weltweit
Well-Known Member
I think one of those seven footers flying directly at you wouldn't offer much of a target.
Ukraine and the Russian invasion, 2022-24
- Thread starter kebabking
- Start date
Spymaster
Plastic Paddy
I suppose there's a financial decision made on whether to shoot down a 20k munition with a 100k one, but surely the main concern is to stop the potential damage.
kebabking
Not a Girly Swot, but I like them....
The best way to kill the small stuff is with Electronic Warfare - you jam it's Comms with it's ground station, and it's GPS/GLONAS receiver, and it just piles into the ground.
Once the loitering munition is in its terminal dive then you revert to the kinetic stuff - radar guided, IR, and beam riding missiles are perfectly capable of hitting small targets: the RN's Sea Dart from the Falklands war was capable of intercepting naval gun shells in flight - but radar directed guns are a great deal cheaper.
It's all well with the technical parameters of modern warfare, it's simply a problem of having enough of the platforms to cover your forces, and to have enough munitions to cope with the numbers.
Once the loitering munition is in its terminal dive then you revert to the kinetic stuff - radar guided, IR, and beam riding missiles are perfectly capable of hitting small targets: the RN's Sea Dart from the Falklands war was capable of intercepting naval gun shells in flight - but radar directed guns are a great deal cheaper.
It's all well with the technical parameters of modern warfare, it's simply a problem of having enough of the platforms to cover your forces, and to have enough munitions to cope with the numbers.
Spymaster
Plastic Paddy
How much of a cost consideration is in the minds of the commanders on the ground? Do they consider that hitting a £20k bomb with a £100k one is too expensive, or is the primary consideration to stop the weapon and fuck the financials?
strung out
💩 🤣 🍆 💦 🧐 👻 🐝 🐈⬛
Surely the cost of the attacking munition is irrelevant, it's the cost of the thing you're defending, whether that's human life, infrastructure or your own military hardware?
Spymaster
Plastic Paddy
I'd have thought that, but when you have limited resources, financial/logistical or otherwise, decisions like that need to be assessed. If so, then a commander on the ground has to decide whether shooting down a five-quid bomb that may or may not hit a school or hospital, is worth firing his last, 100 grand and hard to get hold of, missile. Impossible decision; so interested in what the policy/thinking is.
kebabking
Not a Girly Swot, but I like them....
I'd say expense per se is not a consideration, but opportunity cost probably is: you might get a good lock with the Ukrainians' NASAM Surface to Air missile system on a £10k loitering munition, but if that NASAM/AIM-120 is also your best/only chance of shooting down an incoming cruise missile, or an SU-35 strike bomber, you're probably going to see if you've another option rather than 'wasting' such a capable, and desperately needed, missile on a lower value target.
Spymaster
Plastic Paddy
How's the value of a target decided, and by whom?
There's an LM that could destroy half a hospital immediately but you're expecting a couple of SU-35s in half an hour.
What happens?
kebabking
Not a Girly Swot, but I like them....
Unknowable. Units it's will have firing parameters, and everyone will know the supply situation - but it's decisions taken by people in the field, at the time.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
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existentialist
Tired and unemotional
Tiny. They're not the problem in terms of attacks. You can use (some) anti-air missiles against them, but they're quite tricky to take down, and the cost ratio is eyewatering. There are some "drone jammers" around, but I suspect that we're going to see a rapid evolution of specific anti-drone measures as a result of this conflict. And a rapid evolution of drone control protocols, to make them less jammable and less able to be compromised - Ukraine have successfully taken control of and landed several Russian drones. We probably won't know for sure if Russia are achieving the same, but it seems less likely.
