Short Brothers Blowpipe/Javelin/Starburst/Starstreak

[PR19_Kit]

Blowpipe and Raipers record in the Falklands was recently revised mainly to do with internal RA politics.

For the good or worse?

[Aircav]

RPG is a lot cheaper for anti-armour, never understood why the British army got them along with a rifle the same calibre as the Soviets, be it 7.62x39mm or 5.45x39mm. 

You feeling suicidal?  Rifle Propelled Grenades can't penetrate an MBT.

Try telling the Syrian and Iraqi tank crews that.

[rickshaw]

Blowpipe and Raipers record in the Falklands was recently revised mainly to do with internal RA politics.

Yes, I've heard that.  And pray tell, what was the cause and the result?

[DarrenP]

The basic cause was the Field regiments were undermanned and pulling allot of tours in bosnia,Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan and the AD regiments were rotating through UNCYP and Falklands. So to poach manpower the case was made that GBAD in Falklands wasn't as effective as had been reported at the time. This also fitted into then current thinking that there was only a limited need for AD as insurgent armies and peace keeping ops we would have Air superiority. So allot of assumptions and rewriting and the AD regiments were run down or converted to fly UAV's. Now the UAV approach may suddenly become a dead end as if we go back to cold war will they survive in a modern batlespace with state of art AD and EW or will they revert to being what they are glorified AD training targets.

[rickshaw]

Spoken like a true Cloud Puncher. 

Not wishing to stray into politics, I am somewhat surprised that people think we are going back to the bad old days of the Cold War.  I can see some purpose in re-deploying manpower and resources from an arm which is seeing little use to those that are.

[DarrenP]

I would suggest the Russian actions in Ukraine are showing the Idea that the Russians were our mates now was very short sighted policy. And the Belief that the future of warfare is fighting counter insurgency in 3rd world countries could also be a very short sighted view. Given the popularity of drones to locate and fix an enemy force hmmm wouldn't a counter be a good idea

[zenrat]

Drones work fine against a technically inferior enemy.
How good would they be against one with an equivalent or higher tech level?
Would the link from the drone to the operator not be susceptible to jamming or being taken over (Jack Bauer can't be everywhere)?
Would we see fully autonomous drones and the birth of Skynet?

[Weaver]

I'd imagine it's not difficult to track a drone with IR when it's high enough to be invisible to the naked eye. The surveillance ones are also pretty slow, so once you've got the track, hitting them with something should be straightforward. It doesn't have to be a fancy missile either: good old fashioned guns aimed by modern electronics should do the job. At the other extreme, how much laser energy would it take to mission-kill one? Not that much, I'd bet......

[pyro-manic]

IIRC some drones are (or can be) pretty much autonomous for much of a mission: Global Hawk, X-47 etc? They will fly a pre-planned route without any ground commands, and the X-47B can recover to a carrier by itself. I would imagine that the production follow-ons to demonstrators like Taranis will be autonomous (mostly if not fully), particularly any "combat" UAVs which will need to be able to adapt to the situation.

[rickshaw]

I'd imagine it's not difficult to track a drone with IR when it's high enough to be invisible to the naked eye.

Depends on the drone.  Most have very small visual and IR signatures.  Some actively use shielding, some fly very high (hence a long way a way) and some just have extremely small engines, all of which means its hard to pick them up with a ground based IR detector.   As they usually don't fly fast, there isn't much skin heating either.

The surveillance ones are also pretty slow, so once you've got the track, hitting them with something should be straightforward. It doesn't have to be a fancy missile either: good old fashioned guns aimed by modern electronics should do the job. At the other extreme, how much laser energy would it take to mission-kill one? Not that much, I'd bet......

If you can detect it then tracking it should be relatively easy.  However, remember for visual aiming they are hard to actually track because of tricks of perspective ("how big is that object?  How far away is it?").  Lasers have downed simulated and actual drones and may be one of the answers albeit at present a very expensive one for counter-drone work.

Jamming is harder than most people think.  A blanket jammer would work but then your own side might complain about losing coms.   Drone communications are encrypted and often can be frequency agile.  Most larger drones are semi-autonomous (ie, they only need direction when performing difficult manoeuvres and/or carrying out direct surveillance or are landing/taking off.  The rest of the time they fly on automatic programming).  If jammed, they have a "return home" function which makes them return to base automatically.

[Weaver]

I'd imagine it's not difficult to track a drone with IR when it's high enough to be invisible to the naked eye.

Depends on the drone.  Most have very small visual and IR signatures.  Some actively use shielding, some fly very high (hence a long way a way) and some just have extremely small engines, all of which means its hard to pick them up with a ground based IR detector.   As they usually don't fly fast, there isn't much skin heating either.

