[HN Gopher] Military drone swarms and how to combat them
___________________________________________________________________
Military drone swarms and how to combat them
Author : Gaishan
Score : 118 points
Date : 2022-08-23 02:34 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (smallwarsjournal.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (smallwarsjournal.com)
| mcphail wrote:
| If it hasn't been mentioned, check out The Kill Chain by
| Christian Brose. Obviously Anduril is great in this arena, but
| also Epirus on using microwave tech to eliminate these threats.
| mthehacker wrote:
| The answer to combating military armed drone swarms is simple:
| Nuke the SOBs that use them. Dead men/women/theys don't build,
| deploy or use armed drone swarms. Nuking them, in the long run,
| will save more lives, cost less and end conflicts sooner.
| Although it may not be PC to say it these days, the aim of war is
| to defeat the enemy as quickly as possible...and, like it or not,
| the most efficient way to do that is often to kill as many of
| them as you can as fast as you can. Wake The Folks Up by telling
| them the ugly truth about war. Good day.
| abrookewood wrote:
| This makes no sense at all. Your suggestion instantly takes us
| from a limited conflict to nuclear Armageddon with nothing in
| between.
| decebalus1 wrote:
| Wow, didn't know John Bolton was on hackernews!
| anigbrowl wrote:
| You're not ready for how this is gonna play out in a domestic
| theater.
| asdff wrote:
| Why nuke cities when you can just bomb factories with
| precision? We already have technology capable of sending a
| missile to a specific seat of a car. US military has been
| deploying missiles that just have big swords on them now
| because they are precise enough where they don't have to bank
| on a large explosion to ensure they hit their mark. If the
| enemy opted to shift manufacturing into homes or hide it
| otherwise, you could just have an agent on the inside who marks
| these targets from the ground and they are later destroyed with
| precision.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Ah, the "there's no kill like overkill" idea.
|
| Quoting from TVTropes[1]:-
|
| > Much, much more common in fiction (especially of the 'revenge
| fantasy' type) than in Real Life violence. To a strategist,
| overkill is _Awesome, but Impractical_ because the risk of
| enemy survival is vastly outweighed by the certainty that you
| 're spending a fortune in time, material, and (usually)
| manpower to ensure the enemy's death. The weaker and less
| numerous the target, the more wasteful overkill is.
|
| I would add "or the more geographically dispersed" before "the
| enemy is".
|
| 1.
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThereIsNoKillLik...
| kingkawn wrote:
| 30 people with shotguns loaded with buckshot?
| marshray wrote:
| Very short range. Requires many people for every km of defended
| line. Overwhelmed with numbers. Drones can avoid it with
| altitude.
|
| Overall, an expensive solution unless you happen to have
| thousands of bored soldiers who have nothing else to do (which
| is sometimes the case for some militaries).
| [deleted]
| swayvil wrote:
| Air Force has a giant herf gun called THOR.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_High_Power_Operatio...
|
| https://afresearchlab.com/technology/directed-energy/success...
| Invictus0 wrote:
| It's mentioned in the article
| throwteu wrote:
| Some questions to think about:
|
| What is the smallest practical size for a military swarming
| drone?
|
| How many could fit in one TEU?
|
| How many TEU are shipped to your country every day?
|
| How many drones could be shipped to your country before anyone
| notices?
| pjc50 wrote:
| How many guns fit in a TEU?
|
| How much explosive fits in a TEU?
|
| How many guns and how much explosive is already in your
| country?
| adrianN wrote:
| One person with a million autonomous combat drones is a lot
| more dangerous than one person with a million rifles.
| throwteu wrote:
| Normally sending armaments to a rival/enemy isn't a smart
| move, because they are no longer under your control, they are
| under the control of the other party; and should be counted
| under their assets for belligerent purposes. The point is, is
| that assumption still valid for autonomous drones?
| Symmetry wrote:
| In general the smaller a drone the shorter its range will be.
| So size will very much depend on that,
| echelon wrote:
| If they're completely autonomous they won't need radio or line
| of sight communications.
|
| Load them with explosives or potent chemical weapons and it
| could get really scary.
|
| This YouTube short film terrifies me:
|
| https://youtu.be/TlO2gcs1YvM
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Speaking of which, I've seen a couple of YouTube clips
| demonstrating that even _tiny_ shaped charges are incredibly
| powerful and have a surprising range. Suicide drones don 't
| have to touch you, even a tiny one could kill from meters
| away.
| 323 wrote:
| On the other hand some basic armor, including over the face
| like a motorcycle helmet, will protect you against small
| charges.
| what-imright wrote:
| I doubt it. Shrapnel and bullet kills will decline
| because of the energy cost of carrying the weight
| restricting range. I expect them to use needles fired
| precisely by a mini railgun at exposed areas of skin.
| Coated with a chemical agent. I also expect them to be
| able to recharge via solar or perching on power lines.
| They can then sit on rooftops and wait for a facial
| recognition match on the streets below. They could sit
| there for years. And what about the use of a nuclear
| battery? Now you can't shoot them down for fear of
| contamination. Nightmare
| r00fus wrote:
| None of this is currently feasible not even partially.
|
| It would have shock value if you did something half-assed
| with a drone swarm but then you should be very careful
| that your drones or deployment mechanisms aren't
| traceable back to you.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _I expect them to use needles fired precisely by a mini
| railgun at exposed areas of skin._
|
| How in the world could a railgun compete with chemical
| explosives? The energy density of batteries is nowhere
| even close to the energy density of chemical explosives;
| throw away the sci-fi railgun thing and put a small EFP
| on the UAV instead. That would be a thousand times more
| lethal with a fraction of the weight.
|
| If you really want to use poison needles, then turn the
| UAV into a pincushion and crash it into people. If you're
| dead set on throwing needles, give it a compressed air
| blowgun. Small scale railguns make no sense.
| nradov wrote:
| That's a total joke. We can't even make large railguns
| work reliably, let alone small railguns. Poisoned
| projectiles have long been banned by international
| treaty, and there's no evidence of any major military
| power even considering violating that ban. Nuclear
| batteries are far too heavy for use in any aircraft.
|
| Stop watching so much SciFi and come back to the real
| world.
| what-imright wrote:
| I can promise you it doesn't make a shred of difference
| to the victim if they get their brains blown out of their
| ears by a sniper a mile away, burned alive by white
| phosphorus, ripped to pieces by high explosives, crushed
| under a tank, frozen solid by nerve gas or melted by
| neutron radiation.
|
| It was routine what 80 years ago to gas civilians. The
| only reason it wasn't employed on the battlefield was
| that it was as likely to kill your troops as the enemies.
|
| Violating that ban is inevitable - as soon as one country
| adopts a 'more discriminating' method of killing and
| gains an edge, the rest will follow suit. They'll sell it
| saying a drone would never accidentally kill a non
| combatant.
|
| The naivety of suggesting the technology can't be
| developed with the pace of change we're witnessing is
| astounding. They certainly can make a micro railgun,
| probably already have secretly. And I doubt a micro drone
| needs much more current than a pacemaker provides,
| especially with an energy efficient SoC at the latest
| fab.
| bigiain wrote:
| You might enjoy reading Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez.
|
| https://www.daniel-suarez.com/killdecisionsynopsis.html
| teekert wrote:
| I enjoyed the book but I feel like it ended before it really
| started. Which is also part of the appeal, to think what
| could have happened?
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| I second this, if you enjoy thinking about these topics and
| reading sci-fi it's excellent. Interestingly, Suarez thanks
| Rick Klau in his book who until recently was California's
| Chief Technology Innovation Officer.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| tl;dr _There are numerous options to combat drone swarms, but all
| of them possess notable shortcomings._
| sitkack wrote:
| We must stop and outlaw all autonomous weapon systems right now.
|
| No one can win this. The dollar cost per KIA is going to quickly
| drop below $20. And this will be for all optical hunter killer
| drones.
|
| the only way to win is not to play
| dogcomplex wrote:
| They will be "banned" by the major powers who can afford
| sufficient defenses against them (US, Russia, China, etc), with
| periodic "terrorist" strikes by "unknown actors" with a pattern
| of only mild convenience to said major powers. Meanwhile these
| powers will maintain strategic reserves of the drones only ever
| used for training.
|
| That is assuming there remains any defense against these drones
| by new or conventional warfare. This might be a legitimate
| threat to major military forces themselves at some point.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Don't take it the wrong way, but I just have to laugh. This is
| how children think.
|
| How are you going to fix this with a law? The whole problem
| arises because drones are easily hackable and the technology
| stack involved is cheap and open. Countries make them, what are
| you gonna do, sanction them? You could build a drone swarm in
| your garage and it will be harmless right up to the moment you
| choose to weaponize it.
|
| Chemical weapons are a terrible parallel because while you
| don't necessarily need big industrial facilities, it's not that
| easy to conceal. But there is so much you can do with
| autonomous systems that's completely innocuous, in much the
| same way that you can't do a whole lot about cyberwarfare just
| by declaring it illegal.
|
| I mean look the guy who assassinated Shinzo Abe; Japan is about
| the most law-abiding country going, guns are rare, and as an
| island it's super-easy to control imports and exports, so the
| guy just built one out of parts from the hardware store/garden
| center. Weapons are just not that hard to make, and if you're
| inclined toward lateral thinking the possibilities for drones
| are near endless.
|
| To be frank I think a lot of military drone people are missing
| a trick because they have unrealistically large budgets to play
| with so demand these impressive but very expensive models that
| are designed to be part of an infantry loadout and deliver
| guaranteed kills from around the corner or through the hole of
| a pillbox.
| ahelwer wrote:
| It is "adult" thinking, I guess, to impugn the very idea of
| trying to steer the world away from obvious disaster through
| diplomacy and international cooperation. The thesis of drone
| warfare is that quantity has a quality all of its own. Bans
| and controls are effective at limiting quantity. Not 100%
| effective, but nobody asks this. All of everyday life holds
| the small chance of disaster. Being much less likely to die
| via drone attack is valuable even if the odd rogue attack
| succeeds.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _It is "adult" thinking, I guess, to impugn the very idea
| of trying to steer the world away from obvious disaster
| through diplomacy and international cooperation._
|
| Unfortunately good intentions don't make bad ideas any
| better. Otherwise, let me propose that we solve world
| hunger by mailing everybody a free hotdog. A terribly dumb
| idea, but motivated by the best of intentions trying to
| solve the worst sort of problem.
| bostonsre wrote:
| What about the nation state actors that don't sign on to
| the pledge? Ukraine would be at a significant disadvantage
| if they were playing by these hypothetical rules but Russia
| didn't.
| asdff wrote:
| Same thing that happens when nation state actors decide
| to refine uranium to weapons grade: sanctions that kill
| the economy. These actually work pretty well when they
| are targeted at the oligarchy of a given nation state.
| This puts pressure on the state leaders who exist to
| serve the oligarchy to work to lift sanctions. The
| oligarch doesn't care about anything unless it makes them
| money, and by forcing them to lose money you shift
| incentives accordingly.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _Same thing that happens when nation state actors
| decide to refine uranium to weapons grade: sanctions that
| kill the economy._
|
| You can't disarm America, Russia or China's nuclear
| weapons like that. The example of nuclear weapons only
| shows that cat like this won't go back in bags. The only
| way you'll get countries like this to disarm and renounce
| a class of weapons is if those weapons were never very
| good in the first place (e.g. chemical weapons) or were
| rendered obsolete by new sorts of weapons (battleships.)
| ahelwer wrote:
| Arms control diplomacy has never managed to get everyone
| on board with full ratification all at once. Doesn't mean
| it doesn't make a difference, especially as the years go
| on. Using widely-banned weapons in a conflict has more-
| severe diplomatic repercussions than invasion by
| conventional means.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Up to a point. As far as nukes go, the main reason for
| having one is as a deterrent to conventional attacks.
| Sure, you can try to starve people out, but sanctions
| regimes often run out of moral legitimacy before their
| targets do. And countries like Iran or North Korea that
| are near to or in possession of a nuclear capability are
| not going to cast it away. Gaddafi did that and look how
| poorly it turned out for him.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I was tired when I wrote that last night and it doesn't
| explain my point of view well, so let me give you a more
| considered reply.
|
| Firstly, the inevitability of the disaster is not at all
| obvious. Drone attacks don't scale in anything like the
| same way nukes do. Nor do kinetic attacks have the same
| long-term environmental hangover that nukes and chemical
| weapons do. Drone swarms are a potentially deadly problem
| for military elements and potentially political organs, but
| they excel at narrowly targeted objectives. They're not on
| the same level of existential risk to entire cities, unless
| we get into skynet territory with wholly autonomous
| factories and logistic chains.
|
| What I'm saying is naive is the belief in technical (legal)
| methods. You write: _Bans and controls are effective at
| limiting quantity_ but this is clearly not the case. Small
| arms trafficking is actually widespread despite all the
| hand-wringing, and efforts at gun control in the US are
| token at best.
|
| They're ineffective partly because they are asinine and
| pursued in a childish fashion. Gun control as a _policy
| objective_ is wholly reasonable, and I can give numerous
| arguments on its behalf. But in the US, the legal
| environment is ruled by the 2nd Amendment, whose language
| about how 'the right to keep and bear arms shall not be
| infringed' is so plain as to be inarguable. Gun control
| proponents really won't make any serious headway for the
| foreseeable future unless they try to repeal or rewrite
| this. None of them want to do that because it's a political
| non-starter. (Incidentally, this is not an argument for
| just giving up on the problem; a small tax on the sale of
| ammunition, with all revenue reserved for the medical or
| funeral expenses of shooting victims, is both politically
| and legally feasible imho).
|
| My argument is not only about quantity, but versatility. I
| mentioned how easy it is to manufacture weapons. The sad
| reality is that if you could wave a magic wand and make all
| guns in the USA vanish immediately (or just privately held
| guns if you enjoy being pushed around by people in
| uniform), _in a month 's time you would have a gun problem
| again._ It would be on a smaller scale - at first. But it
| wouldn't stay that way. It's costly to manufacture a really
| well-engineered gun, of course, but it's very very easy to
| manufacture a crappy gun that's Good Enough. You don't need
| a fancy workshop or a degree in mechanical engineering, as
| the Abe assassination showed. If you have some mechanical
| aptitude or admit the use of cheap and easily available
| tools, the emerging insurgency in Myanmar is making
| extensive use of 3d printed guns.
|
| A less spectacular but increasingly widespread use of 3d
| printing is the manufacture of auto sears, a mechanical
| part that swapped into the trigger mechanism of a semi-
| automatic gun to allow fully automatic fire. It's really
| simple, just a lever with a particular shape about the size
| of your index finger. They're trivially easy to make and
| very easy to apply. The ATF charges people for selling them
| quite frequently, but let's be realistic: they are only
| finding the suckers who are so stupid/greedy that they
| advertise more or less openly. This is not _such_ a huge
| problem in my view because most people who want to use one
| of these are into the novelty factor of shooting a high
| powered weapon for kicks. But you 'd be foolish to assume
| that they're not proliferating wildly in certain circles
| just because of a few prosecutions.
