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To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#171

Post by gowld »

kragen wrote: post #170
Animats wrote: post #37

The article has a good intro, and then never goes on to discuss the "key strengths". It's just clickbait. They're also late to the party on this. The US professional military has been discussing this for over a decade. There have already been more than a half dozen articles on drones in Parameters, the U.S. Army War College's journal. "The coercive logic of militant drone use" [1] is worth reading. This covers how no…

The key strength of drones is that they kill who you want to kill, or destroy the materiel you want to destroy, without any collateral damage at all. Coupled with adequate intelligence, which they also help obtain, drones make nuclear weapons obsolete; they are a dramatically more effective means of coercion. There are a lot of fantasies in this thread about how they're easy to defend against, and that would be true…

Who is going to try that and why wouldn't they meet the business end of a nuclear missile?

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#172

Post by kragen »

gowld wrote: post #171
kragen wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key strength of drones is that they kill who you want to kill, or destroy the materiel you want to destroy, without any collateral damage at all. Coupled with adequate intelligence, which they also help obtain, drones make nuclear weapons obsolete; they are a dramatically more effective means of coercion. There are a lot of fantasies in this thread about how they're easy to defend against, and that would be true…

Who is going to try that and why wouldn't they meet the business end of a nuclear missile?

possibly because the officers in the nuclear silo want some of their family members to still be alive when they go home. or possibly because the nuclear dudes don't know who to nuke. or possibly at the point where your answer to a military threat is 'well if they try that we could just nuke them' you are kind of admitting that it is a very serious threat indeed; note that nobody got nuked in response to 9/11

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#174

Post by davidgould »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #145
milesward wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ballistic trajectory versus active evasive behavior.

https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a426717.pdf A target with a 300mm frontal diameter, capable of evading at 10g , is expected to require 6 rounds to achieve a P_hit of 0.5 at 200m range, based on the parameters of your typical Phalanx CIWS. Said Phalanx weapon system might fire a burst of 1s duration in such an engagement, which is 75 rounds. For a missile engagement, that's a problematic number, but for a dr…

Phalanx usually has about 1500 rounds ready, so 20 drones at 75 rounds each will run it out. Phalanx is large, heavy, and costly, and can't be readily be used in built up areas at low angles.

A few dozen m/s is probably a good estimate for quadcopter style drones, but low hundreds m/s should be easy for fixed wing drones, so at 200 meter engagement range (that paper makes it pretty clear that maneuvering targets are hard beyond that) there is only time to hit a few drones before they arrive.

So maybe drone swarms will work even against current CIWS.

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#175

Post by hungryforcodes »

tw04 wrote: post #149
jcrawfordor wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern CIWS are designed to be effective against substantially faster and more agile rockets. Drones really are slow and easy to take down compared to guided rockets and especially kinetic ones, and the military has been working on means of defending against those for decades. The Phalanx is being modified to serve as an anti-UAS system, for example. The challenge is more to do with detection than firing.

Most of those systems are designed to target dozens of incoming targets. It’s entirely reasonable and plausible for drone swarms to number in the thousands of targets. That ciws will likely exhaust its magazine before it can take out all the drones unless I’m missing something.

Lasers. You just have to put "laser defense drones" into Google to get a whole slew of completed or in development solutions. Also EMPS, counter defensive swarms of drones. The list goes on...

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#176

Post by jvanderbot »

kragen wrote: post #170
Animats wrote: post #37

The article has a good intro, and then never goes on to discuss the "key strengths". It's just clickbait. They're also late to the party on this. The US professional military has been discussing this for over a decade. There have already been more than a half dozen articles on drones in Parameters, the U.S. Army War College's journal. "The coercive logic of militant drone use" [1] is worth reading. This covers how no…

The key strength of drones is that they kill who you want to kill, or destroy the materiel you want to destroy, without any collateral damage at all. Coupled with adequate intelligence, which they also help obtain, drones make nuclear weapons obsolete; they are a dramatically more effective means of coercion. There are a lot of fantasies in this thread about how they're easy to defend against, and that would be true…

This is a tech power fantasy. Its not at all representative of the state of the art and disregards a lot of difficulties.

Massed drones absolutely can wreck terrible destruction, death by a thousand cuts to any facility or base or airfield. But the kind of amassed yet precise strike against a hundred targeted individuals, with smart targeting and somehow knowledge of their career status?! Come on.

I wouldn't even finish that movie, let alone fund that proposal.

