> For a trillion dollars, you can overwhelm enemy air defenses with cheap, primitive drones in a saturation attack.
For a few hundred dollars I can jam your communications channel(s) to the drones. Asymmetric warfare sucks.
For a few hundred dollars I can jam your communications channel(s) to the drones. Asymmetric warfare sucks.
The problem is that once we're talking tens of millions of dollars and up -- no, you can't.
We're talking the swarm is likely operating in a shared point-to-point link mode, either using highly directional antennas that are essentially deaf to below, optical links, or (more likely) a mixture of both modes.
At 10,000 drones, they likely can form a stable mesh network over the city covering a wide enough area at a few miles in the sky that you're talking about having to run power plants or detonate magnets with high explosives to generate the kind of wattage needed to shout in to the directional communications gear.
Jamming a few hobbyist drones is nothing like jamming thousands of military grade drones, and the techniques you think will stop their communications aren't all that effective.
However, scanning the area under your bot swarm of amateur attempts to jam the network is probably a great way to target RF engineers in preparation for a ground invasion, and minimize their ability to improvise communications gear once the main communications networks are knocked out.
tl;dr: Taking out a $10,000,000+ swarm of military grade weapons isn't the same as disabling a few hobbyist trinkets, and may get you seriously hurt in the process.
Sure. If you're willing to build a new GPS system, because that's decently jammable for cheap.
Also are you proposing that all the drones will be individually piloted on missions as they are now? If so, I don't strictly have to jam the drones on the battlefield, I can just jam your satellite uplink or physically attack your operations centers. Add the cost of a plane ticket.
So far, we haven't used these weapons against any military that could be considered our peers. I wouldn't be so confident in our operational deployments without anything to base it on.
There are reasons why civilians might be reluctant to simply trust the confident assurances of random anonymous defense contractors.
Which is absolutely your prerogative, and I don't blame you. You make some very good points. I would hope you might also be able to see my perspective: reading "facts" that are incorrect and not being able to add real value to the conversation. Sure, I chose my job, and the frustration comes with the territory.
That's great, but you did not actually address the parent's point that GPS is jammable. Perhaps you are thinking of other methods of navigation that are accurate enough for long-term flying?
Enlighten us, please, rather than responding to people with your job description. Otherwise, you're not really adding anything to the conversation.
Also, jamming is far harder than you might think; anything you use becomes a really easy target.
Edit: After some thought, as long as your internal clock is accurate and you can keep an accurate orientation as to what's 'up', the stars should be able to give you arbitrary lat/long position. Weather + barometer + location + temperate gives you fairly accurate altitude.
Once you start doing the math on "I'm going to keep 1,000+ nodes in a mesh network from operating a phased array capable of keeping a lock on the signal from a constellation of satellites", things like jamming become extremely non-trivial, and only operate over relatively short timeframes or with hugely vulnerable base stations.
Most people are thinking about the capabilities of a single drone -- that's really not the way to think about drone swarms. In much the way that it doesn't make sense to talk about the capabilities of cloud services like AWS in terms of the limitations of single computers or switches of hardware, but in terms of the ability of the system as a whole to emulate high(er) performance equipment.
Similarly, once we talk about real drone swarms acting as a locally networked, single functional unit, presenting itself as single emulated devices or functions that the drones carry out, the whole game changes from what's effective techniques against single, standalone drones.
So to recap, drone swarm's GPS downlink is probably a phased array or something like that distributed over the mesh network of drones (using the local radio gear as localized timing and positioning information between mesh nodes), and nowhere near as easy to jam as it is for a standalone drone (at least, for approximate location; then using cameras and local sensors for say, fine bomb placement).
tl;dr: The power of friendship works for drones too, not just comic book heroes.
I expect that military GPS signals do have some crypto to help prevent spoofing, but that doesn't do any good when you can't hear the signal over the enemy's noise.
Pentagon procurement is a shitshow, but the DoD has many brilliant radio, radar, and signals guys working for them directly, or indirectly.
What then?
Here's something for you to puzzle over:
Your missile has up-to-date topographical maps of an area, and as-up-to-date-as-possible maps of all known anti-missile sites in the area. Thing is that you're not going to know about all of the anti-missile sites: many sites are portable (thus they move around), and some remain offline and nearly impossible to detect until enemy command determines that that site can kill a missile.
If your missile doesn't have commlinks, how do you tell it to avoid anti-missile sites discovered after the missile was launched?
Additionally, a careful reading of the comment that you replied to will reveal that the Tomahawk has -since the 1990's- been a fully autonomous missile fully capable of flying a pre-determined path to a target. Indeed, that is the least interesting part of the missile's capabilities. In short, we've had "self aware" warhead-tipped "drones" since at least the 1990's.
I also assume that OP was refering to drones that could go through current missile defence systems because they can't be easily identified, neither visually nor with radar.
Yes, we (or at least you guys in the US) had them in the form of expensive, capable systems, but not at a smaller, cheaper or whatnot scale.
Also, can't Tomahawk launches not be detected by a some signatures they emit? I assume that modern mil space radar systems are able to do that.
The same could be said for manned fighters. Granted, you still have a pilot who's there and capable of making decisions independently of communications.
But, I imagine if you threw up enough interference to screw with a drone, you'd probably make some very pretty lights happen on an F-35's radar.
I'm surprised weaponized drones aren't displacing cheap rockets.