, monitoring his surroundings, detecting
improvised explosive devices, or acting as a defense
and attack system.
For example, the U.S. Black
Hornet nanodrone was the most advanced at the
time of writing.

Within
their nanoscale technology, these vehicles have an artificial vision system
integrated with machine
learning algorithms, which
allows them to detect the most likely
places where there would be explosives or predetermined targets. This task is complemented with drone sensors
that create a 3D map emulating digital twins (Varas et al., 2020), where the
encrypted data is transmitted to a cloud computing platform to be consulted by
different search teams. This information is processed by an AI that communicates it back to each nanodrone to obtain
more data to identify the threat more easily.

A
civilian application like the nanodrone is
Snapchat’s Pixy mini drone, which autonomously accompanies its user to
record selfies or panoramic shots, and then transfers them wirelessly to the
cell phone., Apart from being
lightweight, this mini drone has a flight autonomy of 5 to 8 hours
with a 20-minute recharge. It also allows
configuring four flight
routes in which it can float, orbit around its user
and follow him.

Snapchat’s
Pixy is not the only mini drone on the market, but it is one of the most
complete, which means that in the short term, the competition and the military
will develop new, improved versions of Pixy.

Security

Current
global security presents a complex dynamic that promises to become even more
acute based on geopolitical and economic instabilities (Deutsche Welle, 2022), leading to military conflicts involving the
major powers. Likewise, the possibility of developing new unmanned weapons
capabilities has opened, with the consequent integration of autonomous systems
for mission-critical military applications, involving portable communication
stations and scalable computing systems, expanding their applications not only
to the air but also to land, submarine, surface and
subsurface operations, even in space.

The
adaptation and scalability of unmanned systems are defined considering that
their application is focused on civil or military missions, which require a
coordinated deployment of multiple technologies to achieve their objective. To
this end, they make use of advanced avionics, drones, robotics, AI and the
internet of things, and more recently, perimeter security and edge computing,
among other disruptive technologies, which contribute their share to the continuous
improvement of new intelligent weapons and communications support for unmanned
systems. Such is the case of drones
whose technology allows
them to carry
out highly accurate attacks based on the GPS
movement of a target, collecting metadata from images, photos and files that
are then transmitted through a computer virus, even from SIM cards, infecting
the target’s electronic device(s).

A high-impact military project by the
United States is constructing the flying aircraft carrier, intending to launch
swarms of combat drones anywhere in the world.
The architect of this development was DARPA, with the X-16 Gremlins project,
which consists of modifying a Lockheed C-130 Hercules aircraft
into a platform for launching
X-16A drones that, once their mission is over, the mother ship will receive
them to refuel
in the air. “The drones will be able

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to fly for one hour within
a radius of 300 nautical
miles (about 555 kilometers) with 22 kilos
of cargo.” (Díaz, 2021 ,
n.p). This system
is intended to be scaled up to other larger aircraft types, such as a B-52 Stratofortress that can fly at higher altitudes and carry more drones and munitions.

The next step of this project is to send drones directly from space, working in conjunction
with a fleet of permanent flying aircraft carriers, extending the range of monitoring and eventual attack to the entire planet. What is
striking about these projects is that human intervention is completely excluded. In theory, with this type of technology, these platforms could be used for
more altruistic purposes
of a scientific nature, such as monitoring the climate or pollution levels in different areas of the world,
among others.

Disruptive technologies on the battlefield

Drones can be used for various military purposes, including surveillance, reconnaissance,
and attack. In
addition, they offer several advantages over conventional aircraft, including
the ability to fly for long periods, operate in hazardous or inaccessible
areas, and be controlled remotely or autonomously on a case-by-case basis.

Polymorphic robotics
is another disruptive technology characterized by the fact that
it can change from one form to another depending on environmental conditions.
Robots of this type demand more energy for transformation and an accompanying
increase in mass in most cases leading to the invention of new elastomers such
as mechanical metamaterials with reversible plasticity (Hwang et al., 2022). Those materials become an ideal option to elaborate
phase change metallic skeleton systems
with switchable stiffness, proposing new developments of Slaughter Bot-like drones
adaptable to the operating environment.

