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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

Actually the American M795 155mm HE artillery round costs the US army about $820 each.

However, FPV drones are the cheapest GUIDED weapon by far. It's finally cost effective to give every single soldier a "Fuck that guy in particular" weapon.

They will be significantly less effective in a real, peer conflict between great powers though. China or the US would likely have significant EW capabilities against drones. The US would probably rather turn off GPS entirely than deal with American soldiers being donked on the head with personalized grenades every day.

So drones in a conflict like that would be much less useful in "hot" locations, or will be significantly more expensive per unit so they can be made harder to jam and interfere with, or will be used more as a nuisance.

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> The US would probably rather turn off GPS entirely than deal with American soldiers being donked on the head with personalized grenades every day.

Would that help, considering that GLONASS, or Galileo, or BeiDou or could be used instead?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLONASS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeiDou

No, it’s not like the internet where you can just turn it off. GPS modules use the 3 major bands (2 at least) in case of failure so you would have to create a localized EMF field to block the radio of a UAV. Turning off GPS will not deter a drone that has a commercial grade or better GPS module.

You are correct that most (all?) the “GPS” modules used for drones would fallback to one or more of the above alternatives to GPS.

I think the comment I was replying to was talking about the United States literally shutting down the GPS satellites and the signals they send out.

Right, which is why I said it wouldn’t make a difference as the drones GPS modules would just switch to one of the ones you listed.

I disagree. The US can't turn off all GPS, short of blasting EU, Russian and Chinese satellites out of the sky. I have an affordable GPS module on my desk right now that already detects spoofing with a fairly high degree of reliability.

But GPS is just one thing in the navigation toolbox. There are so many other ways for drones to orient themselves, from triangulating on RF signals to object recognition and location with ML, and both of these are now commodity technologies. And capabilities (and thus options) go up considerably once you start mixing and matching systems rather than leaning heavily into a single design.

When I say commodity technologies, I mean this stuff is so cheap and accessible now that I can see belligerents launching drone swarms simply to get the countermeasure batteries to reveal themselves. To an extent this is already happening in Ukraine; Russian ECM is superior to anything fielded by the Ukrainians (and allegedly, to anything the west has), but Ukrainians are in turn selectively targeting Russian ECM trucks.

The drones will soon be autonomous. The technology is already here, just not well distributed. EW (except for EMP pulse) will be a dead end.

They are already tracking down signal sources and targeting them. The drones fly around till they get a signal maximum then look down.

I have also seen enemy analog video snooping where they watch the drone take-off point and geo-locate it to bomb.

The drone wars have just begun and it's going to be years before the new paradigm shakes out.

In a great power war the autonomous drones with inertial guidance and optical targeting are coming out.

Hell, with cell phone AI capabilities these days it wouldn't be too hard to shove an android in one of the larger dones and say if you get jammed and see something like this list of pictures, blow it up.

Grenades used to cost $8. Crazy how cheap that stuff is.

I just saw Ukraine drone-dropping Russian landmines back onto Russians. Fields full of free munitions.

>significant EW capabilities against drones.

>harder to jam and interfere with

This is where I have my doubts... We have things like HARM missiles, and I think we probably already have are or are developing "HARD" High-Speed Anti-Radiation Drones, that loiter around then attack whatever decides to start making noise in particular areas.

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