DRONESThe Challenge of Cheap Drones: Finding an Even Cheaper Way to Destroy Them
The sudden proliferation of inexpensive drones in Ukraine is a revolution in warfare. While they vary in size and capability, the economics of defense are particularly stressed by the very cheapest ones, those adapted from civilian models or made with commercially available components.
The aerial target is coming at you or your friends. It can kill any kind of vehicle, including a tank, or hit an ammunition store, command post or even a surface-to-air battery worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Or it may go after a single soldier.
Your challenge is that the target, a quadcopter drone, is really small, maneuverable and hard to detect.
None of that is the biggest challenge. Rather, the confounding problem is that the thing is incredibly cheap, having cost the enemy some low multiple of $1000—far less than the usual cost of shooting down anything. If you use expensive means to knock down such a drone, the other side’s easy answer is just to build more of them and exhaust your budget.
The sudden proliferation of inexpensive drones in Ukraine is a revolution in warfare. While they vary in size and capability, the economics of defense are particularly stressed by the very cheapest ones, those adapted from civilian models or made with commercially available components.
What follows is a look at the difficulties in engaging a little civil-derivative quadcopter. This article in the series particularly focusses on the challenge in developing and making counter-drone systems that use cannon to achieve more range than is available from machine guns—to increase the area that can be defended and the time available for engagement. Another article will look at other tools for defeating cheap drones, such as lasers and jamming.
Northrop Grumman of the US, MSI-DS in Britain, and Australia’s Electro Optic Systems (EOS) are among manufacturers offering systems with cannon.
Two issues arise: such weapons need a multiplicity of expensive sensors to do the job, and they must be built with high precision to hold down ammunition expenditure. So, they cannot be cheap. We can understand this if we follow their engagement sequence.
First, the defender must detect the drone.
First, the defender must detect the drone. For longest-range detection, use of a search radar may be preferred—at the risk of the enemy picking up its transmissions, determining its location and attacking it.
The drone is made mostly of plastic, a poor reflector of radio energy, so the radar needs to be sensitive. It must also be set for detection of targets moving as slowly as tens of kilometers per hour, which means it will have to be clever enough to ignore reflections from birds.
