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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.
I guess a potentially more interesting question is whether that drone could have done $3.4 million of damage via surveillance or something. Seems unlikely in this case, but if we're talking some kind of super top secret installation then it might be worth that kind of force to make sure it's really, really blown up.
Still worth investigating sufficient response that's more economical.
And the steak's so rare, that it's rarely there, all for the cause of economy.
I wonder if there was some conspiracy to ban it or something lest the plebes catch on that there's something amiss.
So they finally got that thing working?
$6.5 trillion missing from Defense Department
'Fact the Pentagon can't account for how it spent money reveals a potentially far greater problem than theft'
The quicker weapons are spent, the better.
What they need as a starting point is something like AEGIS, but that is plug and play onto any vehicle. Something as simple as a turret that is radar-controlled and that uses 5.56 could shred consumer drones all day. It's be a foregone conclusion if they use 7.62.
We call it a "golden hammer". Only in this case it's a single-use golden hammer.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
... this conclusively disproves all of the naysayers who claim that the Patriot missile doesn't work.
So, how is this different than the economics of decoys?
I understand that the objectives are different, but dropping a very expensive GPS-guided bomb to destroy what ends up being a $10,000 tank or aircraft decoy is sort of the same problem from an economic perspective. I mean, the same things that come into play there (i.e., how can tell what is a real threat to me and what is not) are also in play in the drone scenario. If they fire off a multi-million dollar munition at every little thing that twitched then any army would eventually run into problems. Plus, one of the main things which a battlefield commander is supposed to do is figure out what the real threats are and filter out the things that aren't real threats (a really difficult problem in most circumstances).
I guess I don't see what is special about this particular scenario. This problem has existed for decades.
The problem with free stuff. When you are getting the Patriot missiles free from the US but the bullets from a rifle are paid by your national govt, the Patriot is the more cost effective solution.
Children in US dont have healthcare because the govt is busy spending billions on hight tech toys like Patriots.
**Life is too short to be serious**
For the price of a Patriot missile, the enemy could have bought 1,500 drones to overwhelm air defenses with multiple targets.
Can I at least get the video so it's not a complete waste of my tax dollars?
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
The $200 drone did "stand a chance", as it destroyed a $3.4 million missile. That's a victory for the opposition. Very distressing to see that a high-ranking military official in the 21st Century perceives the world as if it's a reenactment of a 19th-Century Prussian military school exercise, but with cool multi-million dollar toys. What is our perception of "winning"? Our validation of the legitimacy of a "win"--mainly based on comic book morals--really has no effect over which side is actually victorious. In fact a win could simply be that one faction consistently lacks control of the battlefield, until one day it's desire and power to fight are fatigued.
I mean, we're talking consumer drone so we're talking what? ~500 feet (~150m) and 100 mph? (~160kph)
Why don't they simply shoot at it with their rifle?
Elok
The problem is the enemy can then send 100 $200 drones next time. They only spend $20K and there's no way you have enough missiles to take them all down.
There needs to be an inexpensive way to deal with inexpensive threats, otherwise the enemy can cause you to spend a fortune and not even accomplish your mission of defending your territory.
The missile needs to smash into the drone then continue on to the location it was being controlled from and explode.
If the combat space is going to be filled with $200 drones and $100 wheeled equivalents, then this sort of "asymetric warfare" needs an effective and cheap counter. But then, how do you prevent your adversary fom deploying the same cheap and effective technology against your expensive, offensive, weapons?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail...
Or a scud missile...?
Really we just need drone interceptors now (which at government prices will only cost $500k so it's 1/6 the cost of the system it replaces! A win!)
We know the drone is definitely dead.
This guy shot down a drone spying on his daughter with a shotgun - way cheaper than a Patriot missile.
https://www.cnet.com/news/judg...
15,000, actually. Or just 1,500 and spend the remaining $2,7M on booze for the victory party.
They claim that they specifically didn't disclose the name of the ally because that could alert enemies of that nation to realize that they may be able to overwhelm the nation economically by simply sending inexpensive drones out at them. However, the USA doesn't give their Patriot missiles to a lot of countries, so the number of possible countries this could be is pretty small. What makes the story dubious is not that they fail to mention the name of the country, but that the list of possible countries is small enough that even releasing the story in the first place could be very nearly just as compromising to that country.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
[...] for companies that cant afford Patriot Missiles?
