Got a Real-World Weapon, Armor or Tactics Question? Mk. XXV

[Kiero]

Do we have much information about what generally happened to US Military members who lied about their age to enlist while too young, especially during WW2, Korea, or Vietnam? My great grandfather lied about his age to join the Navy during WW2 and then stayed in after, and he did eventually get caught (not sure how), but by the time the Navy figured it out, the Korean War was on, he was in his twenties, and his ship was going over there. They let him stay in the Navy and stay assigned to his ship, and he left the Navy as a Chief Petty Officer during the 1960s. I'm not sure if he was punished in any way lying about his age, or how the US Military generally handled underage enlistment at the time if the person in question was 18 or older when caught and still in uniform. Does anyone else know? Like, I'm sure some 15 or 16 year olds must have joined the military early in the war and turned 18 by the time they got found out.

My paternal grandfather lied about his age to join the Royal Marines when he was 15, and was evacuated at Dunkirk. He was kicked out when they returned home.

[Brother Oni]

It has no IR and nearly no radar signature too, is also mostly silent, can fly at varying height, and can navigate complex obstacles.

I'm not so sure on the low radar signature on drones. During Iraq and Afghanistan, CIWS were capable of detecting and intercepting mortar shells; I was reading an account from an operator where there's an initial burst from the weapon to intercept the shell, then a couple of seconds of the weapon going berserk as it detects and fires at any fragments large enough to still trigger the radar.

Man portable mortars officially range from 50-120mm calibre, but most top out at about 81mm. That's not very big for a drone which needs to have an offensive capability; for reference, the new Turkish suicide drones are 3.7kg for the fixed wing ALPAGU and 6.3kg for the rotating wing KARGU. I can't find an actual size for them, but this mockup indicates that even the ALPAGU is substantially bigger than a mortar shell and a little lighter than an 81mm mortar shell (4-5kg, depending on variant):

Spoiler: ALPAGU mock up

Show

If mass drone swarms were to become more common on the battlefield, expect faster and better interdiction weapons - airbursting charges would be effective against swarms (doesn't take much to knock a drone out of the air) and using different detection methods (passive radar or lidar for example).
The LR-BSDS for example can detect synthetic aerosol clouds (eg biological or chemical attacks) at a distance of 30km. Admittedly, it does have a minimum resolution of 1nm, so a nanobot swarm could bypass it, but we're a little way off that at the moment.

[Haighus]

Yeah, I think there is a bit of a hype about drones being able to do everything current weapons can with none of the downsides.

So far we've had fast enough to avoid soldiers shooting them down easily, but slow enough to be difficult to detect, and also to avoid the risk of crashing when disabled.

We also have drones that are very small to make them hard to detect, yet they are still large enough to have the computing power to steer themselves when disabled, carry a useful payload, and be shielded from electronic countermeasures and EMPs. In addition these things are going to have to be weather proof to quite an extent.

I just don't think tiny, fast, autonomous, shielded and weather resistant, and carrying a useful explosive payload is all compatible with each other under current tech, nor would it be for some time.

This isn't even considering the capabilities of the tech it is attacking. The main area where drones have been proposed as a cost-effective solution is in attacking ships in swarms. Brother Oni has talked about CIWS being able to attack that level of target already. Modern ship-borne AA radar systems, like on the Type 45 destroyers, are capable of tracking multiple tiny targets because they are being designed with stealth fighters in mind. The Type 45 is supposed to be able to independently track 2,000 tennis ball-sized objects, and with modern fleet integration, can command various fleet assets to attack these targets. No swarm of drones is sneaking up on a modern naval carrier group, or evading it's attacks. Ships can carry very large, powerful radar systems.

I think drones are more dangerous against land targets, but then they also have to have a much greater degree of autonomous movement to successfully navigate in a forest or an urban environment and attack troops and vehicles. They would still be vulnerable to ground-based AA systems, which can have powerful radars too, but I suspect they would be resistant to man-portable SAMs. So this leaves the dilemma of making the drones fly high, and be vulnerable to SAM installations, or make them fly low, and lose a lot of drones to collisions, and potentially force them to fly slow enough to be shotgunned down.

If they are too tiny, they won't even be able to damage an MBT, short of maybe knocking out the vision of the crew, and may struggle against other armoured vehicles if they are not using shaped charges.

I just don't see how they will negate other forms of warfare at this point. I more see them complementing existing strategies if anything.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I just don't see how they will negate other forms of warfare at this point. I more see them complementing existing strategies if anything.

And advanced drones like that (that can actually be effective against a 1st world military) will cost a bucket-load and a half. Expensive enough that only a 1st world military can reasonably provide enough to matter.

[Vinyadan]

The answer to "make drones useful vs ship" is "saturation strike". Put enough kamikaze drones incoming, against any target, and it will be overwhelmed. This, of course, is true of anything, and in no way restricted to drones: it works with missiles and artillery, and the problem was first observed for missiles, the question being: "what if a medium-to-large Chinese cargo ship is filled with nothing but fire-and-forget rocket-launchers". You have to destroy such a ship before it gets in range, because, otherwise, it will gravely hurt or destroy its target by overwhelming its defence though the sheer number of missiles fired. Which would be extremely nasty because of how cheap such a ship would be, compared to most US naval targets. And even such a ship can be turned into a drone, although this could arguably make it less deadly because of jamming.

