Drones in Whiteout: Autonomous Systems Built for the Harshest Theatre on Earth - Hardcover

Merakai, Jonas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 937794614X ISBN 13: 9789377946142

Verlag: VIJ Books, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

In the Arctic, history has always been written by logistics: who can move, see, and endure when distance stretches supply lines and weather erases the horizon. Today, unmanned systems promise persistent presence across the High North, yet the same theatre that rewards reach also punishes dependence. When a drone is asked to fly through blowing snow, land in gusts, and report through intermittent links, its true capabilities are revealed not in demonstrations but in the slow arithmetic of failure, repair, and recovery. Drones in Whiteout argues that Arctic autonomy is primarily an engineering and sustainment challenge, not only a tactical one. It shows how cold-weather reliability is designed (or not) into materials, enclosures, and software behaviours; how sensor degradation turns perception into a probabilistic wager rather than a clear picture; how whiteout navigation exposes the brittleness of assumptions about maps, references, and GNSS integrity; and how communications loss forces hard choices about authority, transparency, and safe fallback modes. Across platform design, power management, testing, maintenance cycles, and operator rules, Jonas Merakai maps the tension between the promise of unmanned independence and the reality that autonomy still rests on fragile physical and organisational foundations. Written for students, general readers, and analysts who want a framework rather than a catalogue of gadgets, the book provides a disciplined way to evaluate autonomous systems by their control limits, recoverability, and operational sustainment. Readers will come away understanding why "can it fly" is the wrong question in the Arctic, and why the decisive measure is whether a system can keep being useful when the environment and an intelligent adversary attack the same few dependencies again and again.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonas Merakai writes at the intersection of airpower, emerging military technologies, and the institutions that decide how force is used. His work is driven by a simple concern: when tools change faster than doctrines, the greatest risks are often conceptual - sloppy definitions, borrowed metaphors, and unexamined assumptions about control. He approaches autonomy and swarming as questions of strategy and governance as much as engineering, with an emphasis on how real organisations translate technical possibility into rules, training, and operational practice.Merakai is interested in the way modern air combat inherits older patterns of thought: the bomber debates, air defence revolutions, electronic warfare contests, and the recurring belief that a new machine will finally make war clean, quick, or decisive. Against that background, he focuses on the less glamorous determinants of effectiveness: communications links, identification under uncertainty, logistics capacity, and the design of command authority. His style is analytical but readable, aimed at readers who want clarity without hype and scepticism without cynicism.A quiet thread running through his writing is the long memory of twentieth-century air war and its landscapes - airfields, memorials, and contested skies that turned industrial capacity and doctrinal choices into national fate. That historical gravity informs his insistence that autonomy is not merely a technical upgrade, but a shift in who bears risk, how decisions are made, and what can be credibly controlled when violence moves at machine speed.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: VIJ Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 937794614X
• ISBN 13: 9789377946142
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 330
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland