Defense against UAV's

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

I just had this conversation at work today. Your application requires
ATR on the part of the UAV. ATR is a hard problem (to the point of
being largely impossible in the general case).

: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

Ok, now you're talking about radar homers, which are easier (in other
words, they're possible). But they're either easily decoyed or they
start getting expensive.

spray a shotgun of darts with wavy aluminium
:tails into that phased array and see what it can do afterwards).

Pretty much what it could before, only slightly degraded.

--
"Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute."
-- Charles Pinckney