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
The problems with the Iranian drones have been complex. First of all, they fly slowly enough that they fall below the detection threshold for most radar-guided AA missiles (most AA missiles are expecting to hit targets moving at comparatively high speed, maybe >160km/h. The Iranian drones are s-l-o-w by comparison. Plus, they're going - as others observe - for large-scale attacks, which means a missile solution is less useful, as you're unlikely to have as many missiles available as targets to hit. I suspect that they also don't present sufficient of a thermal target for IR-seeking missiles to detect.
Which leaves guns. Firing on a drone flying at 250m with a rifle is a tricky prospect: the bullet's trajectory has to be allowed for, plus "lead" on the drone, clay pigeon shooting style. I suspect you're probably looking at sub-1000:1 probabilities of scoring a hit, and it's probably going to take more than one rifle bullet to damage the drone. And that leaves you, really, with high-calibre (and high-velocity) automatic AA guns, probably radar-guided. I suspect we might see a rapid development of high rate-of-fire, comparatively lightweight radar-directed guns on a scale smaller than you'd need for taking out aviation. In fact, the demise of things like the ZSU-23 has probably been because aviation has become faster and better-protected over the last 40 years - so maybe with these drones, we're actually going to need to go backwards in terms of armament, but coupled with more sensitive and accurate sensing technologies to hit smaller, slower-moving targets.
If Ukraine isn't developing something along those lines right now, I'd be surprised. Quite a lot of "Russian" techological development happened in Ukraine...they've got a good track record.
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
When all is said and done, all that really counts is "boots on the ground".
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
The ww1 trenches were on the western front. not the eastern front as you'd know if you looked into the conflict
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
The beauty of the Ukrainian ground fire-direction system is that, given multiple launch platforms, you can assign - in real time - targets to platforms in the most advantageous way. Someone described it as "Uber for artlllery" (the Russian equivalent works on a timescale of hours). It wouldn't be a huge leap to retrofit that to AA installations to create a similar prioritisation/matching system for them. So, have your missiles hold off because you know you've got guns further downrange if you know you're going to need the missiles for the incoming aviation.
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
After I'd written that stuff about "Uber for artillery" and the AA thing, I thought "the Dowding system".
So, in the early days of WWII, England was faced with the threat of German bombers, and how to intercept them with a fairly limited fighter force. Spitfires hadn't yet appeared, and we were dependent on Hurricanes. What Dowding (chief of RAF) came up with was a system that linked the new Chain Home radars (still, er, quite secret), and manual observation posts, via a network of telephone lines, hubs, and - ultimately - a central command unit and then to the airbases, so that they could match their forces to the targets, and prioritise accordingly.
It worked, largely. Partly through innovation, redundancy, and a creative approach to command. The UK was effectively, behind the techological curve compared to Germany, at least as far as aviation was concerned, and they reduced the imbalance by the use of technology and creatively matching supply to demand. Ultimately, it turned what Germany expected to be a certain win into a situation that was equivocal enough that Germany had to start supporting its bombers with increasing fighter cover, which had its own impact on Germany's ability to use that fighter capability elsewhere.
Which, come the Battle of Britain (essentially, Germany's attempt to overwhelm the British system by sheer force of numbers), bought us enough time to have built up sufficient resources, in the form of additional aircraft, to be able to neutralise the threat.
I think that the same creativity is being employed in the Ukrainian system, which is similarly under-invested in terms of "conventional" air/AA forces, and that this imbalance - coupled with an attitude towards innovation that Russia seems culturally incapable of matching - is slowly tilting in favour of Ukraine, in various fields. If they can innovate (with the help of Western weapons) quickly enough that they can prevent Russia from completely destroying their civilian infrastructure, they, too, will be able to prevail come their "Battle of Britain" (or name other decisive WWII battle to taste).
So, in the early days of WWII, England was faced with the threat of German bombers, and how to intercept them with a fairly limited fighter force. Spitfires hadn't yet appeared, and we were dependent on Hurricanes. What Dowding (chief of RAF) came up with was a system that linked the new Chain Home radars (still, er, quite secret), and manual observation posts, via a network of telephone lines, hubs, and - ultimately - a central command unit and then to the airbases, so that they could match their forces to the targets, and prioritise accordingly.
