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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?
There are considerably less destructive and more awesome ways to generate EMP's then with nukes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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.
buckshot
Oh, I think we'll see something new on the shelves really soon from Remington, Federal, Winchester, Fiocchi, etc.
Droneshot
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Yup. We can simply reuse existing IED jammers. The only way to get past those would be to fly those drones by wire.
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.
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.
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.
The US has a few issues with that. An older working system is not a new boondoggle.
A new system can be exported and then has to have new support contracts. Nations are then fully locked deep into US export grade command and control systems.
The other fear is reload time and the computer systems tracking a lot of moving objects.
Exocet or a few 1970's Soviet systems?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Sell the new project with an animation. A cartoon of 50 normal looking shipping containers release 100 drab colored drones on pre programmed missions. No command and control to block, low flight, low speed.
Some music, national colors and activate the drone patrol system. An advanced computer tracks each of the cheap drones, an animated engage sequence and they all fail.
Its all in the sales pitch, music and fear of the drab third world drone.
Another nation is sold into a multi layer, decades long contract to rent the drone patrol system.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You need a catchy slogan to go with it, The war on drugs, the war against terror (which is TWAT when abbreviated) that sort of thing.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
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"
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.
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
Begun the Drone War has.
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.