undefined | Better HN

0 pointssofixa3mo ago0 comments

> It's quite likely that in about 5 years most military installations will have a mix of weapons to intercept those systems - and depending on a number of factors you could easily end up back at low performance drones being so reliably intercepted as to be a waste of munitions to deploy.

That's unlikely. Anti-drone defences will only improve, yes, but autonomous drone swarms numbering in the thousands to tens of thousands are doable today, and few weapons systems can handle the rate of launch/fire required to combat that. Especially if there are follow-up waves mixing drones and heavy missiles against which your anti-drone defences wouldn't be enough.

> WW1 after all was based on exactly this thinking: surely the volume of an army would overcome the machine gun.

But building a cheap kamikaze drone costs much less than building a human.

0 comments

3 comments · 1 top-level

XorNot3mo ago· 2 in thread

Define cheap and multiply by thousands. Ukrainian front line drones stopped being DJIs years ago.

They're now much closer to $3000 USD+ at the low end for an ISR vehicle. $8000+ for the more capable FPV kamikazes is the estimate for Russian models.

Which is comparable to a 155mm artillery shell. But with a lot less payload.

There's already literally millions of drones being produced and used per year in that conflict - and they've made a big impact, but the stability of the frontline also reveals that the impact of "swarms" is hardly overpowering (the obsession with them is also weird - if you had thousands of assets in the air, the last thing you'd do is put them all close together).

sofixaOP3mo ago

> overpowering

As Iran shows, you don't need overpowering. You need to hit the enemy where it hurts them, like strategic infrastructure.

> "swarms" ... (the obsession with them is also weird - if you had thousands of assets in the air, the last thing you'd do is put them all close together)

On the contrary, a swarm allows you to overwhelm the enemy air defences, which allows you to hit targets, including those same air defences, without having to disable them first. Cf. Iran destroying a THAAD radar.

XorNot3mo ago

Right - until anti-air measures designed to deal with voluminous relatively low performance threats get deployed. There's a reason Ukraine has been rolling out old school anti-aircraft and flak guns, and the modern variants are now starting to be produced - i.e. area effect microwave weapons and high energy lasers. Systems which aren't very useful if your adversary is highly capable, but which are effective if your adversary is relatively fragile. Again: volume turned out to be relatively useless in WW1 when the adversary had well placed machine guns.

But it's also an apples to oranges comparison: THAAD is in no way designed to intercept drone threats. The story here is closer to the US started a fight without actually investing in the sort of defenses which would deal with it - i.e. with a rack of Ukranian interceptor drones as part of the air defenses, the THAAD radar likely makes it.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse