Drone on

Yesterday afternoon, that is to say Sunday afternoon, I had a quick read of the piece in the MIT Technology Review at reference 1 about drones.

The first takeaway is that drones come in three sizes. The big ones which are expensive, which can do all manner of dreadful things and which are probably only sold to respectable buyers. The small ones which you can buy off Amazon but which cannot carry very much; can do damage, but not all that much. Unless, perhaps, you have large swarms of them. And then there are the medium sized ones. Turkey and Iran appear to have specialised in this part of the market and are not too fussy about who they sell them to. And, as things stand, it seems to cost a lot more to shoot one of them down than to buy one, giving financial advantage to the aggressor.

The second takeaway, the one with which I am more concerned here, is that all these drones need to know where they are, which seems to depend in turn on access to GPS services, for which see references 2, 3 and 4. Quick skim here rather than a quick read. The biggest and best is probably the one run by the US Department of Defense, but there are offerings from both Russia and China and there are other players. 

Building these services does not seem to be that expensive, say ten of billions of US dollars to get one up and running, and so people like the Saudis could certainly afford it. But maybe you would not want to get into the GPS supply business without having your own space industry to back it up.

The US seem to operate a two tier service, with a fancy service for its own military and a bog-standard service for everyone else. They seem to have elected, in a considered way, to make the bog-standard service freely available. Which means that as well as all the respectable players getting on board you will also have some bad players. 

I have not seen anything about access to other GPS services, but one supposes that the Russians and Chinese would provide access to their friends, whoever they might be on the day in question.

Having got this far, the thought was, given that the supply of GPS services is something that the governments of  a small number of big countries do, why not control access? Why not block the bad players?

One answer is that, as things stand, you are not going to get the US, the Russians and the Chinese to agree on who the bad players are. And without such agreement, there is probably not much point in unilateral restrictions.

Another answer might be that, given that one wants to make the technology widely available, to get value out of the investment, to do good things for mankind, it is going to be hard to stop it leaking out. There are going to be lots of small players. Who is going to check them out, to stop them flogging their access to the bad guys?

Conclusions

So while it might seem odd to be making a potentially lethal service freely available, not so clear what could or ought to be done about it. 

But I dare say that there are lots of people out there scratching their heads about all this. How can we make lots of money out of GPS flavoured services without letting too many bad guys in?

PS: by way of comparison, access to postal services is not controlled and access to Internet services is only weakly controlled. Pretty much anyone can play. I associate first to the bad guys who operated a postal pools service from the Netherlands at a time, the beginning of the 20th century, when only toffs were allowed to gamble in the UK. And second to the Frank Herbert yarn 'Dune' in which inter-stellar freight services were available to anyone who could pay the fare, but interference with other freight was strictly forbidden. So you could travel in the next berth to your worst enemy without a care in the world.

References

Reference 1: Mass-market military drones have changed the way wars are fought: The war in Ukraine has exposed that widely available, inexpensive drones are being used not just for targeted killings but for wholesale slaughter - Kelsey D. Atherton, MIT Technology Review - 2023.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_signals.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System.

Reference 4: https://www.gps.gov/governance/agencies/defense/.

Reference 5: https://www.wingsmagazine.com. The source of the snap above, via Bing.