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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.
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.
You don't have someone come look for you.
Radar tracks the trajectory of the mortar round, calculates it's original (since it's only a ballistic flight arc, that is trivial) and can feed that co-ordinate back to friendly units instantly
With automated fire control system, the return fire is normally in the air before you fire the second round.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
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.