I read the article but couldn't find any mention of how a radar detects drones? A drone is much smaller than an aircraft, can be confused with birds and can have 0 communication with a command & control station due to AI. So how can anything detect it?
Plus, even if you detect it, it's coming towards you at a speed of 100+ kmph with the intent to crash into you and detonate the payload. Any missile you use is way too expensive relative to the price of the drone. So what to do?
I say this bec the drone footage coming out of Ukraine is shocking. I saw a video of a drone just following a soldier for 30 seconds while the soldier was trying to run away from it. The drone crashed into the soldier and exploded. That is absolutely black-mirror dystopian stuff.
> Any missile you use is way too expensive relative to the price of the drone.
My understanding is that you use a laser, though I don't see why even regular AA guns wouldn't work, especially if it is trying to crash on you, meaning it needs to get very close.
> Plus, even if you detect it, it's coming towards you at a speed of 100+ kmph with the intent to crash into you and detonate the payload.
That will at least help you distinguish it from a bird :) Plus, I suspect that in any military conflict, you'll be more than happy to eat the cost of frying a few birds if it means you stopped the enemy's drones.
> Any missile you use is way too expensive relative to the price of the drone
Western missiles have been designed for generations assuming they're aimed at something expensive you want to break, or to break something next to something sensitive you'd rather not. We have the technology to create swarms of well-enough aimed small rockets. There simply wasn't a niche until now.
This has a range of 400+km (100kmph = 4 hours to respond).
It's purpose to maintain an accurate picture of the sky, tracking many objects at the same time at different altitudes. The radar itself is just part of the picture - its data is integrated with command and control, where decisions are made about the picture coming in, and the data is blended with other sources to get a more accurate picture (not sure if bird or drone? check the video feed data, or a number of other sources).
The unit itself looks at the behavior of the object (speed, acceleration, routes, elevation, radar profile) to determine the likely class of the object (birds don't fly like drones nor do they have the same radar profile).
As far as mitigating threats, command and control again makes those decisions. It depends on the context of the fight and the resources available. In the hypothetical situation you think a kamikaze drone is headed your direction, the radars are mobile - one option is to simply move. You may know (or have a good guess) as to the specific threat - how it is controlled. You might take out drone communications with EW. You might misguide a precision munition by spoofing GLOSNAS/GPS so that it drifts and misses its target. If it is flying at a low elevation, you might be able to take it out with heavy machine gun fire. You might decide to let it strike, due to cost-benefit ratio.
It really gets down to specifics: What's the air asset? What the threat? What's the mission? What's the battle context? What are the resources?
Regarding a drone having zero command & control due to AI - most of the "AI" in drones is simple straight line flying for a couple hundred meters (so called "terminal flight guidance"). This is because enemy electronic warfare cover may jam communications channels for the drone as it approaches closer to a target. As cool as it sounds to have fully autonomous drones making complex decisions, piloting around obstacles in all weather conditions in 3D space, tracking moving targets, etc - this isn't the threat from drones right now.
1) Small drones can be detected. I'm not gonna go into the specifics, but Orlan sized drones with 3m wingspan can be detected from hundreds of km. Smaller sized commercial drones, which are 1/10th of that size, can also be detected pretty well.
2) No mater how small these drones are, they are dependent on some nav and coms system. Even autonomous "fire-and-forget" drones need a somewhat robust GPS link for navigation. For operated drones, any telemetry can and will be linked to.
But, ok, let's assume some futuristic drone that has a powerful AI system to do all its navigation via onboard sensors, which do not transmit or receive any information. How could such a drone get past a radar system? By either being too small for the radar to detect, fly too low for the radar to detect, or have some geometry that voids detection. Or the radar gets jammed, while the drone tries to get past it.
3) Drones have features which can be detected by radar. Motors, for example, would be one of those.
4) Radars are rarely the only sensors used. You have a whole array of different sensors which can be used to pickup stuff. Even with the radars themselves, you could have one radar for detection / target acquisition, and another radar for precise imaging.
