This Ain’t No Duck Hunt: New Weapons in Drone Defense

The arms race between drones and people on the ground looks to be a never-ending struggle. Fortunately (at least for those on the ground), I came across two new and interesting firearm-based solutions for drone defense. While they’re not the 12-gauge that many gun people on the internet seem to favor, they aren’t far off.

The closest answer to grandpa’s 12-gauge comes from Ukraine where drones equipped with two simple pipe shotguns have taken to the skies. In the video below, you can see footage from a Ukrainian anti-drone drone. Instead of dropping nets or carrying a stick into the skies as we’ve seen before, these new models go more kinetic, taking the idea behind duck hunting to new heights . . .

While this is a good solution for one-0n-one, drone-on-drone warfare, the future of drones isn’t going to be so limited in number. Instead of just sending one or two drones, we can increasingly expect to see near-peer adversaries send swarms of hundreds of drones up. No matter how many shotguns you have, there comes a point where the ability to down flying targets with buckshot gets overwhelmed.

An often-suggested solution to this problem is to move away from firearms completely. As we all know, ammo is expensive and the money problem only gets worse as you move from bullets to artillery shells, rockets, and missiles. Systems like Israel’s Iron Dome are great, but they spend a lot of money to down less expensive rockets and drones that the country’s many enemies send their way.

Lasers, on the other hand, only require a few cents worth of electricity and don’t require reloading. Unfortunately, that won’t work for drone swarms the way it does for rockets and missiles. For vehicle-mounted use, there just isn’t enough battery power available and lasers take a few seconds of sustained contact to fry each target.

However, by mixing simple firearms technology with modern computer and radar technology, it’s possible to get up to speed without needing several Teslas worth of batteries on board . . .

Just because humans with shotguns can’t keep up with thousands of targets doesn’t mean a computer paired with a cannon firing 30mm explosive shells can’t be very effective. Using 3D radar, computer vision, and the same cannon you’d find on an attack helicopter, a system that can reliably down drone swarms can fit in the back of a pickup truck and many other tactical vehicles.

The system fires three proximity explosive rounds per second, so even if it can’t score a direct hit, it can land enough spicy metallic pepper close enough to take a drone out of the sky. A 300-drone swarm can be downed in under two minutes by just one of these guns. That may sound like forever, but when you consider that it can start picking them off while they’re over a mile away, that can make a real difference in a fight.

Multiple guns can be tied together and work in concert to down more drones faster, and advanced future laser systems should be able to work together with cannon-based solutions for maximum anti-drone effect.

This may, of course, eventually lead to even more drones being sent in more sophisticated swarms, but larger swarms are more expensive, making that form of attack becomes less cost effective. Given that the low cost is one of the main draws to small drone warfare, further breakthroughs will be needed to keep swarms effective in the long run. In other words, this is and will be an ongoing battle on both offense and defense.