The problem is that the counter drone technology, if it is a drone itself, will necessarily always be more expensive than the attack drone (because it must follow the attack drone). In that case it becomes a lopsided war of attrition.
I don't know anything about anything, so take with a large grain of salt.
drones work because of their elegant control mechanisms. Those require a nice clean radio environment. I suspect, but I do not know, a big spark would mess with the video stream coming from the drone, and probably the real time controls going to the drone. So, like, an arc welder or Tesla coil sparking continuously would do unpleasant things to the drone - no remote control.
You could, of course, make the drone smarter, use AI to detect targets. but that would hurt performance, and make the drone more expensive. I'd point to Iran faking gps signals to ground the us drone, like a while ago.
It's a bunch of tradeoffs. Preprogrammed doesn't have versatility, but is cheap. Dynamic is versatile, but expensive. Remote control is vulnerable to other stuff.
Sparks are easy to filter out. There are complex jamming and anti-jamming measures. Civilian drones aren't designed for this so they are easy to shut down, military drones are getting better at this quickly. Before the war in Ukraine people said russian electronic warfare systems and air defence will make drones useless. There were different phases in this war, at first Russians weren't even doing air defense so Bayraktars were destroying airdefense systems (which is crazy :) ). Now that Russians fixed that issue - Bayraktars aren't doing much damage from what we can see, but the artillery guidance drones are still doing OK. I've heard good things about WB Electronics Fly Eye drones for example. They have some capacity to survive in area where the radio communication is jammed.
Also - if you do jamming - it makes you a big target broadcasting "I'm HERE!". There are missiles that are designed to guide themselves towards jamming/radar stations like HARM.
So with combined arms you can:
- launch a decoy
- watch for radar/air defence/jamming stations
- launch HARM missiles to destroy them
- launch drones to guide artillery
- destroy undefended bases with cheap and accurate drone-adjusted artillery fire
Also - military drones are usually controlled differently from the civilians ones. It feels more like playing RTS (click on the target, wait for the drone to get there) instead of a flying simulator (control the engines constantly). So if you're jammed for 5 minutes while going from point A to point B - it doesn't matter.
Also military drones often use satellite communication which is much harder to disrupt than direct radio connection.
They don’t require a clean radio environment, and can (and have shown in field trials) excellent full autonomous modes. Still a generation or two out for typical consumer drones though.
I guess I don't understand what precision is needed when dropping a grenade. I've never had a grenade thrown at me. I sort of suspect, but have no first hand knowledge, that a half a second is a big deal. yes, the drone will go to the location and drop the grenade. But there's no opportunity for dynamic reaction for changing conditions. I think, but do not know, that a few feet are a big deal with small explosives. Well, I kinda know from bottle rockets and such, but they aren't that scary.
You can cover a lot of small errors with a bigger explosion. but that means more payload, and more expensive.
denying that elegant control of small explosive in a precise location seems like a winner. yeah, you can go to position X but maybe I'm a little to the left of that. of course it's not free, but me picking up my shit and moving 10 feet is pretty cheap. cheaper than a drone for sure.
Maybe it doesn't matter, maybe tensor flow says that's a person near the target, adjust location to drop the explosive on the person.
from the point of a know nothing observer, it sure seems like there is some wiggle room. I'm not convinced an inexpensive drone has the capacity to solve these problems. (but you could send like 36 and drop grenades in a 6x6 grid, but that seems expensive).
you're underestimating the control software. with consumer grade cameras and simple image processing, you can write "go to x, find the nearest person and drop on them". also, just having the camera in the air is enough to make it much easier to launch a rocket at a target for juicier targets.
Not just field trials, your average joe has been able to program waypoint missions for a long time. They generally require reliable GPS after take off, but I imagine rough intertial referential sensors would be enough for warfare. It's enough for commercial aviation.
Consumer grade IMUs drift into unacceptable garbage in about two minutes of flight without GPS corrections[0]. You would need visual odometry to work in GNSS-denied environments
>The problem is that the counter drone technology, if it is a drone itself, will necessarily always be more expensive than the attack drone (because it must follow the attack drone).
Same argument made against Israel's Iron Dome against Hamas's more or less crude rockets.
Said argument misses the point. The question isn't whether an Iron Dome missile is more expensive than a Hamas rocket (it is). It's whether an Iron Dome missile is more valuable than the lives and property lost by letting that Hamas rocket through.
Yes, but this works because Israel has access to vastly more money than Hamas does. So they can withstand a 10^X cost discrepancy. It would not work between two parties who are close to evenly matched financially.
Not necessarily. The hunter drone don't need to carry payload that the attack drone is supposedly carrying. Also it may not need the batteries for long range. It is kind of like bomber-fighter situation.
I think the hunter drones would be first to get autonomous operations. The cost of errors/bugs is less for them than say for a ground attack drone hitting your own tank or unrelated civilian truck.
One option is radio antennas in a gun shaped thing. And it just scales up from there. You can use very powerful antennas on the ground or in a plane to interfere with the control system or GPS.
Also known as a perfect beacon for an anti-radiation missile.
It's not quite "drones HATE this one weird trick". Yes, jamming is a thing, but so are FHSS, ARMs and any number of other countermeasure-counters. No GPS/GNSS/whatever? Inertial navigation systems. No comms at all? All kinds of flavors of automation.
Simple countermeasures may be effective against consumer drones, but the overall problem is an iterative metagame where flawless countermeasures are pretty rare and there's usually a way to adapt or fight back.
I meant that if you intend to use a jammer as a countermeasure against a drone, you're making yourself vulnerable to ARMs. Sure, you can position the jammer away from anything important but that ups your time to redeploy / reconfigure it, reducing its effectiveness. You also lose the jammer, though that might not necessarily be a problem if it's a lot cheaper than an ARM and you have a lot of them available.
But of course ARMs work fine against a drone's controller, too - assuming it isn't using FHSS, though that itself assumes no crazy-advanced anti-FHSS RDF. That's kind of my point regarding how this stuff cuts both ways, how even if a countermeasure works in one instance that's no guarantee it'll continue working, and how countermeasures themselves generally have weaknesses.
Naval engineering provides a lot of examples of this dynamic. Check out what the introduction and development of the torpedo did to the meta.
