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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.
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.
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"
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.