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

Merakai, Jonas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9377940745 ISBN 13: 9789377940744

Publisher: Vij Books, 2026

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Jonas Merakai is a nonfiction writer who approaches defence technology as a question of institutions, engineering discipline, and the limits of control under uncertainty. His work is guided by a simple premise: complex systems only earn trust when their failure modes are understood, rehearsed, and governed with clarity. Rather than treating autonomy as a destination, he is interested in autonomy as a relationship between people, machines, and the environments that expose their weakest assumptions.Merakai writes in an editorial, research-forward style that aims to be useful to readers who need more than headlines but less than proprietary technical documentation. He is drawn to subjects where strategy becomes tangible in material choices: batteries and thermal margins, connectors and corrosion, training syllabi and maintenance logs. In that sense, his attention often returns to the long history of polar operations, where exploration narratives, Cold War basing, and contemporary surveillance all share a common theme: distance punishes improvisation, and weather is an actor with agency.As an author, he favours careful distinctions over dramatic certainty. He aims to map the boundary between what is technically plausible and what is operationally responsible, especially in settings where communications are fragile and recovery is slow. Drones in Whiteout reflects that commitment by treating reliability, sustainment, and human oversight not as supporting details, but as the foundations on which any credible concept of Arctic autonomy must rest.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vij Books
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9377940745
• ISBN 13: 9789377940744
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 330