Buying Options

Read for Free

OR

Print List Price:	$14.99
Kindle Price:	$6.99 Save $8.00 (53%)

Promotions apply when you purchase

Deliver to your Kindle or other device

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

Enter a promotion code or Gift Card

Share <Embed>

Swarm Troopers: How small drones will conquer the world by [David Hambling]

Follow the Author

David Hambling

Swarm Troopers: How small drones will conquer the world Kindle Edition

by David Hambling (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

110 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$6.99

—

Paperback

"Please retry"

$14.99

$11.90

$10.65

Kindle
$0.00 Read with Kindle Unlimited to also enjoy access to over 1 million more titles $6.99 to buy
Paperback
$14.99

9 Used from $10.65 10 New from $11.90

A presidential assassination attempt in Venezuela. Repeated attacks on a Russian airbase in Syria. Strikes on oil tankers and airports in the Yemen conflict. Lethal small drones are already changing the world, and this is just the start. What happens next?

US Special Forces routinely use portable Switchblade killer drones in Afghanistan. ISIS drop grnades from modified consumer drones. Thousands of drones can already be flown together by a single operator.
Swarm Troopers tells the exciting and terrifying truth about the drone revolution: how small, cheap drones bring unprecedent destructive power to the battlefield, making manned aircraft obsolete.

Find out now who the winders and losers will be in the next wave of military innovation which will turn the established order upside down, as hundred-million-dollar jets face swarms of cheap flying robots.

Your guide in this entertaining and informative journey is technology journalist David Hambling (WIRED, Popular Mechanics, Aviation Week) who mixes history, curious anecdote and surprising statistics with penetrating analysis. He shows how drone swarms are evolving the ultimate weapon: precise, deadly and unstoppable . And why no existing defense can handle them.

Swarm Troopers looks at the history of drone warfare, the rise of big drones like the Predator and how they are being eclipsed by smaller unmanned aircraft. And how the future is being shaped by consumer electronics, swarm software, miniaturised munitions and energy-harvesting that allows small drones to fly forever.

What will drone swarms will mean for the balance of power and future wars? Who will be the winners and losers? The answers may surprise you.

Swarm Troopers are coming. Are we ready for them?
A must for anyone who enjoyed Paul Scharre's Army of None.

"Military readers the world over should find this a highly relevant title" -- Andy Kay, Soldier magazine

"Swarm Troopers represents a good basic primer and introduction to this emerging threat — and new Army capability — area" - 'Infantry' magazine.

"A First-rate, non-technical overview of a rather frightening subject - 9/10" - Andrew May, FT

Visit the website http://www.swarm-troopers.com/ for the latest on small drones, from ISIS' first use of explosive suicide drones to China's million-drone Christmas, and home-made flamethrowing drones and more.

Print length

323 pages
Language

English
Publication date

December 10, 2015
File size

670 KB
Page Flip

Enabled
Word Wise

Enabled
Enhanced typesetting

Enabled
See all details

Paul Scharre
376
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $11.49
Seth J. Frantzman
62
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $9.99
Robert J. Bunker
12
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $2.99
John F Antal
24
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $11.49
Bierbauer Alec
288
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $16.99
Arthur Holland Michel
131
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $18.99

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

David Hambling is a technology journalist and author based in South London. He writes for The Economist magazine, New Scientist, WIRED, Aviation Week, Popular Mechanics and Popular Science among others. His first book, Weapons Grade looked at the surprising military roots of modern technology --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B017Q9GGVE
Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 10, 2015
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 670 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 323 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1942761740
Lending ‏ : ‎ Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #453,506 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #275 in Military Science History
- #422 in Military Aviation History (Kindle Store)
- #1,216 in Military Aviation History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
110 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

David Hambling

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Non- Fiction: (Swarm Troopers, Weapons Grade) David Hambling is a freelance technology journalist based in South London.

He writes for New Scientist magazine, Aviation Week, Popular Mechanics, WIRED, The Economist, The Guardian newspaper and others.

Fiction (Shadows From Norwood series): Norwood in South London has deep roots. When I first moved here in 2001, I thought that that all London's history, like all the tourist sites, lay North of the river. I was wrong. Scratch the surface and this place is older and stranger than you think.

The houses on my street are modern; but they are built on Musto's Field, the name a corruption of 'Moot-Stow', a medieval village meeting place. The unremarkable woodland overlooking the garden is a remnant of the primeval Great North Wood which became Norwood. A wood notorious for outlaws, gypsies, hermits and other strange folk.

Our River Effra runs was diverted into an underground sewer a century ago. What hidden creatures flop and scuttle down there, what unhallowed Things are buried beneath those old oak trees, trees untouched since Druids sacrificed beneath them? I mused, and Shadows from Norwood crawled forth...

Follow the series on Facebook here - https://www.facebook.com/ShadowsFromNorwood

Customer reviews

5 star		66%
4 star		22%
3 star		8%
2 star		2%
1 star		1%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Glen Robinson

Great research, needs some editing

Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2016

Verified Purchase

The basic premise is that technology on drones has developed so dramatically in recent years that small swarms of them could threaten even the United States military, including our own massive nuclear supercarriers. I had initial objections to this premise, as likely most readers will have, but Hambling does a very thorough job of going step by step through his argument and documenting every point with government and commercial sources that seem to know what they are talking about.

