18 ms·

Military drone swarms and how to combat them

144 points by Gaishan 4y ago

anigbrowl 4y ago
tl;dr There are numerous options to combat drone swarms, but all of them possess notable shortcomings.
slt2021 4y ago
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
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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/HAN5065.html 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 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 4y ago
        Fair call! Here's Luddite Me thinking drones == battery-powered quadrotors
        kragen 4y ago
        Oh yeah, those are pretty limited. You might look at the Switchblade and Bayraktar mentioned in the article.
- jmpman 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      > 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 4y ago
        sounds like russians bombing Ukrainian villages
    - jmpman 4y ago
      Civilized countries can’t. But once this technology becomes more widely available, would Hamas hesitate to send a swarm of high altitude drone bombers into civilian populations? If ISIS had this technology, would they have hesitated to carpet bomb every city in their path?
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  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 4y ago
> 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?
- defrost 4y ago
  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-drone-swarms/ 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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
  The V2 characterization as a drone in ww2 also made me think the same thing.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    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 4y ago
  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.
swayvil 4y ago
Air Force has a giant herf gun called THOR. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_High_Power_Operational_Responder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_High_Power_Operatio... https://afresearchlab.com/technology/directed-energy/successstories/counter-swarm-high-power-weapon/ https://afresearchlab.com/technology/directed-energy/success...
- Invictus0 4y ago
  It's mentioned in the article
throwteu 4y ago
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?
- echelon 4y ago
  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 https://youtu.be/TlO2gcs1YvM
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      On the other hand some basic armor, including over the face like a motorcycle helmet, will protect you against small charges.
      - what-imright 4y ago
        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
rektide 4y ago
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-force-may-put-angry-kitten-in-planes-for-electronic-warfare-edge/ https://www.c4isrnet.com/electronic-warfare/2022/08/15/air-f... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32543156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32543156
- sbierwagen 4y ago
  >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_Microwave_Advanced_Missile_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-electronics_High_Power...
tamsaraas 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Can you elaborate on the "awful" reputation of Switchblades?
  - RF_Savage 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Wonder if you could do point to point laser comms.
      - kragen 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        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.
Aeolun 4y ago
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.
- adrianN 4y ago
  Perfect micro matters a lot when you zergrush your enemies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs
  - mgdlbp 4y ago
    AlphaStar's blink stalker micro, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUTMhmVh1qs&t=5888s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUTMhmVh1qs&t=5888s with capped actions-per-minute and reaction time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18992698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18992698
    - MaxikCZ 4y ago
      This is what I dont like about Starcraft. The strategy is, in many instances, second to microing the units. The fact that 1hp unit have the same effectivenes as a full hp one is just weird.
- picsao 4y ago
  Carrier drones are the ideal, swallowing cost of transport while not sacrificing amount and speed
- 323 4y ago
  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.
jcadam 4y ago
Ye Olde flak guns?
- kragen 4y ago
  Rheinmetall has been demonstrating gatling-launched fragmentation grenades as a drone-swarm countermeasure.
  - dogcomplex 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        Forgive me, second-hand calculations with similar assumptions but which forgot the t^2 square root on d=1/2at^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.
        kragen 4y ago
        Thank you, too!
mthehacker 4y ago
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.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  You're not ready for how this is gonna play out in a domestic theater.
- abrookewood 4y ago
  This makes no sense at all. Your suggestion instantly takes us from a limited conflict to nuclear Armageddon with nothing in between.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  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/ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThereIsNoKillLik...
- asdff 4y ago
  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.
sitkack 4y ago
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
- kragen 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    - baybal2 4y ago
    - picsao 4y ago
    - chr1 4y ago
      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 4y ago
      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.
AnonMO 4y ago
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.
- kumarvvr 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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
  - somerandomqaguy 4y ago
    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 4y ago
  - saulrh 4y ago
    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.
imtringued 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Who cares? The MIL complex/employment guarantee scheme obviously.
- dogcomplex 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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.
swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
What about proximity fuse explosives? Would it be possible to disable the propellers on a drone by delivering a payload close enough to it?
- dogcomplex 4y ago
  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.
- pjc50 4y ago
  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?
- robocat 4y ago
  Streamers of string? Fishing line / kinked / sticky / cross linked. https://www.google.com/search?q=Confetti+Streamers+defense+drones https://www.google.com/search?q=Confetti+Streamers+defense+d...
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  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 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.
jefc1111 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Diamond Age passingly gets into a far-future evolution of this as well, with the "drones" on a nano scale.
  - generalizations 4y ago
    For that matter, do does Prey, by Michael Crichton.
    - Symmetry 4y ago
      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.
mcphail 4y ago
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.
dimensionc132 4y ago
Slaughter Bots....coming soon https://yewtu.be/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg https://yewtu.be/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg
kingkawn 4y ago
30 people with shotguns loaded with buckshot?
- marshray 4y ago
  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 4y ago
[deleted]
bilsbie 4y ago
Could swarms fly in a V like geese for aerodynamics? (Ps I never understood why a V Is better than a straight line?)
- bombcar 4y ago
  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?
- drc500free 4y ago
  Bodysurfing is easier than swimming.
throwawaymaths 4y ago
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
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
Off-topic: I bought a drone in the US, during a recent visit. I live in Italy. I cannot use my drone here because of some BS from the drone manufacturer. I hate how drone companies essentially dictate many things that don't make any sense, such as the above one. I wish there were an open-source firmware, or something, to allow us to use them more freely.

