What can defend against off-the-shelf drone weapons?
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I expect to get downvoted for this, but after a tour in Iraq I firmly believe theres no weapon or countermeasure thats going to be unilaterally effective at arresting the concept of guerilla warfare and terrorism except negotiation. Otherwise, you end up dividing your city into red and green zones, and pretty soon even if a terrorist attack hasnt happened in a few months, terrorism is pretty successful in making peoples lives outright miserable. smoking kills more americans than terrorism in 2017, but we still have to take our shoes off at the airport.
People just want equality, some measure of freedom, liberty, and prosperity. Show up with tanks, rig an election in favor of your candidate, and disenfranchise an entire segment of the population like we did in Iraq, and you will find people will adopt all sorts of creative and clever methods to not only sabotage your mission, but actively eliminate your high value targets youve come to rely upon for 'nation building' or whatever geopolitical pursuit du-jour is popular.
In Iraq, we called it "winning hearts and minds." doing things to fix problems like providing clean water or just a few meals made incredible progress in crushing the enemies ability to recruit anyone more sophisticated than an angry goat herder. And he quit being angry once we fixed the sidewalk to the mosque.
In maduros case, he is reviled by a sizeable majority of his population. he openly ignores major problems like starvation, he engages his people with violent tactics, and he disregards basic human rights and living conditions. Nothing, no technology on this earth, will keep you safe if your people turn on you. There is no police or military force that can endure sustained guerilla terrorist tactics indefinitely. Not even the US Military.
What can defend against someone who is resourceful, determined, and has an axe to grind? Not much.
Anyone remember Killdozer?
Go over to ar-15.com or some prepper forums and everyone will know exactly who you're talking about, here probably not so much. This crowd doesn't tend to idolize that kind of thing.
Same with the Unabomber. Everyone likes to make jokes, but how many of those people have read what he wrote?
If they'd just cut that guy some slack, like maybe not destroying his business, or helping to relocate, or anything that left him with a reason to keep being a productive member of society, then the outcome would have been very different. But they fucked him into the ground, until eventually he fucked back.
> The story of the batch plant also goes back to 1992, three years after Heemeyer had moved to the area. Heemeyer bought his two acres from the Resolution Trust Corp., the federal agency set up to handle the assets of failed savings and loan institutions. He bought the two acres for $42,000 but later agreed to sell it to the Docheff family, which wanted the property for a concrete batch plant, for $250,000. They agreed, but then he wanted $375,000 and at some later point wanted a deal worth approximately $1 million. All of this was well before the rezoning proposal hit town hall.
He got a quarter of a million for land he bought for $40k. That's hardly fucked into the ground.
The (afaik) plan started after they repeatedly denied him the ability to create his own path to his property, and hit him with fines etc due to a forced rezoning. The guy (apparently) tried to negotiate and got hung out to dry a bit.
Don't know the exact details of whether they were in the right to do so, but the point is the guy felt like he had his back against the wall and had nothing left to live for.
Not condoning the guys actions though.
I protested the Iraq invasion in 2003 but this is a revisionist and historically inaccurate version of why it failed so spectacularly.
The U.S. didn't occupy a functional country and then destroy it. The outbreak of mass murder and tit-for-tat violence wasn't motivated by political grievances against U.S. policy. The U.S. removed a dictator that was keeping the lid on religious sectarian infighting. It erupted immediately into a civil war and that was further inflamed by third parties.
"The fall of Baghdad saw the outbreak of regional, sectarian violence throughout the country, as Iraqi tribes and cities began to fight each other over old grudges. The Iraqi cities of Al-Kut and Nasiriyah launched attacks on each other immediately following the fall of Baghdad to establish dominance in the new country, and the U.S.-led Coalition quickly found themselves embroiled in a potential civil war. U.S.-led Coalition forces ordered the cities to cease hostilities immediately, explaining that Baghdad would remain the capital of the new Iraqi government. Nasiriyah responded favorably and quickly backed down; however, Al-Kut placed snipers on the main roadways into town, with orders that invading forces were not to enter the city. After several minor skirmishes, the snipers were removed, but tensions and violence between regional, city, tribal, and familial groups continued."