A sophisticated drone can use all the same tricks as a conventional aircraft to avoid detection, but one of the selling points of drones is low cost. They're already proving more expensive than expected due to the high number of crashes, so making them more sophisticated just magnifies that and thereby restricts availability. If they have to fly higher to avoid detection, then they also have to have bigger engines, bigger wings and bigger cameras to obtain the same image quality.

Modern IR sensors are very good, and however cool/small the drone is, it's still silhouetted against a cold, empty sky, so the signal to noise ratio should still be pretty high. Huge amounts of very cheap, very fast computer processing power can be had for peanuts these days, so analysing the image for that bit of "noise" that's significant should be easy enough. The main problem with IR sensors is their limited field of view, but against a slow-flying drone that's on a loitering surveillance mission, the sensor can take the time to scan the whole sky. Maybe it'll miss the drone on some passes, but all of them?

The surveillance ones are also pretty slow, so once you've got the track, hitting them with something should be straightforward. It doesn't have to be a fancy missile either: good old fashioned guns aimed by modern electronics should do the job. At the other extreme, how much laser energy would it take to mission-kill one? Not that much, I'd bet......

If you can detect it then tracking it should be relatively easy.  However, remember for visual aiming they are hard to actually track because of tricks of perspective ("how big is that object?  How far away is it?").  Lasers have downed simulated and actual drones and may be one of the answers albeit at present a very expensive one for counter-drone work.

If you can track it you can point a laser rangefinder at it and that's that: you've got a firing solution. Now point a gun at it with AHEAD-style very accurate time-fusing and it's dead. The only defence then is to go higher, with all the costs that entails, to get out of the ballistic range of the gun. However guns can get bigger too, and if they get too big to be practical, the defence can alway go to missiles at the point where the cost-effectiveness curves cross.

A laser that can physically destroy a drone is still pretty exepnsive, but how much for a laser that can just blind or dazzle one? That's why I used the words "mission-kill": you don't have to shoot the drone down in flames, you just have to prevent it from doing it's job.

Basically, a sophisticated opponent is going to push drones into the same sort of cost/capability spiral that has afflicted manned aircraft. That might be acceptable if the absolute costs are still lower, not to mention the "soft costs" of lives risked and political capital spent, but it does mean that the drones are no longer paradigm-breakers. You end up with something akin to a cheaper robotised version of the traditional WWIII situation.

Jamming is harder than most people think.  A blanket jammer would work but then your own side might complain about losing coms.   Drone communications are encrypted and often can be frequency agile.  Most larger drones are semi-autonomous (ie, they only need direction when performing difficult manoeuvres and/or carrying out direct surveillance or are landing/taking off.  The rest of the time they fly on automatic programming).  If jammed, they have a "return home" function which makes them return to base automatically.

Mostly agree, although that "return home when jammed" function is still a mission-kill.

Another thought for an anti-drone weapon: how about a microwave beam? Doesn't attempt to "jam" the drone's comms, rather it just induces enough current in it's electronics to fry/scramble them. Directional too, so there's no problem with freindly forces.

[MikeD]

Try telling the Syrian and Iraqi tank crews that.

From memory the record for a Chally 2 in Iraq was something ridiculous like 50 odd RPG hits plus one (Iraqi) MILAN and still fighting.

[DarrenP]

I'd imagine it's not difficult to track a drone with IR when it's high enough to be invisible to the naked eye. The surveillance ones are also pretty slow, so once you've got the track, hitting them with something should be straightforward. It doesn't have to be a fancy missile either: good old fashioned guns aimed by modern electronics should do the job. At the other extreme, how much laser energy would it take to mission-kill one? Not that much, I'd bet......

who needs to visually or IR track a drone?   Just track it using ESM they broadcast so much electronic noise it must have an amazing electronic picture. Just think all that telemetry and pictures all creates electronic noise.

[rickshaw]

I'd imagine it's not difficult to track a drone with IR when it's high enough to be invisible to the naked eye. The surveillance ones are also pretty slow, so once you've got the track, hitting them with something should be straightforward. It doesn't have to be a fancy missile either: good old fashioned guns aimed by modern electronics should do the job. At the other extreme, how much laser energy would it take to mission-kill one? Not that much, I'd bet......

who needs to visually or IR track a drone?   Just track it using ESM they broadcast so much electronic noise it must have an amazing electronic picture. Just think all that telemetry and pictures all creates electronic noise.

Most drones transmit via satellite link.   Satellite uplinks have very small sidelobes.

[DarrenP]

the uplink maybe the down link foot print is huge and jamming is relatively easy!