In extremely important battles in the future, if drones will become a cheap alternative to fighter jets, in theory, a wing of drones could fire their missiles at enemy ships while getting near, and then, once out of ammo, crash together on the enemy deck, one after the other.

[PhoenixPhyre]

In extremely important battles in the future, if drones will become a cheap alternative to fighter jets, in theory, a wing of drones could fire their missiles at enemy ships while getting near, and then, once out of ammo, crash together on the enemy deck, one after the other.

The issue is that drones have lots of non-payload overhead that missiles don't. Batteries, processors, airframe, etc. They're not moving as fast as missiles, so the kinetic energy of the base thing is minimal. And they can't carry much ammo either. So you'd need a lot more than you would just with missiles.

[Galloglaich]

Is there a general consensus as to how much of a problem the lack of armor on the Zero fighters was? I know pilot training became a massive problem due to attrition and that the Zero became obsolete after the F6F and F4U were introduced en masse, but I'm more interested in the early war performance, like against P-40s or F4Fs.

The short answer is that initially, not so much of a problem, but after a while it did become one.

Every front line aircraft in WW2 had it's strengths and weaknesses. Carrier aircraft in particular tended to be a little weaker for combat than ground based aircraft, because they had to carry extra equipment (arrestor hooks, more navigation gear etc.), had to be strong enough to survive carrier landings without breaking up, but also small and light enough to fit on the (at that time, very small) carrier and manage to take off from it.

The A6M was almost certainly the world's best carrier fighter when it first appeared in 1941. It was an exception to the rule of carrier aircraft being slightly inferior- in fact it was actually better in most respects to almost all land based fighters in the world at that time. Climb, turn rate and general maneuverability, armament and range were all excellent. Speed was "good" - top speed at around 330 mph was less than that of some Allied fighters but good acceleration and streamlining meant it kept up a good combat speed. It also had excellent visibility which was critical for situational awareness.

Range was really the critical factor for carrier aircraft since being on a carrier meant they could frequently operate where the enemy was weak or had no air cover at all.

The other advantage that carrier planes had is that due to all the extra training required to take off and land from ships, the pilots had more training and tended to be better. This was doubly so for the Japanese who had trained some of their fighter pilots as long as 5 years, plus many of them had combat experience form Manchuria etc.

Japanese commanders leveraged this on the operational level by concentrating their carrier forces against relatively small and unprepared Allied air bases, so they were able to win local numerical superiority.

Japanese pilots also leveraged their aircraft's advantages in climb, turn rate and acceleration to dominante their opponents initially.

Opponents of the Zero
Their initial opponents were as follows:

F2A Buffalo
Curtiss CW 21
Hurricane Mk 1
P-39 Airacobra
F4F Wildcat
P-40B Tomahawk
P-40E Kittyhawk

Of these, the F2A and P-39 were never able to be fully worked out for operations in the Theater, and fought mostly when badly outnumbered. CW 21 was a point defense interceptor (which like the zero, had no armor or self-sealing tanks) and was always too outnumbered to really tell if it had any merit. It did get a few victories. Hurricanes seemed to be fairly useless against Zeroes.

only the F4F and the P-40 seemed to have any value against the Zero. F4F first drew blood (but I think against A5M "Claude") at Guam, and then Coral Sea and Midway. Like the IJN pilots, the US Marine and Navy pilots were pretty well trained and had also developed specific tactics for fighting the Zero pretty early on.

P-40 pilots weren't as well trained - some of the Australians only had a few hours on the type before entering combat, but managed to cause casualties anyway when they were able to get in the air (most P-40's in Hawaii and the Philippines were caught on the ground). They mostly got slaughtered at Hawaii, Philippines and Java, mainly due to being badly outnumbered and poor training, but a couple of guys shot down several planes during Pearl Harbor and the Australians had success with them starting at Milne Bay and the defense of Darwin. The main advantage the P-40 had against the zero, aside from armor, was being able to dive to disengage from combat that wasn't going well. The P-40, like the Wildcat, was also very maneuverable, not as much as the Zero at low speed, but it could out roll and turn it at high speed.

(More famously the AVG and later USAAF groups did well against Japanese fighters in Burma / China but these were not zero's, rather the similar Ki-43)

Guns vs. planes
Armor was almost unheard of on planes in 1939, but was nearly universal by 1941. The guns on a zero, two 20mm especially, could tear apart an enemy fighter with a concentrated burst no matter how much armor they had, so the armor had limited value. But that 'glancing blow' protection (how I hate to use that particular cliche term but it does fit here) was important. In a typical engagement, you might get 4 or 5 attempts to shoot down an enemy aircraft. If you shoot, you might get a partial hit, or a 'pretty good hit', or a 'devastating hit'. In the latter case, the plane is doing down regardless. But armor and self sealing tanks can save the plane in the first two cases, sometimes it can still make it back to base, or even continue the fight and win.



However, it could save you from being hit by a few rounds. Check out this P-40 pilot from North Africa examining the results of and Me 109 that hit his plane with multiple 20mm cannon shells. In this image, the 20mm shell hit right behind the cockpit armor, which definitely saved the pilots life. There is a video somewhere in which you can see him walking around the whole plane which was hit 4 or 5 times. He pulled the plug from one of the shells out of the wing and later wore it around his neck.

