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US Army Wants Weapon To Destroy Drone Swarms
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. military loves to use drones against enemies who have no defense against them: think terrorist cells, ISIS/IS/ISIL, the Taliban etc. However, drones are getting cheaper to make, easier to use, and more technologically sophisticated. The day is coming when U.S. military planners will have to defend against drones. And they may have to fight off lots of them.
They already seem to have some ideas — their research proposal says such an anti-drone weapon would "disrupt these platforms' autonomous flight-control and navigation capabilities or cueing a weapons system like the Remotely-Operated Weapon Station (RWS) or other medium or large-caliber weapon." The system would be mounted on vehicles or at Army installations. More interesting, the Army proposal also notes that it might be mounted on UAVs, which raises the possibility of using drones to shoot down other drones.
They already seem to have some ideas — their research proposal says such an anti-drone weapon would "disrupt these platforms' autonomous flight-control and navigation capabilities or cueing a weapons system like the Remotely-Operated Weapon Station (RWS) or other medium or large-caliber weapon." The system would be mounted on vehicles or at Army installations. More interesting, the Army proposal also notes that it might be mounted on UAVs, which raises the possibility of using drones to shoot down other drones.
an EMP!
No way ISIS can win against the Federal Aviation Administration.
How about using infrared beams to disrupt or just plain simple water sprinklers (using some heavy oil) to make the fins too heavy to fly?
of course we're going to see hot drone-on-drone action
how could you even posit a world where that doesn't happen
Wouldn't a tactical EMP burst take out a swarm od drones in fairly short order? Yeah, that might require a tactical nuke detonated at ground level, but still it's doable...
Wouldn't a tactical EMP burst do the job in fairly short order? I imagine a tactical nuke detonated at ground level near perpendicular to a drone swarm could get the job done... So long as the burst was line of site to the swarm with nothing else within the blast radius.
belt-fed buckshot machine gun seems like a cheaper solution.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Ground based? Why not use the existing 20mm anti mortar/anti missile systems?
Are they concerned about swarms of little bitty drones each carrying 0.25kg of C4? Replace the 20mm with a nice powerful shotgun and keep the automation already developed.
good ole jammin. Nothing new here.
What about a shotgun with an improved cylinder or modified choke? Instead of something fancy or expensive, KISS.
Call South Korea and ask any 12 year old how to best defend against a Zerg attack.
stop implying that what's wrong with the US military is that they seek advantage instead of a "fair fight".
What's wrong with the US military is that it is being misused to
attack countries which have not attacked the United States.
And idiots like you don't even care.
I did Read The Fine Article, and it referenced my first thought, which was "don't the cheap terrorists' drones fly low and slow?". Sure enough, the average third world drone is most likely of the variety limited to 500 feet and maybe full bicycle groundspeed. The F-35 on the other hand...
So is this really a military need? Or just an excuse to spend cash on a new defense system? If ISIS or ISIL or OASIS (didn't they break up after that last album?) or whatever gets drones to fly up to serious altitudes, they're going to be larger Predator-sized clones (clones of drones, as it were) which can be shot down with bullet-sized bullets from the aforementioned F-35 or F-Anything for that matter.
(Sidenote, the 'F-Anything' would be an awesome combat fighter designation.)
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
The problem with an EMP is you can't focus it. Focus an EMP and blast the electronics out of the sky. If anything you could disrupt the motors.
These things are going to become a major problem. If you have enough of them, you could outfit them with grapeshot and basically saturate an area. If they're cheap enough you could cover a really, really, really large area. Put lots of plastic explosive on them and you could do some serious damage to buildings and depots.
Today, a drone swarm would be basically unstoppable. Take a bunch of parrot AR drones and some plastic explosive and you'd be able to destroy or heavily damage any facility from afar. Good luck trying to stop them with anything.
We've had a near-ideal solution for decades.
my videogame experience wins again.
Like the old fashioned barrage balloons? or is that too simple?
It doesn't take much to take down a drone, so a little flak ought to do wonders. That or AEGIS systems and conventional ammunition.
the Drone War has!
Sorry
Drones shooting down other drones is so meta.
They already have a substantial network of directed energy weapon technology, which are quite capable of remotely knocking drones out of the sky, through a variety of means including destruction and EMP to disable it. There's also remote control potential through Signals Intelligence. I don't think the US is in true danger of attack as they say..