The last thing we need is to have companies, most likely corporations, arming themselves with Patriot missiles.
The only thing new about these "drones" is that someone else did all the hard work already.
Which means that instead of a handful of enthusiasts who have spent large portions of their lives in the RC aircraft community it's now hundreds of thousands of random idiots who got one under the christmas tree who know absolutely nothing at all about the RC aircraft hobby and community, who haven't even read the owners manual...
Yeah, "So whats the difference?" Right?? /sarcasm
We routinely drop million dollar smart bombs on mud huts and tents in the middle of nowhere. I'm not sure our military even has cheap "dumb bombs" anymore. We fly multi-million dollar high tech aircraft over areas where the enemy barely has the ability to shoot down an old Cessna.
It's no wonder we can't afford to provide food, clothing, shelter, and basic healthcare here in the homeland.
The only thing new about these "drones" is that someone else did all the hard work already.
This *is* the issue. Got a grand (or somewhat less), you have a fully functional remote controlled whatever. You don't really have to RTFM (which, cruising the various forums, is completely obvious).
Same as anything electronic. The Apollo guidance system cost millions of dollars, was a large box and can be out thought by most singing greeting cards.
Progress!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I guess the difference here is that a $100 quadcopter with a $100 brick of C4 and a $5 detonator on it is a real threat. And if I can spend $205 on a threat that you need to spend $3M to prevent (or suffer hundreds in thousands in damage, if you don't prevent it), then I'm going to very quickly win any war of attrition.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
The difference is, that if you spot a decoy and identify it, leaving it alone is the best course of action. If you're unsure, not hitting it won't be much of a problem.
If you spot the drone carrying a small package underneath, you'd better be sure it's not flying over $3.5mln worth of infrastructure...
And yeah, the package could be styrofoam, but can you afford that risk?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
We, as in the US, tend to think that we need to use a 400 billion dollar plane to drop a 40 thousand dollar bomb on a 15 dollar tent.
"Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day... Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime."
Well, shucks. (Totally reliable source, right?)
Not a corporation, though. Give that one some time.
While you're waiting, why not watch a documentary? Editorializing included free of charge.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Not the British. they were too busy bugging Trump's microwave to worry about drones
Just because a General who heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend doesn't mean it happened.
Smells like fake news, repeated across multiple media sites that then makes people think it actually happened.
They have been used to shoot down 10' drones but those don't cost $200 and tend to be flying up quite a bit higher. So 10' drone becomes drone becomes $200 drone and the story evolves into being false.
of knocking out cheap drones like that, maybe a cannon that fires a bunch of lead shot like a giant shotgun or even more effective could be shot like those south american bolas it is basically a piece of rope with balls on the ends and they can be thrown and the rope tangles around anything they hit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I'm not worried about swarm tactics as the other person is. I just want to bleed you dry of ammunition and money. If I launch a drone attack against you everyday it is going to cost you a missile and $3.2m to shoot it down while I am out $500. If I do this for a month (30 days), you are out $96m and I am out $15,000. Drones have a shorter lead time than missiles so the drone can be replaced faster as well. Eventually I will run you out of defense missiles and start landing hits on your infrastructure (antennas, communication whips, power lines) and then things get harder for you.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
You can get drones with preprogrammed flight paths, it isn't a stretch to have the drone fly to a predesignated location drop its payload and fly away. All you need to do is identify a soft target (antennas, power lines, fuel tanks) that doesn't move from day to day, some knowledge of the local winds, a couple of range finders and you can program the drone to fly to a point and make its bombing run. If the target is that important, program your drone(s) to attack in a cluster around the target. The attacks can't be re aimed on the fly, but you can get around the jamming.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
They won't say who the "very close ally" is? I bet its that fucker over in the Middle East.
This is, without a doubt, the reason why I am questioning the credibility of this story.... because the claim is such that they don't mention the name of the country that did this so as to not compromise that nation's defense program if its enemies should realize that they can economically destroy them by sending $200 drones to be destroyed by multimillion dollar missiles, but the list of countries that the USA has given patriot missiles to is so tiny as to make the mere fact that this story was even announced very nearly just as damaging to that country's defense program for the exact same reasons, and if they realized that releasing the name would have compromised them, they must surely have realized the even saying that it happened without mentioning the name could very easily have done so as well.