The Australian ace Clive Caldwell once survived being attacked by three Bf 109's in his P-40, shooting down one of them and damaging the others, and made it back to base with over 100 bullet holes in his aircraft.

But against a zero, with the heavy .50 cal guns of the American planes, just a few rounds like that could set the fuel tank on fire, kill the pilot or disable the engine. It was harder to hit because it was so nimble and climbed like a bird, but if it did get hit it was 'game over' most of the time. They did incidentally put armor and self sealing tanks on later model Zeros, I think by late 1942, but by then too much damage had been done.

The TL : DR is that in combat, the Zero's maneuverability and general performance, as well as it's phenomenal range which allowed it to concentrate force in the early weeks of the war, compensated sufficiently for it's weaknesses - it was basically evenly matched with the F4F and P-40. However when the war shifted into more of an attrition mode for example in the Solomons and North Australia, the IJN took too many losses.

Later when faster planes like the P-38, Hellcat, and Corsair got into the Theater, the A6M was subject to hit and run attacks which put it at a disadvantage, but it could still get kills.

The biggest problem was more Strategic - the lack of armor and self-sealing tanks, combined with an inadequate system for rescuing downed pilots, meant that against roughly evenly matched opponents like the Wildcat, the IJN suffered badly from attrition. Lets say for every 5 Japanese planes badly shot up, they lost 4 pilots either killed or PoW; whereas for every 5 Wildcats or P-40's lost, the Allies only lost 2 KiA or PoW, and were able to rescue the other 3 pilots. In fact quite often even after being defeated the P-40's in particular would limp back to base shot up and manage at least a belly landing.

This meant that under combat 'friction' as Clausewitz called it, over a fairly short time - mostly in 1942- the Japanese lost too many pilots to be sustainable. This was further exacerbated by an overly long Japanese training cycle. US and Australian pilots would be sent back to the home country to train new guys after they had fought for about a year, and allied training systems got better and better as the war went on. Japanese training, though excellent particularly for the Navy, took way too long and by 1943 they had to almost scrap it and push barely trained pilots into war, a mirror image of the Allied situation two years earlier.



The vulnerability of the A6M would not have mattered so much, incidentally, if the Japanese Army had been able to field more robust fighters a little earlier on, like the Ki-61 Tony, an excellent design but hampered, like all later war Japanese designs, with maintenance problems. Same with the Ki-84, Ki-44 and J2M and so on. The twin engined Kawasaki Ki-45 was basically a failure, proving highly vulnerable to P-40's in Southeast Asia. The main and most successful Japanese Army fighter was the Ki-43 but it, like the Zero, lacked armor or self -sealing tanks until around the end of 1942, and they lost too many pilots.

The Navy, in other words, and their Zero fighter, should not have had to do the 'slog it out' sustained air battles of the Solomons or Australia, but they were forced to do so because the Japanese Army didn't have enough good fighters and their main planes (Ki-43) were also suffering from attrition for the same reasons as the Zero.

If you look at other carrier fighters around the world, like the Gladiator and the Fulmar of the FAA, or even the Seafire, they do not compare to the A6M. The F4F was slightly inferior, the F6F was slightly better, but victories by F6F pilots were more due to collapsing Japanese pilot training system and numbers than superiority of the type. The F4U was decisively better but it wasn't flying from Carriers until late 1943 IIRC.

G

[Max_Killjoy]

Another thing that changed, from what I've read. When Allied pilots refused to get into turning fights with the Zero, and instead restrained themselves to hit-and-run attacks, preserving energy during the attack and then getting away to make another pass when they the advantage, it nullified many of the Zero's advantages. (IIRC a tactic first developed by the AVG for use against the IJA's fighters before official American involvement.)

[Galloglaich]

Another thing that changed, from what I've read. When Allied pilots refused to get into turning fights with the Zero, and instead restrained themselves to hit-and-run attacks, preserving energy during the attack and then getting away to make another pass when they the advantage, it nullified many of the Zero's advantages. (IIRC a tactic first developed by the AVG for use against the IJA's fighters before official American involvement.)

Yes, that is true to an extent, but it tends to get oversimplified / exaggerated to the point of cliche. The F4F's did have to get into turning fights, usually, they used special group tactics, i.e. Thach Weave etc., but in practice, they did do some dogfighting - they just avoided extended low-speed turning fights and would try to dive away when things got dangerous (as they could quite quickly).

The P-40 had a performance ceiling of about ~16,000 feet, so they didn't often have the luxury of diving down onto A6M fighters. In practice, they tried to keep their speed up and avoid low-speed turning fights, but they did actually turn with the A6M. The A6M was very nimble at low speed but it had stiff controls at higher speeds. The key to fighting them was to keep the speed up, and then (again), dive away if things got bad which the P-40 could really do well (with a dive speed of ~550 mph or even more).

This is a quote from Robert DeHaven, a 14 Kill fighter ace in the Pacific who flew P-40's and P-38's

""If you flew wisely, the P-40 was a very capable aircraft. It could outturn a P-38, a fact that some pilots didn't realize when they made the transition between the two aircraft. The real problem with it was lack of range. As we pushed the Japanese back, P-40 pilots were slowly left out of the war. So when I moved to P-38s, an excellent aircraft, I did not [believe] that the P-40 was an inferior fighter, but because I knew the P-38 would allow us to reach the enemy. I was a fighter pilot and that was what I was supposed to do."