In fact this is patented technology. Look up Raytheon's multi-functional radio frequency directed energy system. That patent says,
"An RFDE system includes an RFDE transmitter and at least one RFDE antenna. The RFDE transmitter and antenna direct high power electromagnetic energy towards a target sufficient to cause high energy damage or disruption of the target. The RFDE system further includes a targeting system for locating the target. The targeting system includes a radar transmitter and at least one radar antenna for transmitting and receiving electromagnetic energy to locate the target. The RFDE system also includes an antenna pointing system for aiming the at least one RFDE antenna at the target based on the location of the target as ascertained by the targeting system. Moreover, at least a portion of the radar transmitter or the at least one radar antenna is integrated within at least a portion of the RFDE transmitter or the at least one RFDE antenna."
It mentions targeting humans, air craft, atmosphere and more. It images, tracks, and can destroy using the same radio frequency apparatus. http://www.google.com/patents/US7629918
Another patent for disabling vehicles through directed EMPs is Apparatus for producing EMP, the last patent says:
"An apparatus which includes a plurality of sub-atmospheric vehicular devices; a substantially high power microwave transmitter located on each of the vehicular devices; and a waveguide for directing microwave energy from the high power microwave transmitter to a point in free space. The microwave energy from the microwave transmitters is directed from each of the plurality of vehicular devices to the point in free space." https://www.google.com/patents/US8785840.
Signals Intelligence has this deployed across the entire globe including the United States today in a network of hundreds of satellites and large ground based phased array antenna at sea, on land, etc. They already have a defense network for this and a delivery system.
It also targets humans and is responsible for untold slaughter. obamasweapon.com.
You mean when the US military attacks despotic governments that torture and enslave their own people. Yeah that's a misuse of the military. It's better to allow those people to be oppressed.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A very simple WW2 weapon that worked very well against tightly clustered enemy airplanes.
It doesn't work as well today for a lot of reasons but mostly it is that you don't see raids by 100 bombers anymore.
If you want to drop SWARMS of flying aircraft, flak is great. They bunch up and they die the same way everyone in a foxhole dies if someone throws a grenade in there. It doesn't matter if there were ten people in that fox hole... they're done.
Same thing with flak. Set it up so it is computer controlled with timed fuses the same way they had timed fuses in WW2.
In WW2, the flak shells were set to explode at specific altitudes that the bombers were all flying in. So you could have massed flak fire from the ground all detonating in the flight path of the bomber swarm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Ships still use Flak to defend themselves. I believe they call it "defensive artillery"... the concept being that if a missile is coming at the ship, they can fire a salvo of exploding shells to create a wall of death that the missile cannot cross intact.
The same thing could be used against a swarm of small drones.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I would integrate components for tracking, directed energy, ECM and active defense. The tracking component would use radar/radar/radio-direction finding to locate the threats. The DEW component will have wide beam and narrow beam emitters. The wide beam will attempt to blind swarms coming from all directions while the narrow beam tries to defeat individual drone units. Software will analyze threat and prioritize targets for the beams. Once the drone enters a certain range, the system activates a GPS jammer to defeat satellite guidance and pops smoke to defeat optically or laser-guided drone swarms. If drones still penetrate this layer, explosive reactive armor, similar to ADS detonates at the swarm.
Ukrainian troops fighting in the East of the country suffer a great deal from the separatists' Russia-provided drones — those transmit signals to Russian artillery right across the border, which then targets Ukrainians with devastating precision. If they could kick those drones out of the sky, life would become much easier.
It would seem, any counter-measure America can help with could be field-tested right away — all without hurting a single human enemy.
How to do it? I used to think, small rockets could be used. Miniaturized copies of the early SAMs, created by the long declassified designs — current generation of drones aren't really made for evading such a thing...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Aside from the bit about using "drones against enemies who have no defense against them" (they ARE our enemies, after all), I think that this could potentially become very interesting. I can imagine a future when both sides of a conflict have drones that they use for combat, scouting, etc., and that those drones are constantly being upgraded with more powerful AI in order to combat the other side's increasingly more powerful AI in dogfights.
In fact, such a thing could be done as a contest. Get together two teams of programmers and have them write code for a battalion of drones, then unleash those drones on each other. Might be fun.
Hollywood predicted the future.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Sounds familiar:
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots.
Thank you."
Imagine all the people...
i hear the U.S. Army has a fairly powerful laser which can cut steel... I wouldn't think it too hard for them to mount it on a computer aimed turret that just hits anything the radar sees that is of a particular size. Obviously you would only turn that setup on when you need it, but I would think one really fast turret might protect a whole city of mounted on a tall building (and assuming they get a really smart targeting algorithm that minimizes collateral)
What do they mean? The cheesy plastic quadcopters that every hobby store carries? Seems a simple garden hose should take care of those.
What is a drone to the Army? Something bigger? Maybe a firehose?
