Drones gave Azerbaijan a decisive advantage in the recent conflict with Armenia: https://www.csis.org/analysis/air-and-missile-war-nagorno-ka...
no. Azerbajan/Turkey went into it only after verifying that it works, to the devastating effect, against the Russian made air-defenses in Syria and Libya. Now Ukraine has bought these drones and is starting their production. In the next year or two we'll see them being used to the same great effect in Donbass. So far Russia hasn't managed to come up with any meaningful defense. If anything the recognition of the issue has only started to dawn on them, and by the time they manage something the Turkish/Ukranian (they discuss collaborative development) drones will improve another level up - drone capabilities at the current stage (beginning of the hockey stick) are much faster to improve - add speed, a bit of stealth, [partial] autonomy, coordinated swarming. It is a new paradigm shifting generation of warfare like iron navy ships, machine guns, planes, missiles, etc. were in their respective times.
Sure often drones fly in straight lines or hover. But in an adversarial environment they could easily move pseudo randomly and be quite difficult to kill.
Nothing we have now (publicly) is going to do a damn against a shipping container full of 2-5 lb drones each carrying 1 lb of C4 in a swarm with cheap off the shelf sensors going 100 mph nap of the earth in a distributed pattern. And that is currently entirely doable with off the shelf drones using existing software and published techniques for peanuts. Add in some decent programming and logistics talent, and that is a huge problem.
Existing technology can take down conventional drones through Electronic Warfare and EW scales to an infinite number of drones assuming each drone is vulnerable.
I know of no existing (human proximity safe) EW that can handle optical based or internal (IMU) inertial autonomous flight, and both of those are more than good enough in this scenario (though optical may limit the upper speed bounds depending on the onboard processing capabilities). IMU based (pre programmed) could easily allow no active sensor mode, though would require pre-scouting the route.
The US Army is looking to field a demonstrator by 2022 & deploy by 2024.
They're exploring both laser and microwave / EM for the counter-UAS role. In complement to existing SAMs for higher-value/capability targets.
And since China makes like 99% of the parts used in drones, they very well could already have a couple hundred of those lying around and we’d never know.
My nightmare scenario is someone flying hundreds of these in formation on a stadium full of people. They could be launched from a parking lot from a single van or pickup truck. If you sacrifice the ability to hover by giving them wings, you might get very high range and not have to risk yourself at all while launching a devastating attack.
http://tasvideos.org/5384S.html
Check it out, it's incredibly fun:
There's an entire category for movies containing arbitrary code execution:
Not sure a CIWS system that can hit a mach 2 missile that doesn't dodge would necessarily handle the same $$$ spent on a N cheaper drones. How many minutes of firing do modern CIWS systems typically have?
Loitering at max engagement range and dodging might well end up using ammo at a rate that the CIWS can not sustain.
Also I suspect any CIWS can get a kill on just about any part of a missile, where drones often have very small kill zones (often battery or gas, payload, motor(s), and control) that might well be just a few % of the size of the drone.
I googled the phalanx, looks like it typically has a drum of ammo that lasts for about 3 seconds. Is that 3 drones worth? 10? 100?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdwjcayPuag
Edit: Look they even made a smaller system! https://youtu.be/Drm3kdDYBI4
I guarantee you that just grazing a drone with a 20mm round will still kill it, even if you don't "hit" anything critical. :P
Sure the 20mm round represents an amazing amount of kinetic energy, but the drone doesn't offer any resistance, and I wouldn't expect the round to even notice. Sure the disturbance in the air might throw the drone for a few loops, but any decent software will recover.
Sure hitting more substantial targets the target itself becomes of the shrapnel that causes an ever increasing zone of damage. Not clear to me that a piece of paper or thin fabric would exhibit the same behavior.
1. I think you're conflating "cheap agile drone" with "foam or balsa+durakote fixed wing aircraft".
2. Probable engagement aspect for a drone is not "straight up", as would be necessary for your scenario.
3. A little itty bitty hole in a wing does a whole lot more than you'd think.
4. Expecting a high velocity cannon round to just punch a clean hole in the wing is a little much.
Foam's a bit more robust, but a small pebble at a few miles per hour has wrecked my whole durakote day before.
And yes, there's degenerate cases, like you could have a whole sheet of dollar tree foam board maybe take a hit or two.
Explosive (self-destructing) and incendiary
https://www.gd-ots.com/munitions/medium-caliber-ammunition/2...
Modern antiship missiles have complex programs. Some are capable of flying in formation with each other, with one missile flying high for visibility and communicating with the other missiles in the formation that are flying very low. If/when the missile on top is destroyed, another missile in the formation can be automatically selected to take its place.
That ciws will likely exhaust its magazine before it can take out all the drones unless I’m missing something.
https://youtu.be/1DXpPmpmcak?t=365 (watch this entire video for air defense against saturation attacks)
Lasers, electronic countermeasures, tangly stuff, etc, are much more attractive than systems that fire thousands of cannon rounds per minute or that launch explosive missiles.
