IMO it is too soon to tell whether drone defense will hold up to countercountermeasures.
It’s already very common for drones to drop grenades and they can theoretically do so from 1-2km up if you sacrifice precision.
Once sound becomes the primary means of locating drones, I expect the UAS operators to do everything they can to mask the acoustic signature, including varying the sound profile through propeller design, making cheaper drones louder than high-end drones, and deployable acoustic decoys.
Guns have short range so these only work to defend targets fairly close to the system. E.g. Ukraine’s indigenous Sky Sentinel (12.7mm caliber) has a range of 1.5 km and a sufficiently large swarm of FPVs can overwhelm one anyway. For longer ranges, larger calibers are needed, and these have higher costs and lower rate of fire. Skyranger 30mm has a range of 3 km but the ammunition costs $hundreds per round.
I agree that Israel will probably be less affected than larger, poorer countries, but given that drones have probably killed over 200,000 people in Ukraine even a small percentage of this would be a problem for Israel.
Drone countermeasures are an idle hope. The only real counter to drones is more drones.
Lasers, shotguns, tank redesign [no holes!], nets, counter-drones, flak etc will all be part of the arsenal surely but thinking drone countermeasures are going to restore the previous generation’s war doctrine is as silly as thinking that metallurgy innovations will reverse the gunpowder age.
The future present of warfare is drones, drones, drones.
Consider though that if a defense contractor were able to reduce the noise of a helicopter enough to matter militarily, the Pentagon would have poured many billions into that contractor, especially during the Vietnam War during which helicopters were relied on very extensively. Also, the main constraint on the use of civilian helicopters is probably complaints about the noise. And the fans at the front of engines of airliners is responsible for producing most of the thrust on the airliner, and there have been large economic incentives to make those quiet (to eliminate the copious restrictions on airliners designed to limit noise) and although airliners have gotten quieter, they remain quite loud, loud enough to detect and triangulate with arrays of microphones many many miles away. (The reason the are called “fans” and not “propellers” is merely the number of blades.)
Remotely-piloted gliders or glide bombs of course don’t have much of a noise signature, which is why I have tried to be careful in my comments to restrict the scope of my statements to multirotor helicopter-style drones.
Yeah I agree that the physics favors the autoturrets over the drones. I don’t think there will be silent drones and even if they are, visual identification will probably work well enough anyway. (There will totally be fixed-wing drones that turn off their propellers and glide silently towards the target btw...)
But even if you have a perfect autoturret, it can probably only take out, like, 10 drones before one gets through and kills it. So your autoturrets can’t cost more than 10x the cost of a drone… so, like, $10k. Also, even if you have a $5k autoturret that can reliably take out 10 drones before they close the distance, the drones are way more mobile and so can concentrate force, retreat, etc. and thus will have a huge role to play even if they generally stay away from autoturret-defended areas & even if every vehicle has an autoturret on it.
So I think drones are well worth investing in on the current margins, even if we assume that autoturret tech will advance by leaps and bounds and achieve perfection in the next few years. Which is a very generous assumption.
It’s already very common for drones to drop grenades and they can theoretically do so from 1-2km up if you sacrifice precision.
Is it generally useful to lob a grenade into a general area, though? Unless that area is pretty densely covered with things you want to hit with a grenade, it seems like you usually just waste a grenade.
In ww2 the Americans thought they had bombsights for high-altitude bombing with 23m CEP, but actually they were more like 370m CEP. (according to quick google). So, terribly inaccurate. I wonder if modern computers and sensors could enable significantly more accurate bombing. (Sensors to pinpoint your position relative to the target + to judge wind conditions, computers to simulate bomb trajectories). I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer is yes.
Nor would I. In WWII bombers didn’t even know where they were, but we have GPS now such that Excalibur guided artillery shells can get 1m CEP. And the US and possibly China can use Starlink and other constellations for localization even when GPS is jammed. I would guess 20m is easily doable with good sensing and dumb bombs, which would at least hit a building.
The Interwebs seem to indicate that that’s only if you give it a laser spot to aim at, not with just GPS. And that’s a $70,000 shell, with the cheaper PKG sounding like it’s closer to $15,000, and a plain old dumb shell being $3,000. Which seems crazy, but there you are.
Anyway, guiding a ballistic shell while riding it down into the target seems like a pretty different problem from figuring out when to release a bomb.
I would guess 20m is easily doable with good sensing and dumb bombs, which would at least hit a building.