There's no free lunch, though. A very small drone would mean limited range and payload, which in turn means you'll either have to deploy it close to the enemy, or via some larger craft.
Flying a drone too close to ground ads tons of interference to the drone, not to mention detection by things like acoustic sensors, humans, cameras, and what not.
But that also goes for the radars. Small targets can easily disappear in clutter, or dip under the elevation of the radar.
These videos are horrible. On one side I feel for that kid who probably didn't chose to be there and grappling with imminent death. On the other hand if my country was invaded I would probably watch those videos with popcorn. It's a weird war, mixing social media with a ww1 trench war, military hardware with a share button, you get to watch live the horror of the trenches from under your duvet.
The other thing is those drones are mostly made of plastic, have no hot exhaust. Every time Ukraine is glad they shot a $50k drone with a $1m patriot missile I wonder where this war can possibly go.
> Security is tight: An officer checks phones and pictures taken by visitors before they leave to make sure no industrial secrets are taken out of the facility.
What a joke. What if have cloud backup? This level of half-assed checking gives me great doubt about their competency.
The only way to prevent leakage is to have people leave their stuff at the entrance and go through a metal detector.
The problem isn't detecting small objects, it's that at this scale, there's a ton of noise. Distinguishing between noise, foliage, birds, and a tiny FPV drone, is really finding a needle in a haystack. Radar systems have been simply ignoring that level of noise at low altitude, sticking to fast moving small objects (artillery shells, rockets) or generally bigger objects (planes).
What if you cover the drone with non-reflective material? Or does it care about the reflective nature of the core of the object rather than just the surface?
There must be many ways to come at the problem of spotting drones including sound, visual, radio.
Presumably it's just a matter of time once the boffins apply themselves to the task before drones are effectively defended against?
Maybe this is a naive outlook. I can image drones sitting 300 feet above a tank dropping a bomb on it - hard to see or stop that. Or maybe drones that switch off all communication and glide in without radio communication once they spot their target.
Regardless, you can be sure there's absolutely massive money being spent on drone defence right now by governments around the world.
The US has had this capability for quite a while with the LCMR (AN/TPQ 48/49/50), which has been produced in large quantities (1k+, per mfg) and at least a few were in Ukraine.
> Since the war in Ukraine started, the French government has urged companies to produce more weapons, faster and cheaper.
> However, the reality is complicated.
> "It's an ongoing process. Up until now, we were producing around 10 radars a year, now the target is over 20 a year,” Descourvieres said.
If there was an actual war on, and a nation was taking both combat and operational losses - then 10 or 20 per year hardly amounts to squat.
It seems hard to imagine that this is the country which constructed the Maginot Line - in a decade, mostly during a grim economic depression, when their entire nation's population was only a bit over 40M.
Few reasons, one of them is that the Maginot line was built during a time where France was an industrial powerhouse. This has not been the case in a long time.
The other point, is that you are comparing a public infrastructure project with a private company.
Said private company behaves like one and does not want to take unnecessary risks by recruiting and training too much staff and later not having enough orders to keep them on the payroll.
If France were to be at war with a nation knocking on our borders, our policy nowadays is to fire a nuclear-tipped ASMPA missile as a warning shot. We do not rely on our conventional forces or anyone else to safeguard our sovereignty should it escalate to that.
Our army and arms industry have suffered heavy cuts for thirty years after the end of the Cold War, prioritizing quality over quantity, but we've kept what we call a modèle d'armée complet, or an army with a complete set of capabilities, alongside the arms industry to sustain it. Said arms industry after spending decades surviving on frugal orders is now in the process of scaling up production substantially. It takes time, but we've already tripled production of Caesar self-propelled artillery with another doubling in sight for example.
If push comes to shove, we might take some time to wake up from our slumber, but we're French. Picking a fight with the Gallic rooster is usually a bad decision.
> If there was an actual war on, and a nation was taking both combat and operational losses - then 10 or 20 per year hardly amounts to squat.