|
| Just as very basic hardware can be repurposed toward weapon
| manufacture, any computer with a network connection is
| theoretically a cyberattack vector. It doesn't have to be a
| super-clever or advanced cyberattack; you can trade off
| quality against quantity if you are just basically
| competent in python or shell scripting, and you can even
| get results with crude readymade tools like Low Orbit Ion
| Cannon.
|
| So it is with drones. Weaponizing them is trivial; payloads
| don't need to be huge and the same technology that can save
| a life by dropping medical supplies can end one by dropping
| a hand grenade (both of these techniques are being used in
| Ukraine on a daily basis). Computer vision, maneuver,
| obstacle avoidance, communications etc. etc. can all
| enhance the capability of a drone swarm, but all those
| things have valid purposes too. Like a piece of steel
| tubing or a Raspberry Pi with Linux installed, it's not the
| device itself that's the problem but the purpose for which
| it is configured.
|
| So I think it's childish to think you can legislate away
| drone swarming, the same way it's childish to think you can
| just legislate small arms or cyberattacks or drugs or
| protests out of existence. In the end, legislative
| solutions are just about making a really nasty example out
| of the few people you catch doing a Bad Thing and then
| hoping it scares everyone else into compliance. Once you
| lose legitimacy or people decide they don't care that much
| any more, it's useless. I'm emphasizing 'people' here
| because drone technology is so simple and accessible that
| it's not limited to nation states or large industrial
| concerns. Any garage could be a drone lab, any pickup truck
| can be a launchpad.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| In a cynical way, this would mean no more wars.
|
| Once the world sees a few wars where the drones win, every
| country on earth is going to get them. They are cheap, can be
| made by university students, can be weaponized in a myriad of
| ways and can be deployed from far away (UAVs with a thousand
| drones, can deploy them thousands of kilometers) and they are
| disposable.
|
| Silent drones with autonomous instructions, will be the
| ultimate booby trap.
| mach1ne wrote:
| A new weapon always begets new counter-weapons. They may
| provide sufficiently believable protection from the drones,
| though not all-encompassing. Wars may become somewhat
| bloodier and a lot scarier. In any case, I highly doubt
| drones would do much to end wars. Rifles, artillery and other
| super-killers of the 20th century certainly didn't.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| > A new weapon always begets new counter-weapons
|
| Not always. The only counter weapon to a Nuke, is a similar
| sized or bigger Nuke, better delivery systems for the nuke
| and a large number of nukes.
| asdff wrote:
| You can also use something like the NIKE missile system
| or the iron dome.
| ISL wrote:
| Nuclear weapons can be countered by other WMDs, by
| cyberwarfare, by propaganda and misinformation, by
| economic warfare, and many more.
|
| Once launched, nuclear weapons are difficult, but not
| impossible (see ABM defense systems) to counter, but
| there are many ways to counter their unlaunched effects.
| sitkack wrote:
| https://www.research-
| collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/...
|
| Not just wars. Every conflict should make a pact about RoE to
| not use autonomous drones. The asymmetry is too high. There
| is no defense. The cost is asymptotic to zero.
|
| We should outlaw war.
| EGreg wrote:
| Sadly, drones are so cheap that they can be used by anyone
| for any purpose.
|
| We're lucky people haven't discovered yet how dangerous
| drone swarms can be. And as commercial delivery drones are
| allowed to fly the skies, many nameless drones can blend in
| among them.
|
| Really a very dangerous future. Then again we also have
| nuclear weapons and the collapse of ecosystems...
| cmonnow wrote:
| jrm4 wrote:
| The more history of war I read, the more I realize how much it
| ends up looking like iterations of games -- which is to say
| that, it's not like this scary ever-increasing destructiveness.
| Certain ways of doing war just seem to go in and out of
| fashion.
|
| All to say, for better or worse, this all could be just as
| scary RIGHT NOW, but for whatever reason it isn't. No reason to
| believe "uh oh, here comes potentially scary tech, better try
| to blanket ban it now."
| hoseja wrote:
| "We must stop and outlaw crossbows right now."
| kragen wrote:
| I think you're being unreasonably optimistic. Outlawing drones
| won't stop them. You'd have to outlaw general-purpose
| computers, and that law would still only last until the next
| war between great powers.
| sitkack wrote:
| We did a pretty good job with chemical weapons. I realize
| that autonomous weapons have a couple orders of magnitude in
| specificity, range, stealth, etc. We don't have to _just_
| accept defeat.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Until a couple of GRU officers went on a tour of Salisbury
| and poisoned three people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Po
| isoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_...
|
| There's also disputed allegations of chemical weapon use in
| Syria. I'm not sure why they've not been seen in Ukraine
| yet; I think we're back to "not actually that effective in
| open warfare".
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| The only people disputing the claims in Syria are idiots
| tbh.
|
| As for why they aren't seeing use in Ukraine? They aren't
| very useful on the battlefield in most circumstances. Dan
| Kaszeta (a well regarded expert on the matter) has had a
| fair bit to say about this.
| chr1 wrote:
| Chemical weapons are rarely used only because they are not
| very effective. If they were effective they would not be
| outlawed.
|
| When we invent a version that will be practical to use,
| (e.g. small hard to notice drone capable to spray highly
| poisonous chemical right in enemy barracks) all the
| "success" in outlawing we had will instantly disappear.
| kragen wrote:
| Chemical weapons are little-used because they don't work
| very well, even compared to soldiers with bayonets, much
| less compared to the Bomb. Producing chemical weapons is
| very dangerous and requires large industrial facilities.
|
| By contrast, precision-guided munitions make the Bomb
| obsolete (it's great at killing people but it's a
| comparatively crude means of coercion by comparison), and
| they can be produced inexpensively from widely available
| materials.
|
| We should be planning how to preserve what we can from
| defeat.
| [deleted]
| baybal2 wrote:
| adrianN wrote:
| Chemical weapons were successfully outlawed because they're
| not terribly useful in war:
| https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-
| ch...
| picsao wrote:
| bergenty wrote:
| I don't think you can do this anymore, cats out of the bag. I
| mean hypothetically anyone can kill someone with a drone right
| now and it would be pretty hard to track down who did it. Just
| have a drone with a gun or knife attached and fly down at the
| person as they leave the house. Have you seen FPV drones?
| They're extremely responsive, fast and small. You could do it
| from miles away, even another country.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _cats out of the bag._
|
| Yeah, the autonomous weapons cat left the bag decades ago.
| Acoustic homing torpedoes were first used during WW2, and
| became very sophisticated during the Cold War. Missiles that
| can be fired blind and left to find their own targets were
| also developed during the Cold War, like the (since
| discontinued) anti-ship variant of the Tomahawk. "Autonomous
| weapon" describes a lot of systems already in use. Banning
| them all is DOA in America, let alone in Russia/China/etc.
| They're too useful to ban.
|
| America won't even sign the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-
| personnel landmines (because the American military considers
| them important in Korea.)
| bergenty wrote:
| There's a difference here though. Someone could decide to
| do something and have it ready to go the next day with a
| prime delivery and like a hundred bucks.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Anything like that is already banned for civilians (not
| that it will stop somebody clever and motivated enough..)
|
| The question is whether the American government would
| accept banning _itself_ from having autonomous weapons. I
| think they wouldn 't; they're too useful and already
| normalized.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Yes, and while we're at it, let's outlaw war and murder too!