The US got a lot of good will right after the invasion. It destroyed that by disbanding the Iraqi army, by failing achieve basic safety for the country and by managing the country in an incompetent fashion.
Moreover, the country was in horrific shape due to ten years of draconian sanctions. They were theoretically against Saddam but the average Iraqi suffered horribly - the looting of priceless Iraqi artifacts by destitute mob was an expression of what US sanctions had reduced the country to (along with Saddam himself, of course).
But they did disband the Iraqi army and the whole Iraqi state!
>"The fall of Baghdad saw the outbreak of regional, sectarian violence throughout the country, as Iraqi tribes and cities began to fight each other over old grudges."
These are things the Iraqi Army and Police could have kept under control, had they existed. Instead, unemployed soldiers made up much of the sectarian fighting forces.
A country without a state devolving into anarchy shouldn't be that surprising. But to the US, it apparently was!
[0] https://www.quora.com/If-Saddam-Hussein-and-Gaddafi-were-ous...
[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/meast/10/30/iraq.un.euro.r...
Also, Sadam had outlived his utility.
There's also reporting about close ties between the Bush and Saudi families. Same private schools. Kids vacationed together.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/19/syria-...
Guerilla tactics are the evolutionary counter-balance to an overpowering force. If there's a day when a power becomes so great it can't be resisted we're all in trouble. We like it when we're resisting (Revolutionary War) but not when we're being resisted (Iraw and Vietnam). But the tactic exists because it's effective.
The most efficient form of occupation is by getting the benefits of the occupation without the occupation: discretely hijacking a government + their media + most important companies, turning every citizen of a country into a debt slave.
Why fight millions of people if you can pay off a few dozen senators?
The drone threat is similar but different. Protection of a single high value locatoin like a presidential speech (Maduro situation) is quite doable. Some combination of surveillance and kinetic and electronic countermeasures. It's not foolproof but it appears to work ok-ish (there are still high value targets speaking around the world and zero drone assasinations and now nonzero failed assasinations). The problem is that it's resource intensive and asymmetric as hell. And it's still just a question of time until the first successful attack.
A more interesting question is, what does a group of soldiers do to protect from a drone threat? They don't have a fixed location and huge resources, like a presidential speech. You can't fire a hugely expensive AA weapon at an off the shelf drone. It would seem you need some kind of weapon that is light, cheap, and reliably kills an off the shelf drone up to max altitude, and can be re-used or carried in large numbers by a single rifle squad.
It could be as simple as another drone? This is at least my guess. The most reliable and cheap thing to use to attack a drone is another drone. That would then be effectively the start of an arms race of drones. Higher, faster, better armed, better countermeasures. We'd see a replay of the evolution of fighter planes, but for plastic UAV's?
The use of COTS drones might not become a trend though, since jamming/spoofing the GPS and the radio frequencies used would prevent the drones from being directed effectively. Customizing the drone radios would add to effort and costs, and require somewhat specialized skills.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/17000-linux-powered-...
EDIT: Before you accuse me of making up fantasy weapons, you'd best read the above link, and the one below. Computer aimed firearms that perform at "sniper in a box" levels actually do exist.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/01/trackingpoint-shows-...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=191&v=9CO6M2HsoI...
Radio jamming can be as broadband or narrow band as you desire. The narrower the band you target, the less power you need. The catch is, 1) you need to know what frequency you are trying to jam, and 2) this is not at all legal, so it would probably only fly in the middle of a warzone.
The main reason those are not (yet?) being used for terror attacks is that the skill level required to pull that off is quite high, and the people planning terror attacks seem to find it easier to recruit suicide bombers than geeks.
If any of _these_ guys: http://ardupilot.org/about/team - got "radicalized", I suspect they'd be very difficult to defend against...
Your reading comprehension is poor. I'm only using the image as an icon/illustration to prime the discussion. The actual device I discuss is quite different.
https://www.themarysue.com/fake-cod-quadrotor/
Edit: spelling
"Whether reality or simply show, these examples make it clear that a good defense against drones is vital for both bodyguards and military in the field."