If they had, instead, not mentioned the term "patriot missile", and instead just said a "multi-milliion dollar missile", I would have beeen far more inclined to have believed them, because that would not have so drastically narrowed down the list of countries that it could possibly be, and thus be potentially just as damaging to that country as if they had simply said its name explicitly. If they had simply not mentioned that they did not want to disclose the name of the country because they were trying to act in that country's best interest, then I would have interpreted the failure to specify the country's name in the story as either shoddy reporting or else bullshit.. The fact that they explicitly said that this was the reason they weren't disclosing the name leaves only one reasonable conclusion - the story is false.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This is to me really neat. That a radar based missile system is good enough to track something as small and "low-signature-ish" as a drone.
Disclaimers:
a) assuming said "ally" didn't fire off a dozen missiles and finally got lucky
b) the drone is a small one, not one of the large flying wing type things.
So here's the problem, of course not mentioned in the article. The Patriot Missle is doing a heck of a lot more than just destroying the flying drone.
A butterfly net can take down a tiny drone -- but it can't destroy the explosives being carried by the drone. It can't resist a well-thrusted drone either.
How big of an explosion does it take to destroy a mysterious flying object in a safe manner? No clue.
The Patriot missle was designed in an era where the only way to have something fly a long distance to a specific target was for it to be an expensive device. So, an expensive defense made sense.
Now, not so much.
Much like the man-with-baseball-bat-on-the-sidewalk, you can't stop a random person from flying a cheap drone onto the white house lawn. It's just not possible. Similarly, you can't stop that tiny cheap drone from carrying a major explosive -- like a marathon pressure-cooker.
And, on top of all of that, you aren't going to fire a patriot missle at a drone hovering over the white house lawn. Welcome to border vs domestic defense.
Why bother communicating with the drone?
Pre-program it to lift off, fly west a mile, and zip around. They'll either blow it up or ignore it.
Once they start ignoring them, attach a package, give it a camera and basic recognition, and have it fly to anything with wheels. Or whatever costs more than the drone itself.
A smart enemy will not send a swarm as that will give a hint to soldiers that maybe its a stupid idea to be firing 3 million dollar missiles at things there are hundreds of. A Smart enemy will send one every day so bored soldiers with nothing to do will use up a missile. Than when the battery is out of missiles and waiting replenishment then send 100 drones and drop stinkbombs on the battery to complete the demoralisation.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Why was I pwnd?
Think about your claims and reread the quote " did not adequately support $2.8 trillion" and recognize that that is a strangely worded statement. It implies that the Armed Forces have "lost" or "stolen" 2.8 trillion.in the 3rd Q.
Hmm. Since the Armed forces budget is under a trillion a year - how does that make any sense.
Be careful about calling someone stupid and pwnd when you have such poor reading comprehension skills.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
They could have sent out a $50 Million AH-64 Apache helicopter and crashed it trying to chase down the $200 drone with a 30mm chain gun (M230).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Back when I worked on drones (the original $250,000 ones), doing something like this made sense.
But there is more modern tech put out by Boeing that allows mil spec crowd hunter seeker drones to swarm kill cheap drones.
Seriously, it's like $250 per drone, and the controller set is maybe $10,000, it's way cheaper to waste 2 or 3 swarm drones taking out 1 drone than using the old stuff.
Why do you think we made smart JDAM kits for dumb warheads to turn them into 98 percent accuracy from the old style? Those were way cheaper than the cruise missiles we also made, allowing a deliverable cost per unit to drop massively?
Stop using things without thinking about cost. Half of warfare is economics.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"If you must be strong everywhere, you are weak everywhere"
This is the perfect example
Bad guys fly 2000 drones per day, over the Green Zone
At the end of the year, the U.S. declares default on its open debt despite the 14th Amendment, because,you know, wars are lost for costly victory
Pyrrus would know.
This doesn't quite ring true to me due to a medium to long range missile like a Patriot having a minimum engagement range and altitude. I could find numbers, but a google search shows that the Patriot flies for 9 seconds before it is armed, which is quite a long way for a object that quickly accelerates to maybe ~mach 3. How high does a $200 drone fly, and how far away can you spot it on radar at that altitude?
Some people have no baseline on reality and so are easily fooled. As you say, the entire military budget for FY 2015 was under $1Trillion, so unless this report is referring to pesos, there is no way they misplaced 6x their annual budget. Not sure WTF this DoD IG report is referring to, but it aint real money for FY2015.