| ls15 wrote:
| > We must stop and outlaw all autonomous weapon systems right
| now.
|
| Sure, but how do you get Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-un and all of
| their other soul mates into the boat?
| cmroanirgo wrote:
| Perhaps rather than assuming that the other should lower
| their weapons first, it might be more prudent to lower your
| own first.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| This is the opinion of an individual or state who has not
| fully reckoned with existential threats.
| hoseja wrote:
| Works great statistically if you don't much care for your
| own particular continued survival.
| Hayvok wrote:
| This approach was tried by Britain and France in the 1920s
| and 30s. Didn't end well.
| r00fus wrote:
| Here's how it actually works: US moves to outlaw something
| _after_ they have an unassailable supremacy in that area
| (see: nuclear weapons test ban).
|
| So we'll eventually outlaw them once we have a strong edge.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Could swarms fly in a V like geese for aerodynamics?
|
| (Ps I never understood why a V Is better than a straight line?)
| bombcar wrote:
| Imagine a powerboat wake
|
| You can be right behind the boat or just behind the wake as it
| spreads out in a V
|
| Which is better?
| AnonMO wrote:
| So Lockheed recently showed video of its laser weapon. as the
| technology matures I assume energy consumption will drop, and
| intercepting drones or anything is no longer limited by number of
| misses, drones, or ammo but energy. Imagine nuclear aircraft
| carriers pumping an indefinite amount of energy at least in the
| short term into multiple lasers basically creating an energy
| barrier around the craft.
|
| Not a laser expert btw.
| kragen wrote:
| Suppose you have five lasers on your nuclear aircraft carrier,
| they have 20km range, they need five seconds on target to
| destroy it (plus an insignificant amount of time to switch to
| the next target), and your radar/OpenCV/whatever is good enough
| to detect all the incoming drones. Suppose they go 200 km/h (56
| m/s), which is a pretty leisurely clip for aircraft. If they
| all come into range at the same time, you have six minutes to
| burn them all up.
|
| In this scenario it takes 361 drones to land one on an aircraft
| carrier, sinking it unless the attacker totally fucks up. If
| they're like these Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones the article
| says have destroyed 750 land vehicles (I guess in the Ukraine
| war alone?) that cost US$5M each, that's US$1.8 billion dollars
| to sink the aircraft carrier. That's not too bad; you can build
| a new aircraft carrier for US$9 billion or so.
|
| But what if the drones cost US$5000 each? Or US$50? Or what if
| they travel at mach 2? Or are submarines, like loitering
| torpedoes or guided mines?
|
| It may be more economical to just send drones to the country
| where the aircraft carrier is from to kill the family members
| of its military officers, or at least the ones who don't
| cooperate.
|
| Although I have no particular love for US foreign policy and
| military adventurism, I fear we are passing out of a period of
| relative peace and entering a period of extreme
| unpredictability. There is no guarantee that the new stable
| equilibrium will have states or civilization in it.
| avereveard wrote:
| Payload size and speed are major consideration for unit
| price. Besides there already are standoff autonomous
| munitions, we have had missiles carrying their own guidance
| hardware for more than fifty years now, and if you want
| speed, rocket will definitely beat propellers
|
| Tldr you've built an argument on top of a triad of features
| that actually are more of a 'pick two' deal.
| Pelic4n wrote:
| So, in your described scenario, drones are functionally no
| different than a missile barrage, except slower, cheaper and
| maybe easier to deploy. So:
|
| - Effective countermeasures already exists against this kind
| of threats, like CIWS.
|
| - Carriers don't exists in a vacuum, there are a lot of other
| systems in a modern carrier group.
|
| - Just like launching a missile barrage, deploying the
| tens/hundreds of thousands of drones is going to be quite the
| logistical achievement, especially bringing it in range of a
| modern carrier group, designed to project force against
| threats hundreds of kilometers away.
|
| - Drones have significant range/projection issues. The
| Bayraktar, at $2M a piece, has ~300km of range and can only
| bear a very small payload designed to engage armored ground
| targets, nothing that would threaten carriers or destroyers,
| even deployed en masse.
|
| - The bigger the range, the bigger the payload, the bigger
| the size/costs. The effectiveness of your drone swarm is
| always limited by this equation. Millions of small aliexpress
| drones bearing the equivalent of a hand grenade are not going
| to do anything against a carrier provided it can be deployed
| at all. You would need to be <10km away due to their range
| limitation and at this stage, there are already fighter jets
| and destroyers sitting on top of you.
|
| - No single munition under the kiloton order of magnitude
| will sink an aircraft carrier. For a drone or anything under
| the scale of cruise missiles/MOAB, this means nuclear. Hand-
| grenade sized nuclear explosives in drone swarms? I wish! But
| to quote the fantastic game Highfleet, once you get the genie
| out, you cannot put it back in the bottle. If you plan to
| bring nuclear weapons to a war, everybody already has ICBMs.
|
| tl;dr: Drones swarms don't disrupt the current status quo:
| Nothing except nuclear attacks or another modern carrier
| group will defeat a modern carrier group in a single
| engagement. The usefullness of drone swarms is not against
| modern carrier groups but small-scale asymmetrical
| engagements, such as the guerilla operations currently
| carried in Ukraine or in Syria, in which small drones are
| incredibly effective weapons. This is still a big deal, as it
| is the most likely form of conflict we're going to see in the
| rest of this century, not full-on peer-to-peer conflicts
| between superpowers.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >Effective countermeasures already exists against this kind
| of threats, like CIWS.
|
| Phalanx has a magazine of 1,550 rounds, and each burst
| fires 100 rounds. Firing continuously, it would expend its
| magazine in 20.6 seconds. Firing perfectly, (with no
| hostile ECM) it could splash fifteen incoming targets.
|
| What if they launch thirty?
| varjag wrote:
| you reload
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Also, how good is Phalanx at detecting and killing
| something that comes in 6 feet above the water's surface?
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Somewhat good. That's the whole point. It was put in
| service specifically to counter sea skimming missiles.
| Its effectiveness is questionable however.
| marshray wrote:
| It's definitely designed for that scenario.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Here's a video of a crew reloading a Phalanx turret. Note
| how long it takes.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk6HL8URIcI
|
| An actual attack intended to overwhelm point defenses
| would be a single wave, obviously. There wouldn't be any
| chance to reload anything. Whatever you have in the
| magazines and VLS cells at that moment would be all you
| get.
| avereveard wrote:
| A carrier move with a large screen of ships, each
| bringing their own missiles defenses, plus pans with
| their own missiles that are likely to pick up and shoot
| stuff large enough not to be launched in range of the
| carrier group suppression zone
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > Nothing except nuclear attacks or another modern carrier
| group will defeat a modern carrier group in a single
| engagement.
|
| I have little interest in discussing drone swarms (so does
| the article to be fair - a good two thirds are strictly
| about drones which could as well be by themselves) but this
| statement is simply untrue.
|
| It's highly likely that a large number of sea skimming
| missiles would defeat a carrier group. So would a submarine
| intelligently positioned. The ability of a group to counter
| a strike from high altitude is also very questionable and
| let's not mention the very real anti-ship ballistic
| missiles.
|
| Carriers really are a technology of the past for symmetric
| conflicts.
| jonstewart wrote:
| I agree with most everything you say here about the
| limitations of drones, but there's a high likelihood that
| current aircraft carriers are quite vulnerable to anti-ship
| missiles. A DF-26 costs ~$10M, so launching several at a
| carrier, though expensive, would still be massively cost-
| effective in a real war. This article on WotR discusses the
| threat a bit more (I don't have an opinion on the
| solution/approach it advocates for the US military):
| https://warontherocks.com/2020/06/when-it-comes-to-
| missiles-....
