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.
I wouldn't be surprised if the drones they can detect are the larger fixed wings long range ones and not the FPV types.
FPV drones, aside from EW and directed energy weapons, don't have any counter at the tactical scale (although fielding shotguns might help). Any counter will need to be infantry section/platoon scale to be effective, or at a minimum company level weapon system. The range of the AA countermeasure for an FPV drone will be on the order of 500m-1.5km, so covering a 1000s of km long front line is near impossible with current systems.
Even if the entire front is utterly uneconomical to cover, local defenses like these can be used to provide an umbrella to more important points. Field hospitals, ammo dumps, headquarters, maintenance depots, etc.
I understand I am making assumptions bec of lack of information in the article.
Re shooting them down, if you can't shoot them down, whats the point of detecting them? And a drone being kamikaze only matters IF you can shoot them down. Because then it's a race between the drone rushing to kamikaze vs you shooting it down.
I will admit that I am just speculating here because I have a strange interest in militarized drones and little technical knowledge.
PS : Defending your position by saying that a company doesn't fuck around is not a very good argument.
You don't handle a dji dropping mortar rounds the same way you handle a fpv drone with a rpg warhead strapped under it nor the same way you handle a fleet of bayraktar pounding you from 5km above. I'm just saying you're mix and matching things which shouldn't be mixed and matched, the premise is wrong, no one is going to shoot down a $50 dji with a missile and no one will try to shoot a bayraktar with a shotgun. Just like you don't shoot a tank with a rifle or a moving plane with an unguided rocket launcher, you need the right tool for the right job
You can scramble them, shoot them with bullets, catch the drone/projectile with nets, shoot them with missiles, &c.
Again it's one of the main military company in France and it is partially owned by the state, I can assure you the fact that these things are being made is proof that they fulfil their role
> 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.
Admittedly I do not know much about drones, but the point was just that any telemetry that goes out of the drone, is relatively easy to pick up - and is how the military track drones.
At least today the vast, vast majority of combat drones are operated - and the video feed is one of the first things that get picked up from them.
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.
Patriots aren't the answer to Shaheds, but that's the wrong way to look at it. You don't compare the price of an APS charge with the price of an RPG. You don't spec your soldiers' ballistic plates by aiming to bring their cost down below the cost of the bullet you hope it'll stop. The plate is replaceable, the soldier's heart isn't, you sacrifice the thing you're happy to lose to save the thing you want to keep.
They're not happy they shot down $50k of drone, they're happy they shot down 50 kg of explosives that was going to strike a power station, it's not a hard trade to make.
A key difference from your examples is that the enemy doesn't have the capability to simply (and risk-free) send an arbitrary number of bullets at your soldiers' hearts or RPG rounds at your vehicles; the major "cost of delivery" is not the bullet/RPG but the trooper (and his risk) bringing the gun to get a chance to make a targeted shot with the bullet/RPG.
If bullets could leave the factory and magically fly straight at your soldiers, expensive single-use ballistic plates would not be a practical solution - you'd simply run out of them as you can't possibly produce as many of them as the enemy can make bullets.
>On the other hand if my country was invaded I would probably watch those videos with popcorn
We don't even know which country the soldier belonged to. And realistically, if your country was invaded, you are unlikely to be in a position to relax and eat popcorn but I get your sentiment.
I agree how weird this war is. The first war being live streamed. That increases the horror since watching videos of something happening is much worse than just reading about it. And most people don't read but will intently watch a drone following a soldier and exploding.
> Every time Ukraine is glad they shot a $50k drone with a $1m patriot missile I wonder where this war can possibly go.
More drones and more missiles. Until someone figures out cheaper ways of stopping drones. My gut feeling is that in 1-2 years, we will have proper industrial ways of stopping drones en masse. And then drones will become just a part of the commander's arsenal like any other weapon.
> And realistically, if your country was invaded, you are unlikely to be in a position to relax and eat popcorn but I get your sentiment.
Most military age ukrainians do. Ukrainian mobilisation is nothing of the scale of ww1. France was roughly the same size as Ukraine in ww1 and had 7m men under arms. Ukraine has less than 10 times less.
> 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?
Frequency is relative to the size of the object you want to detect and the size of the wave. Higher frequencies detect smaller things and can discern between them. Go too far and you detect bugs. Too low and you only see barn doors.
Spinning blades are a dead giveaway for radars. Certain things reduce radar signature but the interesting part now is electronic countermeasures.
A radar can produce a fuzzball graphic to the viewer of the data, speed, distance, direction of movement, etc.
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.
Or on a smaller scale, something homebrew like a bunch of AK-74s attached to something resembling a minigun [1]. Or the other way around, take old AA guns, place them on the back of a pickup and shred Russian infantry without mercy [2].
