High-power microwave defeats drone swarm | Hacker News Reader

High-power microwave defeats drone swarm

epirusinc.com

231 pointsnis0s171 comments

Here we have the latest Ukrainian drones resistant to Russian countermeasures.[1] There are Japanese drones able to not only survive lightning strikes, but guide them.[2]

Because the Russia-Ukraine war is so active, drones that can survive RF weapons can be expected essentially immediately. Ukraine fields a new generation of drones every three months. They have to.

[1] https://kyivindependent.com/ukraine-tests-new-kamikaze-drone...

[2] https://dailygalaxy.com/2025/04/japan-has-successfully-used-...

You're talking about comms jamming, which has been mostly useless in Ukraine for some time now. Leonidas appears to use directed EMI upset of digital circuits as a mechanism. No existing quadcopter design is immune. And while designing an immune drone is possible, it will be an entirely different cost proposition.

Put sensitive electronics in a metal box, comms over a fiber (already common), and you’re good to go.

Only tricky thing is if currents induced in motors are too hard to reject in driver circuitry, tho even at the extreme this should be possible to insulate with capacitors (or worse/heavier with transformers)

Sounds like a great plan if you don't need a camera, positioning and magnetic compass. You also want your cage grounded or very thick, otherwise with sufficiently strong field it will become preemable.

You can put camera in transparent Faraday cage. With camera and gyro one can do basic positioning...

Basic yes, but drones are precision strike weapons by necessity: they can't carry enough payload to kill everything in a 50m radius for example. They depend on generally nailing a single target with cm-level precision.

And all that stuff is a new supply chain and more weight which isn't payload.

That a countermeasure can be built doesn't mean it's necessarily effective to do so - your drones get less cheap, less numerous, you have to incorporate such systems into tactical and strategic planning.

Also you can't buy the drones off AliExpress anymore. This shouldn't be underestimated, because all the drone swarm wet dreams were built on this.

>payload to kill everything in a 50m radius for example.

cluster heads solve this beautifully because 1kg of high explosive kills everything good enough in 5 meters radius.

Which is still nothing in terms of area lethality terms.

For comparison, the Excalibur GPS guided artillery shell was considered precision because it would hit within 5m reliably.

Compare to the lethal range of a 155mm, where the kill radius is 50m and casualty at 100m.

155mm has payload of around 7kg.

You're talking about a counterdrone system that's at technology demonstrator stage. I don't think they even have any contract or timeline for delivering production systems. Meanwhile tech used in the Ukraine war is adapting by the month.

"That a countermeasure can be built doesn't mean it's necessarily effective to do so" applies especially to reading a corporate press release about a system doesn't even have a timeline for being on the battlefield.

More than basic. DJI offers full GPS-less camera and accelerometer based nav technology on their drones.

A compass is not blocked by a Faraday cage as low frequency magnetic fields still get through.

I was thinking a ferrous shield would warp magnetic flux lines but I could be wrong. And guess you could mill the enclosure from brass, tho it's still not clear how would you get an RF ground up there.

> ferrous shield would warp magnetic flux lines

It wouldn't, the only way to "shield" from magnetic fields is to get them to induce Eddy currents and but that requires more and more length and as the wavelength gets longer and essentially infinite for the Earth's field which is very slow moving.

> RF ground up there. "ground" is relative and not at all required for a Faraday cage to work.

However that is still vulnerable to the microwaves. The issue is that this setup catches microwaves and while, yes, it prevents the waves from entering the electronics it does so by converting them to heat. So if this cage has caught 100J * volume (say 100W for slightly over 1.5 minutes), the electronics are above 100 degrees, and the solder joints are releasing.

The advantage of microwaves is that unlike lasers, kilowatt strong microwaves are easy to generate, it is an incredibly well studied problem, because that's how early radar systems worked. They are what secured the skies above London against the Nazi air force.

Israel seems to be trying another approach with lasers. They decided it doesn't matter if the laser is powerful, if you just have hundreds of 2W lasers aimed at the same target.

Or you can put motors inside the cage, with purely mechanical linkage to the propellers.

You'd have to make sure the linkages are not conductive and there is not even a 1mm clearance on their ports in the enclosure. Non-metal axles are possible but it's hard to find material that would withstand the torque.

You also need to think through your cooling solution. Enclosed batteries, converters and motors will generate a lot of heat over typical mission, and you don't have the benefit of direct air cooling anymore.

How about using a metal axle that penetrates the cage using an intentionally conductive bearing, i.e. a slip ring? It would need very low RF impedance, but it would only need to last for the expected lifespan of the drone.

At just a few GHz, metal mesh ought to be adequate for the cage material, so cooling isn’t necessarily a huge problem.

> Only tricky thing is if currents induced in motors

Many of the drones in the Russia-Ukraine war are powered by ICEs. I'm thinking of Ukraine's long range drones presently deleting Russia's refinery distillation towers, fixed radar installations, parked aircraft, ammo dumps, etc.

Those engines are not purely mechanical, but purely mechanical engines have been widespread and are still commonplace today. A 2-stroke diesel being one example, but even gas turbines can be purely mechanical. So one can imagine such an adaptation in response to microwave countermeasures.

The motor drive side probably isn't that vulnerable, since that's the output side of large power transistors, but the Hall-effect sensors and current sensing in brushless DC motors might be a problem. But you don't have to use brushless motors. They last longer, but drones are ammo, not assets, today.

Pika-CHUUUUU! Wow. Now only if they could weaponize lightning strikes.

Taping a grenade to it (instead of the lightning guidance thing) will be probably as efficient or more, as a weapon.

If they could weaponize earthquakes instead, now that'd be brilliant.

Yes, that has already been achieved by dropping a fine spool of thin “aluminum” wire over the target enemy’s position and then climbing up to 1,500’ altitude during a thunderstorm.

It's the real deal, lots of challenges with high emf. Not surprisingly a very common failure mode is that if you induce currents in the coils of the brushless motors their controllers which are using back emf to set their waveform phase get it wrong and the motors stop spinning, spin backwards, and sometimes just go back and forth like tiny washing machine motors.

Shielding helps of course, adds expense and adds weight, the two things that cut into how many you can make for $X and how far they can fly.

Counter drone systems in battle are going to be a thing, things like the Danish 'bird' RADAR sees them easily enough[1], targeting them with EMF just needs an antenna, generator, and some clever electronics.

This becomes more important as the drones become more autonomous because if there is no operator to 'jam', electronic counter measures are not as effective.

[1] https://www.weibelradars.com/drone-detection/

> Not surprisingly a very common failure mode is that if you induce currents in the coils of the brushless motors

No, that doesn't happen. Currents can be induced in the wires to the motors, but not in the motors themselves. For one thing, the outside surface of the motors is the aluminum rotor which is an extremely effective faraday cage. For another, coils don't act like antennas. Loops of wire in an electric field have the exact same voltage difference as a straight wire.

