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Killer drones pioneered in Ukraine are the weapons of the future
(www.economist.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr7ym1zkda8
Anti-air guns are the countermeasure. RADAR good enough to detect drones + an aimbot and programmable air-burst round to "shotgun" your pellets to damage those soft plastic bits.
We're going back to WW2 tech. AA guns were considered obsolete because Helicopters + Missiles had more range. But now we need to build cheaper AA Guns for the anti-drone role.
AA Guns are also useful vs infantry, so in an infantry vs infantry fight, having an AA Gun platform will be useful even without any drones around. Airburst and rapid fire is always useful, and I expect the computers that make RADAR possible will be far cheaper today than decades past.
They may both have a role.
If you know that a given point is at risk of attack, using a static defense like AA guns is practical. Say you have some sort of specific, high-value target that you can put AA guns around. That may be a very sensible thing to do.
But the problem, if you intend to rely only on those, is that there is then a concentration of force issue. The attacker can choose which point to attack; they get the initiative.
Say you're trying to defend against something like a Shahed-136. It can hit pretty much anywhere in Ukraine. You can't stick an AA gun on everything that Russia might consider trading a Shahed-136 for.
But, okay, say you try to go big with static defenses. Let's say that you can obtain and pony up the resources to hypothetically stick an AA gun at every single point along the front line and border, and that your AA gun has the altitude to hit a drone. You have an unbroken line of engagement envelope all around a country. That'd be an extraordinary expenditure, but it could hypothetically be done. So a drone has to fly through defended airspace. The problem is that if the other guy expends an equivalent amount of resources, he can buy a shit-ton of drones and fly them all through a single gun's engagement envelope. Even if he doesn't even bother to try to attack the antiaircraft gun, your gun defenses are just going to get overwhelmed, because all of the attacker's resources are engaged, whereas the vast bulk of the defender's resources are not in the fight. Maybe you hit a tiny percentage of drones, but the rest are going to be able to simply fly through.
The problem is that the cost of static defenses in that scenario grows at something like the square of the scale of the air conflict -- you have to have enough static defenses to counter all of the attacker's aircraft, and pre-place those defenses at all points that might be attacked, whereas the cost of the attack grows only linearly. It's cost-effective to use static defenses only if the attacker is compelled to attack a limited number of points.
If that's not the case, then using some form of mobile defense is more important -- say, I don't know, you have a fleet of gun-armed, jet-powered counter-UAS UASes. Dollar-for-dollar, they might not be as effective as a static gun. But...you can route most or all of them in to meet any given attack.
-- Sun Tzu, The Art of War, ~400 BC
As far as I know, the routine in the current war is - the AA gun is on a truck that moves 80 km/h, the drone comes in slower than 300 km/h, one or multiple truck crews position themselves on likely vantage points for intercepting, and the rest is luck.
Did you see the Youtube link?
This is a lightweight AA Gun that can be mounted on a cheap pickup truck. This isn't a "Static" defense, this system is more mobile than infantry. It will move with the infantry, it will protect the infantry, and the infantry will protect it.
But you can have an AA Gun on a Pickup truck follow your infantry around, protecting that company. If you have 100 men out on the field, it makes sense to give them at least one AA Gun to protect themselves against a wide variety of drone threats. Or if one AA gun per 100-men is too expensive, then maybe per battalion (~500 men). Etc. etc.
If the enemy drone is moving less than 200mph, the cheaper AA Gun will reliably protect the troops, as long as the person watching the RADAR doesn't fall asleep. And at 115mph, even a Shahed is slow enough that AA Guns reliably work. Most drones are far slower than that.
That's called an F22 Air Superiority Fighter.
Yeah, that'd be nice, but I'm assuming those are off the table for obvious reasons.
Lets start with basic problems first. How can a battalion survive a typical onslaught of Russian drones?
Well, anti-air guns. Bam. We work our way up as the more important, lower-level problems get solved. I know people are talking F16s now, so maybe we're at the point where fighter jets are the next step forward.
No one is going to shoot at a cheap AA Gun (like the "MACE" system) with hundreds of drones: the hundreds of drones will mostly get shot down and ultimately the price wouldn't be worth it. Bullets are far cheaper than drones after-all. Now whether a particular MACE will try to shoot down high-flying drones like Shahed is another question, but its also just another problem all together.
MACE's job is to protect the infantry inside of its shield. And its highly effective at that.
It's static from the standpoint of being required to meet an incoming Shahed-136, which can move more quickly than it; you cannot substantially reposition vehicles on ground-based vehicles to meet incoming attacks from the air. The critical factor is whether you can concentrate your defenses in time to meet an attack, once you have detected that incoming attack.
Force concentration is a job for fighter jets. Most jets can fly at Mach 1, or even Mach2 (700mph to 1500mph). At which point, a 120mph Shahed-136 is basically standing still.
Different weapons for different tasks. The AA Gun is cheap and meant to be widely deployed across the whole frontline. Infantry could use them against other infantry (30mm airbursts will still wreck enemy infantry), and also rely upon those guns to protect themselves vs enemy drones.
I think that we may be violently agreeing. What I had in my original comment:
I guess I read it differently earlier.
The game will iterate further. A machine gun works against current drones. It can be countered however. E.g. use a ducted drone, with a few layers of Kevlar facing the gun. It doesn't need to win, or even survive. It just needs to soak up the fire. The other drones rush in, either behind it, or from various angles.
Even things like chaff and smoke can mess up targeting for long enough to rush in.
You can't armor up a helicopter, and these drones are mostly quadcopters.
I've never heard of Kevlar stopping a 30mm round before either. Note that a 50cal is 12.7mm bulltet. A 30mm bullet is considered a cannon an an effective 118 caliber weapon.
