Keith W wrote:
wrote in message
ups.com...

Jack Linthicum wrote:

Almost all the arguments one sees here are based on the fact that UAVs
are dumb and if you can take the comms out, you are fine. I am not
sure that will hold for long, especially if the UAVs are used against
ships on open sea, in fair weather, in 'kill every warship you see'
mode - which all makes the autonomous decision making of the UAV so
much easier.

That of course also makes spoofing and the use of decoys much easier
and makes the user rather unpopular with any other seafarers. It'd
be something of a pity if your UAV's decided to attack the local
fishing fleet instead of the USN battle group. Given the number of offshore
rigs and support ships as well as tankers in the Persian Gulf such
indiscriminate weapons would seem rather unattractive to the Iranians
as an example.
If you are using video imaging (backed up by some other, e.g.
IR/passive EM sensors),
I suspect it is a graduate student's exercise in image recognition to
distinguish a warship (esp. aircraft carrier) from an oil
rig/tanker/finshing ship. Especially if you are flying slow.
Chaff and flares might foil simple radar/IR seekers, but I can't see
how would they defeat video imaging sensor (+good software behind it).

Design for minimal communication and bandwidth needs
(just for higher level commands/coordination) - much tougher to detect
and jam.


It is easy to imagine a swarm of UAVs used as very sheap relatively
slow (200km/h) flying cruise missiles with small warheads, designed to
attack radars and similar on-ship targets that can be seriously damaged
with a small warhead (spray a shotgun of darts with wavy aluminium
tails into that phased array and see what it can do afterwards).


200 km/hr UAV's are going to be rather vulnerable to all forms
of active defence including point defence missiles like RAM
and to CIWS.
Yes. That's why you want them to be really cheap and use swarming. On
the other hand RAM is IR homing and the IR signature of a 100hp piston
engine is negligible compared to the IR signature of a rocket/jet
engine of the current antiship missiles.

Phalanx (or other gun-based CIWS) should be effective, but has rather
short range (and not THAT much reloads, if you are dealing with a huge
swarm). I suspect it is also looking at targets with much higher radar
signature and very different characteristics.

The CIWS mounts look rather distinctly and will obviously be among the
targeted areas of the ship. You don't need that much of a warhead to
put CIWS radar ot of commission - so perhaps an UAV with 200kg warhead
can actually carry 8-12 short range missiles designed for homing on
CIWS radar and launch them while being out of range of CIWS.

Another possiblity is to actually fly high (say 5-8km) so that the UAV
will have to be attacked by missiles and/or aircraft, not CIWS guns,
and drop (homing) submunition from there, gravity doing the delivery
work. You will want to make these UAVs stealthy, to make the locking of
the missile seeker real difficulty (and postpone finding the UAVs as
much as possible).

There is a tradeoff between sophistication and cost (and reliability,
simple systems are easier to debug/design correctly). However, a
country like China/India or even Iran should be able to mass produce
good enough UAVs for peanuts (i.e be able to field thousands of them).
The key term being 'good enough', not 'super duper, all weather, high
reliability and long service life'. They need to be good enough to
present a non-negligible threat of crippling the attacker's warships,
not an almost 100% guarantee of destruction.

Stefan

Keith



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