> Shielding helps of course, adds expense and adds weight, the two things that cut into how many you can make for $X and how far they can fly.

Shielding adds virtually zero weight; carrying a spool of fiber optic cable adds a lot of weight. All the drones in Ukraine right now are fiber optic but most of them are unshielded... the reason why is not that shielding is heavy, it's just that there are lots of jammers but very few truck-sized weapons intended to totally disable drones.

That's also assuming it would even work on a drone without an antenna. If these weapons are not relatively broad-spectrum then they will be very sensitive to the particulars of the circuitry, and they won't always work.

For another, coils don't act like antennas

Coiled antennas are fairly common and have been around since at least the 1960s...

But typically with a much smaller number of turns. A motor coil should have a decently high inductance and thus act as an antenna only for pretty low frequencies.

Coil antennas can have thousands of turns.

It is not the number of turns that matters to distinguish coil antennas from motors, though indeed a high number of turns in both motors and antennas leads to a high inductance, which ensures that any resonance frequencies will be low, so a received radio signal of high frequency will not be amplified by a resonance.

The magnetic circuit of a coil antenna has a very big air gap, because its ferromagnetic core usually has the form of a cylinder or of a prism and the magnetic circuit closes through the air between the opposite ends of the core.

The magnetic circuit of a motor has only small air gaps between stator and rotor, which are required to allow the rotor movements. Because of the small air gaps, the inductance of a motor winding is much higher than the inductance of a coil antenna with the same number of turns and using a ferromagnetic core made of the same material.

Currents can be perfectly well induced in the motors themselves, by the variable magnetic field of an electromagnetic wave.

Any electromagnetic wave has both an electric field and a magnetic field, hence its name.

An antenna can be made from either a straight wire sensitive to the electric field or from a loop of wire sensitive to the magnetic field.

The only reasons why a motor is usually a bad antenna is that it should have a case with good shielding properties (i.e. the magnetic circuits have only small gaps) and the high inductances of its windings act as low-pass filters for high-frequency induced currents, like those of a microwave transmitter.

There exist electric motors with very low inertia of the moving parts (to enable high accelerations), where the rotor does not have any ferromagnetic material and the stator has large gaps for the rotor. Such motors can be much more efficient antennas than standard motors, but such motors are not used in drones.

All the cheap radios for under 30 MHz signals used antennas made of a ferrite bar with a coil on it, very similar to a motor winding, except that the magnetic circuit had a much greater gap than in a motor, because they were more sensitive at small sizes than antennas sensitive to the electric field.

Moreover, brushless motors do not have an aluminum rotor. You are thinking about AC induction motors. Induction motors do not have brushes, but nobody calls them brushless, because they never had brushes. Only DC motors are called brushless, because their classic variant had brushes, which are replaced by power transistors in brushless motors.

The aluminum rotor of induction motors is normally inside, not outside. The inverted construction is rare.

Both induction motors and brushless motors have windings only on the stator, which is the external part in the normal motor structure, and those are equally susceptible to variable magnetic fields, except that they are usually bad antennas for the reasons mentioned above, especially at microwave frequencies.

In an ideal motor, the stator is not an electrical conductor (which is actually the case for ferrite stators), so it has no shielding properties for electric fields, but it has shielding properties for the magnetic field, if the gaps in its magnetic circuit are small.

Almost all quadcopter brushless motors are constructed as “outrunners,” with a fairly thick, sturdy aluminum motor bell (rotor!) with strong permanent magnets glued inside of it and the stator in the center. I agree that they are not immune to RF but at high frequencies it will require a really comical amount of power to do anything to one.

Oh it will absolutely work on a drone without antenna: in microwave range every PCB trace becomes an antenna. If the field is strong enough it'll just blow the gates on IC inputs. If it's far away it can still do soft upset of any periodic signal, e.g. one of the numerous clocks on digital circuits.

So, we could do the same with robots? Like autonomous killer humanoids?

Electronics is electronics. But the weight trade-offs for anything that walks or drives on the ground aren't as severe as for drones, so you could presumably provide EM shielding and light armor more easily.

At the same time, terrain is just harder and slower to navigate, it's easier to erect barriers, and humans are better at spotting eye-level threats. There's a reason why murder-drones are common on the battlefield, and murder-humanoids aren't.

Murder Turtles, however...

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1056602.1056608

https://donhopkins.com/home/TurtlesAndDefense.pdf

>TURTLES AND DEFENSE

>Introduction

>At Terrapin, we feel that our two main products, the Terrapin Turtle ®, and the Terrapin Logo Language for the Apple II, bring together the fields of robotics and AI to provide hours of entertainment for the whole family. We are sure that an enlightened application of our products can uniquely impact the electronic battlefield of the future. [...]

>Guidance

>The Terrapin Turtle ®, like many missile systems in use today, is wire-guided. It has the wire-guided missile's robustness with respect to ECM, and, unlike beam-riding missiles, or most active-homing systems, it has no radar signature to invite enemy missiles to home in on it or its launch platform. However, the Turtle does not suffer from that bugaboo of wire-guided missiles, i.e., the lack of a fire-and-forget capability.

>Often ground troops are reluctant to use wire-guided antitank weapons because of the need for line-of-sight contact with the target until interception is accomplished. The Turtle requires no such human guidance; once the computer controlling it has been programmed, the Turtle performs its mission without the need of human intervention. Ground troops are left free to scramble for cover. [...]

>Because the Terrapin Turtle ® is computer-controlled, military data processing technicians can write arbitrarily baroque programs that will cause it to do pretty much unpredictable things. Even if an enemy had access to the programs that guided a Turtle Task Team ® , it is quite likely that they would find them impossible to understand, especially if they were written in ADA. In addition, with judicious use of the Turtle's touch sensors, one could, theoretically, program a large group of turtles to simulate Brownian motion. The enemy would hardly attempt to predict the paths of some 10,000 turtles bumping into each other more or less randomly on their way to performing their mission. Furthermore, we believe that the spectacle would have a demoralizing effect on enemy ground troops. [...]

>Munitions

>The Terrapin Turtle ® does not currently incorporate any munitions, but even civilian versions have a downward-defense capability. The Turtle can be programmed to attempt to run over enemy forces on recognizing them, and by raising and lowering its pen at about 10 cycles per second, puncture them to death.

>Turtles can easily be programmed to push objects in a preferred direction. Given this capability, one can easily envision a Turtle discreetly nudging a hand grenade into an enemy camp, and then accelerating quickly away. With the development of ever smaller fission devices, it does not seem unlikely that the Turtle could be used for delivery of tactical nuclear weapons. [...]

And with the right shape, the turtles would bin pack when falling into a ditch and with enough turtles they would make their own bridge for the turtles that came behind :-)

It's turtles all the way down!