Are you suggesting the military overthrow the US government?
What's stopping terrorist organisations from purchasing drones attaching explosives to them and flying them directly into densely populated areas from the comfort of their own vehicle?... now imagine 100, 200, 500, 1000+ drones flying into cities with explosives strapped to them guided by GPS to blow up at specific locations. GG
These drones wouldn't be picked up by radar and wouldn't be seen as a threat by other people as they are too common now a days. I bet you a million dollars the moment this happens you'll not only have all countries ban drones but push and win to exterminate any remaining rights we have.
Is there an easy way for a machine or person to remotely and quickly work out whats a drone and whats a bird? Working out how to knock something relatively small out of the sky seems to me to be the easy part.
Birds do not have rotors.
Fighter planes are designated F-xx ...
FM- means fighter, multi place
So Fighter, Ultralight must be
Killing individual drones or even swarms is purely a last-ditch defense. The best solution is to kill the control centre and the drone operators. You don't win the air war by shooting down planes, you win it by bombing the enemy airfields.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze6HPdD77Dg
You could make a 12 gauge belt fed shotgun. It was done with the MG42 and the AK47. Same idea scaled up to the PKM mechanism.
Hope that every drone has a huge, hot, heavy engine that designers did not think to try and hide.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
at the time it was designed to shoot people in the head, on the grounds outside of an embassy, but with a small tweak, it could easily target drones.
Simple - I just need a few hundred millions
Who's going to fund me ? :)
Drones against drones seems to be finally the right way to spend military expenditures. Anything is better than continuing to use drones against innocent people in deliberate political killings on souvereign foreign soil conducted outside of police authority, judicial oversight and jurisdiction and violating ratified human rights chartas.
No doubt, these drones will be more and more automatic, where commands from their human controllers become more and more abstract. Maybe now they're being flown like an RC aircraft, soon it'll be "go to this location, launch bomb to hit that location", or "fly search patterns in this area and shoot anything that doesn't respond to your coded signals out of the sky".
And so, step by step, we enter the era of robotic warfare. No matter how often the various militaries and politicians pledge that this will not happen.
I said this earlier when you hate enough, you can make anything fit into and confirm your hatred. It's a shame slashdot is headed into the fever swamps. I enjoyed the site for many years.
There's this machine that can shoot lots of mosquitoes out of the air with lasers.
Just upgrade the lasers.
You do realize that the US creates the conditions for the oppression and in many cases installs the oppressor into power, right? See: the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noreiga, just about anybody who rules the Phillippines, much of Central and South America (read General Smedley Butler's "War is a Racket" for that one), much of the rest of the Middle East, etc.
If you're a dictator who will be friendly with US business, we're all over helping you. We only pull out the "oppressed people" card or the "terrorist threat" when some dictator decides to not do business with us (again, see Saddam Hussein or Manuel Noriega).
The US has an absolutely awful history on human rights in the world, and people like you who believe the propaganda are a huge part of the problem.
Your average American would not condone this behavior--if they knew of it. The government and corporate media make sure it's downplayed and have for decades. The result is usually when you present proof to an indoctrinated person they go deeper into denial. That's the US in a nushell.
http://rt.com/news/201795-china-drone-defense-laser/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2819990/China-unveils-anti-terror-laser-cannon-shoot-drones-mile-away-100-accuracy.html
http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/03/drone-wars/
http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/3/7149315/china-is-shooting-down-drones-with-lasers
Take you pick !
Begun the Drone War has.
Some sort of anti-air battery?
Ah yes, the old "the USA is responsible for despots everywhere" argument. I'm curious... please cite the country that has this spotless record on human rights, and has altruistically advanced such rights everywhere, regardless of their own interest? Obviously any country in Europe, Russia, China, Japan, etc are out. So I'm waiting with bated breath for this shining example to the world.
In fact, please cite ANY country throughout history that has had the kind of international power the USA has had and has been as civil and restrained as the USA has been. You're going to struggle with that one.
The solutions presented seem overly complex and over engineered to me.
Given shotgun are effective against small fast targets like birds I would expect a rapid fire automatic shotgun to be at least effective against the small & miniature infantry support drones. Also using air burst ammo for existing grenade launchers.
Against larger drones then use rapid fire AA guns with air burst cannon shells.
mech evolution in action anyone?
So, something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Skynet, getting ready in a military research center near you soon...
Wealthy people get visas. Really wealthy people can buy them.
http://www.nolo.com/legal-ency...
"More interesting, the Army proposal also notes that it might be mounted on UAVs, which raises the possibility of using drones to shoot down other drones."