In the case of design, development and certification of advanced unmanned systems such as
the Slaughter Bot for applications focused on area,
ground, maritime and space security, they are supported by the objectives of the certification authorities’ software team called CAST-32A (CAST, 2016); this for the case of the United States, which ultimately is a world reference whose military industry is supported by multi-core computational hardware, with particular attention to synchronization behavior.

Slaughter
Bot is an emerging example of disruptive technology, which military forces
worldwide have implemented due to its low development and implementation cost
and its high effectiveness in critical operations related to selectively
nullifying targets, where human influence in decision -making is suppressed. In
strategic and defensive terms, this type of technology proves to be an ideal
weapon, even at the metropolitan level (Márquez, 2018), given that its “payload, performance and autonomous capabilities grow rapidly” (Bajema, 2021

, n.p).
Likewise, these types of systems
are used in other areas such as “reconnaissance, target acquisition, confined space and subway inspection, mapping, security, wireless
mesh networks, perimeter
security, etc.” (Ackerman, 2021 , n.p).

The Slaughter
Bot, in conjunction with other advanced unmanned
systems (MQ- 9 Reaper, Predator C Avenger, RQ-4 Global
Hawk, Wing Loong 3 and 1E, CH7, FH97A, WJ-700, X-47B, among others), are not a
replacement for conventional weapons, since their function is centered as a support
resource for the military and government agencies. Therefore, prohibiting the use of these technologies is out of
the question, for the simple fact that their design, development, and
implementation are fast and do not require an extensive technical and
technological infrastructure, making them an invaluable resource for secret and
military operations.

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Advances
related to inertial navigation solutions, leading to the highest accuracy, reliability,
redundancy in data handling, scalability and durability, consistency in hostile
environments and rough terrain, interference-proof, and compatible with other
technologies, are becoming more relevant.

The integration of disruptive technologies such as
Deep Learning, Big data, IoT and Edge computing, among others,
are contributing to the development and management of autonomous
weapons faster than expected, driving many nations to bet on these type of
weapons due to their rapid deployment and replacement on the battlefield, such is the case of the United States,
with hundreds of incursions in Yemen and Kabul for several years in asymmetric
conflicts (Chehtman, 2017).

Discussion

Various civilian
groups have expressed concern about using
Slaughter Bot and similar
technologies, excluding morality in making decisions about who lives and dies
in a military action, leaving everything in the hands of AI algorithms
without human supervision. The problem
of establishing international
regulation is becoming increasingly acute due to the
proliferation of the autonomous weapons market, where not only the
superpowers are leading the way, but countries such as Turkey, Israel, and Iran, which have seen a lucrative business
in selling this type of weaponry
to politically unstable
countries. The critical
aspect of this issue lies in the fact
that this technology can be easily copied
by terrorist groups
and organized crime
with minimal investment.

Access
to this technology by various military and illegal groups is of concern to the international community since it is difficult to control, in addition to the fact that the development
of these weapons does not require a robust technological infrastructure.

The possibility of acquiring Slaughter Bots on the black market is high, and not only these devices but also anti-personnel
micro-drones, which can be deployed stealthily to selectively track and fix
targets, which turns them into vectors to detonate micro-explosives and even
disperse biological or chemical agents.

The outlook for Slaughter Bots in the military shows that they will continue to proliferate, due to their rapid progress in
critical operations, as opposed to other conventional weapons, which makes them
ideal for military forces that lack advanced aerial technology and require
rapid results on the battlefield when deploying their
troops. For example,
in Azerbaijan in 2020,
Israeli 1K and Harop drones were employed in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict (Martin, 2019). This deployment was attributed to a
small group of individuals who once released, selected their targets
and killed them. In general, these drones can loiter for several hours in a
region until they find their target, which can be weapons, communication
systems or fixed or mobile defense systems, among others.

Using intelligent weapons against human
targets is a fact, and the moratorium is still on paper. Russel et al. (2021) points out
that:

Agreements are needed to facilitate verification and enforcement of the moratorium and treaties, including design restrictions on
remotely piloted weapons that prevent software conversion to autonomous
operation, as well as industry rules to prevent large-scale illicit
weaponization of civilian drones. (n. p)

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Implementing
a moratorium on this type of technology is complex, in part because the development of Slaughter Bot-type
systems is easy to carry out, as is the incorporation of intelligent
algorithms, giving drones greater autonomy in their military tasks.