Certainly the Ukrainians are showing the future when it comes to land-based wars; the question is how many of these we're actually going to see.
Of all shapes and sizes. I can imagine a robot M16 attached to a drone spotter might be effective against the sort of small drones that are hitting tanks in Ukraine.
That’s still rather big and is a dedicated vehicle. I wonder if there are initiatives of coupling the remote-controlled weapon turrents on normal vehicles with radar and such enabling anti-air capability:
My initial comment was mostly a remark on approaching it as a new problem and suggesting small arms, not a statement that I thought the existing system was optimized for all situations.
Cost, reliability and simplicity! A WWII-era 20-40mm cannon upgraded with automated targeting system doesn't even have to accurately hit the target if its shell explodes into a cloud of metal fragments that hits propellers and control surfaces or gets ingested into a jet engine.
Directed energy weapons are still in their early days, they're not powerful enough to just shrug off all sorts of potential countermeasures the way a solid chunk of metal hitting the target does.
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.
Minor pedantic FYI - although your comment was clear (I think, or maybe I did misunderstand it), there's a linguistic difference between "Few reasons" (meaning "there aren't many reasons) and "A few reasons" (meaning "more than one", but implying that you're introducing the reasons, not that you're quantifying them as not many).
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.
I suspect the doctrine of nuke as a warning shot is less effective today when a small group can launch, either for own purposes or as a proxy for another state, a large group of drones to strike with speed and precision the targets 1000+ km away. With that threat type nuking is not an option and we are back to traditional defense. My 2c.
Our nuclear deterrence policy is for safeguarding our country's sovereignty and vital interests. Unless that swarm of drones threatens our continuity of the government or our ability to conduct a nuclear strike, I doubt it is worthy of a Tête nucléaire aéroportée.
Unlike any other country with nukes, we do have a last-chance warning shot option in our policy. An ASMPA missile from us means thus far and no further. It's fired from a Rafale fighter rather than a ballistic missile submarine, which means the order can be reversed at the last minute if needed and it hopefully carries the message across before the adversary's early warning systems light up like a Christmas tree with French ballistic missiles.
We do have a problem of scale with our conventional forces, which have been cut down to the bone and are stretched thin operating at capacity. Unlike the Germans, we're using our army to conduct expeditionary forces around the world and have little on hand to spare because we refuse to compromise too deeply on our long list of capabilities to fight wars and have a bad habit of not storing up enough.
It will take a long time to bulk back up, but Ukraine has been a wake-up call that is taken seriously by our policy makers.
No small group has the resources to launch large groups of drones with a 1000km range. Those tend to cost >$100K per unit, and require significant support infrastructure.
That was true 10 years ago, but is no longer true today. All components, including body, motor and electronics are a few thousand dollars and a garage-sized machine shop is very capable.
The limiting factor is the skill to put it together, but recent action in Africa and Ukraine means the number of people who can integrate those components is rapidly growing.
French military doctrine: We will Nuke you as a warning. If that doesn't get the message across, we will empty our nuclear arsenal until all of your miserable cities are rubble and your farmlands are glass.
There's a famous quote by De Gaulle from the early 1960s which basically states that France isn't worth the price of killing 80 million people over, even if you have the means of killing over 800 million French people.
Also, we don't need American ballistic missiles to do so, unlike our friends on the other side of the English Channel.
> 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.
Did you ever read on the early parts of the war, during the race to the sea? Both sides were extremely low on ammunition, as they realized that their ideas of how much ordinance would be used in a real war were completely wrong. It took a really long time to ramp up production capacity to get anywhere near Verdun, and for the biggest horrors of WWI's trench warfare to appear.
Everyone kind of learned their lesson for WWII, as the real signal that war was coming wasn't actual invasion, but the ramping up of industry to actually supply combat. The US intervention in Europe couldn't have happened much earlier, because setting up the logistics to do any intervention whatsoever took years... and this was at a time where, while the US still claimed neutrality, the country was already changing their industrial production to be able to begin intervention.
So even in the good old days, nobody could change their industrial capacity to supply a war on a dime. And if there is no war, the costs of dedicating so much production to unused equipment is prohibitive
I'll take 10 000 modern shells over 1m of whatever the fuck they were using back in ww1. The accuracy was "it's going to fall somewhere between us and were the canon is pointed" and up to 50% didn't detonate.
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.
Even re production. It's only a massive piece of concrete. France is still good at pouring massive amonts of concrete, that's what all of its suburbs are made of. The line was not exactly a marvel of engineering even for the time (and neither forward looking).
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.
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.