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#177

Post by imtringued »

kragen wrote: post #170
Animats wrote: post #37

The article has a good intro, and then never goes on to discuss the "key strengths". It's just clickbait. They're also late to the party on this. The US professional military has been discussing this for over a decade. There have already been more than a half dozen articles on drones in Parameters, the U.S. Army War College's journal. "The coercive logic of militant drone use" [1] is worth reading. This covers how no…

The key strength of drones is that they kill who you want to kill, or destroy the materiel you want to destroy, without any collateral damage at all. Coupled with adequate intelligence, which they also help obtain, drones make nuclear weapons obsolete; they are a dramatically more effective means of coercion. There are a lot of fantasies in this thread about how they're easy to defend against, and that would be true…

$10 will get you a palm sized drone with a flight time measured in minutes. Stop dreaming. The type of drone that people are scared of costs at least $1000.

Hamas sends thousands of rockets in that budget range and nobody is scared that rocket swarms are going to kill thousands of Israelis. IDF retaliation killed more innocent people in a single bombing than all Hamas rockets combined.

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#178

Post by imtringued »

lazide wrote: post #69
sliken wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slow and easy to kill? Seen a drone race? At what range and with what weapon would they be easy to kill? How long would the kill take? At what range could the drone be killed at? Sure often drones fly in straight lines or hover. But in an adversarial environment they could easily move pseudo randomly and be quite difficult to kill.

And even drone races are slow and predictable compared to what is possible with an applied military mind and decent tools. I suspect (or hope) we already have some decent options in the top secret space. Nothing we have now (publicly) is going to do a damn against a shipping container full of 2-5 lb drones each carrying 1 lb of C4 in a swarm with cheap off the shelf sensors going 100 mph nap of the earth in a distrib…

>Nothing we have now (publicly) is going to do a damn against a shipping container full of 2-5 lb drones each carrying 1 lb of C4 in a swarm with cheap off the shelf sensors going 100 mph nap of the earth in a distributed pattern. And that is currently entirely doable with off the shelf drones using existing software and published techniques for peanuts. Add in some decent programming and logistics talent, and that is a huge problem.

Existing technology can take down conventional drones through Electronic Warfare and EW scales to an infinite number of drones assuming each drone is vulnerable.

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#179

Post by imtringued »

sliken wrote: post #75
jcrawfordor wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern CIWS are designed to be effective against substantially faster and more agile rockets. Drones really are slow and easy to take down compared to guided rockets and especially kinetic ones, and the military has been working on means of defending against those for decades. The Phalanx is being modified to serve as an anti-UAS system, for example. The challenge is more to do with detection than firing.

Dunno, do agile rockets dodge? Or just follow a simple preprogrammed patterns (like low, then pop up to attack from above)? Not sure a CIWS system that can hit a mach 2 missile that doesn't dodge would necessarily handle the same $$$ spent on a N cheaper drones. How many minutes of firing do modern CIWS systems typically have? Loitering at max engagement range and dodging might well end up using ammo at a rate that t…

How do you "dodge" airburst ammunition? Can your drone instantaneously change direction at the speed of an explosion? What the hell am I reading here?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdwjcayPuag

Edit: Look they even made a smaller system! https://youtu.be/Drm3kdDYBI4

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#180

Post by kragen »

imtringued wrote: post #177
kragen wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key strength of drones is that they kill who you want to kill, or destroy the materiel you want to destroy, without any collateral damage at all. Coupled with adequate intelligence, which they also help obtain, drones make nuclear weapons obsolete; they are a dramatically more effective means of coercion. There are a lot of fantasies in this thread about how they're easy to defend against, and that would be true…

$10 will get you a palm sized drone with a flight time measured in minutes. Stop dreaming. The type of drone that people are scared of costs at least $1000. Hamas sends thousands of rockets in that budget range and nobody is scared that rocket swarms are going to kill thousands of Israelis. IDF retaliation killed more innocent people in a single bombing than all Hamas rockets combined.

> $10 will get you a palm sized drone with a flight time measured in minutes.

retail, and battery-powered. what will a $10 bom get you with a nitromethane-powered engine or a glider dropped from a helium balloon

> The type of drone that people are scared of costs at least $1000.

they need to rethink that. stop fighting the last war

> Hamas sends thousands of rockets in that budget range and nobody is scared that rocket swarms are going to kill thousands of Israelis

that's because hamas is too dumb to put glider wings and ardupilot on each rocket and possibly too deprived of facebook and imei-logger data to know where to find the specific thousands of israelis who are family members of the invading officers

'our enemy might be as incompetent as the hamas model rocketry club' is not a great way to think out how to provide security

this is not a dream. this is a nightmare

listen, i know this scenario isn't happening today. but it's going to happen within the next few years, and the fact that it isn't happening today isn't much of an argument against that

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