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Comment by ThrowawayR2 | Hacker News Reader

-brrt- Drone swarm, what drone swarm? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5_F4_Eod8 And this is simply the first iteration of such systems.

Drones are slow (slower than WW2 aircraft), short ranged, and not particularly stealthy. Improving any of those aspects raises the price significantly, defeating the point of cheap drones. They are a threat but not as magical as some seem to imagine.

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Commercially-available sport drones fly at over 200 MPH, which is more than fast enough to overcome any human's reaction time, are too small and fly too low to detect via radar, are more agile and maneuverable than any plane or missile ever designed. Their biggest problem is that they are trivially jammable (which will be overcome via autonomy) and operational range (which is doubled for suicide drones).

Drones are about to change operational doctrine in all areas in the same way that aircraft carriers obsoleted battleships. Any military that fails to adapt to this new reality will be absolutely destroyed in the field. Defenses against overwhelming autonomous drone swarms are possible, but not via current missile defense platforms.

I literally posted a video from Rheinmetall demonstrating their drone defense system shooting down a group of drones using a single burst from an AA gun and they are hardly the only corporation in the defense industry working on such systems. You're welcome to contact them to insist that that's not possible and that their system will never work, if you like.

The idea that 200 mph drones cannot be shot down when 300 mph WW2 aircraft can be shot down by WW2 era technology (flak does not care what size the target is) or that drones cannot be detected by radar (even flying birds can be detected by radar) merits a similar dismissal.

The friendly infantry that you're trying to protect are going to love having friendly flak shells exploding fifteen feet above their lines, to say nothing of the fact that drones are so maneuverable that swarms will attack from every reachable direction simultaneously. Flak shells will be minimally useful (and ultimately more expensive than the drones that do get shot down; you've already lost economically). And "radar can detect birds, so it can detect drones" means nothing whatsoever unless you're willing to waste all your AA ammo depopulating the pigeon population. Again, nobody is saying there's no defense, but autonomous drone swarms are going to be as important to warfare as the airplane (which, likewise, there are defenses against). The important thing is to have planners acknowledge it.

Again, you're welcome to contact Rheinmetall and other defense corporations with your extensive knowledge of air defense radar, ground to air cannon and other weaponry, and drone capabilities to explain all these things that you believe they forgot to account for. Perhaps you're right and none of them have ever considered how to reliably distinguish between a flying bird and a, to use your numbers, 200mph drone or the cost of ammunition. I'm sure they will be delighted to have a person with such broad and deep expertise advising them.

But they’re so cheap that you can overrun your opponents defense. Who cares if they’re slow? You can shoot down any individual drone, but you can’t shoot them all down.

Cheaper than a bullet? Seems unlikely.

And if the attacker's drone swarm is that implausibly cheap, then the defender just puts up their own implausibly cheap defensive drone swarm to counter them. Checkmate.

How can you take down a drone with a single bullet? It’s not trivially easy to shoot them down. Also, a “defensive” drone swarm would need more advanced tracking and targeting capabilities, so it would be more expensive. Look at Israel’s Iron Dome. A single interception costs $100,000-$150,000. The rockets being intercepted cost less than $1,000. If Israel was more evenly matched, it would be cost prohibitive to intercept all of the rockets.

The US just announced that it is buying off-the-shelf anti-drone systems for Ukraine that operate chain guns in single-shot mode. Drones are slow so they can use VT rounds instead of the CIWS spray-and-track method.

https://eos-aus.com/defence/counter-drone-systems/slinger/

It's interesting to dig deeper into the vague mention of "special ammunition". According to [1], the Slinger uses Northup Grumman's M230LF Bushmaster 30mm cannon and [2] suggests that the anti-drone ammunition is the recently developed XM1211 HEP (High Explosive Proximity) round which was designed for the M230LF. Finding about the creation of XM1211 rounds is stunning because it means that an effective radar proximity fuse is being stuffed into a tiny 30 mm diameter projectile with enough room left over for adequate explosive to generate a cloud of shrapnel. That's stuff that would have been considered sci-fi a few decades ago.

[1] https://www.australiandefence.com.au/defence/land/more-on-eo...

[2] https://taskandpurpose.com/tech-tactics/army-xm1211-high-exp...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Beam $100 per shot. Israel starts to deploy it this year

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