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Comment by RS-232 | Hacker News Reader

> The challenge that you have with unmanned systems today is you’re going to have to do something that is a little bit out of the ordinary to address all of them,” he said. “They’re not particularly expensive. Their impact is probably way outsized.”

This isn’t a dismissal of drones at all. It’s an acknowledgement of how diverse and inexpensive drones are.

A stinger missile is ~150k USD. A grenade duct taped to a drone is ~150 USD. That’s three orders of magnitude, so you can see why a manpad isn’t an economically viable countermeasure to most drones.

Electronic warfare/directed energy usually fits the bill for the smaller drone threat profile.

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Drones that can survive a modern contested environment are more like $10k+, even in the Ukraine with less technically sophisticated countermeasures.

The US has a few different extremely cheap anti-drone rocket systems under testing that roughly achieve cost parity per missile with a survivable drone. For example, this[0] system which allows an F-15 to carry 42 mini-missiles (+8 Sidewinders). These rocket pods have sometimes been mounted on vehicles historically, so I imagine these ones can be too.

[0] https://www.twz.com/air/f-15e-spotted-packing-big-laser-guid...

Eh... the Skywalker FPV drones controlled by a 5km fiberoptic cable are more on the order of $2,500 and can deliver a 10lb payload which is more than enough to critically damage almost anything on the modern battlefield (that's ~the flying mass of the 81mm HE mortars that NATO uses). The more expensive controller and base station is reusable as well -- you'll never be able to develop countermeasures that come anywhere close to cost parity with that.

That drone is not hardened against modern EW and countermeasures at all. The fiber optic link only solves the problem of not having military-grade RF networking tech for denied environments, which wouldn’t even be an issue for a modern military. It doesn’t protect the drone itself.

Wire-guided systems are ancient military tech. There are good reasons they were phased out decades ago.

Do you really think the Westerners will be able to beat the Russians at the EW thing? If yes, why haven’t they helped the Ukrainians do just that, consistently?

The US has actively downgraded and nerfed the equipment they’ve sent. That’s well-documented and standard US policy wherever they send military equipment. Ukraine received circa 1980 US military tech. Not exactly state-of-the-art.

And yes, the US is much more capable at EW than Russia. No one seriously believes otherwise, Russia doesn’t even have the ability to fabricate the materials necessary to be competitive.

The US does not share their state-of-the-art with their closest allies. There is no version of the world where they are sharing anything close to that with Ukraine. They reserve their most advanced capabilities for themselves.

> Electronic warfare/directed energy usually fits the bill for the smaller drone threat profile.

Down a rabbit hole last night and I saw that fiber-optic drones are the new thing in battle to evade electronic (radio) warfare. They literally spool out fiber optic line and are (obviously) limited in range to the length of fiber they carry. (But this can be 10,000 feet or so?)

That is to evade interference with the network link. AFAIK, the radio tech used is not designed to withstand modern denied environments, which makes it more vulnerable. The fiber optics are a cheap way of addressing that tactically and it is proven tech — a lot of older anti-tank guided missiles are controlled the same way.

Sophisticated electronic warfare systems are designed to affect much more than the communications link; they have to be effective against systems where the RF link tech is designed to survive heavy EW environments (such as what the US uses). EW and countermeasures are designed to attack the onboard systems themselves, since they are intended to be effective against fully autonomous systems that are not being controlled over a network link.

The largest fiber optic guided drones in common use now have ranges up to 20km but that takes a big spool of cable and there's a high risk of breakage. Most though have shorter ranges of 10km or less.

Why not use free-space optical at that point? Are they trying to send HD video back?

To point out the obvious, free-space optical broadcasts your position to the enemy. It is also notoriously subject to interference i.e. something blocking line of sight.

Yeah, video I saw they took the drone into a structure, no longer line-of-sight.

And, conversely, the Stinger's target is the $150M aircraft. It's crazy how there are so many orders of magnitude.

> Their impact is probably way outsized.

This is pretty dismissive in my book, as in not acknowledging that for the last 6 to 12 months (at least) most of the casualties in Eastern Ukraine have been caused by cheap drones. The same cheap drones that have also been a game-changer when it comes to using armoured vehicles, as they're not being used all that much anymore because they're death-traps, the two armies have switched to using cheap motorbikes (the Russians) and ATVs (the Ukrainians).

Maybe there is a language barrier involved here, but "outsized" in this context means drones have more of an effect per dollar than conventional techniques. It's talking about how big their impact is--that they can do a huge amount of damage with very little cost. This is congratulatory language, not dismissive. It's acknowledging the serious defense problem that drones pose. You can't rely on an expensive defense against an inexpensive offense.

"Outsized" doesn't mean "small", it means "much more than you would expect out of something so small and cheap".

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