Modern Warfare - An Aviation Nightmare

$500 Backpack sized Kamikaze Shahed Drone

VS

$4,000,000 Patriot Missile

The geek in me has become fascinated by drones over the past few years. I'm researching another post about drones in more general terms but wanted to talk about an issue that's been dominating the news lately.

We've been hearing a lot about drones being utilized in Operation Epic Storm. While the United States has been dominating against Iran, it comes at a real financial cost when the enemy uses cheap $500 drones, and we've been shooting them down with patriot missiles costing between three to four million dollars EACH.

Iran and Hezbollah have been working together in simultaneous attacks against the U.S. and Israel with missiles and drone swarms. These drones are easy to buy, easy to modify to carry improvised payloads, hard to detect and cheap enough to use in swarms.

In addition to trying to shoot down a swarm of drones with a patriot missile becoming a bookkeeper's nightmare, they're not designed as a defense against drones. Patriot missile systems were originally designed during the cold war to stop enemy fighter jets, bombers and high-speed aircraft flying at medium to high altitudes approaching from long distances. As needs changed, the patriot system was modified and upgraded to intercept low-flying cruise missiles, fast, maneuvering targets, objects designed to evade radar including short-range ballistic missiles, scud-type missiles at high-speed and steep-angle reentry trajectories.

Drones are exactly the opposite - they're slow, small, low-flying and cheap.

Why are we using these expensive patriot missiles against drones? Isn't it like trying to kill a mosquito with a nuclear bomb?

The United States has been using hundreds if not thousands of patriot missiles against drones because they're already deployed in the area, integrated into our radar networks and guaranteed to hit what they shoot at. In other words, it's what's available to us right now.

But this strategy isn't sustainable long term. We are rapidly depleting our stock of Patriot missiles. In addition to the cost, enemy drone swarms cause other problems because they overwhelm radar systems:

• Radar struggles with very small targets - small drones have tiny radar cross-sections, have plastic/composite bodies, a low heat signature and operate at slow speeds.

• To radar, they look like birds, ground clutter or noise.

• Swarms of 20, 50 or 100+ drones overwhelm radar. When too many objects appear simultaneously, they overflow tracking queues, systems drop targets, operators can't prioritize targets and automated defenses misallocate interceptors - It's been described as trying to follow 200 ping-pong balls being thrown at you at once!

• While traditional aircraft fly predictable paths, drone swarms zig-zag, split into sub-groups, can fly "nap of the earth" and approach from multiple angles.

• Because of their ability to fly low to the ground, radar is blocked by terrain, buildings, trees, curvature of the earth creating dead zones for radar systems.

• Some swarm drones employ technology that can emit RF noise, Jam GPS, spoof radar returns and mimic larger aircraft.

• Even if we were to knock out the control link, many swarm drones become semi-autonomous, meaning that they will continue to navigate a pre-programmed route, use onboard sensors, communicate with each other and re-route around threats.

How do we combat against such odds?

We've gained some expertise on knowledge learned from Ukraine. The Iranian drones are similar to Russian drones and the U.S. is leaning on its allies in Ukraine to share their expertise in combating Russian drone attacks. Iran uses Shahed drones and an American anti-drone system known as Merops that worked in Ukraine is being brought into Operation Epic Storm. Merops flies drones against drones, fits in the back of a pickup truck and uses AI to navigate when electronic communications are jammed.

A Shahed drone is especially deadly in oversaturating air defenses and inflicting painful damage. It flies slowly (about 110 MPH), has a range of over 1,200 miles and can carry a relatively big load (88 lbs.) of explosives. Up until recently, we would fire on these drones with missiles from a Predator drone to destroy them. But Ukraine has taught us that if we fly cheap drones directly into the target drone itself, it becomes a warhead that destroys the enemy drone effectively.

The Pentagon told the Senate that the Department of War has committed $1.1 billion to buy drone systems over the next 18 months, including 30,000 small, one-way kamikaze-like attack drones to be delivered to military units over the next five months.

Additionally, the U.S. is poised to work with defense contractors to award deals for:

• High-energy lasers

• Microwave weapons

• AI-assisted radar

• Cheap interceptors

• Drone vs Drone defense systems

We're also using fighter cannons that fire 3,000 rounds per minute, as well as Apache AH-64 Helicopters with 30-millimeter cannons firing 600 rounds per minute in 10 round bursts. Additionally, we are using mobile autonomous C-UAS platform vehicles by Milrem and Marduk to detect aerial threats in various environments:

Marduk Shark and TheMIS unmanned ground vehicle

These systems can be configured for various battle scenarios, can track over 500 targets simultaneously, can be integrated with both kinetic and non-kinetic solutions for lasers, jammers, radio frequency detectors and more.

While the United States is a little late to the game regarding fighting drone attacks, we have a wealth of information from our allies including the backing and budgetary opportunities to make up for lost ground quickly.

The Art of War may be changing as new technologies emerge, but we're changing with it.

Research for this post came from various sources including but not limited to Boltflight, Droneworld, Associated Press, Stars and Stripes, MyDefence, and National Defense Magazine.