Posted on 03/18/2017 7:24:14 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
A Country Just Used a Patriot Missile to Take Down a $200 Drone
by Dom Galeon and Kristin Houser
Serious Overkill
In a rather unusual show of force, a U.S. ally shot down a small quadcopter drone using a Patriot missile, according to Gen. David Perkins, speaking at the Association of the United States Army’s Global Force symposium. And it wasn’t a drill. “We have a very close ally of ours that was dealing with an adversary using small quadcopter [unmanned aircraft systems],” Perkins said. “They shot it down with a Patriot missile.”
A Patriot is a surface-to-air missile (SAM) that can strike long-range targets at all altitudes. Capable of reaching speeds in excess of Mach 2, Patriots are produced by U.S. defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, and each one costs around $3 million. Meanwhile, a typical quadcopter drone can travel 80 km/h (50 mph) tops and can be bought on Amazon for about $200.
(Excerpt) Read more at futurism.com ...
Right up there with using two million-dollar Tomahawks to flatten some empty tents!
Who knew Patriot could see and track something that small?
A few rounds from a .50 cal would have had the same effect for just a few lousy dollars.
Probably shouldn’t be in the news.
In a long sustained war, this kind of thing will seriously impact the war fighting capability. High-tech weapons can be effective, good for troops on the ground, but it is economically impossible to produce a vast number of them. It cannot be made quickly either.
A) “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”
B) Someone hates quadcopter drones.
AUSA 2017 - GEN David Perkins, Commanding General, U.S. TRADOC
I approve in the sense that it was worth demonstrating this capability in the field. Once. Now let’s be thrifty and use bullets for future targets of this kind . . . except for special circumstances.
Where are they getting drones for $200? I pay $450. at Sam’s Club for mine!
IDF fails 3 times to bring down drone over Golan
Apparent air-to-air strike and two Patriot missiles couldn’t take out UAV that flew into Israeli airspace from Syria
Maybe they should have used a $2 flyswatter.
A fifth grader has already develped the concept: anti-drone drone.
“A fifth grader has already develped the concept: anti-drone drone.”
Yes!
Use kamikaze drones to bring down enemy drones. We have teenagers that could do it from their family rooms with an internet connection and a high end gaming console.
I hear that the Army is developing a laser weapon to take out drones. It makes sense. The problem with laser weapons against manned aircraft is that the mass of the airframe is so great that to achieve a damaging temperature rise with a distant laser is extremely difficult. With the much lower mass of the drone, not so much.
If I’m the enemy, I might try to put corner reflectors on the drone, but I think all that does is stress the dynamic range of the tracking sensor and reduce the payload of the drone. I can switch in attenuators (sun glasses) and keep on burning.
A Patriot is a kamikaze drone, with a 150 km range and mach-2+ speed. I think you are vastly underestimating the difficulty of air intercept, but I wouldn’t dismiss the idea out of hand.
My first recourse would be to use a simple noise jammer (like we do against garage door and mobile phone IEDs) to cut off communications with its base, and maybe a low cost anti-radiation missile to attack the base. For a military drone, (not on sale at Amazon, yet) the simple counter-counter would be to have an autonomous mode when jamming is detected, which might be something as simple as a “take me home”, or “attack the jammer” routine.
I might prefer a shotgun over a 0.50 cal, for lots of obvious reasons, number 1 being fratricide. Unfortunately, the Geneva convention on the law of land warfare outlaws shotguns. I would claim that the law of land warfare does not apply to drones. Adding a shotgun to the armament of every rifle squad would be cheap, and would enhance morale in many ways as well as reducing the probability of a drone returning safely to base to a value indistinguishable from zero.
4 Ways to take down a drone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X27-2WDIZR0&t=216s
Number 4 is using trained eagles. I saw two hawk strikes on my bird feeder Tuesday during the pi-day blizzard. Very impressive critters, trust me.
Time to buy stock in Raytheon, eh?
“Unfortunately, the Geneva convention on the law of land warfare outlaws shotguns.”
It does no such thing.
L
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