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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.
I appreciate the ideas, but want to pop in with a relevant point of information. The sound can be (strongly) mitigated. There are extant and 3D-printable rotor designs that do so, and they’d be soon be adopted if sound-tracking caught on. Additionally, and notably more effectively for larger drones, you can play counter-frequency sound to directly cancel out the wave amplitude, as we see in modern stealth helicopters.
So, sound tracking is tricky. You could certainly make the argument that this just reduces reaction time (and you’d be right); but that reduced reaction time due to less overall sound is critical. Additionally, I think RandomRanger is suggesting that drone swarms are the future; most area of effect weapons (like your shotgun idea) are still going to be generally pointed in a direction. This means a semi-autonomous swarm moving from multiple directions would be very, very hard to bring down.
We’ll see. EMP on your position could work, at the cost of any electronics you’ve got on you. Potentially we will see electromagnetic field producing weapons that could neutralize a wide angle… But there we run into power density issues (at least for infantry—a mobile platform could afford to have large batteries, capacitors, and the power production to fill them).
But it won’t be easy, at least for a while. It may well be that the human warfighter is on its way out.
Fascinating, thank you for engaging! The last drones I saw sounded like a hive of bees at 200m out. I hadn't even considered cancelling out the noise - I imagine it's harder to do that at the source rather than at the end-point (the listener's ears) but it's very cool that they do it with stealth copters.
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The field is moving quickly. Sound is just a stop-gap for this year.
Medium-term, we'll put at least one small-caliber point defense cannon on every single vehicle and aircraft. Small, mass-produced phase array antenna for a millimeter-wave radar, a couple of current-gen cellphone cameras, maybe IR if you feel fancy, network between locally adjacent guns, the rest is software.
Those 70GHz+ radar modules exist today, autonomous vehicles need several of those. Automotive pricing policies ensure they cost single-digit dollar amounts. They go out to 1000' and have amazing resolution. Picking out small things going faster than 30 mph is trivial, even if they are hugging the treeline or the ground. Slewing the gun with two high power servos motors is trivial, getting below 100ms to line up on target is not unrealistic. Standardize the ammo (probably some type of buck-shot effective at 500') and prepare to produce it in absurd quantities.
Unfortunately, wrapping your drone in aluminum foil mitigates most of that. You might lose your GPS antenna and the radio link to base (unless that one is highly directional, looking away from the E-field gun), but most autonomous targeting functionality is pretty easy to preserve.
Very interesting, thank you for the explanation!
Since it sounds like you’re more educated on this than me, where does this leave us with humans? I can accept that it isn’t inherently impossible to handle drones (though I note that a single PDC would still be overwhelmed by a swarm)… But humans don’t have PDCs, radar, or the electrical generation for any of that.
Regarding EM warfare vs drones, sure, you can be fully autonomous and protected. But it’s a trade off, isn’t it? Full autonomy seems to me to favor larger drones, rather than disposable and cheap swarms. It’s also more expensive, I’d think.
How do you see the future of drone warfare, or warfare in general?
Attach motors and a tiny shaped-charge explosive to an iPhone - voila, the hardware is done, way below $1000 at scale. For military hardware, that's a cheap drone, and they'll deploy swarms of those for the right objective. This hardware would be capable of flying for many miles, radio extensive intel back home, ignore its burned antennas the moment an EW attack starts and then kamikaze towards the next human the vision model behind its cameras identify. The hardware would be easily fast enough to identify infrastructure and vehicles, or uniforms and weapons, or sex, age, race, ect.
My view is pretty dystopian the moment there will be a hot conflict between near-peers. We'll dump heavy duty cargo pallets worth of drones out the backs of cargo planes (airborne or not), and everybody not under the multi-layered umbrella of a concentrated military presence will have to huddle in their building's basement. But unlike during the air raids of WWII, this time bombed cities/front lines will become mine-fields, since an unexploded kamikaze drone can just turn dormant and wait for something to steer it awake again days later.
The only hint of optimism I have is that this might bring back an age of mutually assured destruction, making near-peer conflicts more rare again. "You can violently disarm Taiwan, you can even land troops, but your people can't ever leave base once they get here." An interesting difference is that iPhone-drones are much, much easier to proliferate than nukes. All the processors, sensors and motors are heavily dual-use items that everybody can buy. In that sense, the number of opponents that are effectively "near-peers" to the west will dramatically increase - unless current smartphone tech (mainly processors and sensors) gets retroactively heavily regulated in the future.
This is fascinating food for thought. I have some minor disagreements—namely, I don’t think a literal iPhone drone would be able to power extended flight (“many miles”), nor that sleep mode with passive sensors would massively increase operational life… (“you can’t ever leave base”).
But, big picture, you paint a convincing view of the future. If we look at the set of “drones under $1000” rather than literal converted iPhones, I think it’s a rather larger space of possibilities. Scary to imagine.
Yeah, that was hyperbole. I was thinking more in terms of the exact processors, cameras, microphones and other sensors, but of course re-arranged for aerodynamics, duplicated (you'd probably want a second/third camera module with significant optical zoom) and hardened against electronic warfare. Extended flight certainly would need more than one pouch cell - but you could use the exact cell from the phone, just duplicate it several times.
Landing and waiting would certainly increase operational life when compared to loitering in the air, or even when compared to traditional cluster munitions (which often had some sub-munitions on delayed timers in order to hit rescue/cleanup operations after the strike). You can even shut down most of the processing power, just wake everything when the microphones pick up voices/steps or the accelerometer picks up the vibrations of a vehicle.
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I can say with a high degree of confidence that the above is significantly underestimating the scope of the problem.
Okay, I’ll bite: I’m obviously less clued in here than you or pbmonster. Where do you disagree with them? What sort of problems are being ignored or minimized?
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