| usrusr wrote:
| A drone able to sink an aircraft carrier with a single hit?
| (sink, not inconvenience) Those are usually called cruise
| missiles and not exactly novel.
|
| I do share the sentiment expressed in the last paragraph.
| AnonMO wrote:
| My comment wasn't this serious but I don't think any munition
| that can damage an aircraft carrier will be that cheap. Also
| im no expert but with more energy isnt the distance at which
| the heat from the laser remains effective becomes longer
| right? So if the tech is truly mature isn't 20km a bit naive
| also what if each laser system is an array of lasers with
| independent movement maybe 10-20 laser per system this
| configuration will definitely out power drones at the scale
| you speak of. The future is hard to predict.
| kragen wrote:
| I think that beyond 20km the horizon is between the laser
| and the drone. Maybe aircraft-mounted lasers could defend
| the carrier over a wider area.
|
| If each drone costs US$50 then you can launch 180 million
| drones for the cost of an aircraft carrier. I don't think
| increasing the number of lasers from my 5 to 10-20 is going
| to help much.
|
| I don't know what is needed for a munition to damage an
| aircraft carrier, but I feel like once it's on the deck
| it's already past the strong defenses and into the soft
| targets. It could be as simple as a wheeled robot that runs
| around stabbing random people, or a poison gas canister
| that fills the interior of the ship with mustard gas, or
| hundreds of hand-grenade-sized mini-claymores that deploy
| to random parts of the ship and conceal themselves quietly
| until a sailor happens to walk by.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > If each drone costs US$50 then you can launch 180
| million drones for the cost of an aircraft carrier.
|
| In a world of frictionless pulleys and spherical cows
| yes, in the real world, no. In the real world aircraft
| carriers and their attendant battle groups do not just
| park within visible range of a coast. Your drone swarm
| needs to find the carrier's battle group, get within
| launch range for your $50 drones (without being shot
| down), maintain some sort of identification of the
| carrier (or whatever ship), and then make a terminal
| approach.
|
| A carrier's air group maintains a perimeter hundreds of
| miles away from the carrier group. Not just fighters
| flying CAP but AWACS planes keeping track of the
| airspace. No one is going to hide a million drones
| launching towards a carrier group. It would be unlikely
| hide even a hundred drones. A drone carrier large enough
| to launch a non-trivial number of suicide drones is also
| unlikely to go undetected.
|
| Even if everything went right and someone managed to
| damage an aircraft carrier with a drone swarm, the
| carrier group alone has enough land attack weaponry to
| seriously hurt the source in retaliation. A nuclear
| response to an attack of a US carrier would not be
| outside the realm of possibility either.
|
| Attacking a US carrier group is a really dumb idea even
| if you've got a really clever weapon.
| dogcomplex wrote:
| Shaped charges can blast a sizable hole through any
| material, likely big enough to fly the next drone
| through. Only so many hits to get through a hull.
| kragen wrote:
| Yeah, in a realistic scenario, if the carrier can take
| out 360 drones before the drone wave reaches it, the
| adversary would launch 700 drones, not 361. I hadn't even
| thought about hitting the carrier in the same place over
| and over again. But supposedly carriers aren't even
| designed with thick armor?
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| If drones are so magically cheap, the carrier deploys its
| own magically cheap defensive drone swarm to protect
| itself when attacked by drones and remains unscathed.
| dogcomplex wrote:
| Nope, ain't that thick (< 1 inch). Probably built with
| multiple expendable flood chambers though, so swarm would
| likely need to make its way through the first hole.
| Plausible a single shaped charge does enough damage, but
| more likely some single-digit of hits needed.
|
| Swimming + flying cheap drones doable: https://www.youtub
| e.com/watch?v=FC9EJhs0pc0&ab_channel=Rutge...
|
| At (wild overestimate) $1k per drone an attacker can
| wield 13 million drones for the equivalent cost of an
| aircraft carrier, not including ongoing expenses.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| The sort of shaped charge you could put on a thousand
| dollar missile could probably pierce small holes in the
| hull of a ship (too small to fly anything through, that
| is fantasy. Shaped charges are bigger than the holes they
| make.) But even hundreds of holes like that that wouldn't
| sink a ship. Not least because the ship is filled with
| sailors trained in damage control, and that sort of
| damage wouldn't be particularly hard to patch up.
|
| Clearing the flight deck with antipersonnel warheads
| would probably work better, but I wouldn't count on that
| to keep a carrier out of action for very long. If you
| really want to sink a ship, either use proper anti-ship
| warheads or don't bother trying.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| > any munition that can damage an aircraft carrier will be
| that cheap
|
| It's all about targeting smarts and precision! This has
| been well demonstrated in Ukraine, where GPS-guided missile
| artillery can simply "reach out and touch someone" 50 miles
| away.
|
| Even tiny drones could do _fantastic_ damage if precisely
| targetted using on-board AI. They could target personnel,
| fuel, electrical equipment, optics.
|
| Don't think about a 50kg bomb dropped on the deck. Think of
| a _swarm_ of 500g drones with 100g shaped charges making a
| beeline for the control tower, and the engine intake of
| every parked plane.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _a swarm of 500g drones_ "
|
| Which have laughable range and can't handle anything
| heavier than a stiff breeze, let alone weather conditions
| at sea.
| robocat wrote:
| There is probably a place for hydrogen filled
| (electrolysis[1]?) blimp drones[0], although needs height
| since blimps are slow and large targets, so perhaps fixed
| wing always more useful. Deploy when wind is favourable?
|
| [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hMCqXmzzWFA
|
| [1]
| https://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/images/pubs/Chisholm-
| Chapt...
| asdff wrote:
| Pack them in a torpedo that releases them right next to
| the boat.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Surely you are joking. If a hostile can get a torpedo
| _that_ close to the target without being detected, they
| would just use a ordinary torpedo and warhead instead.
| asdff wrote:
| Maybe the ordinary torpedo with a warhead is too large
| and visible on radar. The drone torpedo could be much
| smaller, maybe the size of a common fish in the area.
| Maybe you have a bunch of them herded together traveling
| under water in the same manner as a school of fish might
| appear on radar.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Torpedoes aren't visible on radar, you mean sonar.
|
| You're not going to sink a ship with 500g explosive fish-
| shaped torpedo-launched drone things. This plan boils
| down to a really weird and elaborate method of throwing
| hand grenades at a super-carrier until it sinks. This
| whole line of discussion is absurd.
| asdff wrote:
| Imagine you had a drone that could dive to the ocean floor,
| pick up a chunk of rock, fly up one foot above the deck and
| drop the rock, then fly back down and repeat. Imagine you
| had 10 thousand of these swarming a single aircraft
| carrier. You'd be able to sink it before long, and the poor
| sailors aboard will have no defence against 10 thousand
| tiny machines that only appear for a second and are all
| around the ship. Anything you fire at them is liable to
| damage the ship itself.
|
| Maybe you wouldn't even need to have them come above the
| water line. Maybe the drone is just a weight and a magnet
| that can clamp onto the ships haul below the water line.
| Again, you can't combat that without having thousands of
| divers below your ship scraping the hull.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _Imagine you had a drone that could dive to the ocean
| floor, pick up a chunk of rock, fly up one foot above the
| deck and drop the rock, then fly back down and repeat_
|
| That would take a ridiculous amount of energy.