Or all the way up. Yertle the Turtle represented Hitler, and now Trump and Putin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yertle_the_Turtle_and_Other_St...

>Seuss has stated that the titular character Yertle represented Adolf Hitler, with Yertle's despotic rule of the pond and takeover of the surrounding area parallel to Hitler's regime in Germany and invasion of various parts of Europe.[3][4] Though Seuss made a point of not beginning the writing of his stories with a moral in mind, stating that "kids can see a moral coming a mile off", he was not against writing about issues; he said "there's an inherent moral in any story" and remarked that he was "subversive as hell".[5][6] "Yertle the Turtle" has variously been described as "autocratic rule overturned",[7] "a reaction against the fascism of World War II",[8] and "subversive of authoritarian rule".[9]

When Dr. Seuss Made Hitler Into a Turtle: A reading of Dr. Seuss’s “Yertle the Turtle” with a bit of history in mind.

https://benkageyama.medium.com/when-dr-seuss-made-hitler-int...

I'm mad that they're using Ada and not Logo.

Shielding only takes you so far. Somewhere around 10kV/m field strength the energy will find a weakness no matter how well designed the protection is.

The longer pulses the in this platform seem to be a big part of delivering effect on target. Area under the curve is where the damage happens.

IIRC NEMP is assumed to be at 50kV/m for milspec certification purposes. However most exposed devices are much simpler than quadcopters. There are some class exemptions too, e.g. electronic sights are allowed a fraction of second blackout after upset. Not something that would work for an attack drone though.

What I think makes Leonidas more efficient is they likely operate in continuous wave bursts rather than pulses. Probably with a broad comb rather than one specific value too.

I don't think a fraction of a second interruption would be overly problematic. These drones are somewhat heavy and thus bring relevant amounts of momentum. But the start up process is probably far too long

Yes the reboot takes too long, even before you account the time to re-negotiate comms (even over fiber it is not instant). However in a terminal approach on target say a 1/4 second disrupt will likely be unrecoverable. Quadcopter drones are not ballistic or aerodynamic, and stability recovery once it gets tumbling is challenging.

Drone defence (detection and neutralisation) has to move fast because it’s quite asymmetric warfare (i.e drone worth $4K and take out a tank worth $30m) - over the last week for many nights Denmark’s airports and military installations has had drones disrupt air traffic and cause a lot of angst in the population and they were completely not prepared, haven’t wanted to shoot them down, and they don’t know where they’re coming from or where they’re going - scary that they’re caught so much on the back foot

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-25/denmark-defence-minis...

Why don’t they want to shoot them down?

Shooting at flying things in densely populated areas is generally a bad idea because when you miss, whatever ammunition you used falls on somebody on the ground. And if you hit, the debris falls on someone on the ground.

>when you miss, whatever ammunition you used falls on somebody on the ground

No problem, you just say that Russians deliberately target civilians.

This poses a fun dilemma: the belief that Russia deliberately targets civilians (which is likely correct) almost requires us to also believe that the Russian army fields precision weaponry allowing deliberately targeting things (of which the evidence is scarce).

>which is likely correct

Why do you think that?

>almost requires us to also believe

That's easy. Russia deliberately targets civilians, but being totally inept, misses and hits different civilians.

>of which the evidence is scarce

Is it?

Have a look at this one, where Russia hit Ukrainian MLRSes in a night strike.[0] Western media reported that as inhuman and savage Russians destroying a shopping mall.[1] The mall indeed suffered but only because the Ukrainians parked MLRSes next to it. Ironically the Ukraine itself provided the evidence of that by distributing video where they talk about the mall but incidentally show destroyed MLRS (the other one got evaporated).[2]

[0] https://t.me/aleksandr_skif/3150

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/06/world/europe/russia-ukrai...

[2] https://t.me/ASupersharij/28133

Point taken, thanks!

Re: Russia deliberately targets civilians, but being totally inept, misses and hits different civilians. -- Yep, absolutely, but this is unfalsifiable I guess. I mean, maybe they're targeting hostile aliens from space, but being inept, [...]

Re: Why do you think that? -- I extrapolate from Putin's allies really. Hamas specifically (and very vocally / proudly) targets civilians, Hezbollah targets civilians, Iran and Houthis routinely fire ballistic missiles at residential areas. (I'm only listing things I've actually witnessed, as a noncombatant.)

So intuitively they're all in the same bucket. I'll be happy to be completely wrong about Russia in this regard.

There's this, though with a drone https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/06/17/russia-uses-drones-to-ta...

Here is one of the top Ukrainian propagandists posting in his personal channel a video from Belgorod (Russia) that shows wounded Russian women screaming and thrashing in agony (the text reads "Happy New Year, bitches") after Ukrainian MLRS strike at the city: https://t.me/dmytrogordon_official/39688

Here is the Ukraine targeting the same high-rise apartment building in Kazan with multiple drones: https://t.me/readovkanews/91042

Here is the Ukraine blowing a bridge in Russia exactly when a passenger train was passing under it leading to deaths of civilians including children: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/01/deaths-as-russ...

Here are a paramedic and an ambulance driver murdered by Ukrainian drone near Sudzha (Kurskaya oblast): https://t.me/readovkanews/85353

I could go on and on.

Which conclusions do you draw from that about the current Ukrainian regime or Ukrainian nationalists?

I'd say it's a fine example of whataboutism in an argument. The fact that other people in history have committed atrocities does not mean it's hunky dory to Russia to murder people.

>that other people in history

What? It's atrocities that are being committed right now by the Ukraine. Do they mean that "Ukraine deliberately targets Russian civilians"?

The discussion was on whether Russia targets civilians or not. That is not really a function of whether Ukraine does.

If you want to drag Russia vs Ukraine in, obviously Russia is hugely worse as the aggressor with their rapes and torture chambers and the like. I'm not Ukrainian or Russian and I don't think I've seen a clearer good vs evil war in my lifetime.

>That is not really a function of whether Ukraine does

It's a function of what you call what the Ukraine does. If you use a report of an isolated episode to justify the claim that "Russia deliberately targets civilians" accompanying all Western reporting on Russian strikes, than you surely must accept the statement that "Ukrainian soldiers have swastika tatoos"[0]. Do you?

>with their rapes and torture chambers and the like

You forgot the infants raped with teaspoons and Viagra kits distributed to Russian soldiers, all according to Ukrainian sources and Western politicians and media. Having said that, I'm sure war crimes happen just like in any war.

>I don't think I've seen a clearer good vs evil war in my lifetime

That's exactly what Western media wants you to think. Russian state media wants Russians think the same.

[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/videos/video/2025/06/18/guerre-en-ukr...

>I extrapolate from Putin's allies really. ... they're all in the same bucket

Hamas, Hezbolla or Houthis are hardly Russian allies. Iran isn't fighting on the Russian side like North Korea did, but I guess you can call them an ally of sorts.