You can get drones that can carry over 40Lb an that's not far off a ww2 57MM M18's weight.
It carries a stripped-down AR-style carbine, and makes shots at what looks like 50-100 yards with sufficient accuracy.
1) blocking GPS. 2) Electronic noise (mostly the same as blocking GPS, but needs lots more power) 3) thin nets. (bonus points for barrage balloons) 4) shotguns 5) flak (air burst anti-air shells 6) rain
Off the shelf quadcopters are fragile and not designed to cope with hostile flight. Loose a motor and your falling out of the sky.
Loose a GPS track and you'll either hover, or descend. This could be hacked to rely on dead reckoning, but that's inherently inaccurate. the sensors are designed to tell you what way up you are, how fast you are deviating from desired angle, they rarely have odometers.
A small > 250watt narrow band transmitter, Something with harmonics for 2.4gigs, or just a modified microwave magnetron with a decent directional antenna will destroy most hardware.
A thin fishing net is thin, light, cheap and almost invisible. The hardest part is keeping it in the correct place.
Once inertial guidance for missiles became more accurate than ±100 meters, there wasn't a point to reducing the civilian accuracy anymore, so they disabled SA in 2000 and went all-in on availability in 2007.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USYlt9t0lZY
https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.02550
And it's solving a somewhat harder problem - it's done with no maps apart from what it's generating in real time.
Also, "falling out of the sky" can still be an effective weapon if you plan for it.
Most of the measures intended to stop access to explosives, weapons and generally dangerous things are not able to do so 100% but simply make the cost of that access high enough MOST malevolent actors will simply not afford it.
Just don't aim it like a rifle the side lobes might get nasty
900-ish Watts of 2.4GHz will upset most off-the-shelf drones at quite some distance...
https://hackaday.com/2011/03/21/herf-gun-zaps-more-than-your...
GPS is used for all sorts of legitimate human activity, so blocking it would cause problems.
Electronic noise could interfere with not just drones, but all sorts of electronic devices that humans use and need.
Nets, flack, and shotguns could certainly interfere with or harm humans, depending on where they are, and if there's some place they're not to let humans pass, then drones might be able to go through the same route.
Rain is annoying to humans and so plenty of places where humans are are protected against rain, so in those places this is an inadequate defense against drones -- though maybe sprinklers would work (but they can cause their own problems to useful electronics and might even cause an electrocution hazard to humans, depending on where they're used).
In the context of how to respond and if possible disabled a weaponized remote controlled aircraft, I think being dead or seriously wounded also interferes with human activity. These proposals aren't-I didn't get the impression at least-meant to be implemented and operated persistently, but applied into purpose-built apparatuses to disrupt a hostile remote controlled aircraft.
That's a context I'm willing to trade having my phone work for a moment if there's a DJI Phantom dropping bombs over Boston (I beg humor for the hip-hop hyperbole) being taken out of commission before someone gets hurt.
But jamming 1km around every possible target, every day as a precaution is going to be too disruptive. It may actually increase risk to life - by jamming 911 calls for any ordinary accident.
For a spurious one time threat from an unknown actor, then most of these are overkill.
However against a known adversary with an MO for doing drone attacks, these might be legitimate.
An example, a sports event: stringing a fine net from the building/all weather lights, directional GPS blocking (its RF so can trivially be localised.) is cheap and proportional. "RF snipers" with 900 watt converted microwave "guns" (or more likely a beam forming radar type affair)
Scott Evil: Great, now we just need to get the Venezualan President to give a speech at Torrey Pines or the backside of some other world class dynamic soaring hill...
(That's only relevant to this sub-thread's discussion, your point is completely valid in the context of the top level thread... Having said that - needing balloons or planes to get your home-brew autonomous weapons above your target is a whole extra level of logistics and opportunities to get observed/caught compared to launching consumer-grade drones.)
I know somebody who was having a nuisance/peeping tom issue with a neighbor and a drone. They had an unfortunate accident where their cheapo drone somehow collided with the neighbors.