Most people are familiar with the drones that are used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan that look like pilotless gliders and carry names like Predator and Raptor. Those are still being used, actually quite extensively. But Hambling states that the move has gone to smaller and smaller craft, ostensibly for reconnaissance, and the military is using them now, even on a unit basis. Many of them look like the small quadcopters you see sold at Best Buy and Radio Shack. In fact, competition among commercial electronics firms has the military in many cases buying their equipment straight off the rack rather than waiting for their own R & D to develop it.

At the same time, advancements in explosives development has made larger booms come from much smaller packages, meaning that a very small quadcopter could be responsible for decimating as much as an entire building. The premise is frightening.

There are some problems with this book, however. It's self published, and there are many proofreading errors in it. He does a great job of including sources, which I am very grateful, but he builds an argument that still feels one sided. Often it sounds as if the military is either totally stupid and ignoring a potential problem, or that they just aren't telling him what their possible solution is. In either case, the picture is only half there, I believe.

The book goes on longer than I thought it needed to. I thought there was lots of good information here, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject, but there may be some areas that might call for some skimming.

12 people found this helpful

Helpful

Randy Stafford

Are You Ready to Be Droned and Droned and Droned Again?

Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2019

Verified Purchase

To paraphrase a prophet, “Beat your iPhones into swords, and turn your Christmas toys into spears: let the weak say, I am strong.”

This self-published work draws upon David Hambling’s extensive writings about modern drone technology for various magazines. It may be four years old, but it’s still worth reading. The kindle versions has extensive links to various online resources, and Hambling’s blog swarm-troopers.com has kept current with news on the types of drones central to this story. Hambling’s presentation seems to almost be intended as a concisely written academic precis on the subject with an abstract given for each chapter.

I haven’t kept that current with developments in drone technology, so this book was valuable.
Valuable and frightening.

The first thing one learns is that militaries have been messing about with unmanned aerial vehicles since 1849 when an attempt was made to bomb Venice with unmanned balloons. The British military developed a remote-controlled airplane in 1916. Drones piloted remotely via onboard tv cameras were successfully deployed by the U.S. Navy in 1943. A Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter (that would be DASH -- this book is full of often strained military acronyms) was developed in the early 1960s.

So why did it take until 1993 for the U.S. military (actually the CIA) to finally deploy, in a reconnaissance mission, the GNAT-750, predecessor to the famous Predator drone?

Here we see a common theme in the story, particularly in the world driver of weapons development, the U.S. military: “white-scarf syndrome”. That, in the aviation wings of the U.S. military, especially the United Stated Air Force, is the manifestation of an old theme: the highly-skilled, elite, single warrior losing his status and his role in combat and trying to prolong the inevitable. Pikemen rendered the mounted knight obsolete. Musket-wielding peasants did the same with the samurai (though, of course, Japan’s peculiar history let them hold on for centuries before the final reckoning).

In America, the cult of the fighter pilot has reached its apotheosis with that ultimate projection of America’s non-nuclear capabilities: the aircraft carrier. It’s also led to its ultimate absurdity: the F-35 fighter. Its unit costs, depending on whom you believe and what model you talk about, are between $85 and $185 million.

There’s another downfall to manned fighter aircraft: the extraordinary costs and lengths modern Western nations will devote to preventing one of those expensive fighter pilots from being killed or captured.

The unit costs of drones are much less in terms of cost and the vulnerability of their directors.

Drone development also reverses the direction of technology’s flow as documented in Hambling’s own Weapons Grade. No longer does development start in the military and seep its way to civilian applications. The smartphone, with its small package of GPS navigation, cameras, and data processing, in particular has aided drone development. The commercial competition of smartphone development has accelerated the power of drones. “A drone is simply a smartphone with wings, and the wings are the cheap part.”

Hambling emphasizes small drones because, at the time of the book’s writing, 90% of the Pentagon’s drones weren’t the famed Reapers and Predators. They were small drones.

Three issues for drones, the possible limitations on their use, are addressed.

The first is the same limitation on battery power that bedevils consumer electronics. But the common lithium ion battery is not the only possible technology, but, putting aside possible alternatives still being researched, there are other options: fuel cells, solar cells (small drones, because of their size, are much better suited to being entirely solar powered), and simply stealing power for a battery recharge from an electric line. There are “biomimetic” options as well. Drones could perch between flights to save fuel. They can use the same aerial maneuvers to save energy that various birds do.

The second problem is who flies the drone and how is it controlled in a long-distance environment often out of sight and with the enemy mounting jamming defenses. The answer is you can program the drone ahead of time and use “artificial intelligence” to help it carry out its missions and self-modify its instructions as well as seek out targets for death, destruction, or surveillance.

