Introduction
I’d wanted to read this book three months ago but purchasing it was difficult1 so my friend (and reader) RH loaned me a copy. It took me about 3 hours to go through, both because I am quite familiar with the subject matter and because the author, Don Shift, has a writing style that starts nearly every paragraph with a useful and descriptive statement. If I already knew the subject, I skipped on to the next paragraph.
The book is around 400 pages (numbering stops at page 375) and there are only a handful of illustrations so its definitely a reference book. There are some very useful tables for sure2 and a few equations formatted like in an email as opposed to that of a book. OK, all that out of the way what is this book about?
Overview
Drones are here to stay as part of warfare
The off-the-shelf ones you and I would likely use have notable limitations
There are many ways they can be used for offense
But there are workable defenses
If you don’t understand #4 you’ll likely die earlier than you need to
Some Specifics
Shift goes into extensive history of the recent use of drones in the Russian SMO. There are plenty of examples, links to videos and references to websites if you didn’t already know they were both lethal and a force multiplier. I had seen most of the videos myself over the past few years and can tell the “we fixed it in post production” videos better than most. (So: lots of propaganda through fakery.) But still, it is established that there is a new piece on the chessboard and it has some dangerous moves.
Strangely, the history he records jumps over the entire era of drones that I am intimately familiar with - fighting robots, like BattleBots. To wit, my old teammate and I were laying 4 horsepower into spinning up a horizontal blade, C-clamped to a cart while crouched beneath the entire operation. He looked at me and said “This is deadly.” It was. I replied “Yeah so don’t stand up. But if you do you’ll never feel it.” This was 24 years ago. Heck, it’s still on my pre-blog style website.
There is an introductory section on the DJI drones which are without doubt the most prolific weeds in the consumer field. I have owned and flown three myself. Shift explains that many of the creeping “safety” features can be defeated with tools available online; plug your drone in via USB and you can alter some settings. I looked up the tools and as a low level control systems engineer for 3 decades, I can tell you that implementing these “defeats” would take me hours. Likelihood the average guy would do it: never.
There is a piece where Shift suggests that if you are, for example, planning to recon a Cartel compound you should have previously purchased the drone from somewhere else in the country using Bitcoin so it can’t be traced back to you. Likelihood the average guy would do it: never.
It is a reference book, as I wrote. Still, there are some good sections on how to use this idealized, unencumbered drone to gather intelligence, lead an attack and even harangue the target. I found all of that completely solid - like if you had an airborne Dobie-o-Matic at your disposal.
But practically, you don’t. You have a mostly AGL3 locked, battery limited machine that may or may not demand some updates when you want to launch. That was my experience when I was just outside of Carson City, NV last year and wanted to put my DJI Mini 2 into the air - poor cell phone service and the DJI app not rendering correctly on my iPhone scuttled the entire effort. It was discouraging but enlightening because if it happened to me, it will happen to others.
There was some great stuff at the end of the book on how hiding in a trench is sure to get yourself creamed and a verifiably useful tactic is running in random patterns, preferably beneath tree cover, to effectively negate any targeting that the drone can provide. Thus a quite viable countermeasure to airborne 4 brushless motors and a 4K reverse video link is a good cardiovascular system and laced boots. Write that down.
Shift discussed some technical stuff as well and for the most part he was spot on. One thing I did come away with is that this book is more of a retrospective analysis than a first-hand composition. In medicine many studies are performed as retrospectives, that is, “Can we analyze 30 years of accumulated data for people who showed up at the ER with exploded heads who also ate Pop Rocks and drank a soda? Maybe there is a correlation.” I don’t recall any part where the author explained his piloting a drone (I could have missed it) and honestly this is concerning: would you buy a book on tennis from someone who never played?
This blog is about people who tell you what to do because they went first. That was one reason why I started it. Too many others in the “prep” community, between the bloggers and commenters, are just advice slingers.
Real Performance Drones, non-Military
As with the BattleBots events, real innovation takes place in people’s garages and outside of SBIRs4 and companies of over 100 people. Take this post on the blog Area Ocho for example. You think this death machine has all the restrictions of a DJI machine? It does not. Sure, you have to build it yourself but in doing so you get to bump the boundaries of your expendable income against commercialized physics. Without nanny oversight.
Heck just watch this video if you remain unconvinced.
Summary
Should you read this book? Yes.
Should you buy this book? Maybe; better to share the expense and pass it around among your self-reliance group. There are definitely a few gems inside but it doesn’t warrant paying for a copy by itself, like TM 31-2105 does.
Final Note
Six years ago when I was in Shenzhen for work, my coworker SC and I visited the DJI Factory Store in a mall and stopped for some refreshments. About 15 minutes later a young man came up to our table, grabbed a chair, nodded at me and started speaking to my coworker in Mandarin. SC translated that “He was notified about us Westerners in the store - well, that’s just you dude - and wondered if we might want to open a ‘close’ distributorship for DJI back in America.” I had no idea so I declined and SC explained that back to him. He politely departed.
In retrospect, I could have been the Drone Warlord for the Southwestern US. Sad!
I contacted the author directly and offered to send cash since I don’t use Amazon. His reply was “Unfortunately, I am not in a position to sell directly due to security concerns. My apologies.” The irony of selling a book about personal security but the inability to personally manage it is not lost of me.
Useful as in “Copy these, laminate them and keep in your assault pack”
Above ground level, as compared to ASL which is above sea level
Small Business Independent Research, a supposed incentive of government money to “advance the art” in patent-speak. Practically you work in arrears and it is a trap like attacking the the “non-functioning” Death Star 2.
Department of the Army Improvised Munitions Handbook, 1969