AC may very well be trolling.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Question Who won WW2? Britain and France who lost their colonies and became second rate powers or Germany who got out of sanctions and became an economic powerhouse. Winning but spending too much to win is no win at all
Germany lost 10% of its population to the war, about 7 million people, that is a cost to be factored in as well. The UK's casualties were 6.4% of Germany's, about 450 thousand, and Frances were 8.5%, about 600 thousand. The cost of war includes blood not just gold.
Plus there was half the country becoming a vassal state of the Soviet Union for nearly 50 years. That is losing your own country, not a colony.
In Generation Kill there was a scene where some marines were dressed down for shooting a technical with a TOW. I think the cost/benefit of munitions and targets of opportunity was one of the reasons that cannons got put back on ground strike aircraft.
For the Marines its not necessarily the cost itself but the number of TOWs available to them. The Marines are not as well funded as the Army or Navy and are adept at improvisation and making do for very good reasons. The Marines will probably purchase some long barreled high choke skeet/trap shotguns to deal with small drones. As they purchased civilian hunting rifles during Viet Nam as necessary to equip snipers and designated marksmen. Its not that such things won't happen in the Army as well, its that in the Army these ideas will largely be confined to the less senior officers. The more senior officers more likely to turn to some research project with a hollywood looking solution.
When were cannons taken off ground strike aircraft? Fighters yes, that was a bad idea of the 1960s. I believe exterior pod mounted cannons were developed for these fighters for when they were to be used in ground attack roles. And these were hastily repurposed for air-to-air once the error of a pure missile fighter became apparent.
I watched an interesting lecture on Youtube the other day comparing the tank manufacturing strategies of the US, Germany and Russia during WWII. It turns out that all three were different: the US used efficient assembly lines and precise tooling to mass-produce standardized tanks of mid-range cost/complexity, the Russians zerg-rushed low-quality tanks using massive amounts of cheap labor and simple tooling, and the Germans used skilled craftsmen to build high-quality tanks and constantly improved the design (so that each tank was pretty close to unique). Guess which strategy was least successful...
The strategy with the weakest anti-armor airpower. ;-)
Soviet success on the ground had a lot to do with the IL-2 Sturmovik close support aircraft. Plus there are the anti-tank guns on the ground. Tank v tank is only a part of the complex and deadly environment tankers tried to survive.
My question is why does a Patriot Missile cost $3.4m - there is no way that it should cost that much in this day and age.
Lets look at a relatively modern concept - - - ASYMMETRIC WARFARE
This fits the definition better than anything else has over the last couple of decades.
Grab a couple of dozen 'drones' at less than $300 each, and cause the expenditure of multi-million dollar munitions to be used for EACH of them !
SOMEONE needs to fall back on the simpler, but reliable, method of using laser-tagged bazooka-style munitions to 'down' these drones.
The Viet Nam era shoulder fired rocket launchers would be ideal for this type of coverage, and there has to be a lot of these old(er) munitions stockpiled somewhere. Just because they were vulnerable to local-fire when used against tanks does NOT mean they were useless - just that they were inappropriate for that type of mission. Pull them out of mothballs, and re-task them for THIS type of mission.
Even at a few thousand dollars each, they are virtually worthless sitting buried in a munitions warehouse - but could easily be re-purposed for these types of missions - essentially using already-paid-for materials, AND freeing up storage space and logistic accountability costs.
Use the Patriot targeting systems, link to the shoulder-launched warheads for target acquisition, and blow the quad- / hex- / octo-copters out of the sky.
redneck geek
The solution is probably already being developed in a defense lab somewhere.
Instead of wasting a US$3.4 million missile, you deploy a force of 10 hunter-killer drones worth maybe US$100,000 each to patrol a given area.
Much like a Roomba, they know when to come back to recharge or switch battery packs. They never get tired or bored and don't complain about the MREs and missing the kids at home.
They have sensor suites for detecting other drones and can be notified by ground forces of sightings.
Not quite sure what kind of package they could be fitted with to take down another drone but I'm sure there are plenty of cheap off-the-shelf options.
The cost of the drone means nothing. What is significant is the cost of the damage done if it is not brought down.
They are, of course, right about the future cost of large numbers of missiles. But that is for much later, when there will be time to find other methods (like shotguns).
And of course good training for the missileers is difficult and expensive. Quite possible that the decision was made, to provide good realistic training for the team. Which it no doubt did!