"You could fight a Jap on even terms, but you had to make him fight your way. He could outturn you at slow speed. You could outturn him at high speed. When you got into a turning fight with him, you dropped your nose down so you kept your airspeed up, you could outturn him. At low speed he could outroll you because of those big ailerons ... on the Zero. If your speed was up over 275, you could outroll a Zero. His big ailerons didn't have the strength to make high speed rolls... You could push things, too. Because ... if you decided to go home, you could go home. He couldn't because you could outrun him. ... That left you in control of the fight."

How the fights went depended on the bombers - during level bombing raids by twin-engined bombers the fighting might take place at 18-22 thousand feet. In tactical bombing (such as Dive or Torpedo bombers in Naval action or close air support / or dive bombing airfield attacks such as at Guadalcanal or Milne Bay, the fighting altitude would be lower, sometimes very low.

Overall, pilots who survived did their best to understand the performance envelopes of their own plane and of those they were likely to face. Against Zero's it was a good idea to keep the speed as high as possible and stick with wingmen to avoid getting jumped.


The allies also had more and better radio's and were able to coordinate better as a result in at least some air battles. Some Japanese fighters only had radio receivers, and some (especially some of the Army planes) had a radio that barely worked or no radio at all, this gave the Allied pilots a significant advantage in group tactics - i.e. if you were being chased you could ask for help, if you spotted the enemy you could notify your comrades and tell them how many and at what altitude (as opposed to just waggling your wings) etc.

G

[Knaight]

It's also worth noting that some of the early planes that went up against the Zero were downright terrible, partially because Allied strategists were assuming that Japan wouldn't be able to make a good plane, and thus the terrible ones would work. The Buffalo in particular stands out there - that plane was garbage, being both sluggish and not particularly maneuverable, with a whole host of minor flaws on top of that.

[Galloglaich]

It's also worth noting that some of the early planes that went up against the Zero were downright terrible, partially because Allied strategists were assuming that Japan wouldn't be able to make a good plane, and thus the terrible ones would work. The Buffalo in particular stands out there - that plane was garbage, being both sluggish and not particularly maneuverable, with a whole host of minor flaws on top of that.

True and yet the Finn's loved it and did extremely well with it.

Kind of like the P-39 - the Americans could do very little with it, there was only 1 P-39 Ace in the USAAF in the whole war. Same for the other allied countries that used it.

But the Russians loved it and did bang-up with it. Their #2 ace flew it - the #2 Allied fighter ace of the war. It's still a bit of a mystery.

But the long and short of it seems to boil down to the fact that different aircraft were better suited for certain Theaters than others, and spending time familiarization with a new aircraft (which the Russians did with the P-39), particularly a foreign made one, and training your pilots on the type -as well as stripping away a little extra weight- can pay large dividends.

It's clear though that few of the Allied aircraft on hand could handle the A6M. The Spit V didn't do very well either.

G

[Carl]

@Brother_Oni: The problem with the mortar example is a mortar us a solid hunk of metal. These drones are going to be mostly composites and plastics. That means on a size for size basis the radar signature will be a fraction the size of a mortar shell. And thats assuming no stealth features are built in. Those cost but costs are coming down all the time and a soldier isn't cheap to train, you need a drone thats cheap compared to the lifetime cost of a soldier. That doesn't mean it would be technically impossible to pick them up, but especially at low altitude over land you start to run into problems with false positives if you set the sensitivity too high.

@Haighus: We've been building autopilots with that level of navigation features for decades, meaning the computational needs are quite low. he real hard part is providing the semi-autonomous targeting, not in terms of processing power but in terms of programming. Your effectively being required to build a full expert system to do that, and thats a programming technique thats still only really in the toddler stage. We've done it and they work but getting it down pat isn't easy yet. Everything other than that relies on tried and tested technologies we've been using for decades allready.

I mean as a practical matter you could probably build a proof of concept using entirely off the shelf parts. RC plane, Smartphone, block of C4, Detonator. The only custom bits would likely be the gimbal for the phone and the interface between the phone and the plane systems, (plus software). Fro a material cost PoV your paying less than a thousand dollars and the plane is likely overpriced, (RC planes are a bit of a specialist hobby so the usual mass production factors apply, somewhat defrayed by the need to upgrade the construction for more stealthy features), and the phone has a lot of unneeded expensive features and programs, (but somewhat defrayed by the ened to put in better comms gear and the advanced software). I wouldn't be surprised to find you could produce a viable drone assuming you don't suffer software cost spirals, (the riskiest bit), for less than 2k dollars at mass production scales.

Based on this random link produced by google the cost of training a soldier is around 40k US dollars at current exchange rates and the same search turned up a claim of 17.5k dollars for the equipment. That's a lot of drones for each infantryman.

[Max_Killjoy]

@Brother_Oni: The problem with the mortar example is a mortar us a solid hunk of metal. These drones are going to be mostly composites and plastics. That means on a size for size basis the radar signature will be a fraction the size of a mortar shell.

Radar cross-section is about a lot more than material composition.

Drones tend to have a lot of surface area and bits sticking out, and rotors are very hard to "stealth up".

[Carl]

Radar cross-section is about a lot more than material composition.

Drones tend to have a lot of surface area and bits sticking out, and rotors are very hard to "stealth up".

Yes but many materials like most plastics and composites are virtually see through to radar, they don't reflect much energy back, metal is exceedingly good at reflecting energy back. Your right that it's not all about construction material, but the materials makes an enormous difference and make any comparison between the two relatively irrelevant. Rotors are hard t stealth because they often have to be metal because of the performance requirements, keep it modest and you don't need metal rotors, which again significantly eases the problems.

[Knaight]

Radar cross-section is about a lot more than material composition.

It's mostly size and shape, where the right shapes can make things seem orders of magnitude smaller than they actually are (hence the angles seen on stealth aircraft, and the general lack of gentle curves on said aircraft, along with the general lack of certain much worse angles).

[Brother Oni]

@Brother_Oni: The problem with the mortar example is a mortar us a solid hunk of metal. These drones are going to be mostly composites and plastics. That means on a size for size basis the radar signature will be a fraction the size of a mortar shell. And thats assuming no stealth features are built in. Those cost but costs are coming down all the time and a soldier isn't cheap to train, you need a drone thats cheap compared to the lifetime cost of a soldier. That doesn't mean it would be technically impossible to pick them up, but especially at low altitude over land you start to run into problems with false positives if you set the sensitivity too high.

How big do you think fragments of a mortar shell are after it's been intercepted by a CIWS burst?

How much of a lidar trace does a drone have compared to an aerosolised spray of liquid?

I'm not saying there's current off the shelf technologies that work perfectly, but I am of the opinion its just a matter of adjusting the sensitivity appropriately and if a few birds or clouds get picked up as hostiles, there's still the human operator to confirm the order to fire. Alternately, set up a big no fly zone around the site to be protected; anything that gets close is doubled checked by an operator and anything that breaches the zone is an automatic shoot on sight.

[Max_Killjoy]

Yes but many materials like most plastics and composites are virtually see through to radar, they don't reflect much energy back, metal is exceedingly good at reflecting energy back. Your right that it's not all about construction material, but the materials makes an enormous difference and make any comparison between the two relatively irrelevant. Rotors are hard t stealth because they often have to be metal because of the performance requirements, keep it modest and you don't need metal rotors, which again significantly eases the problems.

Shape can exacerbate radar reflectivity, which is part of the problem with rotors regardless of the material they're made of.

Motion is also an issue -- radar returns from rotors have a very distinctive pulsing pattern that makes them stand out more than gross reflectivity would suggest.

[Carl]

How big do you think fragments of a mortar shell are after it's been intercepted by a CIWS burst?

How much of a lidar trace does a drone have compared to an aerosolised spray of liquid?

I'm not saying there's current off the shelf technologies that work perfectly, but I am of the opinion its just a matter of adjusting the sensitivity appropriately and if a few birds or clouds get picked up as hostiles, there's still the human operator to confirm the order to fire. Alternately, set up a big no fly zone around the site to be protected; anything that gets close is doubled checked by an operator and anything that breaches the zone is an automatic shoot on sight.

Depends how the shell was destroyed. If it was using APFSDS (i'm not sure what they load into the 20mm CIWS these days, some systems use APFSDS soem use normal cannon shells some use programmable canister rounds), it probably tore it apart without detonating the explosives, so a moderate number of medium sized pieces. If it was explosives it probably blew out part of the shell venting the force of the likely sympathetically detonated filler mostly out that way produce several large pieces. Unless you get a perfect nose to nose intercept your very unlikely to cause it to fragment the way it would upon hitting somthing on its own, so large fragments are entirely possibble. Bear in mind even vs sea skimming missiles it uses a 100-200 round burst but only achieves a small handful of hits. it fires that many rounds because thanks to shell drift from the aim point due to inherent inaccuracy it takes that many rounds to put enough in the right piece of sky to hit the target to achieve a kill. Most of the rounds fired miss their target. Given a mortar shell is vastly smaller i'd be surprised if more than one or two rounds hit the mortar bomb before it broke up.

The problem with upping the sensitivity isn't that you might lock onto the odd false target. It's that almost any moving object could become a potential target. Artillery shell lands and throws dirt and rocks in the air? You could get it firing on some of that. You open up on a flight of drones and scare the birds on the ground into flight, you just added several dozen new targets. Hell given how low drones would fly you could have issues with overshoots throwing up stuff into the air that the system then locks onto or swaying tree branches in strong winds. Te problem with high sensitivity isn't odd false targets, it's that you can turn almost anything that moves above the ground surface into a potential false target. if you can;t eliminate them sufficiently then the system becomes unusable.

Worse even if you can get false ratio low enough, every false target engaged is one less real target you can engage, and when the drone swarms are coming-in in massive numbers you need every intercept you can get out of the system. Bear in mind the Phalanx system only has enough ammunition for a half a dozen intercepts before it needs reloading, and assuming the barrel life is similar to it;s airborne variant it will only last 50-100 intercepts before it requires the entire set of barrels changing.You can certainly seriously improve on this, But it's key to keep the wastage down or it's going to overstress your logistics.

Shape can exacerbate radar reflectivity, which is part of the problem with rotors regardless of the material they're made of.

Motion is also an issue -- radar returns from rotors have a very distinctive pulsing pattern that makes them stand out more than gross reflectivity would suggest.

Don't misunderstand me, i'm not saying shape is irrelevant. What i'm saying is both play important roles and having an advantage in one seriously helps you with the other because the two affect each other strongly.

[Brother Oni]

Depends how the shell was destroyed.

In the specific case I was mentioned (mortar defence over a land base), they used a mix of HEI and tracer, with pre-programmed destruct so you don't leave live shells all over the area. Mortar shells also travel a lot slower than a sea skimming missile so would likely be easier to hit, but I can't find an interception rate for the weapon (probably for OPSEC reasons).

Worse even if you can get false ratio low enough, every false target engaged is one less real target you can engage, and when the drone swarms are coming-in in massive numbers you need every intercept you can get out of the system. Bear in mind the Phalanx system only has enough ammunition for a half a dozen intercepts before it needs reloading, and assuming the barrel life is similar to it;s airborne variant it will only last 50-100 intercepts before it requires the entire set of barrels changing.You can certainly seriously improve on this, But it's key to keep the wastage down or it's going to overstress your logistics.

You're not comparing like with like here - you're using future drone tech vs current interception capabilities. Ideally you should be comparing current drone tech (MQ-9 predators, the Turkish drones mentioned earlier, the Russian UAVs used in the Ukraine) with the CIWS and other interdiction systems, or theoretical interdiction systems with theoretical drone swarms, otherwise we end up in this situation here where we end up arguing in circles.

It's like comparing a WW2 era KV1 tank versus WW1 era 7.7 cm FK 16 AT gun, where one is the result of tried and tested technology shoe-horned into facing a new threat, while the other was the the cutting edge of technology after 20 years of development and out-performed everything when it was first deployed.

There's issues on both sides of the equation (effectiveness of drones vs effectiveness of interdiction systems), but given that the of future drones on the battlefield is a developing and unknown area, we don't know what the capabilities will be. We do have hard data on the effectiveness of interception systems though, so that is the bar that drone performance has to meet, else they'll be relegated to recon/target acquisition and we'd just use faster and sneakier missiles instead.

[Carl]

In the specific case I was mentioned (mortar defence over a land base), they used a mix of HEI and tracer, with pre-programmed destruct so you don't leave live shells all over the area. Mortar shells also travel a lot slower than a sea skimming missile so would likely be easier to hit, but I can't find an interception rate for the weapon (probably for OPSEC reasons).



You're not comparing like with like here - you're using future drone tech vs current interception capabilities. Ideally you should be comparing current drone tech (MQ-9 predators, the Turkish drones mentioned earlier, the Russian UAVs used in the Ukraine) with the CIWS and other interdiction systems, or theoretical interdiction systems with theoretical drone swarms, otherwise we end up in this situation here where we end up arguing in circles.

It's like comparing a WW2 era KV1 tank versus WW1 era 7.7 cm FK 16 AT gun, where one is the result of tried and tested technology shoe-horned into facing a new threat, while the other is the result of over 20 years of development in a new field.

There's issues on both sides of the equation (effectiveness of drones vs effectiveness of interdiction systems), but given that the of future drones on the battlefield is a developing and unknown area, we don't know what the capabilities will be. We do have hard data on the effectiveness of interception systems though, so that is the bar that drone performance has to meet, else they'll be relegated to recon/target acquisition and we'd just use faster and sneakier missiles instead.

1. Your misunderstanding the problem. Let me use a different CIWS as an example because we have a bit more info on that, (or at least i was able dig up a couple of key pieces of info on it). the GOALKEEPER system. I'm taking the accuracy from the A-10 mounting, but the A-10 is probably less prone to vibration than the CIWS mount as the mass of the system is mounted to is a key factor here.

It's accuracy works out at 80% of rounds landing within a circle of a diameter 1/100th the firing rnage. In it's CIWS configuration vs a mach 2 missile it fires approximately 100 rounds starting at 1500m and finishing at 300m. Using the P270, (the hypothetical target in this scenario), as a basis we can determine what percentage of the round fired that will strike a missile at any given rnage. Let's use the shortest range for maximising hit rate. At 300m the weapon has a spread of 3m diameter for 80% of it's rounds. Or 1.5m radius. That equates to the rounds being spread over an area of 7.068m^2. The missile has a diameter of 0.8m, or radius of 0.4m for a frontal area of 0.5026m^2. You can probably all but run the math on that yourself. Roughly 1 in 14 of the rounds that land inside the 80% area will hit, or roughly one in 17.5 of those fired. If you average the dispersion area over the entire engagement envelope you get an average of approximately 1 in 227 rounds. Thats obviously false and there's several reasons for that. The most important one, (and the only one i';m going to cover), being that the dispersion of rounds within the inaccuracy diameter will tend to be biased towards the center.

The point is however they don't miss the missle with most of their shots because of anything the missile is doing, it's a fundamental physical limitation of the weapon itself.

2 A). Your misunderstanding somthing key if you think i'm describing highly futuristic drones here. That was my point on the whole "we can build a proof of concept out of majority off the shelf parts". There are only two bits of stuff involved that we've never done before. The first is providing adequate capable comms gear in such a small form. And the second is the target recognition software. The first is really a matter of miniaturisation limits. The second is the only real difficulty. And if the turkish drone cna do what is being claimed up thread then clearly it allready has been solved in some fashion. Expanding on that with better detection resistance is again an engineering challenge we've allready solved on larger scales.

2 B). I totally acknowledged the possibilities earlier of more advanced interception systems and even described the broad outlines of one that would have significantly better barrely life and ammo economy earlier. I also acknowledged that IMO it's not going to replace the humble grunt. It's just going to change the operating requirements for the humble grunt, which in of itself would be a very useful strategic and/or tactical capability. The point i;m making is that defending against them isn't going to be trivial in terms of challenge and is going to have consequences far beyond whatever effect they have on the humble grunt.

[Max_Killjoy]

You're disregarding proximity fuses?

[Carl]

Where did i do that? And what point is that supposed to be relevant to exactly?

[Brother Oni]

Where did i do that? And what point is that supposed to be relevant to exactly?

Point 1, where you discuss the probability of directly intercepting a missile by striking its frontal area of 0.5026m². I believe you've assumed the GOALKEEPER system is using APDS in CIWS configuration, which is why it has to strike the missile directly. A proximity fuze would vastly increase the effective radius of an intercepting shell to disrupt a missile.

Since a drone will not be travelling at mach 2 any time soon, I'm wondering if that 80% interception rate would go up, both through a slower rate of fire (the system can afford to take longer to calculate a more accurate firing solution) and a bigger effective radius via proximity fuzes and HE shells.

Given that the vast majority of militaries are deploying more and more drones, it's highly likely that they'll become more and more sophisticated.
Whether that will expand in a more offensive capacity or whether they'll be more for recon (apparently the not-Russians were using drones as spotters for artillery during the Ukraine conflict, something which a number of Western militaries were watching in great detail) will probably depend on how the interdiction systems develop in response to any potential drone threat - while I agree with you that this is likely to be non-trivial, I'm of the opinion that there's still a lot of hype over-exaggerating their capabilities, at least in their current form.

The technology isn't the only issue, there's also the political and legal limitations: I've heard of developments into small automated UGV drones to scout out buildings or terrain and it won't be hard to add a proximity charge to it (or just duct tape a hand grenade to a drone like the not-Russians did). Depending on how sophisticated its target acquisition system was, it could potentially fall foul of the CCCW or got added to it in a later amendment.

[Vinyadan]

In the end, it will probably come to throwing a nuke in the sky and hope it gets the drone formation... Option B is creating some sort of vacuum bomb to screw rotor-based drones by creating a km long airless sphere (or corridor) and make them fall by depriving them of lift.

[wolflance]

Where did i do that? And what point is that supposed to be relevant to exactly?

At this point I am starting to lose touch on where the issue lies.

Even the fastest of missiles can be intercepted/shot down in one way or another, but that doesn't make them any less effective or dangerous.

So likewise I don't see the CIWS (or other AA systems) affecting the effectiveness of drones in any way. Drone being THE cheap, precise, small, and unpredictable weapon, surely there are more targets you can strike than your enemy can reasonably defend with CIWS. Basically anything short of a MBT can be killed with a smallish drone operable by a single person. That's some serious firepower being held inside a long range, precise and cheap package there.

[Max_Killjoy]

At this point I am starting to lose touch on where the issue lies.

Even the fastest of missiles can be intercepted/shot down in one way or another, but that doesn't make them any less effective or dangerous.

So likewise I don't see the CIWS (or other AA systems) affecting the effectiveness of drones in any way. Drone being THE cheap, precise, small, and unpredictable weapon, surely there are more targets you can strike than your enemy can reasonably defend with CIWS.

The cheaper and smaller the drone, the less actually capable it is, and the more vulnerable it is to small arms fire, local point defense, etc.

Reading these discussions (and not just here), it's like there's this thought that drones will go Mach 2+, be maneuverable enough to enter buildings, have good enough sensors that nothing can hide from them, have secure enough communications that they can't be hacked or jammed, have advanced AI so they can act independently, be small enough to be hard targets for defensive fire, be invisible to radar and lidar and imaging IR, carry enough warhead to do meaningful damage... and be cheap enough for half the world's militaries to field millions of them each.

And at the same time, any comparison is made to present-day or even decades-old defensive systems, as if the magical advancements that will allow 1-pound invisible brilliant drones carrying 25-pound warheads wouldn't be used on the defensive systems as well.

Hell, if drones are going to be so awesome, then the most advanced militaries will just field defensive drone swarms to counter them.

[Vinyadan]

Some years ago, the Deutsche Bahn found out that having a small army of surveillance drones in the sheds would have costed them less than making up for the damage caused by vandals and spraypainters to trains. So defensive uses of drones look like a really cheap alternative.

About using drones vs drones, that would likely end up with dedicated drone classes, like interceptors. Not that it would be too strange: just compare the Global Hawk with the Predator with the Scan Eagle. But the main reason for developing such a class of drones would probably be low costs, enabling your enemy to strike at you with more than you can handle without using drone technology yourself. The question is whether drones really would be the cheapest alternative, when it comes to interception.

As for whether or not they will be good and made in the millions, I think that nothing is impossible, but there need be such a demand. And there's also the fact that prices for military-grade long-range weapons are very high, and cheap gets relative. I mean, cheap is a combination of absolute cost + GDP of the maker/buyer + value of items destroyed or captured or denied to the enemy via the product + GDP of the enemy + human costs that have been avoided + collateral costs/gains (like fighting a shorter war, that should be a net gain).

So I can see millions of recon drones, but I can't see millions of air force drones. I could see a multi-role infiltrator drone for each squad, though. That whole "enter building, scan around, fly a bit high, defend yourself" part would be nice. And some things, that now soldiers have to carry themselves, could be put on the drone. Like radio jammers to be safe from IEDs, or medi kits.

