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An Israeli firm exhibited a supposedly world-first drone in July*; it is a loitering kamikaze drone that combined a passive radio frequency seeker with rather ordinary electro-optical and thermal sensors.
(marketing video; don't believe everything you see in advertising)
It appears to be the product of the 'small Harop' development project (I could have checked this, but it's too peripheral and I'm no paid author here).
This drone is no doubt still rather expensive (think: car to super sports car price range) and it's big, but let's assume that costs and sizes go down over time as usual and make such drones/missiles affordable in large quantities.
The new face of air dominance** would not be thousands of P-47s, Typhoons and other tactical aircraft over Normandy '44 or hundreds of A-10s and supersonic jets slaughtering withdrawing Iraqis in 1991: It could be thousands of loitering (and in case of no success returning for recovery) drones that do not only search for targets with thermal sensors (often based on cues by dedicated recce assets), but also detect almost all*** kinds of radio emissions as a lead for further investigations with IIR and E/O. Multiple communicating drones could pinpoint emitter locations precisely by triangulating, so ceasing emissions is of little help against drones that can look with imaging infrared sensors and know very well where to look.
Movements would compromise stealth as they did in '44 and ever since, but so would also many uses of radar and radio communications.
This is not only a horror scenario for underfunded small country armed forces fearing that their country might be targeted for bullying by some great power(s): Such oppressive use of drone airpower might be the fate of those who neglect updating their idea of air war and reorienting their battlefield air defences in time. An once-a-decade investment of € 1 bn with almost no operating costs might suffice to dull the tip of the spear of two mechanised NATO brigades.
*: This blog post was actually written and scheduled for publication on July 15th.
**: This is about the exploitation of air dominance. How to gain and sustain it is a different issue.
***: Some radio frequencies have so very high atmospheric dampening and some such emitters so very low power that detection is impractical beyond uselessly short distances. This includes wireless communication between personally electronics carried by the same person or vehicle. Other radio links would be directional and some radars would 'look' horizontally with too little emission power upwards to where the drones would be.
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ReplyDeleteSuicide drone airpower faces the issue that even WW2 era AA can cause significant losses to it. And in order to make them survivable you just end up with regular missiles using a fancy name. Any sort of modern AA is going to mess a drone swarm up so badly that your better off just spending the money on regular missiles.
ReplyDeleteWell, the quite modern battlefield air defences of Armenia failed in a shooting war against drones, so you should consider your position unsupported and in fact disputed by reality.
DeleteBesides, this post was about the sensory abilities; survivability can be had through different means, including terrain following flying below treetop height, radar stealth, high speed final dash down from safe altitude, evasive manoeuvres at 500+ m distance and ECM support (jamming, decoys).
Might this perhaps be a benefit for the "little guy"? It sounds to me like a once in a decade investment of a billion Euros might be a pretty small price for most national military budgets. Australia's military budget for 2021 is in the region of $AU44.62 billion. Our current submarine fleet cost us around $AU1.2 billion a year which breaks down as $AU670 million for sustainment, $AU 225 million for workforce and $AU 300 million for upgrade projects. I reckon we could afford to spend a coupe of billion every couple of years on kamikaze drones.
ReplyDeleteThere may be such innovator benefits, but as I described earlier, drone war can turn industrial. The powers who can afford or wartime-produce millions of drones would be dominant.
Deletehttps://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.com/2021/03/drone-art-of-war.html
Thank-you for the link - most informative. I do think that the key elements to drone warfare are numbers and sophisticated AI. Perhaps moving a little into the realm of science fiction, but the strong co-ordination of a massive drone swarm by a single over-arching AI on the ground or as an emergent feature of the swarm itself would be rather capable, MBTs, ships and aircraft start to look (in my imagination at least) like big, dumb targets.
ReplyDeleteCentralised command and control requires sufficiently effective long-range communication. Cooperative swarms with local cooperation rule sets don't require this and would at the very least be required as backup mode.
DeleteWhat's the different between a guided missile and a drone? To me it seems that drones are slower delivery vehicles that do often use cheap sensors, but can have a fusion of information from many different sensors. Due to their slow speed, drones can loiter independently and being cheaper with less expensive sensors and drive for movement, can saturate an area with more dangerous objects. Guided missiles are bound to loiter on a launch platform, which limits their availability and enables a better defense against their approach.
ReplyDeleteWell, drones are supposed to be recoverable (in case of kamikaze drones at least when they didn't engage).
DeleteColloquially, drones are associated with being slow, so some would call single use munitions that fly at Mach 0.3 a "drone" and one of speed Mach 0.7 a cruise missile.
The division between drones and non-drones is particularly blurry among underwater vehicles. Some single use kamikaze mine clearing vehicles get called "drones" while torpedoes are commonly reusable in peacetime (they float and get recovered by suitable boats) while being 100% single use in wartime (buoyancy makes them sink after wartime use even if they didn't explode).
The difference of greatest tactical consequence regarding flying drones of the army is the ability to loiter for more than a few minutes. Compare this to the fibreoptic guided missiles that were the hype in the 1990's (only the Serbs were actually offering them for sale). The cable breaking was probably not as much the issue as the inability to take the time to find the target. Such missiles would only be better than normal artillery if they can spend a while to find a roughly triangualated or counterfire radar-detected (and already scooting) target.