Whereas naval Phalanx systems fire tungsten armor-piercing rounds, the C-RAM uses the 20–mm HEIT-SD (High-Explosive Incendiary Tracer, Self-Destruct) ammunition, originally developed for the M163 Vulcan Air Defense System.[26][34] These rounds explode on impact with the target, or on tracer burnout, thereby greatly reducing the risk of collateral damage from rounds that fail to hit their target.
Not that the risk is zero, but at least it's "greatly reduced".
A CIWS is not a reasonable way to stop drone attacks on civilian targets.
The thing is exactly that those drones are so slow, and low.
Phalanx performance against sea skimming missiles is know to be poor.
And that on dielectric, flat sea surface.
Even military drones weighting few tons can fly autonomously under 100m.
Ironically, it's now depressions in the terrain which will provide more air defence since they will force terrain following drones, and cruise missiles to move at oblique angles.
Basically the problem is the same as with low, and slow cruise missiles, except worse.
The research pivoted very early to "training humans to more successfully defend against small drone attacks". I'm not sure how much success they've had or what success is defined as for something like this.
That is what birdshot is for. Birdshot, e.g. "No. 9 or 10" shot, are tiny lead BBs about 2mm diameter. Because they are small, they have a large surface area to mass ratio, and consequently, they fall back down to earth at a low, safe speed. When they land on dry leaves, they bounce off and sound a bit like rain. When it is shot into the air and falls back down onto you, it won't even bruise you, let alone injure you. (However it can kill if fired directly at somebody.)
If you can hit it with a pistol it’s easy to hit.
But I guess taking down a drone is not like taking out a mortar shell. It is probably much easier with some sort of flak or even launching a net.
Very. The calculation made for each round could be irrelevant before they travel 500m. Drones also have no obligation to approach at the same convenient high angle mortars do. 2-3 drones weaving between buildings faster than a human can aim? Sounds terrifying.
A target with a 300mm frontal diameter, capable of evading at 10g, is expected to require 6 rounds to achieve a P_hit of 0.5 at 200m range, based on the parameters of your typical Phalanx CIWS. Said Phalanx weapon system might fire a burst of 1s duration in such an engagement, which is 75 rounds.
For a missile engagement, that's a problematic number, but for a drone that's probably only moving a few dozen m/s and carrying a small payload, it's an entirely satisfactory engagement.
Phalanx is an early 1980s weapon system. The Army is going to be fielding directed-energy SHORAD systems next year, equipped with 50kW lasers.
A few dozen m/s is probably a good estimate for quadcopter style drones, but low hundreds m/s should be easy for fixed wing drones, so at 200 meter engagement range (that paper makes it pretty clear that maneuvering targets are hard beyond that) there is only time to hit a few drones before they arrive.
So maybe drone swarms will work even against current CIWS.
Sure, but current drone swarms wouldn't.
A drone optimally randomly dodging at treetop height is a much more difficult target.
Which are available to how many militaries?
have you seen a harop? its huge,its built to fly slow and for a long while and carry big payload and has zero evasion capability
Not all drones are AI, there are remote drones that are very fast and very hard to kill, pulling Gforces that would make normal pilots pass out. With the US declaration that drones are "munitions", we have effectively stated that we can launch them into the airspace of countries that we aren't technically at war with, and claim it was "border fire", like we did with Afghanistan.
How? They fly just few hundred meters above the ground, launch from field runways, and for the price of a single B-2, a country can buy 2000 of them.
Jamming? Even a country like Turkey was able to devise a passable inertial navigation, and and programming for autonomous operation way exceeding an easy to trick "attack anything that moves" mode.
To counter them, you will need a very sizeable air force fitted with best radars possible to track them down individually, and strafe with a cannon (since no missile currently can lock onto something so small, slow, cold, and low flying.)
Or, you know, currently fielded SHORAD systems and CIWS?
Even if that wouldn't be a problem, you will still need really a lot of that.
Either self-radar or tied into a broader net.
That's current-gen, repurposed from something designed against cruise missiles.
Next gen will probably optimize for or supplement with lighter weight projectiles, depending on whether lighter or heavier drones proliferate.
100-300km - way outside of range of artillery. And they are all field runway launchable, so you don't really get anything from bombing the airfield.
And most of them are made to fly below heights at which any air defence is effective.
The drones flying slow, and low makes them harder to kill, not easier.
A transcription error that has been carried forward over several sources, apparently. The general undoubtedly said "field-expedient", meaning devices that can be cobbled together in the field. Take a commercial drone from ToysRUs and tape a hand grenade to it, and you have a field-expedient war drone.