Sounds exactly like the kind of situation that arose in the early days of WWI ; when the enemy started using observer planes, it was natural to arm your observer planes so you could shoot down the other. Then you started getting more weapons to shoot down the armed ones. Resulting in WWI dogfights.
Throwback to 1914 is what I say.
Current generation maybe, but eventually these will aquire the same autonomous capabilities that cruise missiles have, only they'll be a lot more nimble.
Some decent planning and either satellite imagery or on the ground surveillance and you can simply pre-plot the flight path. Want to take it a step further, outfit the units with more cruise missile tech like TERCOM or DSMAC.
Sure current gen cruise missiles can use GPS and / or satellite guidance via the tail fin cameras they carry, but they work pretty well without it and you won't be launching drones from a thousand miles out.
Short distance route planning is a whole lot easier to do.
_ USA has had and has been as civil and restrained as the USA has been_
You are kidding, are you? ... You can find and read the telegram in library on congress.
US installed the bolshevik jewish communist in russia, they installed the communists in china, they installed the communists in a lot of places.
And when Hungary wanted independence from the CCCP, the white house sent a telegram to moscow, saying that "usa does not like the independent, anti-communist reqimes near CCCP border"
Technology is already here, it is called signal jamming. Just jam the frequencies that are in the area.
We could just start an Olympics of Battlebots and invite every country to send its drones, duke it out in a stadium, with pre-arranged real estate ante. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Gently reply
Wants weapons that disable highly destructive weapons. And then it wants weapons that are even more destructive than those weapons. But don't worry... 'We're the Good Guys (TM)"
Just use a GPS jammer.
For a swarm to work it needs to be cheap.
This should pretty much makes it dependent on GPS.
The interesting question is how much did the military spend to figure out what to do?
Why not just build robots to do all the work instead, so we were not using drones to prop up repressive social orders based on wage slavery?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
"Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Seriously, they need lower joule rail gun that can fire lots. It does not need to shoot 100 miles, but only 10 miles. BUT, it needs to shoot a larger numbers of rounds, more like a Gatling or Phalanx gun. And for further out, laser.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Drone swarms got you down? Use your smart bomb. Just be sure you are close enough when pod intersection happens or you might miss part of the swarm.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
An EMP might not work - because a drone don't have to be electric in nature. An EMP have no effect on the WWII V2 weapon, for example. A simple fuel-powered engine (no electronics). Guidance by mechanical gyroscope and mechanical clock.
Also, electronics not involved in communication can be shielded. Instead of radio, use laser or other light for comm. A surveillance drone don't necessarily need communication - it can fly a preprogrammed path and bring home a movie recorded from inside a faraday cage.
A third-world drone would easily go 500 km/h, which is a bit faster than a bicycle. A drone built for speed is easy - start with good rc plane . . .
Apologies if this has already been mentioned, but why not surround the installations to be protected with balloons tethered by parachute cord?
Anything trying to fly through a wall of string is bound to have issues (you may need a couple of layers since you could always just try and drive another one through the gap the first one made.
Actually, scrap that idea, someone will just build a drone with wire cutters on the front like the bat-wing had.
So... like a big net? Or... if they are all propeller based, why not some sticky nasty gunk that you can spray all over them? Block the optics, add mass and hopefully cook the motors. Or better yet...a big sticky net.
X
So, 2/3rds — not 99% — were deemed not worth intercepting. 270 of the remaining 300 were intercepted. If the thirty rockets, that did get through managed to kill 3 Israelis between them, it is fair to extrapolate, that — without the system in place — the 30 would've been killed.
Not to support the AC's figure, but Hamas rockets tend to be erratic, there's always some uncertainty as to their impact point. Especially when you're deciding whether to intercept well before impact.
So, logically speaking, some portion of the 1/3rd they decide to engage would also land in a spot that wouldn't cause damage they care enough about to justify the expense of interception, but because the impact uncertainly zone contains stuff they DO care about, they intercept anyways.
So you could have a situation where they let it go when the uncertainty zone's center is 1 mile from anything they care about, but intercept when it's within .5 miles, even though there's still a 90% chance it won't hit anything they care about.
That being said, I agree that more would be killed without the system in place, making it effective. Cost effective might be a different matter.
I don't read AC A human right
Propaganda works both ways buddy. The world creates conditions for oppression, and to single out the US as the reason for it is facetious.
On the heads of something. Don't think it will be sharks, but something with frickin' laser beams on their heads.
If it can disable missiles, it should be sufficient for drones.
Why does this sound like one of the several episodes of Stargate Universe at the end of the series?
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Why not just equip a drone with an EMP, fly into the swarm, fzzzt, dead drones drop from the sky.
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