[AlexanderTheGr8]

I read the article but couldn't find any mention of how a radar detects drones? A drone is much smaller than an aircraft, can be confused with birds and can have 0 communication with a command & control station due to AI. So how can anything detect it?

Plus, even if you detect it, it's coming towards you at a speed of 100+ kmph with the intent to crash into you and detonate the payload. Any missile you use is way too expensive relative to the price of the drone. So what to do?

I say this bec the drone footage coming out of Ukraine is shocking. I saw a video of a drone just following a soldier for 30 seconds while the soldier was trying to run away from it. The drone crashed into the soldier and exploded. That is absolutely black-mirror dystopian stuff.

[lm28469]

You're making a lot of wrong assumptions, drones can be any size, nobody's talking about missiles to shoot them down, not all drones are kamikaze, &c.

If they're already being produced they do work for their intended purpose, Thales doesn't fuck around

[AYBABTME]

I wouldn't be surprised if the drones they can detect are the larger fixed wings long range ones and not the FPV types.

FPV drones, aside from EW and directed energy weapons, don't have any counter at the tactical scale (although fielding shotguns might help). Any counter will need to be infantry section/platoon scale to be effective, or at a minimum company level weapon system. The range of the AA countermeasure for an FPV drone will be on the order of 500m-1.5km, so covering a 1000s of km long front line is near impossible with current systems.

[Arrath]

Even if the entire front is utterly uneconomical to cover, local defenses like these can be used to provide an umbrella to more important points. Field hospitals, ammo dumps, headquarters, maintenance depots, etc.

[Log_out_]

Helmet trophy like systems with shotgun cartridges?

[AlexanderTheGr8]

I understand I am making assumptions bec of lack of information in the article.

Re shooting them down, if you can't shoot them down, whats the point of detecting them? And a drone being kamikaze only matters IF you can shoot them down. Because then it's a race between the drone rushing to kamikaze vs you shooting it down.

I will admit that I am just speculating here because I have a strange interest in militarized drones and little technical knowledge.

PS : Defending your position by saying that a company doesn't fuck around is not a very good argument.

[lm28469]

You don't handle a dji dropping mortar rounds the same way you handle a fpv drone with a rpg warhead strapped under it nor the same way you handle a fleet of bayraktar pounding you from 5km above. I'm just saying you're mix and matching things which shouldn't be mixed and matched, the premise is wrong, no one is going to shoot down a $50 dji with a missile and no one will try to shoot a bayraktar with a shotgun. Just like you don't shoot a tank with a rifle or a moving plane with an unguided rocket launcher, you need the right tool for the right job

You can scramble them, shoot them with bullets, catch the drone/projectile with nets, shoot them with missiles, &c.

Again it's one of the main military company in France and it is partially owned by the state, I can assure you the fact that these things are being made is proof that they fulfil their role

[petre]

Apar from shooting'em down, one could hijack them or mess with their GPS or RC signals or even fry their circuitry with highly directional microwaves.

[rasz]

>Thales doesn't fuck around

Thales fucking around:

https://english.nv.ua/business/total-isolation-of-russia/mil...

https://www.barrons.com/news/france-s-thales-accused-of-sell...

https://stopwapenhandel.org/killed-by-thales-military-techno...

https://strikesource.com/2023/10/18/french-connections-how-f...

[Adverblessly]

> Any missile you use is way too expensive relative to the price of the drone.

My understanding is that you use a laser, though I don't see why even regular AA guns wouldn't work, especially if it is trying to crash on you, meaning it needs to get very close.

> Plus, even if you detect it, it's coming towards you at a speed of 100+ kmph with the intent to crash into you and detonate the payload.

That will at least help you distinguish it from a bird :) Plus, I suspect that in any military conflict, you'll be more than happy to eat the cost of frying a few birds if it means you stopped the enemy's drones.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Any missile you use is way too expensive relative to the price of the drone

Western missiles have been designed for generations assuming they're aimed at something expensive you want to break, or to break something next to something sensitive you'd rather not. We have the technology to create swarms of well-enough aimed small rockets. There simply wasn't a niche until now.

[opt-skept]

This has a range of 400+km (100kmph = 4 hours to respond).

It's purpose to maintain an accurate picture of the sky, tracking many objects at the same time at different altitudes. The radar itself is just part of the picture - its data is integrated with command and control, where decisions are made about the picture coming in, and the data is blended with other sources to get a more accurate picture (not sure if bird or drone? check the video feed data, or a number of other sources).

The unit itself looks at the behavior of the object (speed, acceleration, routes, elevation, radar profile) to determine the likely class of the object (birds don't fly like drones nor do they have the same radar profile).

As far as mitigating threats, command and control again makes those decisions. It depends on the context of the fight and the resources available. In the hypothetical situation you think a kamikaze drone is headed your direction, the radars are mobile - one option is to simply move. You may know (or have a good guess) as to the specific threat - how it is controlled. You might take out drone communications with EW. You might misguide a precision munition by spoofing GLOSNAS/GPS so that it drifts and misses its target. If it is flying at a low elevation, you might be able to take it out with heavy machine gun fire. You might decide to let it strike, due to cost-benefit ratio.

It really gets down to specifics: What's the air asset? What the threat? What's the mission? What's the battle context? What are the resources?