That is correct. But you want to ramp up production without too much over-investment. It is not certain, at the moment, that this conflict will devolve to a full-blown world war. So if you invest in a factory to produce 1000 radars a year, what good is it if the conflict putters out?
There is zero solidarity on a European level for common investments in armament, with most countries lining up for US-made equipment instead of investing in ramping-up their own production. So that also means that the financial burden of ramping-up arms production is also not shared.
It's getting hard to believe anything in this world anymore. A million shells fired by the Germans in Verdun in a mere 8 hours and now the entirety of Europe can't make that number in a year.
Pouring cement will always be easier/cheaper than maintaining an ever increasingly expensive army...
Imagine the amount of wasted resources and man hours it would have required to keep France world war ready since 1945
If there is an actual threat the response will be nuclear, that's the whole point of having nuclear submarines deployed 24/7. For regular military operations we have quite good intel services and projection forces
Yes, before this war I never realised that our (western) military production is a joke. I am very disturbed that we cannot outproduce Russia despite having 20x their military budget.
People who say that the West could produce more if it was really pressed - well so could Russia, people are still driving BMWs and having parties, they have not mobilised the way the British have during WW2. I think it's dangerous to believe that we could magic capabilities out of thin air when it really counts.
The way we do contracts is a clownshow - UK has ordered more NLAWS and they will take two years to deliver.
Meanwhile in the Vietnam war, USA lost 10,000 combat aircraft, more than currently exist in all of western world combined. I cannot explain this in any way other than the system being rife with waste and abuse.
Not unlike with vaccines, massive production ramp ups are possible once the suppliers know that they aren't carrying any significant risk of losing a lot of money for overbuilding capacity.
As some of us learned in the pandemic, increases in production capacity that are not going to be long term will get your company hobbled, if not downright bankrupted if you overproduce. See what happened to anyone that assumed the demand for exercise equipment for the home was going to be long lived.
When looking at this kind of problems, it's always either regulation or incentives.. and here it isn't regulation, so it's all incentives.
The Maginot line in France has become synonymous with a useless measure of defence providing a false sense of security though.
It's a combination of several things.
First military hardware is a lot more expensive. A ww2 tank was a big piece of iron with a diesel engine in it, a modern tank has a ton more tech, all produced in small series (imagine the cost of the iphone if only 1000 were manufactured a year). That's even worst for planes. You can't line up an army on the scale of ww2 armies. And since the EU can't agree on single plane or tank design anyway, the volumes for each device are tiny and design/fixed costs hugely expensive to amortise.
Then you have socialist or quasi-socialist governments all over Europe, in France in particular, but even in the UK, slashing military budgets to launch big redistribution programs, along with building up big bureaucracies since the 80s. Government spending managed to go up as the share of military spending and other basic services (police, justice) went down. The problem with benefits is that people come to rely on them and then it becomes politically impossible to cut them back (same thing in the US), unless you have a Thatcher, but there is none on the horizon. So basically now these countries are stuck and have zero wriggle room even to face imminent danger.
That's the cost of free riding on US military spending for half a century. If an elected Trump walks away from both Ukraine and NATO, Putin will have free reign to bully the other missing pieces of his russian empire (moldavia, baltic states, even poland). And there will be little a country like France will be able to do with its small military samples. Its army was seized to bomb terrorist camps in Africa and nuke an invader. They have nothing in between.
When you are not at war, and your defence alliance is also not at war, and the only perception of war is from the most paranoid nation on the planet, who is also part of your alliance, then ramping up defence spending isn't about defence, it's about profit.
War is a racket. Nothing more. Maybe "Ar est une raquette" makes it sound sexier, I dunno.
Ideally you want to prepare for war _before_ the war actually starts.
The perception doesn't come from a paranoid nation, but the fact that a neighbor is actually at war and the invader keep telling that after that it will be your turn.