[wolflance]

The cheaper and smaller the drone, the less actually capable it is, and the more vulnerable it is to small arms fire, local point defense, etc.

Reading these discussions (and not just here), it's like there's this thought that drones will go Mach 2+, be maneuverable enough to enter buildings, have good enough sensors that nothing can hide from them, have secure enough communications that they can't be hacked or jammed, have advanced AI so they can act independently, be small enough to be hard targets for defensive fire, be invisible to radar and lidar and imaging IR, carry enough warhead to do meaningful damage... and be cheap enough for half the world's militaries to field millions of them each.

And at the same time, any comparison is made to present-day or even decades-old defensive systems, as if the magical advancements that will allow 1-pound invisible brilliant drones carrying 25-pound warheads wouldn't be used on the defensive systems as well.

Hell, if drones are going to be so awesome, then the most advanced militaries will just field defensive drone swarms to counter them.

While that is certainly true (smaller drones are less sophisticated, and carry less boom), the same can be said for AA defense. Man-operated AA weapon will have a hard time responding to smallish drones in a timely manner, while something relying on radar/other detectors will be too bulky to be deployed everywhere, and are themselves vulnerable to things like anti-radiation drone or missile.

A mach 2+ weapon will probably be classified as a missile, or at least a missile-drone hybrid, instead of a "pure" drone. Modern drones can achieve nearly everything you described, or will achieve them in the very near future, but cannot pack everything into the same drone. In any case, a drone agile enough to sneak into building does not need to carry tank-killing firepower, since tank can't fit into the building anyway. A carrier-killing drone carrying 1000-pound warhead though, will be hardened against jamming and detection, but doesn't require the agility of its smaller counterpart.

as if the magical advancements that will allow 1-pound invisible brilliant drones carrying 25-pound warheads wouldn't be used on the defensive systems as well.

It's not that these advancements can't be used by other defensive systems. Things like detection/jamming or stealth/anti-jamming are very universal in their military application. However drone is so far the best platform to integrate and utilize these new technologies together, in a never-tried-before way. A cruise missile will have zero need for drone swarming technology, or drone-level AI, since they don't loiter for long enough to make those things useful.

Also, you can't expect to arm your humvees with tomahawk missile to strike at targets 500km away, but with drone, now you can. Previously, you can't expect to use a tomahawk missile to kill an enemy APC from long range (overkill and waste of money). With drone, now you can! The relative cheapness of drone has more implication than simply swarming and overwhelming your target. It also allows you to throw what amount to launch anywhere, "budget tomahawks" at targets previously deemed "not valuable/important enough" to warrant an actual tomahawk strike. And these less valuable targets tend not to have sophisticated AA systems guarding them.




Most smallish kamikaze drones have fuel that last for about half an hour to several hours (depending on its size and purpose), so I don't see defensive, anti-drone drone being a very viable strategy (since to be defensive you need to make the drone stays airborne longer), but I am holding my breath.

[Mr Beer]

Anti-drone guns might use lighter calibre rounds or even some form of shot since presumably you don't need nearly the same KE to kill a drone as you would a missile. So maybe specialised defences can make up for the numbers problems by simply putting a lot more lead in the air.

It's going to be horrible for the poor bastards on the ground who get swarmed by suicide drones carrying explosives. Imagine seeing hundreds of these things swooping down on your squad and knowing you can't possibly shoot them down before they get you all.

[Galloglaich]

About using drones vs drones, that would likely end up with dedicated drone classes, like interceptors. Not that it would be too strange: just compare the Global Hawk with the Predator with the Scan Eagle. But the main reason for developing such a class of drones would probably be low costs, enabling your enemy to strike at you with more than you can handle without using drone technology yourself. The question is whether drones really would be the cheapest alternative, when it comes to interception.

This.

I think we are going to see such development rapidly in the next few years. I believe we are in a stage with drones right now analagous to airplanes in the early years of WW 1. Mostly used for surveillance, just experimenting with causing harm to ground targets (ok a little more than experimenting, but not really militarily decisive yet). I do agree the next phase is going to be drone vs. drone interceptors, both on the ground and in the air.

And the incredible state of large scale RC civilian aircraft right now (some reaching speeds of 400 mph for example and easily big enough to carry say, a light machine gun) suggests we will soon see some impressive drone interceptors, bombers, escorts and so on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hNRB_B1fAA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-4LD2i4oDg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD2TYt2b_FE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtRqiAtOO3E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRpd12J-nOg

Check out this one with the cockpit view

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHsK1HFAhow

There is also already pretty advanced software capable of controlling these things in combat, at least on the 'tactical' level (i.e., how to attack and shoot at enemy aircraft) i.e the AI in the more sophisticated flight Sim software.

Would it be hard to modify one of those RC planes to shoot down drones lke the type the Taliban and ISIS were using to successfully surveil their enemies troops to coordinate VBIED attacks and even drop hand grenades into the hatches of armored vehicles.... no it would not. If I was in the military today in some kind of advisory position where people would listen to me I would be encouraging the development of things like these RC jets and in combination with AI software from games like IL2 (which already gives me a hard time)

Haven't convinced you? How about an RC plane shooting another one with airsoft

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTScNHvVbyc

G