CNN is reporting that mouse/rat infestations at the front lines are a serious problem for both sides:
Rats and mice swarm trenches in Ukraine in grisly echo of World War I
The animals are making life miserable for soldiers, hampering combat effectiveness, and spreading some really awful diseases.
A BBC article about the drone war. According to it, it only takes about 14 hours to learn to be a drone pilot. It sounds deeply stressful. People don’t usually look up for danger, after all.
Well, just like deer in treestand-infested forests learn to look up, so will human soldiers. Not making things any less stressful, mind you.
There’s not much point in just knowing they’re there, if you can’t do much about them. We’ve seen many videos of Russians trying to shoot down, or run away from, these things, and they rarely end on a good note. Until someone comes up with a good way of detecting and knocking these small drones out of the air, they’ll continue to be a cheap and effective weapon.
Punt guns.
Or possibly Serena Williams.
The Ukrainians are unlikely to release videos of their drones getting shot down or failing to strike their targets.
But they are releasing a whole lot of these videos. And none of the Russians we see appear to be engaging in any systematic methods to try to avoid or destroy the drones. If some other Russian units do have useful doctrines, they’re not sharing them with a whole lot of other Russians. This suggests to me that they really are having trouble with these things.
AFAIK nobody has any good solution to the various sorts of drones. Yet. There are some partly effective countermeasures, some cost effective countermeasures, but none that are both.
ISTM a high powered laser connected to a very sensitive radar and electro-optical system for aiming would be the best thing. But battlefield laser vehicles are still the stuff of science fiction and the wet dreams of various defense contractors.
Looks like drone targets rather than missiles, but…
UK test fires $13-per-strike DragonFire laser weapon against ‘aerial targets’
BELFAST — A high energy laser, estimated to cost less than £10 ($13) a shot, has hit airborne targets at a test range in northwest Scotland, the first time the UK said it has achieved such a firing…
Despite the innovation lab not disclosing which targets were specifically hit during the trials, London’s Times newspaper reported that DragonFire engaged “drones from several positions miles away.” It also claimed Dstl scientists have forecast the weapon could be operational off a Royal Navy ship within five years.
USN experimented with this stuff on a ship for about the last 10 years. Short version, it’s 10 years in the future and has been for decades now. Lots more info here:
Probably a hantavirus. There are a couple of particularly nasty ones specific to that part of the world.
Does an anti-drone laser have to destroy it? Blinding a drone is a mission-kill unless it’s a slow motion cruise missile following a preset path.
True, blinding it would work.
But the cameras on these things are not real wide-angle. if it’s heading directly towards your laser system you can shoot at it and you’re probably in the direction it’s looking. Less so if your job as a laser system is to protect a nearby town, bridge, whatever. The drone is after that stuff, not you.
Separately, military lasers that work at the frequencies human eyes are sensitive to are already illegal under the various treaties of war. No blinding lasers is up there with no poison gas. Oddly, drone cameras (and especially commercial drone cameras) generally work at the same frequencies eyeballs do, since that’s where the Sun’s illumination is strongest. Yes, some cameras go farther into UV or IR than eyeballs do.
The thing is, it’s not hard at all to destroy one of these small, cheap drones: A BB gun would do it. The difficulty is just in hitting the things in the first place, since they’re so small, can move erratically, and can be fairly high up.
That’s still after the earlier difficulty of spotting the things in the zeroth place. Many of the worst are too small, slow, quiet, or stealthy to reliability pick up on air defense sensor systems like radar unless you have some serious detector density or luck in having them fly over someone in the field.
‘Golden BB’.
Modnote: please avoid completely empty replies to thread drift. This is still a breaking news thread.
Sorry. ‘Golden BB’ is a military term relating to what Chronos posted. Basically: A lucky shot.
Except maybe our cardboard drones ? A BB pellet would go through 90% of it without doing any noticeable harm.