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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Imagine trying to defend yourself against 10 bullet-size drones flying towards your face with a small but lethal explosive charge at the tip.

I'm not itching for the chance here, but I'd be very surprised if Western R&D isn't cooking up mostly-autonomous, short-range anti-drone weapons (lasers, small caliber guns) that they intend to strap to pretty much everything bigger than a jeep. I imagine that modern electronics manufacturing could build a miniature CIWS for not too much more than the drone it's targeting: the RF and compute electronics to do this are much more ubiquitous than they were when the original technology was deployed on ships.

They can fly so low though! At the treeline, below the treeline, at waist height... At sea you have clear lines of sight and an elevated position to shoot down at surface-skimming missiles.

Countering these things is hard, as we see in Ukraine. The solution may just be to have more drones of your own.

The noise is pretty distinctive, though. I bet you could cook up something if you had the time and money. A few sensors around the tank for triangulating the source of the buzzing, and four shotguns on a mounted swivel placed around the tank. When the defences are turned on, they auto-target and fire a wide blast of pellets towards the sound.

Obviously, making that safe and viable for actual day-to-day work would be harder but I think that there are things you can do.