We’re still in the very early stage of drone development for warfare and Ukraine is using a lot of civilian gear. Now the armed forces of the world are plowing their funding into R&D I expect them to develop quickly. For example, aluminum air batteries are perfect for this use case but havent been developed because until now single use batteries haven’t seen any demand. Those will at least double or triple the range for armed drones. High end solar panels can allow them to sit and wait for a trigger to attack.
Combine that with the tech behind the Redbull F1 camera drone [1] that can fly at 200mph and drones become much deadlier to attack helicopters. Slap a rocket motor on it for final approach, even a sub-M civilian model rocket motor, and it’s over. Imagine the drone just sitting there listening for a helicopter to get close enough - humans wouldn’t even need to be involved except to place it strategically.
>Imagine the drone just sitting there listening for a helicopter to get close enough
Imagine a drone which outputs the signature of an attack helicopter to draw out that loitering drone and then destroy it, leaving the space open for an actual attack helicopter to swoop in and do its business.
How? A helicopter is on the order of 75-80 decibels at 1000 feet. That’s the equivalent of a giant flying stadium speaker consuming kilowatts of power, that has to catch a much smaller 200mph drone while being just as cheap.
The attack drone can just move and triangulate the sound, eliminating anything that’s trying to mimic a helicopter without outputting enough decibels.
How much would it cost to slap some plywood on an old/scrapped heli engine and make a remote-controlled decoy that just looks and sounds a bit like an attack chopper?
Drones don't need to be small, and big doesn't always mean expensive.
Use your imagination. The counter-drone doesn't have to output the exact same energy profile as an attack helicopter, just close enough to trigger the anti-helo-drone's activation.
Examples: the counter-drone outputs only a specific frequency (the anti-helo drone isn't running a whole sound analysis, just a narrow range). It outputs that at much lower decibels (the anti-helo-drone just thinks the helo is farther away). It outputs that sound in bursts and directionally (the anti-helo-drone is only listening in a specific place).
Once found, the counter-drone dispatches a kill drone which can match the anti-helo drone's speed.
Sure all of these "hacks" will be countered by future versions of the anti-helo-drones, but that's kinda my whole point.
"Just close enough" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
It doesn't matter if the decoy can match frequency if it can't match amplitude because it's trivial to triangulate the position and eliminate anything that's too quiet. Any helicopter that sounds "farther away" than its actual position is obviously a decoy. Measuring the time of flight on reflections eliminates directional speakers.
These aren't even hacks, this is something an Alexa smart home speaker is equipped to do today. Add a rudimentary radar and the decoy now has to have the same radar cross section as a big metal helicopter. Chaff isn't going to work when sensor fusion includes computer vision.
> Once found, the counter-drone dispatches a kill drone which can match the anti-helo drone's speed.
Once it's dispatched, how is it going to target and intercept a small drone with a tiny radar cross section that has thrust vectoring? That's a job for static CIWS/AA, not a cheap counter drone dispatched from a decoy.
My point is that attackers have the technological and cost advantage here, possibly forever. Civilian quadcopters can't easily take down a 150 knot helicopter now but the technology to make 200+ mph military drones is already here, it just hasn't been combined into a weapon yet. No imagination needed, it's practically inevitable.
That's a lot of specific engineering just to protect the helicopter. Or you can just spend that engineering effort and money on replacing the helicopters with more advanced drones.
>the anti-helo drone isn't running a whole sound analysis, just a narrow range
Why? Sure you might be limited to that if you're using an Arduino but with an FPGA or even a cheap "edge AI" NPU you could do a very thorough analysis (even credit card sized image recognition modules with camera are <$50 now). Heck even a seeedstudio respeaker can do live voice identification and isolation, noise cancellation, and 16 direction source location/indication using 4 microphones!
The thing is, maybe it just doesn't make economic sense to protect the (expensive) helo with such more expensive shenanigans, given the volume of oomph it can bring onto the battlefield.
Knights in armor didn't necessarily die out because of their vulnerability to guns; rather, professional pikemen and musketeers started making more economic sense.
Most of these counter-drones would start out dumber rather than leaping to the end state.
A megaphone is pretty loud and doesn’t require kilowatts. Sure it’s directional, but it would be good enough in a sweep pattern to trigger sleeper drones. That would necessitate triangulation and counter-countermeasures.
Welcome to the arms race! Lockheed Martin is hiring!
since the waiting drone is a camera drone wouldn't it just activate the camera and have some object detection as well as the sound detection? turn enough to see where noise is coming from, anything the size of a helicopter, wait until next sound source?
on edit: ah, I understand a later comment better now, but I mean, detecting the waiting drone is probably going to involve that waiting drone doing lots of movement - not turning its camera to look at noise source.