50cal is well beyond the size where Kevlar is useful, let alone a 118 caliber airburst round. You need thick steel or Aluminum plates and a drone can't carry that kind of armor.
Smokescreens work on the ground where terrain can provide hiding. I've never heard of an air platform using a smoke screen.
Maybe a flare to draw fire / RADAR, but quadcopters move too fast and cover too much ground for smoke to be useful to obscure sight. AA guns engage at about 3mi or 5km away, who cares about a few meters of smoke?
If it fires big, heavy rounds, then they are slow and of limited numbers. You then bait it at range, or swarm it. If it uses lighter round, to get higher speeds, or more shots, then you use a different platform to soak its shots.
You're also likely vastly overestimating the final engagement ranges.Right now its long flights at relatively high altitudes. A properly designed drone swarm could hug terrain to close, or be deployed early and loiter on the ground in cover.
A good chunk of the swarm would also be small. 10cm would be big enough to carry just enough teeth to not be ignored. They would also be nimble as hell. It would be a numbers game.
As for the use of smoke. You use 3 or 4 types of drone. A smoke bomb lays down cover. Camera drones fly through and around it to triangulate on your gun. Finally a sniper platform drone moves out of cover and shoots blind, using the camera drones feeds. A coordinator might be required to sort the data. Critically, only cheap, disposable drones are exposed to fire.
The key is that you can mix and match drones on the offensive. Your defence needs to be able to react to all of them.
Common 30mm systems carry 700+ rounds and fire 10 per second.
So no on both cases. As I said, gun and bullets are the answer.
Note that these are programmable airburst rounds, meaning the system is self-exploding once it hits the desired range. It wouldn't take more than 5 shots to blanket the area of a smokescreen.
There is no mix and match here. You have yet to describe a system that can handle a typical 30mm gun, let alone two or four of them working as a team.
The actual teammate is a helicopter. The anti-helicopter is a stinger missile. Etc. Etc. And so the war games continue. But I see no role for your hypothetical drone swarm.
By the time you have enough drones to saturate a freaking machine cannon on aimbot that modern AA guns are, I'll add a 2nd or 3rd gun as a teammate. Bullets and AA guns are pretty cheap.
Drones can't effectively fire rifles because of physics. Sorry, just not stable enough. 30mm guns weigh a half ton, easy for ground equipment to move and is why 30mm systems can fire for 3mi out.
Any small gun you put on a drone won't have the range, stability, or accuracy of a ground based autocannon. You need to upgrade all the way to a CAS system like A10 before you compete, but missiles have negated that role on the modern battlefield.
And missiles don't need a drone to launch.
3mi range is distance to horizon on the ground btw. No drone can fly lower than the ground. Any amount of elevation means more range on the AA gun.
Gun drones are perfectly viable. They just can't fire well while flying. (At least not more than 1 shot) The current prototypes have to land and anchor themselves. They are currently machine guns, for area suppression, though anti-material would be viable.
The gun drone is also not in the smoke cloud, it's behind it. The smoke, chaff, strobes etc are just to break the ability to counter target it. You don't need to just saturate the cloud, but the whole area behind it.
As for the smoke, it's not 1 cloud. A drone's advantage is hyper mobility. A swarm would easily attack from multiple directions. Your gun is now required to saturate multiple clouds at multiple angles. 1 might be hiding something nasty, or 2 or none. Smoke (or chaff etc) drones would be dirt cheap, as would simple distraction drones.
To fight it, you would either need to put up a wall of shrapnel, which would quickly deplete a mobile weapon, or get accurate targeting data. Both could be viable, depending on the situation, but it's risky.
As for engagement ranges. A drone swarm would be cut down by advancing over a large open area. I fully agree on that. It would also struggle engaging fixed defences. That changes in a city, or forest, or mountainous area. A patrol or convoy could be encircled by a swarm in seconds, engaging from multiple sides simultaneously.
Your gun can fire 10 rounds a second. That's 50 rounds in 5 seconds. 200 micro drones, hitting from all sides could easily overwhelm it. Most don't even need a payload, they are $10-20 decoys. 1 clean hit on your gun however, and it is potentially disabled. At that point the more expensive stuff can potentially attack with impunity.
It takes 3 minutes for a 60mph drone to travel 3 miles.
It takes 1minute 30 seconds for a 120mph drone to travel 3 miles.
So no. I'll literally run out of ammo (70 seconds of firing) before you arrive.
Please show me a built up area where you have clear line of sight for 3 miles. 3-500m would be optimistic. You would have 10s to 100s of 15cm drones. They would flit around bins, cars, buildings and through windows. A racing drone can pull 4.5G of acceleration. It can spin that in a fraction of a second.
3G is enough to cover 300m in around 5 seconds. That's also assuming it is going from a dead start. If it can build up speed before entering line of sight, it would be even quicker.
Even worse, they could easily spend 30 seconds to manoeuvre around you. The sensor package drones (cameras, lidar etc) playing peekaboo, to snatch data. By the time they move, they've built a complete 3D map. They know every blind spot, every area the gun can't target. Your gun will go from nothing to shoot, to too many targets in a second or so. Most will just have extra batteries. They exist to draw fire. A few will have payloads designed to target your defences. Others will have payloads aimed at breaking up your situational awareness.
If you engage the micro drones, then your firing arcs will give windows for heavier elements to engage you. If you don't, then the armed micro drones will damage your defences or block your sensors, to create the same effect.
Avdiivka.
The vast majority of these battles are fought in the open planes of Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMx051QX7mU
I like your attempts at turning this into a 300m problem instead of a 3-mile problem. But I'll take it that you know just how worthless a drone swarm would have been in the practical battlefield at Avdiivka, or other similar locations.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=rr7ym1zkda8
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