https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr7ym1zkda8
Anti-air guns are the countermeasure. RADAR good enough to detect drones + an aimbot and programmable air-burst round to “shotgun” your pellets to damage those soft plastic bits.
We’re going back to WW2 tech. AA guns were considered obsolete because Helicopters + Missiles had more range. But now we need to build cheaper AA Guns for the anti-drone role.
AA Guns are also useful vs infantry, so in an infantry vs infantry fight, having an AA Gun platform will be useful even without any drones around. Airburst and rapid fire is always useful, and I expect the computers that make RADAR possible will be far cheaper today than decades past.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=rr7ym1zkda8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
They may both have a role.
If you know that a given point is at risk of attack, using a static defense like AA guns is practical. Say you have some sort of specific, high-value target that you can put AA guns around. That may be a very sensible thing to do.
But the problem, if you intend to rely only on those, is that there is then a concentration of force issue. The attacker can choose which point to attack; they get the initiative.
Say you’re trying to defend against something like a Shahed-136. It can hit pretty much anywhere in Ukraine. You can’t stick an AA gun on everything that Russia might consider trading a Shahed-136 for.
But, okay, say you try to go big with static defenses. Let’s say that you can obtain and pony up the resources to hypothetically stick an AA gun at every single point along the front line and border, and that your AA gun has the altitude to hit a drone. You have an unbroken line of engagement envelope all around a country. That’d be an extraordinary expenditure, but it could hypothetically be done. So a drone has to fly through defended airspace. The problem is that if the other guy expends an equivalent amount of resources, he can buy a shit-ton of drones and fly them all through a single gun’s engagement envelope. Even if he doesn’t even bother to try to attack the antiaircraft gun, your gun defenses are just going to get overwhelmed, because all of the attacker’s resources are engaged, whereas the vast bulk of the defender’s resources are not in the fight. Maybe you hit a tiny percentage of drones, but the rest are going to be able to simply fly through.
The problem is that the cost of static defenses in that scenario grows at something like the square of the scale of the air conflict – you have to have enough static defenses to counter all of the attacker’s aircraft, and pre-place those defenses at all points that might be attacked, whereas the cost of the attack grows only linearly. It’s cost-effective to use static defenses only if the attacker is compelled to attack a limited number of points.
If that’s not the case, then using some form of mobile defense is more important – say, I don’t know, you have a fleet of gun-armed, jet-powered counter-UAS UASes. Dollar-for-dollar, they might not be as effective as a static gun. But…you can route most or all of them in to meet any given attack.
The spot where we intend to fight must not be made known; for then the enemy will have to prepare against a possible attack at several different points; and his forces being thus distributed in many directions, the numbers we shall have to face at any given point will be proportionately few.
For should the enemy strengthen his van, he will weaken his rear; should he strengthen his rear, he will weaken his van; should he strengthen his left, he will weaken his right; should he strengthen his right, he will weaken his left. If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.
Numerical weakness comes from having to prepare against possible attacks; numerical strength, from compelling our adversary to make these preparations against us.
Knowing the place and the time of the coming battle, we may concentrate from the greatest distances in order to fight.
But if neither time nor place be known, then the left wing will be impotent to succor the right, the right equally impotent to succor the left, the van unable to relieve the rear, or the rear to support the van. How much more so if the furthest portions of the army are anything under a hundred LI apart, and even the nearest are separated by several LI!
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War, ~400 BC
If you know that a given point is at risk of attack, using a static defense like AA guns is practical. Say you have some sort of specific, high-value target that you can put AA guns around. That may be a very sensible thing to do.
Did you see the Youtube link?
This is a lightweight AA Gun that can be mounted on a cheap pickup truck. This isn’t a “Static” defense, this system is more mobile than infantry. It will move with the infantry, it will protect the infantry, and the infantry will protect it.
Say you’re trying to defend against something like a Shahed-136. It can hit pretty much anywhere in Ukraine. You can’t stick an AA gun on everything that Russia might consider trading a Shahed-136 for.
But you can have an AA Gun on a Pickup truck follow your infantry around, protecting that company. If you have 100 men out on the field, it makes sense to give them at least one AA Gun to protect themselves against a wide variety of drone threats. Or if one AA gun per 100-men is too expensive, then maybe per battalion (~500 men). Etc. etc.
If the enemy drone is moving less than 200mph, the cheaper AA Gun will reliably protect the troops, as long as the person watching the RADAR doesn’t fall asleep. And at 115mph, even a Shahed is slow enough that AA Guns reliably work. Most drones are far slower than that.
If that’s not the case, then using some form of mobile defense is more important – say, I don’t know, you have a fleet of gun-armed, jet-powered counter-UAS UASes. Dollar-for-dollar, they might not be as effective as a static gun. But…you can route most or all of them in to meet any given attack.
That’s called an F22 Air Superiority Fighter.
Yeah, that’d be nice, but I’m assuming those are off the table for obvious reasons.
The problem is that if the other guy expends an equivalent amount of resources, he can buy a shit-ton of drones and fly them all through a single gun’s engagement envelope. Even if he doesn’t even bother to try to attack the antiaircraft gun, your gun defenses are just going to get overwhelmed, because all of the attacker’s resources are engaged, whereas the vast bulk of the defender’s resources are not in the fight. Maybe you hit a tiny percentage of drones, but the rest are going to be able to simply fly through.
Lets start with basic problems first. How can a battalion survive a typical onslaught of Russian drones?
Well, anti-air guns. Bam. We work our way up as the more important, lower-level problems get solved. I know people are talking F16s now, so maybe we’re at the point where fighter jets are the next step forward.
No one is going to shoot at a cheap AA Gun (like the “MACE” system) with hundreds of drones: the hundreds of drones will mostly get shot down and ultimately the price wouldn’t be worth it. Bullets are far cheaper than drones after-all. Now whether a particular MACE will try to shoot down high-flying drones like Shahed is another question, but its also just another problem all together.
MACE’s job is to protect the infantry inside of its shield. And its highly effective at that.
This is a lightweight AA Gun that can be mounted on a cheap pickup truck. This isn’t a “Static” defense,
It’s static from the standpoint of being required to meet an incoming Shahed-136, which can move more quickly than it; you cannot substantially reposition vehicles on ground-based vehicles to meet incoming attacks from the air. The critical factor is whether you can concentrate your defenses in time to meet an attack, once you have detected that incoming attack.
The game will iterate further. A machine gun works against current drones. It can be countered however. E.g. use a ducted drone, with a few layers of Kevlar facing the gun. It doesn’t need to win, or even survive. It just needs to soak up the fire. The other drones rush in, either behind it, or from various angles.
Even things like chaff and smoke can mess up targeting for long enough to rush in.
Say you’re trying to defend against something like a Shahed-136. It can hit pretty much anywhere in Ukraine. You can’t stick an AA gun on everything that Russia might consider trading a Shahed-136 for.
As far as I know, the routine in the current war is - the AA gun is on a truck that moves 80 km/h, the drone comes in slower than 300 km/h, one or multiple truck crews position themselves on likely vantage points for intercepting, and the rest is luck.
