French company ramps up production to meet demand for its military drone radar (opens in new tab)

If they're already being produced they do work for their intended purpose, Thales doesn't fuck around

My understanding is that you use a laser, though I don't see why even regular AA guns wouldn't work, especially if it is trying to crash on you, meaning it needs to get very close.

> Plus, even if you detect it, it's coming towards you at a speed of 100+ kmph with the intent to crash into you and detonate the payload.

That will at least help you distinguish it from a bird :) Plus, I suspect that in any military conflict, you'll be more than happy to eat the cost of frying a few birds if it means you stopped the enemy's drones.

Western missiles have been designed for generations assuming they're aimed at something expensive you want to break, or to break something next to something sensitive you'd rather not. We have the technology to create swarms of well-enough aimed small rockets. There simply wasn't a niche until now.

It's purpose to maintain an accurate picture of the sky, tracking many objects at the same time at different altitudes. The radar itself is just part of the picture - its data is integrated with command and control, where decisions are made about the picture coming in, and the data is blended with other sources to get a more accurate picture (not sure if bird or drone? check the video feed data, or a number of other sources).

The unit itself looks at the behavior of the object (speed, acceleration, routes, elevation, radar profile) to determine the likely class of the object (birds don't fly like drones nor do they have the same radar profile).

As far as mitigating threats, command and control again makes those decisions. It depends on the context of the fight and the resources available. In the hypothetical situation you think a kamikaze drone is headed your direction, the radars are mobile - one option is to simply move. You may know (or have a good guess) as to the specific threat - how it is controlled. You might take out drone communications with EW. You might misguide a precision munition by spoofing GLOSNAS/GPS so that it drifts and misses its target. If it is flying at a low elevation, you might be able to take it out with heavy machine gun fire. You might decide to let it strike, due to cost-benefit ratio.

It really gets down to specifics: What's the air asset? What the threat? What's the mission? What's the battle context? What are the resources?

Regarding a drone having zero command & control due to AI - most of the "AI" in drones is simple straight line flying for a couple hundred meters (so called "terminal flight guidance"). This is because enemy electronic warfare cover may jam communications channels for the drone as it approaches closer to a target. As cool as it sounds to have fully autonomous drones making complex decisions, piloting around obstacles in all weather conditions in 3D space, tracking moving targets, etc - this isn't the threat from drones right now.

2) No mater how small these drones are, they are dependent on some nav and coms system. Even autonomous "fire-and-forget" drones need a somewhat robust GPS link for navigation. For operated drones, any telemetry can and will be linked to.

But, ok, let's assume some futuristic drone that has a powerful AI system to do all its navigation via onboard sensors, which do not transmit or receive any information. How could such a drone get past a radar system? By either being too small for the radar to detect, fly too low for the radar to detect, or have some geometry that voids detection. Or the radar gets jammed, while the drone tries to get past it.

3) Drones have features which can be detected by radar. Motors, for example, would be one of those.

4) Radars are rarely the only sensors used. You have a whole array of different sensors which can be used to pickup stuff. Even with the radars themselves, you could have one radar for detection / target acquisition, and another radar for precise imaging.

There's no free lunch, though. A very small drone would mean limited range and payload, which in turn means you'll either have to deploy it close to the enemy, or via some larger craft.

Flying a drone too close to ground ads tons of interference to the drone, not to mention detection by things like acoustic sensors, humans, cameras, and what not.

But that also goes for the radars. Small targets can easily disappear in clutter, or dip under the elevation of the radar.

The other thing is those drones are mostly made of plastic, have no hot exhaust. Every time Ukraine is glad they shot a $50k drone with a $1m patriot missile I wonder where this war can possibly go.

Seems like you're asking them to give up the farm for some PR.

The article states they can determine the difference.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-05/the-milit...

The other point, is that you are comparing a public infrastructure project with a private company.

Said private company behaves like one and does not want to take unnecessary risks by recruiting and training too much staff and later not having enough orders to keep them on the payroll.