| r00fus wrote:
| As long as we're imagining we could use that same amount
| of energy and drop tungsten rods from orbit.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| If someone had the technology to make a drone able to
| dive 3.7km to the bottom of the ocean, had enough
| strength to bring back a rock and then propel itself 40m
| above the surface and keep that small, your scenario
| would be the least of my worry.
|
| Anyway, if you are in position to bring something close
| to a carrier from underwater, an heavy torpedo will do
| the job for a lot less money that your swarm.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| Can't a laser be defeated by deflecting the light or reflecting
| it? Or dispersing it?
|
| Afterall, its just a focused heat beam of electromagnetic
| radiation.
| scottyah wrote:
| The weaponized ones are rarely just in the visible spectrum.
| But yeah just like radar there'll probably be a lot of cat
| and mouse games
| Jensson wrote:
| A mirror is like a trampoline, there is a limit to how much
| it can reflect before it breaks. Or an electric circuit if
| you want a closer comparison, at low loads you wont notice
| any problems but as you turn up the voltage it will start to
| absorb energy and at high enough levels it will break.
| somerandomqaguy wrote:
| I'm not an expert in laser systems but just from my layman's
| understanding:
|
| A polished mirror surface might slow the heat build up a
| little bit but the best mirrors on the planet will still heat
| up if you're throwing enough energy at it; no mirror has a 0%
| absorption rate.
|
| What's more, any imperfection on the surface will act as an
| focal point for the heat to build up; a spec of dust, a dew
| drop, a little oil from your fingertip, anything that can
| absorb the heat from the laser basically turns it into a hot
| spot that the laser will burn through rather quickly.
| picsao wrote:
| saulrh wrote:
| Small imperfections on a reflective surface will absorb
| energy, heat up, and cause damage, causing more imperfections
| which absorb even more energy and heat even more rapidly.
| Positive feedback loop. The emitter gets around it by keeping
| the beam diffuse and focusing it onto the target downrange;
| you can very reasonably field a laser with a half-meter
| aperture and a one-centimeter spot size.
|
| Dispersal requires consumables. You leave consumables behind
| when you move and you _have_ to move because the laser can
| keep going indefinitely, so it 's a losing proposition.
| Consumables are heavy and limited.
| asdff wrote:
| You can't just have a drone deploy a reasonable enough
| mirror that tracks the beam wherever it goes? So what if
| there is an imperfection if the drone is cheap and you can
| have a replacement come online instantly behind it with a
| fresh mirror. If it costs less energy to make the drone
| than it does to fire this high powered laser downrange, you
| win the war over time.
| jefc1111 wrote:
| Neal Stephenson's excellent (if a little over-long) book
| Termination Shock suggests another option for dealing with
| attacking drones. Not going to leave a spoiler here though.
| kadoban wrote:
| Diamond Age passingly gets into a far-future evolution of this
| as well, with the "drones" on a nano scale.
| generalizations wrote:
| For that matter, do does Prey, by Michael Crichton.
| Symmetry wrote:
| For me, it seemed that with Prey Chrichton had to sacrifice
| a lot of realism to cram the nanotech shaped pegs into the
| dinosaur shaped hole he was going for.
| rektide wrote:
| A couple days ago there was news that the air force is going to
| start taking the "Angry Kitten" sdr pods they'd used to emulate
| adversary craft (for training).and statt trying to use it for
| electronic warfare[1] (cant find original link... this is similar
| but has a more tentative disposition on it happening or only
| maybe).
|
| At the time I was mainly thinking jamming. I figure it's probably
| a different class system to be able to directed-energy fry a
| craft. But even just throwing some EM spikes at it, having pulse
| emitting, might be enough to wreck elements of even a pretty
| capable aytonomous attack craft swarm.
|
| [1] https://www.c4isrnet.com/electronic-
| warfare/2022/08/15/air-f...
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32543156
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >The Counter-electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile
| Project (CHAMP) is an air-launched directed-energy weapon
| capable of incapacitating or damaging electronic systems[1] by
| means of an EMP (electromagnetic pulse).[2]
|
| >On 14 May 2015, the Air Force nominated the Lockheed Martin
| JASSM-ER as the optimal air vehicle to carry the CHAMP
| payload.[8] CHAMP is capable of up to 100 shots per sortie.[9]
|
| >In May 2019, it was revealed the Air Force had deployed at
| least 20 CHAMP-equipped missiles.[10]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-electronics_High_Power...
| tamsaraas wrote:
| some kind of bullshit. Terms "conflict" instead of war. Promotion
| of DJI crap, while there are much better ones. Naming aircraft
| without pilot inside called a drone. Strong recommendation about
| switchblade, while switchblades got awful reputation in Ukraine,
| and instead used another weapons to kill occupants. And the most
| awful thing - the topic created by served military.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Can you elaborate on the "awful" reputation of Switchblades?
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Extremely vulnerable to jamming and other electrical warfare
| and thus not usable at the frontlines.
|
| Ome can find out from public sources that Switchblades run
| their video and control 900MHz + 2.4GHz bands. Which makes
| sense for a disposable product and likely worked fine in
| Afganistan. But against an adversary with jammers and other
| EW it will fare much worse. Still usable in the rear, as we
| have seen.
| ge96 wrote:
| Wonder if you could do point to point laser comms.
| kragen wrote:
| US military radios use FHSS spanning 225-420 MHz. I don't
| know details but I bet they're hard to jam or even
| detect.
| bob1029 wrote:
| DSSS/FHSS schemes are almost magical in LPI and
| resilience when applied aggressively in a military
| setting.
|
| Operating below the noise floor shouldn't be possible at
| first glance, but through the power of statistics it
| absolutely is feasible.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| nothing stopping them from running different radio
| infrastructure
| Aeolun wrote:
| Seems like small drones are the best weapon against big drones.
| Kind of curious that they seem to assume that the drone needs an
| operator. If I were defending against a drone swarm I'd want my
| drones to be piloted by AI.
| picsao wrote:
| ajuc wrote:
| Piloting isn't the main bottleneck. It's easier to automate the
| piloting than the maintenance, and unless we're talking one-use
| drones (so, guided missiles really) - there's a lot of
| maintenance. Somebody needs to transport the drones to the
| front, program the goals, recharge the batteries (which takes
| hours often), rearm them after the mission, download the
| gathered data, change the encryption keys, etc.
|
| And if you manage to automate some of that - automation make
| your drone swarm vulnerable to disruption. Enemies can wait
| near automatic refueling/recharging station and capture the
| drones one-by-one for example. They can put a gps tracker on
| the automatic drone transport system and shell the enemy base
| once it gets there. Or they can put a grenade on a captured
| drone, release it, and detonate it when the drone is recharging
| destroying the whole swarm cheaply.
|
| Ultimately there's a trade-off between automation and
| resilience that should be familiar to web developers.
| antihero wrote:
| What if you launch the drone swarms from a large plane
| circling out of danger, like an AWACS or gunship?