France is an ally of Ukraine and making sure Russia loses it's baseless imperialistic invasion of Ukraine is the EUs #1 foreign policy priority, because if it doesn't it might attack NATO/EU members.
Especially with Macron under which the national debt skyrocketed. We are supposed to find a lot of money really quickly but he always spends billions on outside issues without public consultation.
Heck, there's a promise for 3 new billions just this year! That's insane. All that money is going to waste in a war that isn't ours, and that is lost for Ukraine from day 1. Of course in the end of the day it will be citizens like me would have to pay for that through new and higher taxes. As if we weren't already in the top 2 in that matter... https://www.info.gouv.fr/actualite/france-ukraine-jusqua-3-m...
Well, I mean, China has probably already stolen it. Given the nature of espionage it's highly likely the U.S. has the details and can build it on their own.
AlexanderTheGr8|1 year ago
Plus, even if you detect it, it's coming towards you at a speed of 100+ kmph with the intent to crash into you and detonate the payload. Any missile you use is way too expensive relative to the price of the drone. So what to do?
I say this bec the drone footage coming out of Ukraine is shocking. I saw a video of a drone just following a soldier for 30 seconds while the soldier was trying to run away from it. The drone crashed into the soldier and exploded. That is absolutely black-mirror dystopian stuff.
lm28469|1 year ago
If they're already being produced they do work for their intended purpose, Thales doesn't fuck around
Adverblessly|1 year ago
My understanding is that you use a laser, though I don't see why even regular AA guns wouldn't work, especially if it is trying to crash on you, meaning it needs to get very close.
> Plus, even if you detect it, it's coming towards you at a speed of 100+ kmph with the intent to crash into you and detonate the payload.
That will at least help you distinguish it from a bird :) Plus, I suspect that in any military conflict, you'll be more than happy to eat the cost of frying a few birds if it means you stopped the enemy's drones.
JumpCrisscross|1 year ago
Western missiles have been designed for generations assuming they're aimed at something expensive you want to break, or to break something next to something sensitive you'd rather not. We have the technology to create swarms of well-enough aimed small rockets. There simply wasn't a niche until now.
opt-skept|1 year ago
It's purpose to maintain an accurate picture of the sky, tracking many objects at the same time at different altitudes. The radar itself is just part of the picture - its data is integrated with command and control, where decisions are made about the picture coming in, and the data is blended with other sources to get a more accurate picture (not sure if bird or drone? check the video feed data, or a number of other sources).
The unit itself looks at the behavior of the object (speed, acceleration, routes, elevation, radar profile) to determine the likely class of the object (birds don't fly like drones nor do they have the same radar profile).
As far as mitigating threats, command and control again makes those decisions. It depends on the context of the fight and the resources available. In the hypothetical situation you think a kamikaze drone is headed your direction, the radars are mobile - one option is to simply move. You may know (or have a good guess) as to the specific threat - how it is controlled. You might take out drone communications with EW. You might misguide a precision munition by spoofing GLOSNAS/GPS so that it drifts and misses its target. If it is flying at a low elevation, you might be able to take it out with heavy machine gun fire. You might decide to let it strike, due to cost-benefit ratio.
It really gets down to specifics: What's the air asset? What the threat? What's the mission? What's the battle context? What are the resources?
Regarding a drone having zero command & control due to AI - most of the "AI" in drones is simple straight line flying for a couple hundred meters (so called "terminal flight guidance"). This is because enemy electronic warfare cover may jam communications channels for the drone as it approaches closer to a target. As cool as it sounds to have fully autonomous drones making complex decisions, piloting around obstacles in all weather conditions in 3D space, tracking moving targets, etc - this isn't the threat from drones right now.
TrackerFF|1 year ago
2) No mater how small these drones are, they are dependent on some nav and coms system. Even autonomous "fire-and-forget" drones need a somewhat robust GPS link for navigation. For operated drones, any telemetry can and will be linked to.
