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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.
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.
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.