The Prevalence Of Drones In Modern Warfare
BY Herschel Smith
2 years, 9 months ago
By way of brief followup to my post entitled Things Learned About Modern Warfare From The Ukrainian War, I thought I would roll in the experience of my former Marine son.
It was long held that the USMC is special operations, so they don’t need one. I have a whole host of thoughts on this claim that would take us very far afield and ruin the main point I want to make. Besides, readers would get bored and skip out on it.
But sooner or later the MC would capitulate, and Marine Raiders were folded into SOCOM. When that happened, money flooded in. They had all sorts of perks that other Marines didn’t have, for example, when my son learned to perform CQB and room clearing, he went to hot shoot houses, all over the country, before his deployment to Iraq.
The SOCOM Marines do too, but before that, they have (onsite at Camp Lejeune) better-than-video-game quality simulations of shoot houses (with physical movement) that could be programmed for whatever situation they wanted to test, and it could be run at any time, night or day, but only for the SOCOM Marines.
Each SOCOM Marine, even when my son was in the Corps, which ended in 2008, had his own cage with equipment. Literally anything he wanted was in this cage.
When my son visited these cages with a buddy on Camp Lejeune, you know what was found in many of the cages? Drones, along with controls for them. They could pick them up at will and carry them on whatever deployment was next.
Drones. Modern warfare requires them for intel and surveillance. The losers will not have drones. The winners will.
On March 21, 2022 at 11:37 pm, 41mag said:
There’s gotta be a low-tech tactic or tool that can defeat Drones.
On March 22, 2022 at 6:57 am, Bill Buppert said:
“There’s gotta be a low-tech tactic or tool that can defeat Drones.”
You will be a very wealthy man if you solve this wicked problem.
On March 22, 2022 at 10:40 am, John L. Hobbs said:
Hmmm….
Would the Ukrainian request for Shotguns have anything to do with their effectiveness at whacking low flying things?
On March 22, 2022 at 11:33 am, Ohio Guy said:
“Would the Ukrainian request for Shotguns have anything to do with their effectiveness at whacking low flying things?”
@ John L. Hobbs, I think one would have better luck shooting at bats in the evening using birdshot.
On March 22, 2022 at 1:15 pm, IA Brooks said:
Drones are a short-lived item on the modern battlefield. Both sides will have drones: the side that wins will be the one keeping their birds alive, and (since that is impossible) the one with the best resupply.
On March 22, 2022 at 2:25 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ Bill Buppert
Re: “There’s gotta be a low-tech tactic or tool that can defeat Drones.”
“You will be a very wealthy man if you solve this wicked problem.”
In principle, you can attack the data link between the drone and its home base, whoever is flying the thing in Nevada or wherever. But it is nearly-certain that the links are encrypted digitally, which makes it a tough nut to crack. But maybe flooding the air with high-intensity radiation in the same or a similar spectrum would shut down the link. The engineers here would have to chime in on that….
But when drones/UAVs become self-sustaining and self-directed, even that ploy will no longer work. And DARPA and other agencies are hard-at-work on just that. A retired military officer I know, who is an expert on drones/UAVs, believes that once drones are programmable for independent action, a scary line will have been crossed. “Terminator time,” in other words. A UAV could be programmed for a specific target or package of targets, and then set loose to do its thing, without a data link back to base.
Self-directed devices of this kind would be a massive paradigm shift, since the human element in the “kill decision” (whether to open fire or not, target selection and discrimination, etc. as human beings have done since antiquity) would then for the very first time, be absent.
A very good sci-fi novel came out some years back, on this very subject: “Kill Decision” by Daniel Saurez. Excellent book, exciting and informative at the same time – but scary, too, in its implications.
On March 22, 2022 at 7:18 pm, Huck said:
I have thought for a while that the best way to take out a drone i s with another drone. At least the high flyers. The low flying tactical drones will be a mix. Maybe the rebirth of falconry.
On March 22, 2022 at 8:37 pm, TheAlaskan said:
Spark-gap interrupt/jamming engine. Jam the downlink signal. Blind the drones when they’re near you (target.)
Drones target via video…
On March 22, 2022 at 9:15 pm, robehr orinsky said:
I put my homestead on craigslist last summer to see what kind of interest was out there . A young fella called and wanted the location . I told him but also said that the place was heavily wooded and could not be seen from the road . He said he had means to view the property and did not want to make an appointment to see it . The old coongirl barked and tried cocking her 8 inch ears . I turned the road cam on and saw him launching his drone . Nice one . Probably a $10,000 drone . Soon as it came over the north treeline I put a 3 inch double aught over that way . Got one of the four props and she listed and stumbled her way back to the road . He never did call back . The old Goose gun always did have a sweet pattern .
On March 22, 2022 at 10:15 pm, TheAlaskan said:
Build your own spark-gap generator….
produced by spark-gap transmitters are electrically “noisy”; they have a wide bandwidth, creating radio frequency interference (RFI) that can disrupt other radio transmissions. This type of radio emission has been prohibited by international law since 1934.
On March 23, 2022 at 7:42 am, Daniel said:
I forgot the name of the piece of equipment, but like halfway through my first deployment (right when. Congress all of a sudden ordered armor on all humvees etc.) when we were helping weld plates to the sides I remember having to attach this huge pole with like a dome on top of it. All vehicles carry them now. What I was TOLD was that it disrupts some type of signal in the area, like for cell phone usage in a certain radius around that vehicle. This is not verified and only here say, but yea ♂️
On March 23, 2022 at 11:29 am, Aesop said:
Huck has nailed this.