But, ok, let's assume some futuristic drone that has a powerful AI system to do all its navigation via onboard sensors, which do not transmit or receive any information. How could such a drone get past a radar system? By either being too small for the radar to detect, fly too low for the radar to detect, or have some geometry that voids detection. Or the radar gets jammed, while the drone tries to get past it.
3) Drones have features which can be detected by radar. Motors, for example, would be one of those.
4) Radars are rarely the only sensors used. You have a whole array of different sensors which can be used to pickup stuff. Even with the radars themselves, you could have one radar for detection / target acquisition, and another radar for precise imaging.
There's no free lunch, though. A very small drone would mean limited range and payload, which in turn means you'll either have to deploy it close to the enemy, or via some larger craft.
Flying a drone too close to ground ads tons of interference to the drone, not to mention detection by things like acoustic sensors, humans, cameras, and what not.
But that also goes for the radars. Small targets can easily disappear in clutter, or dip under the elevation of the radar.
cm2187|1 year ago
The other thing is those drones are mostly made of plastic, have no hot exhaust. Every time Ukraine is glad they shot a $50k drone with a $1m patriot missile I wonder where this war can possibly go.
plussed_reader|1 year ago
Seems like you're asking them to give up the farm for some PR.
snypher|1 year ago
The article states they can determine the difference.
gumby|1 year ago
ed_mercer|1 year ago
What a joke. What if have cloud backup? This level of half-assed checking gives me great doubt about their competency.
The only way to prevent leakage is to have people leave their stuff at the entrance and go through a metal detector.
CatWChainsaw|1 year ago
fjfaase|1 year ago
I guess with modern electronics and DSP, a much smaller system must be able to detect drones with ease.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART-L
AYBABTME|1 year ago
AlexanderTheGr8|1 year ago
TheCleric|1 year ago
(Archived version: https://archive.is/xSz8x)
andrewstuart|1 year ago
Presumably it's just a matter of time once the boffins apply themselves to the task before drones are effectively defended against?
Maybe this is a naive outlook. I can image drones sitting 300 feet above a tank dropping a bomb on it - hard to see or stop that. Or maybe drones that switch off all communication and glide in without radio communication once they spot their target.
Regardless, you can be sure there's absolutely massive money being spent on drone defence right now by governments around the world.
ceejayoz|1 year ago
sand500|1 year ago
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-05/the-milit...
genmud|1 year ago
bell-cot|1 year ago
> However, the reality is complicated.
> "It's an ongoing process. Up until now, we were producing around 10 radars a year, now the target is over 20 a year,” Descourvieres said.
If there was an actual war on, and a nation was taking both combat and operational losses - then 10 or 20 per year hardly amounts to squat.
It seems hard to imagine that this is the country which constructed the Maginot Line - in a decade, mostly during a grim economic depression, when their entire nation's population was only a bit over 40M.
LunaSea|1 year ago
The other point, is that you are comparing a public infrastructure project with a private company.
Said private company behaves like one and does not want to take unnecessary risks by recruiting and training too much staff and later not having enough orders to keep them on the payroll.
boricj|1 year ago
Our army and arms industry have suffered heavy cuts for thirty years after the end of the Cold War, prioritizing quality over quantity, but we've kept what we call a modèle d'armée complet, or an army with a complete set of capabilities, alongside the arms industry to sustain it. Said arms industry after spending decades surviving on frugal orders is now in the process of scaling up production substantially. It takes time, but we've already tripled production of Caesar self-propelled artillery with another doubling in sight for example.
If push comes to shove, we might take some time to wake up from our slumber, but we're French. Picking a fight with the Gallic rooster is usually a bad decision.
fransje26|1 year ago
That is correct. But you want to ramp up production without too much over-investment. It is not certain, at the moment, that this conflict will devolve to a full-blown world war. So if you invest in a factory to produce 1000 radars a year, what good is it if the conflict putters out?
There is zero solidarity on a European level for common investments in armament, with most countries lining up for US-made equipment instead of investing in ramping-up their own production. So that also means that the financial burden of ramping-up arms production is also not shared.