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Anything far enough away to not be targeted by a ground to
| air missile would also probably be too far away for a drone
| to make a round trip. A quick Google search says even SAMs
| from the 1950s can hit targets over 30km away.
| dinkledunk wrote:
| Put your drones inside a missile and launch them at their
| target.
| mattlondon wrote:
| I saw a slide somewhere recently - there are already
| plans for this as an artillery shell or missile. I think
| it was combined with ordinary ordnance- drone is ejected
| before main weapon payload towards end of "flight". Drone
| helps pick highest value target then is used after for
| damage assessment. Presumably then it self destructs
| or/or kamikazees
| Gaishan wrote:
| I like this idea if it could be a cheap form of Smart
| Chaff.
| nradov wrote:
| That depends on the flight regime. If the big drones are at
| high altitude and/or moving fast then a small drone will never
| have the performance or sensors to achieve an intercept. So we
| need fast missiles or directed energy weapons fired from large,
| expensive platforms (which could be manned or unmanned,
| operating on land, sea, or air).
|
| AI piloting technology remains very primitive. We don't have
| anything yet that can cope well with a dynamic air combat
| environment involving multiple unpredictable threats, EW,
| countermeasures, and complex ROE. That's just total science
| fiction today so we can expect to have humans in the loop at
| some level for many years to come.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Actually it's ordinary table yarn or fishing line. Fly it
| around the drones and trip up the props.
| adrianN wrote:
| Perfect micro matters a lot when you zergrush your enemies:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs
| mgdlbp wrote:
| AlphaStar's blink stalker micro,
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUTMhmVh1qs&t=5888s
|
| with capped actions-per-minute and reaction time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18992698
| 323 wrote:
| Small drones have limited range, so you need to deploy them
| everywhere. The front line in Ukraine is 1000 km.
|
| Maybe you can have a big "carrier" drone transport them to
| where they are required, like in StarCraft.
|
| Or maybe you can make the small drones recharge directly from
| the grid, by landing on top of power lines and deploy the
| necessary connections.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Small attritable drone swarms deployed by strike aircraft.
|
| https://youtu.be/ndFKUKHfuM0
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perdix_(drone)
| usrusr wrote:
| If you want a defensive screen: minimalistic gliders,
| deployed to high altitudes, that dive down onto a target when
| needed. They'd simply use altitude as energy storage, and
| when that's nearly used up they take the rest to make it to
| some designated landing field, ready to get collected for the
| next launch. Multiple "shifts" at different points in the
| altitude cycle at any given time.
| slt2021 wrote:
| suicide drone swarm is non-economical and is a pure waste of high
| tech electronics in an explosion.
|
| HD surveillance drones on the other side, especially land based
| drones, like robotic dogs or sea drones. to execute forward
| observer role, provide realtime recon will be future. with
| precise targeting and intel - hitting high value target becomes
| trivial
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| The article doesn't talk about suicide drone squad (I don't
| blame you from not reading it. It's obvious from reading the
| very poor comments that nearly no one did).
|
| The article talks about swarm of small drones used in group for
| surveillance, cheap guided ammunitions and drones used as decoy
| and to do electronic warfare recon in advance of fighter
| planes.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > suicide drone swarm is non-economical and is a pure waste of
| high tech electronics in an explosion.
|
| You state that very confidently, but give no reasoning at all.
|
| A Javelin missile costs (IIRC) something like $100k. A Tomahawk
| cruise missile costs $2m. If you shoot more than one at a
| target (which I'm sure happens), you've got yourself a suicide
| drone swarm.
|
| If you strap warheads to 5 COTS $1000 drones, and kill a tank
| with the swarm, that could be both 1) more economical than a
| Javelin, and 2) may even defeat some countermeasures (e.g.
| active ones optimized to attack a single threat, reactive armor
| designed to protect against a single hit).
| samplatt wrote:
| No COTS drone that can carry a realistic payload is going to
| cost $1000. They'll cost $5000-$15000 so will still be 6x
| cheaper than a Tomahawk ^_^
| kragen wrote:
| An RPG-7V1 PG-7VR has 750 mm penetration in RHA and weighs
| 4.5 kg, including the rocket motor. How expensive is a COTS
| drone that can carry 4.5 kg?
|
| It looks like a Carbon Cub with a 15-cc engine and a
| 90-inch wingspan costs US$400:
| https://www.horizonhobby.com/product/carbon-cub-15cc-
| arf-90/... It has 1170 square inches of wing area and a
| claimed wing loading of "22.4 oz/sq in" which probably
| means 22.4 oz./sq ft. That would mean it weighs 5.1 kg, and
| the manual https://www.manua.ls/hangar-9/carbon-cub-15cc-
| arf/manual confirms it weighs 5.2 kg.
|
| The Carbon Cub surely can't carry nearly its own weight in
| payload. You'd probably have to scale it up by a linear
| factor of about 1.7, which would probably bring the cost to
| about US$1000.
|
| Or you could launch the drone with compressed air or put a
| couple of solid-fueled rocket engines on it.
|
| You probably won't sink an aircraft carrier with a Carbon
| Cub firing an RPG (retrofitted with guidance systems) but
| you should have a pretty good chance of blowing up a tank.
| samplatt wrote:
| Fair call! Here's Luddite Me thinking drones == battery-
| powered quadrotors
| kragen wrote:
| Oh yeah, those are pretty limited. You might look at the
| Switchblade and Bayraktar mentioned in the article.
| jmpman wrote:
| I disagree. Given a drone high enough that it can't be shot
| down with anti aircraft cannons, it must be shot down with a
| missile. Make the payload powerful enough that it can create
| damage of much higher cost than the missile, and the defender
| will be forced to use the missile. Now, optimize these high
| altitude drones for the lowest cost, and send them in a swarm.
| Send them during cloud cover, and a land based laser will be
| ineffective. Coupled with a CRPA antenna, these GPS guided
| drones would be hard to stop. As long as you can produce these
| drones for cheaper than the defensive missile, the attacker
| wins.
| slt2021 wrote:
| conventional warfare is going lose to drones, no doubt about
| that. I am not sure about hybrid/proxy wars where line
| between civilian and enemy is blurred (afghanistan, gaza
| strip).
|
| as powerful as it is, but you cant launch swarm of drones at
| civilian village which may host a couple insurgents.
|
| the only true countermeasure against western military tech
| will become hybrid conflict, where entire civilian population
| is an adversary, where you cannot win by military means only.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > as powerful as it is, but you cant launch swarm of drones
| at civilian village which may host a couple insurgents.
|
| If a hellfire missile with a few civilian casualties is
| acceptable, I don't see why a swarm of drones with a few
| civilian casualties isn't.
|
| Not that I think it's acceptable in the first place, but...
| slt2021 wrote:
| sounds like russians bombing Ukrainian villages
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Suicide drones are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) furnished
| with explosives, which cause the drone to detonate upon impact
| with another object.
|
| Don't we already have a word for this: missle?
| Teever wrote:
| There are a multitude of form factors and a drone can take that
| aren't that of a missile.
|
| Quadcopters are a very good example. Blimps are another.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Yes. And generally speaking, the term 'drone' is dumb and
| should be avoided because everybody gets weird ideas about what
| it means. It started as a pun, applied to a radio controlled
| aircraft rigged as a gunnery target, designed to fly once
| before dying like a drone bee. In just about any case where you
| might say "drone", there is a more precise and self-explanatory
| term you could use instead. For instance
|
| > _unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)_
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| "Drone" is a _perfect_ name for these wee, buzzy, soulless,
| robotic horrors...
|
| _Thanks to its big eyes, a drone spots a queen in the melee.
| It zeroes in and grabs her. Mating is completed in less than
| 5 seconds, during which the drone's endophallus is turned
| inside out into the queen and inflated by haemolymph under
| high pressure. As haemolymph rushes into his endophallus, the
| drone loses control of his body and falls back, unable to
| move. Ejaculation happens at such speed and force that it can
| be heard by people as a 'popping' sound._
|
| _Alas, these amorous moves will not end well for the lucky
| suitor. His endophallus breaks off, leaving its extremity
| inside the queen. The drone dies shortly after._
|
| https://scottishpollinators.wordpress.com/2020/09/21/drones-.