Here is a bit about Israel, which supports the Ukraine:

   Two of the sources told the outlets that in the first few weeks of the war, the IDF allowed up to 15 or 20 civilian deaths for every low-ranking Hamas militant assassinated.

   That number could increase to up to more than 100 civilians if the IDF were targeting a single senior Hamas official, the sources said.

   "There was a completely permissive policy regarding the casualties of operations," one source said, according to the report. "A policy so permissive that in my opinion it had an element of revenge." [0]

Assuming that's true, should we extrapolate that too?

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/israelis-military-idf-civili...

> Hamas, Hezbolla or Houthis are hardly Russian allies

I beg to differ.

* Russia sent missiles to Houthis just this year. Also assists with intelligence for attacks, at least according to https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/10/26/russia-provides-targ...

* The meeting where Putin says they have longstanding ties with Hamas: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/04/17/putin-meets-with-r...

Iran, well, we agree: they're very much aligned politically, seem to have shared weapon programs (rumor has it, Iran's Shahed drone == RF's Geran' drone).

Having said all that, I now realize that I must've misused the word ally to mean political sympathizer, my bad. I meant "closely aligned" more than anything, like when the Russian media says "Anglo-saxons" to describe the political bloc.

Re: Assuming that's true, should we extrapolate that too? -- Honestly, maybe? I don't have an opinion, much less an educated one.

>Russia sent missiles to Houthis just this year.

The article says it didn't happen, just that maybe some people disembarked.

>The meeting where Putin says they have longstanding ties with Hamas

That's not exactly what he said: "Russia’s stable, long-term relationships with the Palestinian people, their representatives and various organizations". If you deal with Palestine you have to deal with Hamas. Russia has stable, long-term relationship with Israel too.

>I meant "closely aligned" more than anything

To some degree, what degree is that is debatable. It's more like the enemy of my enemy (the US) thing if you ask my opinion.

>rumor has it, Iran's Shahed drone == RF's Geran' drone

Russia used to import Shahed drones, than organized their production domestically with Iranian help, improved the design, greatly scaled the production, created a decoy version and a jet-powered version.

>Honestly, maybe? I don't have an opinion, much less an educated one.

I'd rather not extrapolate in both cases)

does it apply to birdshot? The solution is many small projectiles with great drag to mass ratio

If you fly the drone 100m up in the air it will block commercial flying due to risk of collision but birdshot can’t reach it.

Even if you manage to hit it at that range there just isn’t enough kinetic power left to really do any damage.

For example here is a Finnish journalist being shot at 70m with birdshot. https://youtu.be/WJgzzrcSmNM?t=124 note that the shot did hit them but none managed to go trough the cardboard and normal civilian clothes were enough protection for other parts of the body.

Basically outside of drones that are trying to hit you (suicide fpv drones) birdshot is kinda useless as there isn't really any reason to fly them so close that they would be in effective range.

The other thing is even if birdshot works...the drone is likely to fall down relatively intact where again - it might hit someone.

Lest anyone misinterpret your statement, shotguns are still dangerous at long range: No. 7 1/2 shot carries, and is dangerous to humans, for 125 yards; No. 6 shot is dangerous for 250 yards; 3 and 4 shot are dangerous for 300 yards and BB shot is dangerous for 450 yards. The heavy shot used for geese is dangerous for 1,400 yards -- almost a mile.

The spread will mean you likely won't hit what you are aiming at, but it is still dangerous.

Bullets are spin-stabilized: if you shoot at something in the air and miss, the bullet will generally still be lethal when it eventually returns to the ground. That’s a no-no in densely populated areas.

You would not be able to hit a drone with a bullet. Statistics are against you.

You use fancy AHEAD ammunition that disintegrates, and hopefully the drone with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AHEAD_ammunition

Yet, the bursts fired are expensive as fuck. Much more expensive than the drone.

Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdwjcayPuag

Can't some kind of shot shell get used that just throws pellets in the direction? Shorter effective range but way better chance of hitting the drone. Also, comparatively cheap.

What you linked seems like it would only be needed for an armored drone?

This system has a range up to 5 km. Shotguns shells are sometimes effective, often not. There are enough videos of, mostly Russians, trying to shoot them down with a shotgun.

This AHDEA ammunition, while expensive, will bring down not only a drone, airplane or chopper, but also artillery grenades.

I'm fairly certain clay pigeon shooting type ammunition and aiming skills stand reasonable chances of hitting even small drones and doing sufficient damage to knock then out of the sky, but only at maybe 50m or so range. A typical attack drone like the types used in Ukraine right now are probably capable doing well over 30m/s on final approach, so it'd be a tough interception still, only about a one second window to get your shot off before it's likely to deliver it's payload ballistically even if you have scored a direct hit.

I suspect the same sort of skills displayed in Ukraine building home made Ardupilot based drones with optical final stage guidance could also be turned to building multi barrel "Phalanx-style" shotgun setups on manual plus computer-optical assisted aiming, in a form factor compact enough to be installed in the back of a Hilux. And that'd be very much the sort of mostly Commercial Off The Shelf approach that seems to do so well tipping the asymmetric warfare in Ukraine's favour in this war.

No, the range is far too short. Hitting a moving target with normal bullets is not particularly difficult but you have to consider where those bullets land. Hence why many guns designed for this purpose use larger ammo capable of self-destructing if they don’t hit the target.

I'm fairly certain they're shotting down drones with bullets in Ukraine. See for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkkdWu7Xt7o

Sure, and for those reasons of probability of a successful hit, hunters don't tend to shoot birds on the wing with rifles either. I mean it's doable, but it's a very hard shot to land with a MK-1 Eyeball.

But we've seen infantry effectively using shotguns in Ukraine as a defensive weapon against drones for the same reason hunters use shotguns to shoot birds on the wing, within your weapon's range the odds of a disabling hit are pretty high if you're trained.

So not sure why it has to be either a rifle bullet _or_ a massively overengineered defense contractor's very expensive super-duper-shotgun round.

Haha, wait, it's flak guns again, just redone for the 21st century. Ah bless.

If the choice is restricted by stand-off range, that is a different kettle of fish, maybe do bring back the, once considered entirely obsoleted by high altitude aircraft and missiles flak.

But in the here and now, regular shotguns are being used defensively, with a certain level of success, by infantry against drones in Ukraine.

Based on random videos I have seen, it seems pretty difficult to shot down a drone with a shotgun. Sure, better than nothing, probably your best bet at that point.

Clay pigeon / skeet shooting is hard too, it's a competitive sport for a reason, but then, so is shooting a target with a rifle at 400 yards, but the armed forces train you up on that. So designated drone marksman might become an interesting new speciality in the modern army.

Rheinmetall's Skynex system costs an estimate of 4k € per engagement.

That is unlikely. I think it fires bursts of 7. I assume 4k is realistic for one shot. So we are talking ballpark of 30k per "burst".