Twirrim|1 year ago
These radar systems are many orders of magnitude more complicated than anything manufactured during WW2. It's not something easily scaled up.
ciscoriordan|1 year ago
stefan_|1 year ago
lm28469|1 year ago
Imagine the amount of wasted resources and man hours it would have required to keep France world war ready since 1945
If there is an actual threat the response will be nuclear, that's the whole point of having nuclear submarines deployed 24/7. For regular military operations we have quite good intel services and projection forces
ClumsyPilot|1 year ago
Yes, before this war I never realised that our (western) military production is a joke. I am very disturbed that we cannot outproduce Russia despite having 20x their military budget.
People who say that the West could produce more if it was really pressed - well so could Russia, people are still driving BMWs and having parties, they have not mobilised the way the British have during WW2. I think it's dangerous to believe that we could magic capabilities out of thin air when it really counts.
The way we do contracts is a clownshow - UK has ordered more NLAWS and they will take two years to deliver.
Meanwhile in the Vietnam war, USA lost 10,000 combat aircraft, more than currently exist in all of western world combined. I cannot explain this in any way other than the system being rife with waste and abuse.
hibikir|1 year ago
As some of us learned in the pandemic, increases in production capacity that are not going to be long term will get your company hobbled, if not downright bankrupted if you overproduce. See what happened to anyone that assumed the demand for exercise equipment for the home was going to be long lived.
When looking at this kind of problems, it's always either regulation or incentives.. and here it isn't regulation, so it's all incentives.
cm2187|1 year ago
It's a combination of several things.
First military hardware is a lot more expensive. A ww2 tank was a big piece of iron with a diesel engine in it, a modern tank has a ton more tech, all produced in small series (imagine the cost of the iphone if only 1000 were manufactured a year). That's even worst for planes. You can't line up an army on the scale of ww2 armies. And since the EU can't agree on single plane or tank design anyway, the volumes for each device are tiny and design/fixed costs hugely expensive to amortise.
Then you have socialist or quasi-socialist governments all over Europe, in France in particular, but even in the UK, slashing military budgets to launch big redistribution programs, along with building up big bureaucracies since the 80s. Government spending managed to go up as the share of military spending and other basic services (police, justice) went down. The problem with benefits is that people come to rely on them and then it becomes politically impossible to cut them back (same thing in the US), unless you have a Thatcher, but there is none on the horizon. So basically now these countries are stuck and have zero wriggle room even to face imminent danger.
That's the cost of free riding on US military spending for half a century. If an elected Trump walks away from both Ukraine and NATO, Putin will have free reign to bully the other missing pieces of his russian empire (moldavia, baltic states, even poland). And there will be little a country like France will be able to do with its small military samples. Its army was seized to bomb terrorist camps in Africa and nuke an invader. They have nothing in between.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
CrzyLngPwd|1 year ago
War is a racket. Nothing more. Maybe "Ar est une raquette" makes it sound sexier, I dunno.
https://www.heritage-history.com/site/hclass/secret_societie...
mrighele|1 year ago
The perception doesn't come from a paranoid nation, but the fact that a neighbor is actually at war and the invader keep telling that after that it will be your turn.
snowpid|1 year ago
rat87|1 year ago
gwervc|1 year ago
Heck, there's a promise for 3 new billions just this year! That's insane. All that money is going to waste in a war that isn't ours, and that is lost for Ukraine from day 1. Of course in the end of the day it will be citizens like me would have to pay for that through new and higher taxes. As if we weren't already in the top 2 in that matter... https://www.info.gouv.fr/actualite/france-ukraine-jusqua-3-m...
RcouF1uZ4gsC|1 year ago
Then came probably America most just war, fighting Japan and Hitler.
War may be a racket 99% of the time, but that 1% really matters.
adaml_623|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
cm2187|1 year ago
[deleted]
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
Ajay-p|1 year ago
Ajay-p|1 year ago