See queries.* For the first part: I’ve wondered about this in relation to defense needs or coverage of, e.g., drone bombers, drone recon, drone situational awareness reporting over ongoing battles, even bomb-damage assessment flights. Each have different impacts for both sides, of course, and for each defensive technology is getting better and better.
The second part, obviously more speculative in nature, was prompted now by the vid Service Academies Swarm Challenge: Game Play and Challenges, a program DARPA decided to reveal parts of; a newer vid was released yesterday, but this is the best overview.**
Add to that the multiplier of unmanned drone swarm technology–for both offense and defense–which is continuing apace.
** “…prompted now” because the topic in general has blown my mind ever since I read Lem’s The Invincible in the '70s and as a journalist of computer animation in the early '90s.
Here’s a partial list of drone air vehicles List of unmanned aerial vehicles - Wikipedia. Look how long that list is. There’s quite a variety in there. They range from the size of your hand to the size of a 737.
Fighters can’t detect, much less attack, A).
Finding and killing B or C is trivial. I’d expect that the command trying to defend airspace from airplane- or nearly-airplane-sized drones would be using current tech air surveillance radars and SIGINT to locate these things and deploy manned interceptors and SAMs against them just as they would against manned aircraft.
I believe the Army is working now on counter-drone tactics using attack helos as low-speed quasi-fighter aircraft well suited to killing the miniature planes & hovering surveillance drones they expect a mature sophisticated enemy to deploy against them. But that’s mostly going to be a visual fight, not a radar-guided one.
Swarms are a fascinating topic. I don’t know of anything besides speculation that’s out in the unclassified world I now inhabit.
I suspect the end state is that the only effective defense against a swarm is another swarm of equally cheap, but somewhat more capable, drones. Along the way there’s going to be lots of asymmetry and some nasty surprises.
A laser “flyswatter” is a plausible point defense weapon against a swarm of small drones or smarter bombs. So high value targets will probably have one or more of those. Line of sight is always a massive limitation for any ground based sensor or shooter. Which means these flyswatters are a type of CIWS (Close-in weapon system - Wikipedia) a last ditch solution for the leakers that weren’t stopped earlier by other longer-ranged systems. Whatever leaks past the flyswatter is going to hit the target.
The Army has been working out tactics and how to field systems at the testing stage with ground troops as well. Army eyes outfitting soldiers with anti-drone guns on the battlefield. Systems mentioned in the article include the Battelle produced Drone Defender and the testing of systems to upgrade the Stryker Fire Support Vehicle variant with radar and laser. As a story it gives a little insight into some of the methods that Leo might find useful. How to integrate a capability effectively is not entirely a matter of a top down good idea. It’s putting weapons into the hands of troops and figuring out how to make the integration work as part of the combined arms team.
The Drone defender has passed testing and has also seen real world “trials” in Iraq during the Battle for Mosul. IS has demonstrated a pretty robust drone capability using civilian purchased systems during that fight. It utilizes remote control disruption and GPS disruption as a vaguely described directed energy weapon. It’s claimed to be capable for airspace up to 400m above ground level so it’s only good for the smallest threats.
The Stryker mounted system ups the capability from the small hand fired systems into medium size drones. It’s a near operational “flyswatter” today. Swarms are a matter of how much power is available and what rate of fire it can sustain. I haven’t seen any claims as to altitude. Recent tests have been with a 5kW laser. GDLS (General Dynamics Land Systems) anticipates 30kW capability by 2020 which should increase the capability/range against the medium and large systems if they can deliver.
Good info. This FAA Launches Drone Defense Tests for Airports - DRONELIFE is a year old now, but discusses experiments the FAA is doing in defense of the airspace around civil airports. In addition to the article itself, some of the links to defense system manufacturers and to other blog posts may of interest to the OP.
Of course FAA is hampered compared to DoD in that it can’t just go blasting them out of the sky to fall on a US city. So they’ll be focusing more on smarter, subtler, “non-kinetic” approaches. Which DoD will use some of as well.
The drone Defender GPS disruption capability, even if my assumption that it is somewhat directional is true, might just be frowned upon by the FAA. It certainly is a tougher problem in some ways for them. The bright side for them is it’s a very fixed defense. That removes some of the constraints the DOD has because of supporting mobile operations.
That last bit made me think of relevant electronic countermeasures that we’ve been implementing in recent years. The IED/Counter-IED fight involved vehicle mounted jamming of command detonated systems. In some ways that was a harder threat to counter. The detonation signal just had to get through once while the target was nearby. Even a drone with some autonomous control for when it isn’t under direct control loses quite a bit of it’s utility if it can’t phone home reliably. Driving with a modified system constantly on would most certainly present a susceptibility to direction finding against peer/near-peer threats. Having the system stay quiet until it detected transmissions or was manually activated might be an option. It would be a smallish bubble around equipped vehicles. That might well help against a swarm of the small UAS or mid-sized UAS flying nap of the earth to avoid the more dangerous higher altitudes, though. It could conceivably jam those in range simultaneously. That can reduce the effectiveness of a swarm while the more kinetic members of the combined arms team work through the target rich environment.
I have seen pieces about the Air Force testing of GPS jamming systems. Even North Korea has demonstrated the capability. That’s one of the two attack methods used by the Drone Defender but on a larger scale. Jamming the control networks on a larger scale isn’t exactly a cutting edge technical solution. A directional system to mitigate effectiveness of entire swarms of the higher altitude and larger UAS systems certainly seems like a realistic part of a layered defense solution. I have not seen anything open source about efforts along those lines, though.
It certainly is a tougher problem in some ways for them. The bright side for them is it’s a very fixed defense. That removes some of the constraints the DOD has because of supporting mobile operations.