So the relevant comparison isn't a slow cheap drone versus a Tomahawk or a Toyota; it's a hundred thousand slow cheap drones versus a Tomahawk, or two thousand slow cheap drones versus a Toyota. A hundred thousand slow cheap drones is enough to coerce all the officers of any army into resigning; all you need is the realtime whereabouts of their parents, siblings, children, and spouses, and effective ransomware that reliably spares the children of officers who have already resigned, or who haven't yet been contacted. And no CIWS is going to help with that, even if it doesn't run out of ammo after the first fifteen drones, because the children aren't on an aircraft carrier or an army base.
Jef Raskin pointed most of this out in 02001 in an underrated essay, 'next time it can be worse'. At least so far, it hasn't been.
Massed drones absolutely can wreck terrible destruction, death by a thousand cuts to any facility or base or airfield. But the kind of amassed yet precise strike against a hundred targeted individuals, with smart targeting and somehow knowledge of their career status?! Come on.
I wouldn't even finish that movie, let alone fund that proposal.
keep in mind that what is happening today is not what will happen tomorrow or what can happen in five years
you are rejecting the possibility because of its unfamiliarity, much as the navy rejected the possibility of a surprise attack on pearl harbor
Pearl harbor was easy, required no new tech, just will. And Pearl Harbor was well known before the attack, had been demonstrated years before. This isn't that.
Rather than go through and carefully solve the fascinating puzzle of how to destroy civilization step by step, I'm just going to point out that these things are not actually very difficult. Instead of hoping that the next Daesh can't recruit anyone who knows how to build an IMSI catcher, write a Facebook app, or use LinkedIn (or VKontakte if their adversary is Russia), think about what happens when there's a conflict between two adversaries that can.
> The US could. Russia, China. After some testing. But not the next ISIS.
Certainly the three states you mention could develop that capability, yes, although they don't currently have Slaughterbots fleets ready to launch. And Daesh certainly wasn't able to develop it, although they did drop a bunch of unguided hand grenades on people from remotely-piloted quadcopters. But what about Turkey? France? Rebels in the West Bank less incompetent than Hamas? The Zetas, who as I understand it have been running their own cellphone networks for 10 years? The Sinaloa cartel, which has thousands of drones carrying contraband across the US border? The Jalisco cartel, which is already targeting the families of police officers? The US-backed Guaidó faction in Venezuela? The US-backed military dictatorship currently running Egypt?
This isn't something that requires the budget of an aircraft carrier, and it's not something you can see from a satellite before it happens.
I've actually worked in this area before. There's more attention on this than you might imagine, and less than it deserves. There's also better ways to use drones to cause terror and disrupt operations that I obv won't get into. Maybe its not tech fantasy as I originally said, but it is much further out than you originally said as well, and it's a bit overkill. If you wanted to have the effect of causing fear in soldiers using drones, I think (but don't know) there are easier ways that don't require the same limiting assumptuons about technology, logistics and scaling.
Except that I think it's kind of impossible and we are basically doomed.
Hamas sends thousands of rockets in that budget range and nobody is scared that rocket swarms are going to kill thousands of Israelis. IDF retaliation killed more innocent people in a single bombing than all Hamas rockets combined.
retail, and battery-powered. what will a $10 bom get you with a nitromethane-powered engine or a glider dropped from a helium balloon
> The type of drone that people are scared of costs at least $1000.
they need to rethink that. stop fighting the last war
> Hamas sends thousands of rockets in that budget range and nobody is scared that rocket swarms are going to kill thousands of Israelis
that's because hamas is too dumb to put glider wings and ardupilot on each rocket and possibly too deprived of facebook and imei-logger data to know where to find the specific thousands of israelis who are family members of the invading officers
'our enemy might be as incompetent as the hamas model rocketry club' is not a great way to think out how to provide security
this is not a dream. this is a nightmare
listen, i know this scenario isn't happening today. but it's going to happen within the next few years, and the fact that it isn't happening today isn't much of an argument against that
There have already been more than a half dozen articles on drones in Parameters, the U.S. Army War College's journal. "The coercive logic of militant drone use" [1] is worth reading. This covers how non-state groups have used drones, what worked and what didn't. The US Army is unused to fighting under a hostile sky, and now, a few times, they've had to. "In 2017, then commander of US Special Operations Command General Raymond A. Thomas noted, “[the] most daunting problem [of 2016] was an adaptive enemy who, for a time, enjoyed tactical superiority in the airspace under our conventional air superiority in the form of commercially available drones and fuel-expedient (?) weapons systems, and our only available response was small arms fire.” They also mention a drone disabling an Israeli naval vessel in 2006.
There's been a lot more military use of drones than is generally realized. Much of it is for recon. Commercial hobbyist drones are more than good enough for finding out what the enemy is up to, and most drone use by militant groups is for that.
So far, that article indicates, drones have been unable to yield a decisive advantage in any conflict. At least to militant groups.
Not many people read Parameters. That paper has only 65 downloads. More should.
[1] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...