It doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to imagine a future in which drones are used not to impress, but to kill. Indeed, a now-viral clip from Gerard Butler’s 2019 film Angel Has Fallen it unfolded: small drones, massivelyit can be like a giant swarm of bees. You could hit one, but not all of them.
“We like these great displays of cityscapes or Spitfires or whatever is rising in the night sky, but it’s the same technology that’s used to make weapons of war, so who’s going to do it first?” This is Professor Clarke. “In combat terms, the area below 1,500 meters is the new area of air warfare: it is now the domain of drones.”
So how to defend yourself against them? “Ultimately, the focus should be on electronic countermeasures. It’s an arms race. You see hapless Russian soldiers shooting at them, but now you see Ukraine and Gaza that even the sound of a drone causes terror. Like Doodlebugs in World War II, the psychological phenomenon is a weapon in itself.”
There are almost as many potential defense tactics as there are drones, but one of them is sure to prevail. Traditional air defenses are not only ill-suited, but often too expensive: Former U.S. defense officials have argued that the best weapon against small drones is the Standard Missile-2, a medium-range anti-aircraft weapon. The latest version, Block IV, costs $2.1 million each. Even if a swarm attack is not successful, it can be financially devastating.
Futuristic solutions range from solid-state lasers that the U.S. uses to disable unmanned aerial vehicles, to guns that fire from all angles to catch as many drones as possible, to new AI-powered censors that can detect flying drones at high rates. lower and slower than traditional air weapons, so traditional weapons can destroy them earlier. Perhaps out of haste, Israel is currently focusing on the latter.
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