Our army and arms industry have suffered heavy cuts for thirty years after the end of the Cold War, prioritizing quality over quantity, but we've kept what we call a modèle d'armée complet, or an army with a complete set of capabilities, alongside the arms industry to sustain it. Said arms industry after spending decades surviving on frugal orders is now in the process of scaling up production substantially. It takes time, but we've already tripled production of Caesar self-propelled artillery with another doubling in sight for example.

If push comes to shove, we might take some time to wake up from our slumber, but we're French. Picking a fight with the Gallic rooster is usually a bad decision.

That is correct. But you want to ramp up production without too much over-investment. It is not certain, at the moment, that this conflict will devolve to a full-blown world war. So if you invest in a factory to produce 1000 radars a year, what good is it if the conflict putters out?

There is zero solidarity on a European level for common investments in armament, with most countries lining up for US-made equipment instead of investing in ramping-up their own production. So that also means that the financial burden of ramping-up arms production is also not shared.

These radar systems are many orders of magnitude more complicated than anything manufactured during WW2. It's not something easily scaled up.

Imagine the amount of wasted resources and man hours it would have required to keep France world war ready since 1945

If there is an actual threat the response will be nuclear, that's the whole point of having nuclear submarines deployed 24/7. For regular military operations we have quite good intel services and projection forces

Yes, before this war I never realised that our (western) military production is a joke. I am very disturbed that we cannot outproduce Russia despite having 20x their military budget.

People who say that the West could produce more if it was really pressed - well so could Russia, people are still driving BMWs and having parties, they have not mobilised the way the British have during WW2. I think it's dangerous to believe that we could magic capabilities out of thin air when it really counts.

The way we do contracts is a clownshow - UK has ordered more NLAWS and they will take two years to deliver.

Meanwhile in the Vietnam war, USA lost 10,000 combat aircraft, more than currently exist in all of western world combined. I cannot explain this in any way other than the system being rife with waste and abuse.

As some of us learned in the pandemic, increases in production capacity that are not going to be long term will get your company hobbled, if not downright bankrupted if you overproduce. See what happened to anyone that assumed the demand for exercise equipment for the home was going to be long lived.

When looking at this kind of problems, it's always either regulation or incentives.. and here it isn't regulation, so it's all incentives.

It's a combination of several things.

First military hardware is a lot more expensive. A ww2 tank was a big piece of iron with a diesel engine in it, a modern tank has a ton more tech, all produced in small series (imagine the cost of the iphone if only 1000 were manufactured a year). That's even worst for planes. You can't line up an army on the scale of ww2 armies. And since the EU can't agree on single plane or tank design anyway, the volumes for each device are tiny and design/fixed costs hugely expensive to amortise.

Then you have socialist or quasi-socialist governments all over Europe, in France in particular, but even in the UK, slashing military budgets to launch big redistribution programs, along with building up big bureaucracies since the 80s. Government spending managed to go up as the share of military spending and other basic services (police, justice) went down. The problem with benefits is that people come to rely on them and then it becomes politically impossible to cut them back (same thing in the US), unless you have a Thatcher, but there is none on the horizon. So basically now these countries are stuck and have zero wriggle room even to face imminent danger.

That's the cost of free riding on US military spending for half a century. If an elected Trump walks away from both Ukraine and NATO, Putin will have free reign to bully the other missing pieces of his russian empire (moldavia, baltic states, even poland). And there will be little a country like France will be able to do with its small military samples. Its army was seized to bomb terrorist camps in Africa and nuke an invader. They have nothing in between.

The perception doesn't come from a paranoid nation, but the fact that a neighbor is actually at war and the invader keep telling that after that it will be your turn.

Heck, there's a promise for 3 new billions just this year! That's insane. All that money is going to waste in a war that isn't ours, and that is lost for Ukraine from day 1. Of course in the end of the day it will be citizens like me would have to pay for that through new and higher taxes. As if we weren't already in the top 2 in that matter... https://www.info.gouv.fr/actualite/france-ukraine-jusqua-3-m...

Then came probably America most just war, fighting Japan and Hitler.

War may be a racket 99% of the time, but that 1% really matters.