Regarding a drone having zero command & control due to AI - most of the "AI" in drones is simple straight line flying for a couple hundred meters (so called "terminal flight guidance"). This is because enemy electronic warfare cover may jam communications channels for the drone as it approaches closer to a target. As cool as it sounds to have fully autonomous drones making complex decisions, piloting around obstacles in all weather conditions in 3D space, tracking moving targets, etc - this isn't the threat from drones right now.

[TrackerFF]

1) Small drones can be detected. I'm not gonna go into the specifics, but Orlan sized drones with 3m wingspan can be detected from hundreds of km. Smaller sized commercial drones, which are 1/10th of that size, can also be detected pretty well.

2) No mater how small these drones are, they are dependent on some nav and coms system. Even autonomous "fire-and-forget" drones need a somewhat robust GPS link for navigation. For operated drones, any telemetry can and will be linked to.

But, ok, let's assume some futuristic drone that has a powerful AI system to do all its navigation via onboard sensors, which do not transmit or receive any information. How could such a drone get past a radar system? By either being too small for the radar to detect, fly too low for the radar to detect, or have some geometry that voids detection. Or the radar gets jammed, while the drone tries to get past it.

3) Drones have features which can be detected by radar. Motors, for example, would be one of those.

4) Radars are rarely the only sensors used. You have a whole array of different sensors which can be used to pickup stuff. Even with the radars themselves, you could have one radar for detection / target acquisition, and another radar for precise imaging.

There's no free lunch, though. A very small drone would mean limited range and payload, which in turn means you'll either have to deploy it close to the enemy, or via some larger craft.

Flying a drone too close to ground ads tons of interference to the drone, not to mention detection by things like acoustic sensors, humans, cameras, and what not.

But that also goes for the radars. Small targets can easily disappear in clutter, or dip under the elevation of the radar.

[lr1970]

> Even autonomous "fire-and-forget" drones need a somewhat robust GPS link for navigation.

GPS is a satellite "broadcast" that GPS receivers listen to. GPS receivers are "passive" in a sense that they do not transmit any signals at all.

[TrackerFF]

Admittedly I do not know much about drones, but the point was just that any telemetry that goes out of the drone, is relatively easy to pick up - and is how the military track drones.

At least today the vast, vast majority of combat drones are operated - and the video feed is one of the first things that get picked up from them.

[cm2187]

These videos are horrible. On one side I feel for that kid who probably didn't chose to be there and grappling with imminent death. On the other hand if my country was invaded I would probably watch those videos with popcorn. It's a weird war, mixing social media with a ww1 trench war, military hardware with a share button, you get to watch live the horror of the trenches from under your duvet.

The other thing is those drones are mostly made of plastic, have no hot exhaust. Every time Ukraine is glad they shot a $50k drone with a $1m patriot missile I wonder where this war can possibly go.

[amenhotep]

Patriots aren't the answer to Shaheds, but that's the wrong way to look at it. You don't compare the price of an APS charge with the price of an RPG. You don't spec your soldiers' ballistic plates by aiming to bring their cost down below the cost of the bullet you hope it'll stop. The plate is replaceable, the soldier's heart isn't, you sacrifice the thing you're happy to lose to save the thing you want to keep.

They're not happy they shot down $50k of drone, they're happy they shot down 50 kg of explosives that was going to strike a power station, it's not a hard trade to make.

[PeterisP]

A key difference from your examples is that the enemy doesn't have the capability to simply (and risk-free) send an arbitrary number of bullets at your soldiers' hearts or RPG rounds at your vehicles; the major "cost of delivery" is not the bullet/RPG but the trooper (and his risk) bringing the gun to get a chance to make a targeted shot with the bullet/RPG.

If bullets could leave the factory and magically fly straight at your soldiers, expensive single-use ballistic plates would not be a practical solution - you'd simply run out of them as you can't possibly produce as many of them as the enemy can make bullets.

[AlexanderTheGr8]

>On the other hand if my country was invaded I would probably watch those videos with popcorn

We don't even know which country the soldier belonged to. And realistically, if your country was invaded, you are unlikely to be in a position to relax and eat popcorn but I get your sentiment.

I agree how weird this war is. The first war being live streamed. That increases the horror since watching videos of something happening is much worse than just reading about it. And most people don't read but will intently watch a drone following a soldier and exploding.

> Every time Ukraine is glad they shot a $50k drone with a $1m patriot missile I wonder where this war can possibly go.

More drones and more missiles. Until someone figures out cheaper ways of stopping drones. My gut feeling is that in 1-2 years, we will have proper industrial ways of stopping drones en masse. And then drones will become just a part of the commander's arsenal like any other weapon.

[cm2187]

> And realistically, if your country was invaded, you are unlikely to be in a position to relax and eat popcorn but I get your sentiment.

Most military age ukrainians do. Ukrainian mobilisation is nothing of the scale of ww1. France was roughly the same size as Ukraine in ww1 and had 7m men under arms. Ukraine has less than 10 times less.

[plussed_reader]

Wouldn't the method of detection be a trade item to obfuscate until it's reverse engineered?

Seems like you're asking them to give up the farm for some PR.

[snypher]

>can be confused with birds

The article states they can determine the difference.