| ..
| sliken wrote:
| Drones normally have wings, or quad (or more) rotors. Powered
| by batteries or gas, fly rather slowly, can loiter, can collect
| intelligence, and have a human in the loop for target
| selection.
|
| Missiles typically have zero or minimal wings, powered by a
| rocket or at least a turbine, fly quickly (500 mph and up),
| can't loiter, can't collect intelligence, and generally don't
| have a human in the loop after being fired.
|
| There's a little overlap, but not that much.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Missile generally seems to imply a specific form of propulsion.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Rocket engine, turbojet, pulsejet, ramjet, scramjet.. I don't
| think missile implies a form of propulsion. Before WW2, both
| America and the UK experimented with propeller powered cruise
| missiles too.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Bows, slings, and hands can also be used to propel
| missiles.
| [deleted]
| defrost wrote:
| China recently launched an autonomous drone "carrier" that can
| deploy and recharge air and sea drone swarms .. 60+ flying and
| speedboating idependant objects that can criss cross, confound,
| change course, and shepard the one or several bombs to target.
|
| This is somewhat more than just "a missile".
|
| [1] https://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/05/31/china-
| mothership-d...
|
| ( Damn, I had the youtube of their sea demo bookmarked but not
| archived .. and now it's taken down )
| kragen wrote:
| Yeah, that's 60+ missiles. That's terrible that it's been
| taken down; now with LiveLeak gone there's noplace to find
| it, is there?
| recycledmatt wrote:
| The V2 characterization as a drone in ww2 also made me think
| the same thing.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| The V-1. The V-1 was a cruise missile with a pulsejet engine.
| The V-2 was a ballistic missile with a rocket engine.
| chii wrote:
| the one distinguishing difference is loitering capability of a
| drone.
|
| most missiles are not capable of loitering today. But i guess
| if missiles of tomorrow start getting such capabilities, then
| the line between a drone and a missile might blur even more.
| asdff wrote:
| Is loitering significant when you can park a ship or an AC130
| nearby?
| scottLobster wrote:
| Relative stealth, cost plus response time? Imagine a
| soldier designating a target and one drone of the loitering
| swarm automatically locks on and suicides into it, no human
| interaction required.
|
| Also would be a lot cheaper than maintaining a ship or
| AC130 on station.
| asdff wrote:
| Can't you already send a missile from thousands of miles
| away in mere minutes though? That way, your "loitering"
| swarm in this case (really just a missile silo) can be
| maintained in an area that is more secure than overhead
| of the enemy at all times where it could potentially be
| engaged before you use it to designate targets.
| scottLobster wrote:
| Sure, but sometimes the bad guys move within minutes, and
| missiles are terribly expensive. I'm thinking more on a
| tactical level, like a swarm of super long range,
| relatively cheap on-demand precision hand grenades that
| the soldiers wouldn't have to carry, could strike targets
| at a distance in seconds due to locality, and could fly
| around corners and through windows if necessary. And the
| unused drones can potentially be retrieved when the
| engagement is complete.
|
| Of course if the enemy has technological countermeasures
| to such a thing then it becomes a different issue, but
| you can say that about any technology.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Modern tomahawk cruise missiles can loiter, with two hours
| total flight time (some of which is spent getting to the
| area.)
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Drone guidance and maintenance is also much more accessible
| than missile guidance and maintenance - I would imagine.
| kragen wrote:
| Yup, my grandfather worked on autonomous suicide drones back in
| the 01950s.
| jcadam wrote:
| Ye Olde flak guns?
| asdff wrote:
| I bet a trebuchet launching random scrap metal or rocks and
| debris would work just as well too. You can make one with some
| scrap wood capable of sending a watermellon hundreds of yards
| as it is.
| kragen wrote:
| Rheinmetall has been demonstrating gatling-launched
| fragmentation grenades as a drone-swarm countermeasure.
| dogcomplex wrote:
| Sheer quantity can hit. Targeted shots are dodgeable with
| high probability from 3m+ distance. Whether this is
| economical to the defender vs the attacker is the question.
| kragen wrote:
| Hmm, you're thinking that if a gun is pointed at a drone
| and launching grenades at it at 500 meters per second, the
| drone can dodge the grenades with high probability if it's
| 3 meters or more away from the gun? 5 meters is 10
| milliseconds, and the assured kill radius of the grenades
| is presumably at least 200 mm; for the drone to move 200 mm
| in 10 ms it needs to average 20 m/s in an unpredictable
| direction, which means it needs to accelerate to 40 m/s in
| 10 ms, 4000 m/s/s, 408 gees. How do you propose for the
| drone to accelerate at 400 gees, other than being hit by a
| bullet?
| dogcomplex wrote:
| Forgive me, second-hand calculations with similar
| assumptions but which forgot the t^2 square root on d=1/2
| _a_ t^2. Reran them and you are correct.
|
| Racing drones routinely do 6Gs. So ~60m/s/s acceleration.
| With your above assumptions that's then about a 40m
| distance needed for a drone to juke out of the way of the
| shot. Thank you very much that's an important difference.
| dimensionc132 wrote:
| Slaughter Bots....coming soon
|
| https://yewtu.be/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| I feel like a sustained blast from screaming directed spy-1 radar
| ought to do the trick. Not sure why that isn't also a strategy
| for hypersonic missiles
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| What about proximity fuse explosives? Would it be possible to
| disable the propellers on a drone by delivering a payload close
| enough to it?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Drones, especially repurposed commercial drones are extremely
| fragile. Almost anything will work. It's the getting close to
| it that matters - with what? Another drone?
| dogcomplex wrote:
| Duh. You can disable one with a bouncy ball. That's 1 out of
| 10-100 million for the same price of an aircraft carrier.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Yes. There are a couple point defense systems originally
| designed to counter rocket and cruise missile attacks that can
| readily attack drones as well. Example:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5_F4_Eod8 This specific
| system uses a magnetic coil to measure the muzzle velocity of
| the shell as it's leaving the barrel, and sets a timing delay
| for the shell to burst. So that combined with the radar means
| this thing can put flack in very precise places.
| robocat wrote:
| Streamers of string? Fishing line / kinked / sticky / cross
| linked.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=Confetti+Streamers+defense+d...
| imtringued wrote:
| Who the fuck cares about "drone swarms"? Americans already bomb
| civilians to death with their regular non swarming drones with
| superior range altitude, payload capacity and maximum flight time
| yet the classic hackernews comment revolves around some inferior
| plastic toy Jerry rigged with improvised explosives.
| gsatic wrote:
| Who cares? The MIL complex/employment guarantee scheme
| obviously.
| dogcomplex wrote:
| The article is about defense even of military
| assets/organizations, and concludes there is no great counter
| yet. The civilian threat is just a tiny cherry on top of all
| the other current civilian threats.
| kragen wrote:
| Because the regular non-swarming drones Americans use to bomb
| civilians to death, like the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper, cost
| over US$100 million each, and they can be shot down. This means
| that with a slaughter budget of US$10 billion you can only
| deploy 100 drones and you can only deploy them in areas that
| don't shoot SAMs at them. Maybe you can kill 10'000 people
| (each Hellfire missile costs US$150'000, so that's an
| additional US$300 million for 2000 of them).
|
| If your inferior plastic toy jerry-rigged with improvised
| explosives costs US$1000 then for the same slaughter budget you
| can deploy 10 million drones and probably kill 100 million
| people, depending on how many murder missions each plastic toy
| survives. What's more important, though, is that your 10
| million drones can kill 1000 precisely chosen people.
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