144 points by Gaishan 4y ago

tl;dr There are numerous options to combat drone swarms, but all of them possess notable shortcomings.

slt2021 4y ago

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

tablespoon 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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/HAN5065.html 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 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 4y ago
      Fair call! Here's Luddite Me thinking drones == battery-powered quadrotors
      - kragen 4y ago
        Oh yeah, those are pretty limited. You might look at the Switchblade and Bayraktar mentioned in the article.
jmpman 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
      sounds like russians bombing Ukrainian villages
  - jmpman 4y ago
    Civilized countries can’t. But once this technology becomes more widely available, would Hamas hesitate to send a swarm of high altitude drone bombers into civilian populations? If ISIS had this technology, would they have hesitated to carpet bomb every city in their path?
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
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 4y ago

> 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?

defrost 4y ago
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-drone-swarms/ 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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
The V2 characterization as a drone in ww2 also made me think the same thing.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  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 4y ago
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.

swayvil 4y ago

Air Force has a giant herf gun called THOR. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_High_Power_Operational_Responder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_High_Power_Operatio... https://afresearchlab.com/technology/directed-energy/successstories/counter-swarm-high-power-weapon/ https://afresearchlab.com/technology/directed-energy/success...

Invictus0 4y ago
It's mentioned in the article

throwteu 4y ago

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?

echelon 4y ago
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 https://youtu.be/TlO2gcs1YvM
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    On the other hand some basic armor, including over the face like a motorcycle helmet, will protect you against small charges.
    - what-imright 4y ago
      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

rektide 4y ago

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-force-may-put-angry-kitten-in-planes-for-electronic-warfare-edge/ https://www.c4isrnet.com/electronic-warfare/2022/08/15/air-f... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32543156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32543156

sbierwagen 4y ago
>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_Microwave_Advanced_Missile_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-electronics_High_Power...

tamsaraas 4y ago

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 4y ago
Can you elaborate on the "awful" reputation of Switchblades?
- RF_Savage 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Wonder if you could do point to point laser comms.
    - kragen 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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.

Aeolun 4y ago

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.

adrianN 4y ago
Perfect micro matters a lot when you zergrush your enemies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  AlphaStar's blink stalker micro, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUTMhmVh1qs&t=5888s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUTMhmVh1qs&t=5888s with capped actions-per-minute and reaction time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18992698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18992698
  - MaxikCZ 4y ago
    This is what I dont like about Starcraft. The strategy is, in many instances, second to microing the units. The fact that 1hp unit have the same effectivenes as a full hp one is just weird.
picsao 4y ago
Carrier drones are the ideal, swallowing cost of transport while not sacrificing amount and speed
323 4y ago
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.

jcadam 4y ago

Ye Olde flak guns?

kragen 4y ago
Rheinmetall has been demonstrating gatling-launched fragmentation grenades as a drone-swarm countermeasure.
- dogcomplex 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Forgive me, second-hand calculations with similar assumptions but which forgot the t^2 square root on d=1/2at^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.
      - kragen 4y ago
        Thank you, too!

mthehacker 4y ago

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.

anigbrowl 4y ago
You're not ready for how this is gonna play out in a domestic theater.
abrookewood 4y ago
This makes no sense at all. Your suggestion instantly takes us from a limited conflict to nuclear Armageddon with nothing in between.
tuatoru 4y ago
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/ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThereIsNoKillLik...
asdff 4y ago
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.

sitkack 4y ago

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

kragen 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - baybal2 4y ago
  - picsao 4y ago
  - chr1 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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.

AnonMO 4y ago

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.

kumarvvr 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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
- somerandomqaguy 4y ago
  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 4y ago
- saulrh 4y ago
  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.

imtringued 4y ago

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 4y ago
Who cares? The MIL complex/employment guarantee scheme obviously.
dogcomplex 4y ago
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 4y ago
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.

swagasaurus-rex 4y ago

What about proximity fuse explosives? Would it be possible to disable the propellers on a drone by delivering a payload close enough to it?

dogcomplex 4y ago
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.
pjc50 4y ago
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?
robocat 4y ago
Streamers of string? Fishing line / kinked / sticky / cross linked. https://www.google.com/search?q=Confetti+Streamers+defense+drones https://www.google.com/search?q=Confetti+Streamers+defense+d...
jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
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 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.

jefc1111 4y ago

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 4y ago
Diamond Age passingly gets into a far-future evolution of this as well, with the "drones" on a nano scale.
- generalizations 4y ago
  For that matter, do does Prey, by Michael Crichton.
  - Symmetry 4y ago
    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.

mcphail 4y ago

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.

dimensionc132 4y ago

Slaughter Bots....coming soon https://yewtu.be/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg https://yewtu.be/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg

kingkawn 4y ago

30 people with shotguns loaded with buckshot?

marshray 4y ago
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 4y ago

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bilsbie 4y ago

Could swarms fly in a V like geese for aerodynamics? (Ps I never understood why a V Is better than a straight line?)

bombcar 4y ago
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?
drc500free 4y ago
Bodysurfing is easier than swimming.

throwawaymaths 4y ago

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

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

Off-topic: I bought a drone in the US, during a recent visit. I live in Italy. I cannot use my drone here because of some BS from the drone manufacturer. I hate how drone companies essentially dictate many things that don't make any sense, such as the above one. I wish there were an open-source firmware, or something, to allow us to use them more freely.