… but I don’t think a hand grenade is typically an anti-building munition. From the little I know about grenades, it seems like they’ll have to fix the roof, but unless you’re really lucky, the building’s still going to be mostly usable, and, other than hearing loss, anybody inside is going to be OK unless they’re in the room directly below where the grenade hits, and maybe even then.
If you’re attacking buildings, I suspect you may need a bigger drone.
The Interwebs seem to indicate that that’s only if you give it a laser spot to aim at, not with just GPS.
Good catch.
Agree grenade sized munitions won’t damage buildings, I think the conversation is drifting between FPVs and other kinds of drones, and also between various settings, so I’ll just state my beliefs.
Fiber FPVs with 40km range and 2kg payload (either kamikaze or grenade/mine dropping), which can eventually be countered by a large number of short range guns if they fly at low altitude. It’s not clear to me if the 40km range ones need to be larger
Heavy bomber drones can be equipped with fiber (or Starlink for US allies) and carry 15kg+ payload, enough to damage buildings and sensitive industrial equipment. They can do this while flying above the range of small guns and need dedicated antiaircraft guns
Fixed wing can carry even larger payloads with longer range and higher altitude, but are still pretty slow, except for the ones with jet engines
Drones equipped with GPS will know their position to within ~10 meters like the GPS only variant of Excalibur. It seems possible to constrain the payload’s horizontal velocity by 1 m/s on average, and the drop time from 1500m is 17 seconds, giving an error of 17 m. The overall error would be sqrt(10^2 + 17^2) = 20 m. If GPS is jammed, it’s not obvious they can do the first part, but probably they can still use cameras or something
All of the above are extremely threatening for both organized warfare and terrorism against an opponent without effective cheap air defense.
Even with the next evolution of air defense including radar-acoustic fusion to find threats, the limited reliability of ~all types of existing air defense and large number of drone configurations makes me guess that drones will remain moderately threatening in some form. Given that Hezbollah was previously firing unguided rockets with CEP in the hundreds of meters, some kind of drone that can target with CEP around 20 meters could be more cost effective for them if they cannot procure thousands of cheap guided missiles. If they could drop six individual grenades on six people from a bomber drone even in the presence of air defense, that would be even more effective, but it seems unlikely
Excalibur is made by the US, which has no incentive to reduce costs, and so its $70k price tag is more of a “maximum the army is willing to pay” situation. This is true to some extent with Skyranger so maybe someone motivated will build smart ammunition that costs $40 per round and make it cost effective.
IMO it is too soon to tell whether drone defense will hold up to countercountermeasures.
It’s already very common for drones to drop grenades and they can theoretically do so from 1-2km up if you sacrifice precision.
Once sound becomes the primary means of locating drones, I expect the UAS operators to do everything they can to mask the acoustic signature, including varying the sound profile through propeller design, making cheaper drones louder than high-end drones, and deployable acoustic decoys.
Guns have short range so these only work to defend targets fairly close to the system. E.g. Ukraine’s indigenous Sky Sentinel (12.7mm caliber) has a range of 1.5 km and a sufficiently large swarm of FPVs can overwhelm one anyway. For longer ranges, larger calibers are needed, and these have higher costs and lower rate of fire. Skyranger 30mm has a range of 3 km but the ammunition costs $hundreds per round.
I agree that Israel will probably be less affected than larger, poorer countries, but given that drones have probably killed over 200,000 people in Ukraine even a small percentage of this would be a problem for Israel.
Drone countermeasures are an idle hope. The only real counter to drones is more drones.
Lasers, shotguns, tank redesign [no holes!], nets, counter-drones, flak etc will all be part of the arsenal surely but thinking drone countermeasures are going to restore the previous generation’s war doctrine is as silly as thinking that metallurgy innovations will reverse the gunpowder age.
The
futurepresent of warfare is drones, drones, drones.Consider though that if a defense contractor were able to reduce the noise of a helicopter enough to matter militarily, the Pentagon would have poured many billions into that contractor, especially during the Vietnam War during which helicopters were relied on very extensively. Also, the main constraint on the use of civilian helicopters is probably complaints about the noise. And the fans at the front of engines of airliners is responsible for producing most of the thrust on the airliner, and there have been large economic incentives to make those quiet (to eliminate the copious restrictions on airliners designed to limit noise) and although airliners have gotten quieter, they remain quite loud, loud enough to detect and triangulate with arrays of microphones many many miles away. (The reason the are called “fans” and not “propellers” is merely the number of blades.)
Remotely-piloted gliders or glide bombs of course don’t have much of a noise signature, which is why I have tried to be careful in my comments to restrict the scope of my statements to multirotor helicopter-style drones.