There's this view, held by some, that with the atomic bomb, the cat's out of the bag, and the escalation of weaponry hit the ceiling in terms of organized conflict. But that there's also a non-linear side effect.
The outlook of this view holds that, if we indeed smacked into the ceiling, harnessing the same natural power that fuels the sun's daily dose of daylight, well, there's a whole vacuum of optional behavior between a floor of sharpened wooden sticks or hurled rocks, and a maliciously used hydrogen bomb, and all of human creativity to imagine interesting ways to negotiate that gradient between a single hostile neolithic ape, and nuclear age, mutually assured ICBM psychosis.
So maybe we got only a foot off the ground with primitive biological sabotage, or fumigated battle trenches dug into former farm fields, before we catapulted into the upper limit with the idea of multiple re-entry vehicles delivered in waves, to target thousands of cities simultaneously.
And what was the idea for how to cope with all your favorite cities being instantaneously incinerated?
That's right. Cave networks underneath mountain ranges. Going full dwarven on the problem.
So, the bonus side effect of going full AD&D dwarf character class, is that it also models well for self contained space stations.
Maybe closing the door to the biosphere, whilst certainly a tragedy of the commons it may be, possibly opens a window to outer space?
> That's right. Cave networks underneath mountain ranges. Going full dwarven on the problem.
I've played Dwarf Fortress, and I know how those games typically end. I think we have enough !!FUN!! on the surface.
War brings out terrifyingly brilliant innovations from the strangest of places.
Having a better weapon doesn't stop a shitty weapon from killing you.
I guess that im just making an argument about the modern west.
Making bomb timers that lasted months/years to avoid detection was no mean feat in the early 80s
It's happened before. P.A. Luty wanted to make a point about British gun control laws, so he built a submachine gun out of ordinary hardware store parts and wrote a book ("Expedient Homemade Firearms") containing detailed instructions. He got jailed over making these weapons, of course, but the point stands.
the big shift that drones represent is replacing trained soldiers with direct industrial output. the future is swarms.
Most people don't want to destroy their lives by shooting someone with a gun, yet it happens every day.
My point was that there are people who want to murder, and drones will be very suitable for that, and the fact that 99.99% of people don't won't really matter.
and something like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantsir_missile_system
(Not familiar with the western equivalents but the idea is the same.)
A small drone does not have the ability to carry the shielding required to protect itself from interference, which can include jamming GPS and even taking over controls of the drone to capture it.
A larger drone is easy target for AA systems.
From earlier this year with pictures: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/russia-...
There were several attacks repelled in the last month also but I only have Russian language sources (maybe South Front will have some more details in English - coverage of Syria in Western media has been pretty sparse in the last months with all the government successes in Daraa).
Once the target is detected, a rather large cheap swarm deployed on the attack vector to block projectiles and intercept the enemy drone would probably make the most sense. The drones can absorb the hits and blow up when they reach their targets.
ECM-based solutions do seem to have problems with also taking out the good guys equipment and capabilities.
The same things that defend against off-the-shelf radio airplane weapons - a risk that has spanned decades. A couple of dozen dollars and some foam core creates an equivalent risk (or greater, since it has a longer range due to being more efficient than multirotors).
Don't they have inertial navigation if they can't get a GPS signal, and pre-programmed routes that don't need radio control.
You need odometry for that. There are opticalflow modules that will allow you to do that, but they cost power.
Bringing tech into the equation doesn't add much when you're talking about a payload in the single-digit pounds region.
Still, not really a new risk, however.
This might mean throwing a net over the inner alcove or erecting a temporary tent to block the outside facing windows.
undefined is not a functionPerhaps you’d use shotgun shells loaded with rock salt, so any overshoot into a crowd would be less-than-lethal.
Things like auto-targeting lasers might work too, but the way the way to fight technology is with better technology.
Whoever has more money to purchase and deploy drones wins. Same as it's always been.
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/search?q=drone%20gren...
Yes. It doesn't take that much explosive to kill someone.
A claymore mine can be fitted to the bottom of most drones it’s much more effective and it’s electrically triggered.