Does the spin-stabilized part have any relevance here? It doesn't have anything to do with the lethality of a falling bullet.

Spin-stabilized bullets bleed their speed at a far slower rate, greatly increasing average terminal velocity and therefore lethality.

You're right– spin-stabilized bullets would have significantly less drag, thus would travel much higher, and thus come down with way more lethality. Honestly though, unless someone's trying to shoot the drone with a musket, all bullets are going to be stabilized somehow.

Nope. Maybe the idea was that an unstabilized slug will tumble and lose velocity quickly, after which it's just some junk falling from above, mostly harmless.

They aren't on the back-foot, it's just that there's no way to minimize civilian casualties when Russia sends weapons of war into neutral civilian zones by definition. The answer becomes deny and don't engage.

It's gray-zone warfare.

This seems like an ideal application of the electrolaser. This was an ultraviolet laser that would ionize a channel through air and then a high voltage pulse could be sent over that channel to a target. Originally they were talking about this being like a long range taser as a non-lethal stun weapon, but maybe more suited for anti-drone technology.

I don't know why this didn't get realized in its original form. Maybe there was a practical impediment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser

You might enjoy Lightning On Demand's Lorentz Cannon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lix-vr_AF38

I does seem like a lot of stuff is needed. He's got 2 tons of capacitors in a stack 20 feet tall to get around 35 feet of range. He although he says:

"I was surprised at just how fast the plasma cannon range scaled with increasing drive voltage and how much explosive force the shock wave can deliver to target the data suggests that a plasma cannon with just a 30t high Marx Tower could achieve 1/4 mile range"

I know military contractors will have 3 or more orders of magnitude more money to throw at their technology demos, but I suspect there's some cold hard physics which shows it's totally impractical to defend anything more then very small high value targets with a system like that.

They used a filament to guide their charge.

This type of weapon reflects the West's approach to drone warfare—multi-million-dollar pieces of equipment that will need to be right on the front line to defend troops and positions. I'll tell you right now, it would last about 10 minutes on the front lines in Ukraine. What many people don't realize is the sheer volume of drones being used in some of the battles along the front—it's not hundreds, but thousands. Trenches are being abandoned, and everyone is going underground. Ground drones can’t even be sent in to support front line troops anymore, as vehicles are taken out within minutes. This is a weapon of last resort, to take out what gets through to the rear. We need front line solutions which don't exist yet.

Here is a quote from a piece a front line defender in the Ukrainian Arm Forces wrote. His name is Maksym Zhorin

>Equally dangerous is the technological obsolescence of NATO countries and their inability to counter modern threats. Adequacy of response, means of combat, even simply understanding what real war looks like today — all of this is missing. Therefore, even a few drones have become a problem for them.

I don't know what the solution to drones are because everything is evolving in real time.

Hit their cheap drone with your cheap drone? Seems like mg bullets are cheaper as well. Hook up an mg to a webcam with motion tracking and stick it in a bush. Might not even need sophisticated tracking with sufficient volume of fire.

Technologies are obsoleted at ridiculous rates during the war. Anyone still remember how HIMARS was supposed to win the war? Indeed it was absolutely fantastic at first, but everyone sort of stopped talking about it. It turns out Russians zoomed in on the weakest spot of these types of weapons - reliance on GPS. As soon as they started jamming that, the effectiveness of a whole slew of those types of weapons went way down. So now there is a whole rush to create anti-jammable GPS technology.

Same thing with drones. They are a game changer but then Russians figured out they can use drones too. Moreover, they were the first ones to field fiber optic drones. Those things are bonkers. As in, if someone told me "this defense company is creating fiber optic drones" I could have bet it's a corruption scheme as the idea just seems to implausible yet here it is, now both sides use them.

In fairness, Ukraine received nerfed versions of most of that tech from the US, increasing its susceptibility to things like GPS jamming. A lot of it was downgraded to circa 1980-1990s capability levels, which is still adequate for a lot of the Soviet era tech Russia is using.

It would likely be a mistake to overfit what is happening in the Ukraine to US capabilities.

NATO needs to start working on more low-tech high volume solutions.

The Netherlands and Germany used to have old anti-air systems that were basically a tank undercarriage with a radar and two rapid fire machine guns. It was a system from the 1960s. Ineffective against fighter jets since those fly higher than the range of the guns, but a modern version of this would be cost effective against low tech drones.

You could build something like it using an existing armoured personnel carrier, fast movable gun and a modern radar sensor. It would be helpless against jets or tanks, but I think the way to use it would be to have high-tech air defense systems shoot the jets (with very expensive missiles) at long range and use these glorified air guns to shoot the drones at much closer range.

There is a reason why you won't find nor Shilka nor Tunguska there.

>NATO needs to start working on more low-tech high volume solutions.

It has. Don't be fooled that just because you haven't seen it means it doesn't exist.

>The Netherlands and Germany used to have old anti-air systems that were basically a tank undercarriage with a radar and two rapid fire machine guns

The GEPARD. Every country has similar. Soviet countries had the Shilka vehicles, US built https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M163_VADS (and the Duster before it). Even before we put radar on these things, slapping a bunch of 50 cals on the back of a truck was standard, and Ukraine does that right now, to mild success.

Currently the US is building some https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion_C-RAM which is basically just a non-self propelled (but still technically mechanized) SPAAG, but is modern so it can even take out missiles and sometimes mortar shells! Also, Rheinmetall has been working on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyshield for quite some time, but holy shit is it pricey for what it is, and it uses special ammo too so that's sucky. Pretty much every arms manufacturer in Europe though is taking their default 30mm or 40mm cannon and slapping it and a generic small radar on whatever mobility platform they can find. The market is ravenous for it right now. It's just not a premier product though, as it's basically off the shelf hardware. Except for the US, who struggled and failed to make the M247 Sergeant York

The West's current plan to entirely null small drones and Shahed style things that fly slowly is the APKWS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Precision_Kill_Weapon...

The gyst is, you take dirt cheap ($3000) rockets that we have a million of, slap a $10k laser guidance package on them, and then use an F-literally whatever (or even helicopters) with bog standard targeting pods to click on a drone and make them go away. I don't think this is viable against DJIs with grenades but I'm pretty sure the plan for that is the MK-82 special delivered to any patch of warm on the FLIR

If you think that can't scale, understand that since WW2, the US's entire air strategy is "fly 1000 sorties all day every day forever". It's why the US doesn't actually have that much in terms of Anti-Air platforms. Their anti-air platform is 3000 planes. They also managed to actually execute such a strategy in the first Gulf War.

There's a lot happening in the Ukraine war that absolutely will not carry over, because you must understand that the Ukraine airspace is basically unused. Neither combatant has enough air power or anti-air systems to control the airspace, or to project air power. They mostly just have the occasional sortie to lob a bomb or launch cruise missiles. This would not be the case with NATO, as long as the US joins in.