Drones killing drones becomes the order of the day.
In WWI, aircraft (including balloons) were used to observe and direct ground attacks (infantry and artillery), exactly as the drones are being used now.
Pretty soon unarmed planes were armed and shooting at each other, and both side’s planes were bagging balloons right and left. The observation balloon era ended in short order.
Planes, not so much.
Drones, by their very nature, cannot be armored to any practical degree without becoming F-35 Thunderjugs.
Drones whose only job is to detect other drones will gradually get the ability to locally jam them, blind them, ram them, or otherwise kill them/shoot them down.
Thermal detection would be available OTS now, at a cost, but the next most obvious method would be sound detection. They make a helluva racket, necessarily, and if you use sound homing for targeting them, neither night nor simple daylight low-vis is any help at all.
It would also be possible to locate them by triangulation with any network of linked directional sound detection apparatus, whether drone- or ground-borne, and working out the IFF particulars so you can distinguish Enemy drones from Friendly drones.
And then the need will arise for defensive drones, to protect the obs/recon drones. Just like in WWI.
And then the drone geeks will be subdivided into fighters, bombers, and reconnaissance, just as manned aircraft are.
The limitations will be the cost and available technology, and the limitations of whatever coordination system is deployed.
Robust networks and distributed Cᶾ will wallop the daylights out of less-capable networks and players.
And if someone develops a Sidewinder/Atoll-sized ARM, that targets the communication signal of the drone operators, playing with drones will get about as fun as running the radar van for an SA-2 battery when a Wild Weasel comes out to play.
Picture something like the old OV-1 with 6-12 Sidewinder-sized beam-riding missiles slung onboard. The sensor operator cruises along, finds a batch of OPFOR drone operators, and after they have a good picture of the AO, a bunch of drone operators suddenly have a 20# warhead flying up their tailpipes, and the whole sector goes dark.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Now Team Drone has to spoof their own signals to avoid that. And it goes back and forth like that, just as with manned aircraft, until someone finds a literal killer app.
In the sort-term who wins in Ukraine comes down to simple math: can Ukraine maintain endless resupply of Javelins, Stinger, etc.?
If they can, they will continue to destroy Russian vehicles ad infinitum. If they cannot, they’ll be overrun when they run out.
At the moment, they’ve wiped out something like 10% of all available Soviet tanks and AFVs.
The only question is can they maintain that combat productivity for longer than Russia can afford to burn up its armor?
[Side note, but very related observation: nearly everyone forgets (or never noticed) that Vlad had to deploy 250K troops to Kazakhstan about 6 weeks before the Ukrainian adventure. Kazakhstan, after LPG prices (which is how they fuel their vehicles) doubled nearly overnight, went hogwild in response, the entire vassal republic was in open rebellion, and those troops were desperately needed to put that rebellion down. The Kazakhs were literally pulling incoming and unarmed Russian troops off their transport trucks on arrival, and pummeling the dog feces out of them. If Vlad pulls those troops out now, Kazakhstan goes off again, like Ukraine did (cf. “two-front war”). If Vlad leaves them there, he’s already got 1/4th of the Russian Army tied down indefinitely and unable to help out. 25% permanently tied up + 10% destroyed, so he’s already burned up over 1/3rd of all available forces, at D+21. He has other frisky republics to police (Chechnya and Georgia), plus opportunistic neighbors on multiple borders. At some point, Ukraine wins by default, short of WMDs going weapons-free – which event pulls NATO in in about 5 seconds – and then either he bails out of this disasterpiece, about an hour ahead of the coup that topples him, or we’re back to whether Russian generals would rather fry Russia for Putin, or shoot Putin in the head to save Russia. My money says at that point, Putin gets a 9mm Q-tip in his ear, but I’m a romantic at heart.]
On March 23, 2022 at 8:13 pm, AlfredENewman said:
DOD developed an EM gun that shoots down drones. Looks like something out of Fallout. My buddy got to test it. Hobbyists have come up with anti-drone nets that can be carried from other drones to gum up props. And yeah, jamming the connection is one option, but many drones are programmed to return to a specific point if control is lost. I wonder if you could train birds of prey to knock them down, the way they do pigeons at airports?
On March 23, 2022 at 9:53 pm, Jackfrost said:
I suggest folks check out FPV drones.. They are very agile and fast.. Hard to see let alone catch/disable physically. Plus they are cheap. $150-300 will get you a very capable FPV setup. Some setups can be set for long range. No software except for programming flight control boards initially.
DJI drones are okay but rely on software via an app but DJI willfully sets no-fly zones up. Autel drones have no restrictions. – Both have a range of a few miles via line of site. BUT majority of older DJI’s drones require an attached device.. Autel, does have a controller with a screen built in
I’ve flown my DJI FPV drone out 3 miles. No phone/tablet needed after initial setup. Just uses the controller, goggles, and drone unit.
Fix wing is also a good option via FPV/digital video link. You get what you pay for… There are options for flight control boards as well, like if you want it to loiter over an area while you operate a separate camera.. Idea is to be high enough and small enough to be ignored. some systems can fly for 80 mins.
For all examples I mentioned, there are options for control and video link… Such as for long distance there is a ham radio/VHF option.. (TBS crossfire)
Getfpv.com
https://www.team-blacksheep.com
hobbyking.com
https://store.flitetest.com