So how much mayhem can a small drone carry out? More than you might think. In a chapter that was the most informative and startling to me, Hambling tells us. The big factor is the closeup precision the drone enables. That enables smaller payloads, and there a bunch of options. The Tec Torch slices through steel using a flashlight sized device and a small fuel cartridge. Thermobarics are enhanced explosives. A four pound charge can take down a building. Small incendiary charges can be carried drones. (The U.S. and Japan, in World War Two, tried just that with, respectively, bats and unmanned balloons.) Tanks can be taken out with relatively small charges if properly directed. And, of course, you can use good old fashioned firearms on a drone including an 12 gauge shotgun weighing less than two pounds. Drones themselves can be used to fly into jet engines. Non-lethal options include “laser dazzlers” to blind people.

Or, for spy purposes, you can tap into radio communications and wi-fi with a drone.

But it’s the “swarm” part of the title that’s truly important. You don’t have to worry about battery power if you continuously fly a swarm of drones, replacing individual drones when a recharge is needed. You can offload piloting and data processing to a flying mosaic of processors. “Quantity”, Joseph Stalin said, “has a quality all its own”. Not every drone has to get through to the enemy airfield or jet fighter or the radar equipment of an aircraft carrier. Mount a swarm of drones whose unit cost is under $10,000 and you can render that F-35 inoperable or engage in “aerial denial” of a piece of real estate. Individual drones can successively target until it’s destroyed.

The defensive response is, of course, a swarm of your own, an option Hambling explores in the book and the related website. That part is still theoretical, but, lest you think Hambling is just engaged in abstract theorizing, the book is full of technical details on the drones in use and prototypes built by the time of the book’s publication.

And don’t think standard techniques of arms control are going to be of any use. Most of drone technology is international and commercial. Anyone can buy it. Iran and its allies in the Middle East have already used, in combat, drones they built. And only one person has to come up with a design and the results can be publicized worldwide and sometimes built – at least in part – by a 3-D printer.

Yes, the weak are about to become stronger. Military tactics and weapons development and production in America will need to be seriously rethought if it is to maintain its military supremacy.

And using drones isn’t just a game for nations. Terrorists can use it. Biological agents and lethal chemicals are lightweight payloads. Terrorists or a nation could offload a drone swarm from a cargo container and make life miserable for the inhabitants of a city. We are in the same position civilians were doing the First World War. The drone will probably get through.

And it doesn’t take much imagination to see how this could be tool could be used by governments against dissidents. Government options range from merely physical and electronic surveillance to that and one of those thermobaric payloads delivered to a dissident meeting house. Or you could simply be very ostentatious in your surveillance as a deterrent.

One suspects that writers of science fiction and thrillers have already mined this book for ideas.

But this is, after all mostly a history book now. We’re further along now in this timeline of potential dislocation, suppression, and terror. We now live in the prophet’s “valley of decision”.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Peter M. Kilkenny

The things. Three of them.

Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2017

Verified Purchase

Three things.

#1 - Fire your editor. If I'm reading your book and wishing I had a red pen to circle the typos/grammatical errors, your editor sucks.

#2 - Outstanding work on hypothesis as it relates to potential uses of various types of drones and your history of unmanned airborne whatnots was quite the interesting read.

#3 - You seriously need to update your information sources on actual military operations. Your historical references are solid but man oh man, your information on current military ops are less than heroic. (Ex. A patriot battalion can fire 16 missiles. That's just flat out incorrect.)

That aside, it was a decent way to kill time.

10 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Mike Olley

Great book - easy, fascinating read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 23, 2020

Verified Purchase

Great product only wish the country I paid for the item in (the UK), got a fair and reasonable slice of taxes of the item to pay for the roads the delivery driver used, the police to police them and the NHS staff for those who fall foul of them - you get the idea.

6 people found this helpful

R. murphy

well structured interesting read on history and capabilities of small drones

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 5, 2020

Verified Purchase

Just bought a small drone, found this while looking for drone related books. Very good on how military drones have evolved from specialised hardware and software, to use consumer electronics and open source software.

One person found this helpful

Liz Stevens

A Trooper of a book with Swarms of info.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 18, 2016

Verified Purchase

A grabbing title which gives this non-fiction book a real sci-fi feel and deservedly so. Drones have been a futuristic phenomenon mentioned in many sci-fi books and films, but we are now in that future. Drones have been used effectively and now every Military Unit wants one, and they are even the toy of the moment to be seen being flown by toy shop staff in every Mall.

David Hambling offers an easy to read conversational tone throughout the book which keeps you flipping the pages and wanting more, the content is relevant and flows well; each chapter having an entertaining quote which is then explained in greater detail. Every fact is researched and proper references given for further study if you so wish.
A must-have book for anyone interested in modern weapons, warfare or non-fiction writing. Although I am not often found reading military books this is really worth the time and effort. A super book and I will be reading more of his books.

7 people found this helpful

cwar

You can't ignore this

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 31, 2020

Verified Purchase

A really excellent book. Very well written and very engaging.

One person found this helpful

carol grundy

Excellent summary of drone tech

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 27, 2021

Verified Purchase

A fantastic, well researched book which takes a broad, technical subject and sums it up perfectly. The range of current and future technologies it covers is amazing.

See all reviews