HEADACHE TO DEFEND AGAINST
So what are the choices for militaries searching for to guard precious belongings if standard air defences would wrestle to detect and destroy such drones?
There are a number of anti-drone methods (or Counter Unmanned Plane Programs, C-UAS) out there, starting from weapons and missiles to digital jammers that disrupt the indicators between the drone and its operator. Different options are additionally being developed, reminiscent of the usage of laser (directed vitality) weapons to destroy the drone.
Every has its downsides, nonetheless.
Missiles are an costly solution to down drones that may be cheaper by orders of magnitude, whereas they, like weapons, are restricted by the quantity of ammunition every system may be carried.
Directed vitality weapons have excessive energy necessities which suggests they have an inclination to have a big bodily footprint. Japan has constructed and examined a 10-kilowatt directed vitality C-UAS system that’s mounted on a big eight-wheeled truck.
Thus, a sufficiently giant drone swarm has the potential to overwhelm missile-, gun- and energy-based C-UAS methods with their sheer numbers. One other situation is scaling, significantly in giant international locations like Russia, the place actually 1000’s of methods should be acquired to adequately defend each possible goal.
If the swarm makes use of the native cell phone community to function, because the Ukrainians are claiming, then jammers can be of restricted utility as they function on different frequencies. Either side within the conflict have additionally been growing the usage of fibre-optic drones within the battlefields of jap Ukraine, the place operators management their drones by way of a fibre-optic cable hooked up to the drone that may stretch for tens of kilometres, which means they can’t be jammed by digital means.
The opposite attainable resolution towards the menace is what’s termed passive defences. These embody the constructing of hardened shelters that present all-round safety for high-value belongings which might be on the very least able to safety towards smaller munitions explosive gadgets.
It is going to take a whole lot of effort and won’t come low cost, however the flipside is, what’s the price of leaving excessive worth army belongings like plane susceptible to a menace that’s not simply hypothetical? It’s a query that every one international locations shall be shortly attempting to reply now.
Mike Yeo is the Indo-Pacific Bureau Chief for defence media outlet Breaking Protection. He has has greater than a decade of expertise as a defence journalist, specialising in regional defence and safety issues.
