For the first time, a combat drone killed a person on its own initiative

For the first time, a combat drone attacked people in a completely autonomous mode. According to New Scientist magazine, the Turkish flying hunter Kargu-2 independently tracked down a living target and attacked it.

This happened as part of the conflict between the government forces of Libya and the forces of the Libyan National Army. At this point, the drone did not receive any commands from the person.

Turkish Kargu-2 drones packed with explosives attacked anti-government rebels in Libya completely autonomously. The UN report says that the lethal weapons have resulted in significant losses of the Pantsir S-1 anti-aircraft missile system belonging to the Libyan national army.

During a clash between the Libyan government and forces loyal to Khalifa Haftar, the commander of the splinter faction of the Libyan National Army, rebels were bombarded with “unmanned aerial vehicles and lethal autonomous weapons systems,” the UN Security Council said in a statement.

Haftar’s forces were retreating from the capital, Tripoli, as they were “tracked down and remotely attacked” by Kargu-2 drones. Since Haftar’s unit was not trained to defend against the new technology, the rebels retreated in disarray. Kargu drones can be controlled manually, however, in the described collision with the Libyans, they were self-controlled and used on-board cameras and machine learning technology to independently search for enemies and target them.

According to New Scientist, the information was provided by a confidential source and details of the incident were not disclosed.

This is how the plot of the story “The Guardian Bird”, which was written in the fifties by Robert Sheckley, is realized so casually. A very instructive text that has ceased to be fiction, turning into a boring everyday reality, writes Andriy Manchuk.

Just recently, too, very often, with a shudder from Sheckley’s visionary talent, I recall this story. Those interested can listen to this book on link…

Drone Kargu-2

Kargu is a helicopter-type kamikaze drone that has been supplied to the Turkish army since 2017. In 2019, the Turkish defense company STM launched the production of advanced Kargu-2 drones, which can be remotely controlled by a human operator or use an on-board camera and AI for autonomous target search. …

The drone weighs 15 kilograms with the ability to stay in the air for up to 30 minutes. The warhead with which the drone is equipped can be fragmentation – to destroy enemy personnel, cumulative – to attack lightly armored vehicles and thermobaric to destroy targets in a confined space.

Kargu-2s unite in a swarm and, upon collision with a target, explode like “kamikaze”. The Drive reports that Kargu are capable of combining into a swarm of 20 drones for a massive attack.

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