IMO, the biggest oversight in the west is that we should be building roughly a billion copies of the Russian Krasnopol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnopol_(weapon_system) . The power of drones has been cheap precision. It used to be only the US had precision in quantity, but shitloads of drones with laser designators is a vast "democratization" of precision in weapons. The US has the Excalibur guided artillery shell, but it's been basically nulled out by GPS jamming and was too expensive anyway.

Some western countries have various more effective semi-guided artillery munitions, things like the BONUS round, but they're expensive, and it's nice to have a commodity version of "I point a laser at that square centimeter and am sure that it dies for like $30k"

This fictionalized demo video from the company is entertaining: https://vimeo.com/942125659/223b79c285

It's an over the top promotional video that feels like it's out of movie. Must have cost them plenty to make it. It's like porn for military gear.

Fascinating to me that making content like that presumably helps them sell.

Shit you can do when your target audience isn't "people in general", which is #1 reason why modern ads are so bland and boring. Also, I assume they're not trying to sell a specific product here, but rather an idea that someone can later invest in.

Not so different from matrix isn’t? I’ve got no idea how it works but does it also destroys all forms of electronics in the area?

Because this is all what they have - a fictional dramatization meant to impress layman decision makers into buying a tremendously expensive system that'll never be viable.

This would've worked in a world with no major conflict where the main enemy was a fictional one dreamed up by them to be especially vulnerable to the sort of system they make but we don't live in that world.

You have to consider that they assume that the enemy uses the standard online forum strategy of swarming the drones.

If you have enough drones for a swarm, you'd realize that losing some of them to figure out the enemies' anti air defense range would be a viable strategy, which means you'll stop swarming them.

Also, will these swarms even be picked up by radar?

And the OP link reads like a PR news release.

Speak of microwave anti-drone weapons, YouTube channel Tech Ingredients made one with microwave oven parts: https://youtu.be/V6XdcWToy2c?t=1298

At 21:38 of the video (link above is timestampped), as the drone got hit by the microwave, one side of it's motors stopped/malfunctioned, which lead to asymmetric thrust, causing the drone to flip and fall. But the drone itself seemed still functional after the fall.

Not sure how much damage Epirus’ Leonidas could cause. My opinion is, if you want to anti-drone, you need to kill it fast, faraway and complete. If the vehicle is not agile enough, the drones will just go behind you. And if a drone can total a tank with ease, that armored carrier vehicle will not survive much hits.

Generally, if a motor desyncs, you need to reboot the ESC. It's very hard for the drone to take off again, though, as stuff on the ground tends to tangle up in the motors.

Actually, if you can capture the enemies' drones intact and reprogram them, the enemy is fucked.

The starting cost for a drone show is around $20k USD, so it wouldn't be hard to fake what they are doing. It's hard to say if this a functioning system that can take down drone swarms, or someone is testing the market for a system that can.

That seems a lot more complicated than simply using cheap unshielded drones against an ineffective weapon, but I guess it's possible

They’re selling defence equipment to countries, it wouldn’t help their cause if this is just smoke and mirrors. It either works or it doesn’t.

Hasn't stopped Boeing

I’m intrigued. Elaborate?

If you read the entire article, you’ll find a mention of an audience member pointing at a drone. Remarkably, the device/weapon was able to precisely bring that drone down without affecting any of the nearby drones. Clearly, they have something working for them. I can only imagine that it would be significantly more challenging than simply throwing a very wide EMP. Controlling an EMP is the seemingly impossible task, and they managed to succeed.

To be fair, they'd be able to do that even more easily with a drone show (ie remotely controlled drones).

This is not EMP.

It is just a high-power microwave transmitter, made with gallium nitride field-effect transistors.

Like any microwave transmitter, it can use a directional antenna. If the antenna is big enough, it can have a narrow enough transmitted microwave beacon to intercept only a single drone.

The GaN FETs enable a higher transmitter power at whatever high frequency they are using. At lower frequencies, a 70-kW power was already easily achievable in the past. The higher frequency allows a precise aiming of the microwave beacon with an antenna of reasonable size.

I believe they're using a phased array grid of emitters to electronically steer the microwave, not just a normal directional antenna. This means the antenna doesn't need to physically move to change what is pointing at. (within some bounds)

Really. A British fraudster managed to sell $20 golf ball finders as bomb detectors for thousands of dollars each to various militarys. He got away with it for quite a while.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29459896

This article is sparse on details.

How much energy, how long is the pulse, how close were the drones?

Regardless I think the primary challenge with these systems will be energy on site and a surge of it during waves of attacks. Charged up capacitors can only handle so many waves.

I was wondering the same thing, but haven't found much. Sounds like it's only ever been a mobile installation - on a trailer, stryker, and a ship. Except for the ship, that probably means a relatively limited power supply. And its limited range probably means that stationary installations don't make much sense.

Sure seems like NATO would love to get a hold of some of these.

Potentially collateral damage too. You zapped some drones 100 yards away, but what about that airplane a couple miles out?

> what about that airplane a couple miles out?

Are these Masars? If not, square cubed to the rescue.

Lasers and masers are not inherently collimated or straight lines. The only thing specific to lasers/masers is that all the light is the same wavelength. Beam, parabolic and phased antennas are all very capable of making much tighter beams than your average laser.

In fact at the limits of performance lasers (and particularly masers) are quite bad at generating straight beams, because they are quite small sources of light and divergence is inversely proportional to the width of the emitter. It is a misconception that they are low-etendue.

Lasers are coherent emitters, which means that they behave like a perfect point source and the beam forming is limited only by diffraction. The collimation is limited only by the lens diameter and quality.

I assumed they would be masers or at least something with high directional gain. Otherwise your zapping a bunch of other stuff. Someone else said it's only a 2km range.

Cruising altitude is ~40k feet or 12 km and the range of the weapon is 2km. The system only works because of all the exposed wiring on quadcopters; everything in a plane is enclosed in a highly conductive aluminum shell and is very well protected. The windows are large enough to let in microwaves, but not very well. Some antennas might be in danger but in general planes are built to survive lighting. It would be a real freak accident for something to break.

I'd be more concerned about small planes or other drones. But if a little shielding fixes it, then this will quickly be obsolete as it's trivial to dd shielding if you're a malicious actor.

And also - what about the payload that drone was delivering, aimed at the target and doing 150kmh or more when your microwaves zapped it and killed off all the electronics. It'll only take it 2 unpowered/unguided seconds to cover that last 100m, so it'll have dropped 20m on a ballistic trajectory. It won't have hit your tank right in the crew hatch, but it's still delivered its explosive way too close for comfort. Perhaps not a problem if the target is an armored vehicle, but it'll probably still set your ammunition store or fuel dump on fire.

> How much energy, how long is the pulse, how close were the drones?

1 millisecond pulses and 70 kW continuous usage[1] which is roughly equivalent to the AN/TPQ-53[2]. 2 km range.