Yeah I agree that the physics favors the autoturrets over the drones. I don’t think there will be silent drones and even if they are, visual identification will probably work well enough anyway. (There will totally be fixed-wing drones that turn off their propellers and glide silently towards the target btw...)
But even if you have a perfect autoturret, it can probably only take out, like, 10 drones before one gets through and kills it. So your autoturrets can’t cost more than 10x the cost of a drone… so, like, $10k. Also, even if you have a $5k autoturret that can reliably take out 10 drones before they close the distance, the drones are way more mobile and so can concentrate force, retreat, etc. and thus will have a huge role to play even if they generally stay away from autoturret-defended areas & even if every vehicle has an autoturret on it.
So I think drones are well worth investing in on the current margins, even if we assume that autoturret tech will advance by leaps and bounds and achieve perfection in the next few years. Which is a very generous assumption.
Is it generally useful to lob a grenade into a general area, though? Unless that area is pretty densely covered with things you want to hit with a grenade, it seems like you usually just waste a grenade.
In ww2 the Americans thought they had bombsights for high-altitude bombing with 23m CEP, but actually they were more like 370m CEP. (according to quick google). So, terribly inaccurate. I wonder if modern computers and sensors could enable significantly more accurate bombing. (Sensors to pinpoint your position relative to the target + to judge wind conditions, computers to simulate bomb trajectories). I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer is yes.
Nor would I. In WWII bombers didn’t even know where they were, but we have GPS now such that Excalibur guided artillery shells can get 1m CEP. And the US and possibly China can use Starlink and other constellations for localization even when GPS is jammed. I would guess 20m is easily doable with good sensing and dumb bombs, which would at least hit a building.
The Interwebs seem to indicate that that’s only if you give it a laser spot to aim at, not with just GPS. And that’s a $70,000 shell, with the cheaper PKG sounding like it’s closer to $15,000, and a plain old dumb shell being $3,000. Which seems crazy, but there you are.
Anyway, guiding a ballistic shell while riding it down into the target seems like a pretty different problem from figuring out when to release a bomb.
… but I don’t think a hand grenade is typically an anti-building munition. From the little I know about grenades, it seems like they’ll have to fix the roof, but unless you’re really lucky, the building’s still going to be mostly usable, and, other than hearing loss, anybody inside is going to be OK unless they’re in the room directly below where the grenade hits, and maybe even then.
If you’re attacking buildings, I suspect you may need a bigger drone.
Good catch.
Agree grenade sized munitions won’t damage buildings, I think the conversation is drifting between FPVs and other kinds of drones, and also between various settings, so I’ll just state my beliefs.
Fiber FPVs with 40km range and 2kg payload (either kamikaze or grenade/mine dropping), which can eventually be countered by a large number of short range guns if they fly at low altitude. It’s not clear to me if the 40km range ones need to be larger
Heavy bomber drones can be equipped with fiber (or Starlink for US allies) and carry 15kg+ payload, enough to damage buildings and sensitive industrial equipment. They can do this while flying above the range of small guns and need dedicated antiaircraft guns
Fixed wing can carry even larger payloads with longer range and higher altitude, but are still pretty slow, except for the ones with jet engines
Drones equipped with GPS will know their position to within ~10 meters like the GPS only variant of Excalibur. It seems possible to constrain the payload’s horizontal velocity by 1 m/s on average, and the drop time from 1500m is 17 seconds, giving an error of 17 m. The overall error would be sqrt(10^2 + 17^2) = 20 m. If GPS is jammed, it’s not obvious they can do the first part, but probably they can still use cameras or something
All of the above are extremely threatening for both organized warfare and terrorism against an opponent without effective cheap air defense.
Even with the next evolution of air defense including radar-acoustic fusion to find threats, the limited reliability of ~all types of existing air defense and large number of drone configurations makes me guess that drones will remain moderately threatening in some form. Given that Hezbollah was previously firing unguided rockets with CEP in the hundreds of meters, some kind of drone that can target with CEP around 20 meters could be more cost effective for them if they cannot procure thousands of cheap guided missiles. If they could drop six individual grenades on six people from a bomber drone even in the presence of air defense, that would be even more effective, but it seems unlikely
Excalibur is made by the US, which has no incentive to reduce costs, and so its $70k price tag is more of a “maximum the army is willing to pay” situation. This is true to some extent with Skyranger so maybe someone motivated will build smart ammunition that costs $40 per round and make it cost effective.