With AI, a drone
or a swarm of drones
can be programmed to carry
out targeted attacks, turning them into scalable
weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which contain weapons of mass agility
(WMA) for use in targeted
assaults using chemical
or biological agents.
This type of scenario is
known as drones (Marquez, 2021c), which frames the integration of advanced emerging technologies converging to the
development of multicore platforms for critical avionics and robotics
applications.

It is common to find in autonomous drone’s multicore processor technologies combined with state-of-the-art computing
about system hardware
architecture. For example,
PCIe 4.0 and

5.0 data communication buses (Gomez, 2021) integrated with next-generation memories, which show new multithreaded processing architectures, thus breaking traditional computing schemes, accelerating SoC (System on Chip) processes
with higher speed rates and low latency,
essential for technologies that must respond to events in extremely
short times.

Avionics is designed to delimit and control physical
interference patterns specific
to the processor cores and
the external environment. Likewise, it seeks to optimize the development of applications that allow the rational use of all cores, minimizing conflicts on shared
resources in the process, considering that AI-based algorithms demand them. With this type of technology,
SWaP requirements
(weight, size, and power) increase, becoming a priority when evaluating the performance of autonomous and semi-autonomous systems,
for which miniaturization goes hand in hand with power and improved thermal dissipation.

What
is perceived from these technological developments is that robotics and AI will be the articulating points of the
new generations of autonomous weapons in the future. In this way, attacks
by any power or terrorist
group can be unpredictable, generating chaos in society in search of geopolitical
imbalance, especially if we take into account that this type of device can carry and detonate
dirty bombs (Biancotto et al., 2020; Rump et al., 2021) which, although they have not yet been used,
is an issue to contemplate, taking into account
that many politically unstable countries are
developing their own nuclear initiatives. Also,
there is the potential for autonomous weapons to become vectors for
disseminating biological or chemical agents.

Autonomous weapons have opened a new niche for the arms race, where superpowers do not
want to leave any space for advantage
against their counterparts (Saeed, 2017; Jash, 2018; Haosheng,
2021), driving ever more extraordinary advances for which precision and
lethality are essential, being the sentence “shoot and forget” more
valid than ever.

On-air
mission tactics, these have been adapting to new possible battle scenarios such
as the case of Ukraine-Russia, China-Taiwan or South Korea-North Korea, all
motivated by the flexibility of programming fleets of drones to attack one or
several targets in situ, as is the case of the Turkish drone Bayraktar TB2
(Sanchez, 2021), as well as the American
kamikaze drones Switchblade (Miller
& Chadwick, 2018) put to the test in the same battle scenario. Also, Poland placed at the Ukrainian army’s disposal the Fly Eye drone,
which acted as a backup
to the counter-offensive showing
in real-time the location of the enemy,
allowing to coordinate the assaults to assess the damage subsequently.

A variant of the Bayraktar Is the Akinci, specialized for possessing a range close to 8000

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Technological developments and implications of autonomous military
drones: prospects in global geopolitics  147

km and a flight
autonomy of a full day, with a payload capacity
of one and a half tons, allowing it to carry smart weapons such
as MK-82s (Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining, 2017)
and fire cruise
missiles from the air. This action that was only possible from fighter jets and submarines.

In
the case of the Russian military, they employed drones whose similarity in some
cases has been inferior to those used by Ukraine. However, the Olan-10 drone
stands out because it works
in conjunction with the Leer-3
electronic warfare system,
consisting of a truck
equipped with Krasukha-4 technology, which
blocks communications several kilometers around, deactivated at the same
time the drones that circulate within its radius of action by interfering with
their GPS signals (Clark, 2022).

With
the use of swarms of drones, the possibility of success of a mission is
expanded since, from a group, the probability of dispensing with some of them is acceptable as long as the
objective of attacking and/or neutralizing a target is achieved. This all comes down to operating
costs, which are low compared to a single-person aircraft whose value can be 10
to 15 times higher, where stealth
may not suffice.
Incorporating drone swarms in support
of fifth and sixth-
generation fighter aircraft will become a trend in the coming years, providing
more excellent safety for pilots while increasing defensive and offensive
power.