> Regardless I think the primary challenge with these systems will be energy on site and a surge of it during waves of attacks. Charged up capacitors can only handle so many waves.

That is not how this kind of thing works. Capacitors are a terrible energy source. Their voltage drops off exponentially as they discharge and almost all electronic are very particular about the voltage they require. A railgun wants current and does not care about voltage. Radio transmitters care a lot about voltage.

Regardless, a 70 kW generator fits on a small trailer. Smaller than the weapon itself. It will run for days on a good sized tank of diesel.

[1] https://www.twz.com/land/army-puts-50m-bet-on-next-gen-leoni...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/TPQ-53_Quick_Reaction_Capab...

> Capacitors are a terrible energy source.

They're a pretty good way of storing energy in a way you can deliver it _really really_ fast. Sure, not in a way your carefully designed electronic circuits can make use of it, but if you need a really really big ZAP! capacitors are a reasonable option. After all, clouds and dirt are not the most efficient choice for capacitor plates, and air is not an ideal dielectric, but lightning goes ZAP! quite satisfyingly.

As I posted elsewhere here,you might enjoy Lightning On Demand's Lorentz Cannon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lix-vr_AF38

> Regardless, a 70 kW generator fits on a small trailer. Smaller than the weapon itself. It will run for days on a good sized tank of diesel.

At full load and a thermodynamic efficiency of about ~31% a 70kW generator is about 300hp mechanical. Those fit on a trailer. Not a "small" trailer. A dual axle type trailer with ~1.3 tons of capacity (Cummings C70D2RE.) Military generators tend to be heavier than commercial units. It will burn about ~175 gal/day of diesel, so yes a "good sized" tank about: about ~3.2 55 gal drums every day.

Now, they're imagining "625 element" systems for adequate coverage of a high value site, like an air base. About 2000 bbl/day. That's a little more than 10 large tanker trucks of fuel.

Logistically non-trivial. The Russian's have learned that large fuel trucks are short-lived in drone-dense environments.

Of course, that all for 100% 24/7 operation. I suspect that any real system will quickly become adept at running far less than 100%.

Epirus makes some good stuff from what I hear. Its use cases are limited though. Its another exquisite system. This means it will be high cost and low volume.

Sure bases and high value assets will have great protection. They already do. Stinger missiles (1 example) have been able to hit quads since the day quads took to the air. The cost asymmetry (150k+ vs 1k) means they are rarely used so you have to let most drone threats go.

The opening days of the Ukraine war showed that all you need to do to stop an army is tale out its undefended logistics tail. Fuel trucks, water, ammo, food, etc. These need to be protected also, and exquisite system like Epirus wont be part of these convoys.

Another take away from Ukraine is the lay-in-wait tactic where drones sit near the road hidden and wait for you to come by. The Epirus system (and most of the other cUAS systems) are not able to help. You are probably over a slight hill, hidden by trees, or too close to the danger zone where a bigger system would also destroy you.

Basically everything and everyone has to have a means of engaging these threats. It must be cheap (cost per kill including the initial system purchase), easy to use, and widely available.

There was a nice video, I've seen at some point where a "DJI Phantom 3 drone gets hit with an electrical impulse of 1.4MV - basically, a lightning strike."

And at the end, they were able to protect the drone, with a tiny bit of shielding...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3iJjrQmEho

> they were able to protect the drone, with a tiny bit of shielding

That's not what happened in the video! Per the comments:

"I was really hoping the conductive tape lightning rod was going to work, but no."

A gutted microwave oven and a satellite tv dish have been demonstrated to disable DJI drones at ranges exceeding 500m - either having them fall out of he sky or trigger return to home. That's broadband jamming on the 2.4GHz radio frequencies though, not sending enough energy to screw with electronic (apart from the sensitive radio receiver frontends).

(This was original DJI Phantom era, so maybe 10 years or so back. I'm not aware of results of similar testing against newer DJI gear, but I doubt it'd be much different, at least for consumer DJI stuff.)

I wonder if this will work with fibre-optic drones.

Anything with a power supply and a radio receiver has some susceptibility.

No radio on fiber drones, but anything electronic is effected. Truly effective shielding gets heavy, and cuts the payload and range significantly.

They actually do still have a radio, it's just not critical to the mission.

yes because it attacks the coils in the motors.

Probably would work once or twice, and then some kid will notice copper foil tape makes great Faraday shields. Hams already do this cage technique all the time to help lower the noise floor on cheap equipment.

Probably better off with #12 or #9 bird shot shells, or a cool pet falcon named Xavier. =3

Makes a big assumption that they're synchronously remote controlled over RF.

Fiber lasers can direct 10's-100's of kW of power almost continuously and with a range of several km with proper optics:

https://youtu.be/BkbVeA4Lejc

https://youtu.be/lFMvesTUjAA

https://youtu.be/eFiDYFnlp7s

A faraday foil layer will save electronics and shielded cable runs will block air induced pulses. Wired motor coils will tolerate, and fiber optic are immune. You can even control via IR data using a bidirectional LED with a faraday copper window screen protecting the electronics. The police use a microwave car stopper that uses pulsed EMI. Just new armor = new chinks = the race continues.

They make conductive spray paint for this sort of thing [1], so it can be applied to the inside cover of electronics. Usual use is targeted application for EMI suppression.

You'll sometimes find a squirt this on the inside of consumer electronics, for a quick radiated emissions compliance fix.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/stores/MGChemicals/page/0ADAC495-496D...

This feels like a weird counterpart to the can of plasti-dip spray in my garage.

Combine those with the more-common juxtaposition of WD-40 versus duct-tape, and one can probably summon something eldritch.

> You can even control via IR data using

You can... once.

But that IR transmitter will be easily detected and destroyed.

> "Epirus has improved on previous iterations by using Gallium Nitride (GaN) semiconductors to generate microwaves instead of fragile, power-hungry magnetron vacuum tubes"

Presumably this technology could also be used to make more efficient and powerful microwave ovens. Have any consumer appliance makers started using GaN semiconductors in their microwaves?

Probably not enough margin in microwaves ovens to justify putting GaN stuff in it yet. Maybe for premium products. Bigger volume! Silent operation! More efficient!

Would it be silent? A lot of the noise sounds like transformer noise which you would still get

It would be operating off rectified DC (like an induction hob) or using a SMPS operating at ultrasonic frequencies to deliver a lower DC voltage, you wouldn't get the 50Hz buzz even if there was a transformer.

It's in development: https://www.digikey.com/Site/Global/Layouts/DownloadPdf.ashx...

Varying the phase between multiple antennae can enable the field distribution inside the oven to be intelligently controlled to achieve homogeneous cooking results. Furthermore, by modifying the frequency and phase to match the food in the oven, very high RF energy delivery efficiency can be attained – above 90% even for small loads.

