A US Ally Shot Down a $200 Drone With a $3 Million Patriot Missile (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report on The Verge: Earlier this week, General David Perkins, the commander of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) spoke at the Association of the US Army's Global Force symposium, where he discussed the threats that the US military would begin to face in the coming years. One notable example is how a US ally recently shot down a $200 consumer drone with a $3.4 million worth Patriot Missile. Perkins' talk during the symposium focused on the complexity of a military organization in the field, and how the interconnected nature of air, ground, and sea forces can lead to a fragmented response to a threat between the commanders who are in charge of specific areas. [...] "The gut instinct was," he explains, "that's an air defense problem, because they're in the air." "In fact," he went on to say, "we have a very close ally of ours that was dealing with an adversary using small quadcopter UASs, and they shot it down with a Patriot missile." The problem, he said, wasn't effectiveness: the tiny drone didn't stand a chance -- the issue is economics.

Comments

Re:Potential Damages?

[TheRaven64]

This isn't a new issue with drones. I recall a debriefing from the Iraq war where an Apache pilot was asked what he thought the cost of the missiles that he fired and the value of the convoy of trucks that he destroyed were. Hopefully the trucks contained something important to the enemy's war effort, because otherwise he'd spent a few million dollars to destroy a few tens of thousands of dollars. One of the strategies that's been core military doctrine since the US-Soviet conflict in Afghanistan (and Vietnam before that) has been to try to make your enemy outspend you by a large margin. A superpower like the USA might be able to afford to spend $100 for every $1 you spend, but starts to struggle when it has to spend $1,000 or even $10,000 for every $1 that you spend.