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#22
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Defense against UAV's
wrote in
ups.com: I kept specifying "small, stealthy UAVs" - which by definition would be used for recce, not attack - as these are the hardest targets to detect and destroy. Now it may be that powerful navies will not be too troubled by what they can do (you can't hide a ship too easily anyway, so their enemy will know they are there) but armies certainly are worried, because UAVs can be used to detect the movements of troops and vehicles and identify targets for attack - even to lase them to guide in homing munitions. And some of the recce UAVs being developed at the moment are really small and quiet and will be very difficult to spot. Even if SAMs could deal with these small UAVs, the problem would be that the enemy could then just send over hordes of very cheap UAVs (without the expensive sensor kit) to soak up the SAMs - a very cost-effective way of degrading your enemy's capabilities. Unless and until a small and cheap "anti-UAV" homing missile can be developed, I think appropriate guns (and ammo) provide the best answer. It is of course correct that a big, weapon-carrying UAV will be much easier to detect than a small one (although a stealthy design may still cause problems, just as stealth strike planes do). In contrast, fast anti-ship missiles may be difficult to intercept but they have hot engines and leading-edge surfaces which are easy to detect with IR sensors: stealth and high speed do not go together very well. Tony Williams Military gun and ammunition website: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk There's a lot of ASSUMPTION that this "UAV" was a small drone and not a full-size RC military aircraft. Does anyone know for certain what it was? -- Jim Yanik jyanik at kua.net |
#23
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Defense against UAV's
Jack Linthicum wrote: wrote: Jack Linthicum wrote: snip 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). A swarm of UAVs requires a swarm of controllers and a swarm of secure frequencies to accomplish that control. I wonder if a follow-on to a Shrike or ALARM would bother to hit the transmitting antennas and instead have a large enough warhead to take out the whole controlling facility. A swarm of current generation UAVs requires a swarm of controllers. A swarm of highly autonomous UAVs (perhaps better viewed as a swarm of ultra cheap cruise missiles accompanied by some stealthy UAVs with good sensor suites) launched on a 'kill everything that floats and resembles a warship'' need not. The swarm flies silently (no communication) to the designated target area, contacts the controllers when it sees the target (or does not find it), the controller just tells them "move to X,Y" or "20% attack this ship, 20% attack that ship and the rest presses on to X,Y". One/few controllers, intermittent, low bandwidth, frequency agile, tough to intercept/jam communication. Of course, the tough part is the autonomous acting - but as I said, it you need it to work only in fair weather, out of ground clutter, in "kill all that is floating" mode, your task is much easier then what the US requires from its UAVs. The assymetric warfare thing... |
#24
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Defense against UAV's
wrote: No solution is perfect. No UAV is perfect. No weapon is perfect. ....and no defence is perfect. The concern for navies should be that a very cheap piece of kit (a small UAV with a laser designator) could guide in very cheap guided munitions which could take out a very expensive warship. If the report on the Iran UAV is accurate, the USN is evidently not on top of this at present. I hope they are working on it, very hard. Tony Williams Military gun and ammunition website: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk |
#25
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Defense against UAV's
Jim Yanik wrote:
There's a lot of ASSUMPTION that this "UAV" was a small drone and not a full-size RC military aircraft. Does anyone know for certain what it was? Well the USN hasn't said anything yet, so all we have to go on are what the Iranians are known to have. http://www.globalsecurity.org/milita...ran/ababil.htm wing area 1.76m² Max. launching weight 83 kg Cruise speed 165 Knots Endurance is 1.5 h Minus 25 minutes on station leaves 30 minutes there and 30 minutes back or a range of 80 nm. -HJC |
#26
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Defense against UAV's
wrote: wrote: No solution is perfect. No UAV is perfect. No weapon is perfect. ...and no defence is perfect. The concern for navies should be that a very cheap piece of kit (a small UAV with a laser designator) could guide in very cheap guided munitions which could take out a very expensive warship. If the report on the Iran UAV is accurate, the USN is evidently not on top of this at present. I hope they are working on it, very hard. Tony Williams Military gun and ammunition website: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk Like anti-radiation missiles. Against the launch sites and control points. |
#27
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Defense against UAV's
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 ----== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com - Unlimited-Unrestricted-Secure Usenet News==---- http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 120,000+ Newsgroups ----= East and West-Coast Server Farms - Total Privacy via Encryption =---- |
#28
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Defense against UAV's
Jack Linthicum wrote: wrote: If the report on the Iran UAV is accurate, the USN is evidently not on top of this at present. I hope they are working on it, very hard. Like anti-radiation missiles. Against the launch sites and control points. Since only a simple radio signal is needed to control the UAVs (and then not all of the time - only when they want to instruct them to do something) that would be very much harder than hitting a high-powered radar which has to keep transmitting a distinctive signal all of the time to do its job. And AR missiles could easily be decoyed by lots of cheap radio transmitters scattered about. The problem here is that it could be a kind of 'asymmetric warfare', in that the costs and problems of the defence are potentially far more costly than those of the attackers. Tony Williams Military gun and ammunition website: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk |
#29
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Defense against UAV's
wrote: Jack Linthicum wrote: wrote: If the report on the Iran UAV is accurate, the USN is evidently not on top of this at present. I hope they are working on it, very hard. Like anti-radiation missiles. Against the launch sites and control points. Since only a simple radio signal is needed to control the UAVs (and then not all of the time - only when they want to instruct them to do something) that would be very much harder than hitting a high-powered radar which has to keep transmitting a distinctive signal all of the time to do its job. And AR missiles could easily be decoyed by lots of cheap radio transmitters scattered about. The problem here is that it could be a kind of 'asymmetric warfare', in that the costs and problems of the defence are potentially far more costly than those of the attackers. Tony Williams Military gun and ammunition website: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk The mention was of swarms which implies swarms of signals which then implies if I have an ECM craft up and I get lots of radiation from one direction I will send a message to that source. The decoys may work the second time but not the first or third. The control point will be that, singular, one command directing all of the UAVs from one spot. How many generals would you trust if you were Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? |
#30
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Defense against UAV's
Didn't the Serbs shoot down a U.S. UAV with a helicopter door gun over
Bosnia a few years back? Helicopter guns might be a cheap way to deal with low performance UAV's, assuming you have a sensor that can detect the UAV and direct the Helo to the target. |
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