It has been demonstrated how a steak can be cooked on the same plate as ice cream without it melting, showing the precision of the directed RF energy. In practice, one gets outstanding control over internal meat temperature, with a tight tolerance of just one degree Celsius. Therefore, food can be cooked automatically, and one simply specifies the steak “doneness” level, for example, medium rare; and the oven will measure the food’s properties and calculate the required settings. Without having to manually enter the power levels, cooking is more predictable, and the interface more user-friendly

A consumer version is e.g. the Miele Dialog oven, costing $10K

It's a cool demo but I'm pretty sure if this become widely deployed, enemies would just start to wrap drones in copper tape or something to make this far less effective.

Would this be safe for e.g. birds?

I'm pretty sure people with hostile drones inbound on a battlefield aren't too worried about whether it's safe for birds.

I'm not even sure that the people responsible for keeping airports safe and open care too much either. But no doubt there'll be pushback ranging from genuinely concerned anuimal rights people, through to completely unhinged conspiracy theorists. who make it difficult to build/test/deploy this sort of thing in civilian contexts.

"people with hostile drones inbound"

People under treat will justify all sorts of things. It's up to everyone else to to balance whether their response is reasonable.

The microwaved birds should be completely safe to eat

Why do I feel like this is going to be defeated by some household item that costs $2

I'm wondering if this would work for cars in car chases, maybe too much shielding...

Maybe off topic, but I was wondering if the EM countermeasures harm the bird life.

I wonder if someone will embed microwave sinks to recharge batteries

This looks like a repurposed AESA radar. What took them so long then?

Laughable garbage. Notice the article fails to state at what range the system engaged the drones or the size of the system itself. I suspect this is a container sized system that costs tens of millions of dollars, and has an engagement range of maybe a couple miles against non-hardened targets.

Drone swarms also only exist as a flight of fancy not a real threat. We know how drones are actually utilized, and the 'swarm' you are talking about constists of a dozen drones spread out maybe over 10 square miles.

If you're so confident in your system, then send it to Ukraine (or considering the current admin, Russia might be more your speed).

I wish the day would come when Americans would look at R&D as a valuable and meaningful activity in of itself, not as some sort of long con designed to allow investors and VCs to magic money out of nowhere.

Claims show it disabling many small, largely unhardened drones; they do not prove it can defeat a properly shielded electronics bay.

Won't this be pretty easy to defend against with some shielding and optocouplers? Doubly so for fiber optic drones.

Send it to Denmark, please.

What happened to the thesis of yesteryears of Nuclear Deterrence? At these point, I feel like countries actually want wars to continue.

It doesn't work if you don't have nuclear weapons.

Russia has nukes and it doesn't use them. Why is it behaving responsibly in this regard? Is Russia thoughtful that Ukraine doesn't have nukes so it shouldn't use them. It seems that both sides want the war to continue.

As an armchair Internet commentator, my theory is that the deliberately provoked proxy war is designed to drain Russian resources, gauge their capabilities and potentially destabilize without direct engagement. I would agree that neither side is interested in stopping the war at this stage.

There could be multiple reasons. You can't hurt russia too much because they have the nukes. Russia can't lose and Ukraine can't win. The deterrence if it existed should have worked for Russia because America showed to the world that wars can be stopped prematurely and on your terms. This is a moral way to test more weapons on both sides. This war will let all parties know who stands where. This is more like bickering between superpowers and to establish a new equilibrium.

As an armchair internet commentator it's so weird how you managed to cook up verbatim wordage to Russian propaganda and chose to state the origin of the conflict as if a sovereign people being invaded deserved it.

Please stop presuming malicious intent. If you want to have a discussion, try starting by assuming good faith. If you do not wish to have a discussion, well...

>...state the origin of the conflict as if a sovereign people being invaded deserved it.

I've done noting of the sort. The origins of the conflict are more complex than your framing allows. Furthermore, as we attempt to describe those origins, it would be helpful if you didn't confuse that description of events with a prescription or endorsement of specific actors.

If we are unable to describe something coherently, we are unable to reason or have a reasonable discussion around it. Reasonable people should be able to hold distinct concepts in their mind simultaneously, even if they are seemingly contradictory from a surface level. As an example, we can and should be able to describe the events, speculate as to the underlying incentives of various parties and simultaneously hold moral principles which reject the use of violence.

Propaganda can sometimes mislead by conflating these things. This prevents reasonable discussion.

Again, just super weird to say "the deliberately provoked proxy war" and not "the Russian invasion of Ukraine".

Just weirdly weirdly exactly the same themes and even the same words as the actual declaration of war by the aggressor nation - Russia[1].

But you know. No agency whatsoever or something. Just straight up impossible for the 2nd largest nuclear power on the planet not to invade a neighboring sovereign state in a war of conquest.

[1] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/full-text-putin-s-declar...

If the extent of your reasoning ends with hasty generalizations (specifically, perceived parallels with Russian propaganda), many things will seem super weird. Simplistic categorization is a poor way to model the world. In a productive discussion, further inquiry allows us to narrow in on the dispute. Typically this process clarifies the details in question.

Professor John Mearsheimer of the realist school has some hour long lectures on the topic of Ukraine. Some even precede the war itself. Obviously as a disclaimer, I do not agree with everything he has to say. You can pick and choose which sources or interviewers better appeal to your partisan biases. I won't choose for you, as you might dismiss it based on the source. That said, he's spoken with everyone from Amy Goodman on "Democracy Now!" to the Hoover Institution.

You might consider how your framing of super weird Russian propaganda applies to his lectures and interviews.

Mearsheimer is quite literally Russian propaganda. See the title pages of his books. The books are paid by "the Valdai Discussion Club", a propaganda arm of the Russian government.

Guilt by association is a poor substitute for an argument. The partisan takes on this site have eclipsed actual discussion. Mearshiemer has also appeared with a variety of think tanks, because he is widely respected. It is easy to cherry pick one. It should be obvious how this line of reasoning is flawed, especially in the context of non-prescriptive realism.

Let's go back to the poster's super weird assertion. By definition, a provocation is something which results in a response. Observing that it is a provocation isn't the same as endorsing the response. Knee jerk categorization doesn't remove this discernment. Instead it misleads by glossing over the details. I would regard that to be a byproduct of propaganda.

I have no horse in this race but if you want a news source or opinion on the pro-Russia side of the things and steelmanning the russian side, this channel is good.

https://www.youtube.com/@Sebastian_Sas

If Russia nukes Ukraine (or anyone else) NATO would declare war on Russia, that's the only reason Russia is not using them

The longer this war goes on the more skeptical I am that NATO wouldn't just wag a finger angrily and then impose more sanctions.

I presume they evaluated the global response to dropping nukes and decided it's not worth it.

A nuclear first strike is a red line for pretty much every major country. Russia would likely face extremely severe sanctions even from their remaining trading partners.

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