One could ask: Why is the US not a decade ahead of the rest if the world in weaponizing small drones and deploying countermeasures to them?
The answer is a few letter: ATF & FAA.
If the original intent and clear meaning of the 2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution had been honored, armed drones and countermeasures to them would be common in the USA.
If the US looses a war in the next 20 years, it will be the fault of the ATF & FAA.
You may not work for the military-industrial complex, but I do.
The US is over a decade ahead in deploying countermeasures to small drones. Systems like T-HEL were deployed over two years ago to an unspecified combat zone for field tests. There is a multi-layered approach to countermeasures including detection, jamming, and kinetic and energy attacks.
The US doesn't really have a program to weaponize small drones because it does not need one. You do not need a DJI phantom with a VOG-17 grenade on it being piloted by a soldier within artillery range of the enemy when you have operators at Creech and Holloman shooting hellfires at targets halfway around the globe.
Where jamming systems like Russia's Breakwater has been seen, repeatedly, on drone footage being observed and attacked by small drones, US systems like MFEW-AL are so effective that they are almost impossible to test in the US due to the coordination needed to ensure that cellphone coverage for the entirety of Kern County, CA or Clark County, NV isn't annihilated by its output.
Detection is also where coming capabilities will eclipse the rest of the world. DARPA has several programs to develop and commercialize detection techniques that are very impressive including Moving Target Recognition and Target Recognition and Adaption in Contested Environments, where multi-spectrum systems orbiting overhead will automatically detect, recognize, categorize, and alert persons and other systems in the area of a flying drone (or moving tank or truck) from 60,000 feet (or from SPAAAACE, in the future).
The vision is that automated surveillance hits get pushed out to systems on the ground, jammers activate, kill systems switch to "auto", and ELINT systems hunt for the transmitter so that target tasking can happen and a hellfire or artillery round deployed.
It's going to take time to design, build, test, and deploy those systems but they're coming and for all practical purposes nobody else (excluding Israel) has even started.
The Houthis have shown that with the proliferation of advanced cheap drones we're starting to enter a period like the 18th century where random rebels can compete militarily with nation states. The ATF and FAA don't know how to handle that. Meanwhile, U.S adversaries are taking advantage of that paralysis.
This thread is a weird place for you to soapbox. This is about two companies in Canada. Not only that, but it's about intelligence / security concerns, not airspace regulations.
Hopefully. But where military tech trickles down to consumers, and consumers can't have any fun with drone thanks to the FAA, we don't have the drone ecosystem that it would take to win that contest. The US military draws from the US, so it can't go to the civilians and ask for drone operators and mechanics and engineers if there's not a vibrant drone ecosystem. How many high schoolers in the US are playing with drones to become future drone company owners? Manufacturing them, designing new ones, fixing existing ones. I want to believe but the FAA rules are just so stifling that it's just not there.
But between youtube, cheap IR cameras, 10k-Neuron-Net running on a raspberry pi, github open source swarming algos, extremely cheap 3'D printing, hap-hazard innocuous chemicals, and a global ubiquitous surveillance state...
A "sufficiently motivated citizen" could literally walk down the street, encounter an altercation, and snap their fingers, and have their opponent 'neutralized' within seconds, all with off the shelf hardware and open source software, right now.
These people exist, but do we really want to stir them?
It's a very chilling effect. Instead of American football driving things, it should be drone piloting. We should reorganize our culture around drone flying, in order to be more competitive during world war 3 that we find ourselves in. We should have a national league of drone pilots, and every high school in the country should be fielding teams to find the best pilots across the country to the level of the Superbowl.
all moot. em jamming. best you get is line of sight, if that isnt countered too with constant retro-reflective detecting IR jamming directional beams(ie. any remote with a convex lense)
it will certainly be interesting. this is why we are Ukraine, to figure it out now.
But you don't need line of sight for the whole squad of operators if you can put up a repeater that the operator's signals can go through.
The FCC killed the hobby and in the process, made us fight with one hand behind our backs. Still, the future of autonomous drones means maybe we won't have human operators for the swarm so maybe it's moot.
They make drones by the millions, it doesn't matter how many $200,000 gold plated hangar babies we have, they'll be swamped by the end of the first month, and we won't be able to replace them.
Which shouldn't necessarily instil confidence, as that technology isn't distributed and if a government was to become corrupted/captured and tyrannical, then the government would exclusively have access to that latest tech.
There are reports from Ukraine that US supplied drones (both civilian and military) have not been effective — and this from a country that has been able to put drones made of cardboard to good use!
US is sending all sorts of gear, not just dusty stuff from the back of the shelf. Sure, there would be reapers, but also modern stuff from switchblade drones (in use since 2010) to Phoenix Ghost (designed a couple of years ago).
one way this war has been calamitous for Russia as it has shown NATO how unprepared they are for Russian electronic countermeasures. Let’s see if NATO can learn and adapt in time.
> To my knowledge, we’re not sending anything newer than the Iraq War to Ukraine.
Not sure what specific drones have been sent, but we're definitely sending stuff newer than the Iraq War; heck, Ukraine has received the newly-developed GLSDB before US forces got it for other-than-testing use.
The answer is a few letter: ATF & FAA.
If the original intent and clear meaning of the 2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution had been honored, armed drones and countermeasures to them would be common in the USA.
If the US looses a war in the next 20 years, it will be the fault of the ATF & FAA.