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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!
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?
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.
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?
What's scary is not necessarily military use of these, but possible terrorist use of these.
Imagine some terrorists launching a large swarm of cheap low-flying drones in NYC with programming to seek out large groups of people and armed with high yield explosives and capable of putting out large amounts of shrapnel relentlessly all throughout the highly populated areas of the country.
I would find that to be my greatest worry.
It may be more of a domestic security need to have some special defenses than a military need.
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.
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.
What is a drone to the Army? Something bigger?
It depends on who has to be sold on the emerging drone threat.
Aeronautical engineers in South America could be working on stealthy new drones to fly in drugs. AWACS might not see that new drug drone.
A stealthy glider is released and allows a drone like control system to fly in wealthy illegal immigrants every night.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Go look at the source code to one of the open source projects like OpenPilot,
they integrate accelerometers, gyros, magnetometers, barometric altimeter and GPS for their navigation system,
modern GPS chips also have anti-hijacking/jamming, eg SiRFstarIV GSD4t consumer device chipset,
and the off the shelf radio control kit can do encrypted spread-spectrum comms.
It is not trivial to stop one by jamming, a shotgun up close is way more effective
FYI, Flak is a German acronym for Anti-Aircraft Artillery.
It should also be noted that it wasn't terribly effective at stopping bombers. Note the second Schweinfurt raid as an example (considered to be one of the worst raids for damage to the attacking planes) - 291 unescorted bombers, set upon by both enemy fighters and flak, lost only 60 bombers (another dozen or so were so badly damaged they were scrapped AFTER they got back home).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"