Maybe helicopter moving should just have an increasing number of little anti-drones flying with it, increasing further the cost and complexity of helicopters.
But thats counter-counter territory- that means you are already on the entrenched territory backfoot that produces trenchwarfare, just with a overromanticized million- dollar queen piece in the background that brings no additional value to the battleground in a drone- vs drone saturation scenario. Its the same as tank vs minefield vs anti-rpg equpiment. Yes you can protect and counter, but the approach is so slow- expensive, it makes the original idea no longer worth the effort.
> We’re still in the very early stage of drone development for warfare and Ukraine is using a lot of civilian gear. Now the armed forces of the world are plowing their funding into R&D I expect them to develop quickly.
I'm not sure that follows.
Military drones like the Predator have been around for 30 years - at a cost of $30 million a drone. US military contractors are many things, but they're never cheap. And at that price, you don't have many and so they're never where they need to be.
The battlefield impact in Ukraine has been because for $500 you can strap a grenade to a DJI Mavic and you've got 60,000 times as many of them. And sure it's got much less range and inferior sensors and less jamming resistance and so on - but the price lets it be it's in the right place at the right time.
Defence contractors aren't famous for their cost-effective practices, so I'm not sure they can improve on the most important aspect of these drones.
A DJI Mavic with a grenade has a flight time of only about 20 minutes, and can only operate at low attitude and close to the operator. The MQ-1 Predator can travel hundreds of km under satellite control and orbit for hours at medium altitude to provide persistent overwatch with advanced sensors. The cheap drones used in Ukraine are in no way a substitute for large, expensive drones like the Predator / Reaper. They address totally different missions and it's naive to compare them.
NATO has been flying large, expensive drones equipped with long-range radar at the edges of Ukrainian and Russian airspace. You don't hear much about it but this has been tremendously helpful for feeding Ukraine targeting data and warning about attacks. Can't do that with a cheap drone.
0 of these heavy UAVs will be able to operate in contested airspace. This is why you no longer see Bayraktar footage anymore, and they aren't even remotely as heavy.
Successor heavy UAVs such as the RQ-180 are specifically designed to operate in contested airspace. These are far more capable and survivable than anything Turkey can produce.
We're back to "is the purpose of a defence contractor to siphon public money, or is there a war currently on which might impact the personal lives of the C-suite of the defence contractor?"
But exactly - Ukraine's defence contractors and suppliers have to innovate, and do it on the cheap. As a result there will be lots of lessons to learn, and after the war, hardware and concepts to sell (like Israel does, it's a top military exporter because it has had to develop and innovate).
Also, the US has shown it can stomach its pride and buy foreign off the shelf designs which are better (okay, not always, cf. the KC-45 vs KC-46, but still). And of course there's the whole rest of the world.
It's good to have more options but Anduril and Ares are mostly a lot of hype. They won't achieve anything close to an order of magnitude improvement. Costs are largely driven by the laws of physics, and those are the same for everyone.
I'm honestly not informed enough to comment, but everyone seems to agree there is really bad mismanagement at Lockheed & co + the incentives as set up are truly fucked up (I remember reading on that, but don't have the source handy) and actively encourage manufacturers to pile on costs to make more profits.
If there's good R&D and first-order thinking in the mix, one order of magnitude does not seem insane to me. It's a cliche, but look at what Elon Musk has achieved, everyone said it couldn't be done, but it happened.
Ultimately other things can help, like designing new innovative form factors and cathering to a changing reality (it's doesn't make sense to shoot down 50k$ drones with 1M$ missiles).
I think the speed will be what protects the helicopters from the drones. The drones can't sustain 200 miles per hour for long while the helicopter can do it for literal hours. The rocket motor is a good idea, probably the most likely to succeed
Nope. Due to retreating blade stall, only a few helicopter models such as the CH-47 can hit a top speed of 200mph, and then only with a light load for a short time. They certainly don't have enough fuel to sustain that speed for hours. High sustained speeds require a fundamentally different design such tilt rotor or compound.
Combine that with the tech behind the Redbull F1 camera drone [1] that can fly at 200mph and drones become much deadlier to attack helicopters. Slap a rocket motor on it for final approach, even a sub-M civilian model rocket motor, and it’s over. Imagine the drone just sitting there listening for a helicopter to get close enough - humans wouldn’t even need to be involved except to place it strategically.
[1] https://youtu.be/NDUcoNlgPrk