Cooperating
drone swarms are ideal as opposed to employing a single drone, as the workload
can be divided and respond to different variables in response to environmental.
Similarly, the development of three-in-one drones that fly, navigate, and hover
on the ground will soon become a reality, expanding their multifunctionality on
the battlefield.

The low-cost arms race is growing, driven not only by the superpowers, as countries such as Israel, Turkey, India, and Iran, among others, have their own R&D programs. Consequently, a myriad of possibilities is opening as to what will happen in the coming years on the battlefield,
espionage, urban surveillance, monitoring and targeted attacks; for which the existence of lethal autonomous
weapons raises a broad discussion of their impact on society.

There
are concerns about the ethical implications of using autonomous drones and the
possibility that they may be employed in ways that violate international law. Some critics
argue (Bolaños & Bossano, 2020; Rivera, 2017; Chamayou, 2016) that drones can carry out targeted killings or extrajudicial executions without sufficient oversight
or accountability. There is also uneasiness about the possibility of
drones being hacked or used as weapons by terrorists or other malicious actors.

What
can we expect for the future? Undoubtedly significant advances in AI combined with IoT and quantum
computing, opens a myriad of development possibilities aimed at creating
and improving the performance of autonomous weapons, increasing the
capacity for massive data analysis, improving cyber security and defensive intelligence. With the current geopolitical
dynamics, what is expected is an intensification of the quantum arms
race, understood as the use of quantum computing integrated with disruptive
technologies applied to the military environment, given its potential to leave
current offensive and defensive systems in tatters.

Conclusions

The research
successfully achieved its objectives by characterizing current
and future autonomous military drones,
their implications for defense strategies and the technological

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148  Jairo Eduardo Márquez Díaz

trends shaping
their development. Regarding the specific objectives, several autonomous drone developments were identified and how they are accelerating the arms race,
changing tactics and strategies, raising concerns about
proliferation risks, and ethical implications.

Autonomous
drones are seen as low-cost but high-impact weapons that will transform future
battlefields. This leads to evaluating their role in global security, which has
been undergoing substantial changes, accentuating arms competition in the face
of new warfare demands.

Opponents of these technologies (Johnson, 2020; Marks, 2020; Slijper et al., 2019) argue that military drones must be programmed with some degree of ethics,
raising issues such as the responsibility assumed by the programmer(s) if an autonomous system mistakenly kills civilians.
Likewise, it has been brought
to the forefront how these
systems are increasingly lethal and, at some point, violate ethical principles
and international law.

The actions
intended to be implemented in limiting or prohibiting technologies such as the
Slaughter Bot or any advanced unmanned system, should be directed in another
direction, more towards the technological aspect than anything else, because
thinking about global control of intelligent weapons is utopian.
However, the effort
by UNESCO (2021)
to adopt the recommendation on the ethics
of artificial intelligence in its 41st meeting, for which the actions
in this regard are divided, is valued.

Moreover, there is a trend of integrating AI, IoT and quantum computing, among other
technologies, leading to improved autonomy, lethality, and data processing
capabilities of drones. Future drones
are expected to have multipurpose functionality and operate
in swarms. This scenario
poses several dilemmas, which must be addressed diligently based on the new
global geopolitical landscape. New threats are constantly emerging, so new
drone technology developments are expected, even at the hypersonic level, e.g.,
the Turkish Kizilelma drone, taking military and
espionage incursions to a higher level combined with cyber-attacks.

Suggestions
for future research.

The above can be built upon by analyzing ethical,
legal and governance dimensions,

such as:

•
a study of the ethical and legal framework for autonomous weapons
and drones,

•
exploring the human role in the control and oversight of autonomous weapons,

•
an analysis
of the impacts of emerging technologies, such as quantum computing, on future
drones and weapons systems,

•
a study of multinational collaborations and governance efforts around autonomous

weapons,
and

•
monitoring proliferation risks from non-state actors acquiring autonomous weapons.

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