It worked, largely. Partly through innovation, redundancy, and a creative approach to command. The UK was effectively, behind the techological curve compared to Germany, at least as far as aviation was concerned, and they reduced the imbalance by the use of technology and creatively matching supply to demand. Ultimately, it turned what Germany expected to be a certain win into a situation that was equivocal enough that Germany had to start supporting its bombers with increasing fighter cover, which had its own impact on Germany's ability to use that fighter capability elsewhere.
Which, come the Battle of Britain (essentially, Germany's attempt to overwhelm the British system by sheer force of numbers), bought us enough time to have built up sufficient resources, in the form of additional aircraft, to be able to neutralise the threat.
I think that the same creativity is being employed in the Ukrainian system, which is similarly under-invested in terms of "conventional" air/AA forces, and that this imbalance - coupled with an attitude towards innovation that Russia seems culturally incapable of matching - is slowly tilting in favour of Ukraine, in various fields. If they can innovate (with the help of Western weapons) quickly enough that they can prevent Russia from completely destroying their civilian infrastructure, they, too, will be able to prevail come their "Battle of Britain" (or name other decisive WWII battle to taste).
WouldBe
Dislicksick
Some drones return to their launch point if they lose Comms so could blow up the people that launched it.
Don't the RN have radar operated guns that can take out a coke can? Seem to remember something on a recent RN documentary. They could take out drones cheaply.
Chz
Stark Raving Sane
It's a speed thing again. Anything that can target a small object like that is designed to take out incoming shells and rockets. The software will need to be rewritten because it will (quite logically, given the original context) refuse to target something as slow as a drone. Otherwise the RSPB would get awfully upset at them.
keybored
Well done. You remember cat good.
Surely not if its GPS has been jammed.Some drones return to their launch point if they lose Comms so could blow up the people that launched it.
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
And GPS is dead easy to jam - the signals are tiny.
keybored
Well done. You remember cat good.
Don't say tiny, say low in power (-125dBm). We've already established on this thread that tiny things are harder to intercept.
WouldBe
Dislicksick
Depends how they work. Some are controlled like a conventional RC aircraft. If they lose the RC signal they use GPS to return to where they took off from. Don't know if these drones work like that or not.
agricola
a genuine importer of owls
TBF I am not sure about these bits.
I mean, Germany wasn't effectively ahead technologically in 1940 - the 109E wasn't superior to the Spitfire, nor were the Luftwaffe's bomber force better than what the RAF had (although 1940 was probably when the two bomber forces were closest; in later years the gap got ever wider until by 44/45 it was a chasm).
When they were ahead technologically it was either on a temporary and specific basis (the period where the Fw190 was far superior to the contemporary Spitfire for example), or in areas that were impressive but not war-winning and often hugely wasteful in terms of effort and resources (the V1/V2, or the 262 or the Walther u-boats). As an aside is perhaps interesting from a psychological standpoint how the idea of Nazi technological superiority is one of the last surviving successful myths of theirs; after all there isn't really much to back it up.
I do agree though about the brilliance of the Dowding system, what he did was create a system that was decades ahead of every other country on Earth and it was one of the twin RAF-related scandals of that war that he never got the recognition he deserved. The row between him and the "big wing" crowd is not one that makes much sense from our perspective - history has proved him entirely correct and them entirely wrong.
keybored
Well done. You remember cat good.
What I mean is if the drone's GPS capability has been jammed (using electronic warfare), they cannot do that. I can't think of any other way a drone could find its own way home autonomously.
WouldBe
Dislicksick
What I meant was if you jam the RC signal you could end up bombing the Russians.
2hats
Dust.
You could use INS, beacons of opportunity (cell towers, broadcast signals), terrain matching to return to safe territory.
Waiting for drone-hunting drones.
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