Truppe britanniche “spara” sciame di oltre 100 droni

“Drone swarms make X obsolete” is a common refrain, particularly from people who’ve just watched a drone light show, but the reality is that they’re largely just marginally ahead in the innovation tussle at the moment – this weapon isn’t a _jammer_ but a directed-energy weapon that uses radio waves to physically damage drones. Commensurate with the drone’s cheapness is their relative lack of resilience, which means weapons like this – capable of destroying multiple drones for each “shot” costing £0.10 – are a great counter…we’ve just never had to field them before since they threat to now has always been high performance aircraft and missiles, so there’s some catching up to do.

Side note: I’m a bit wary of the implication in the title of the shooting down of a swarm of 100 drones, as the article later says:

> During the trials, the Army managed to simultaneously detect, track and neutralise multiple drones in a single engagement.. According to the Ministry of Defence, over 100 drones were neutralised during the series of tests – the largest anti-drone swarm trials the British Army has conducted to date.

Which to me reads a lot more like “there were a series of shots in which multiple drones were destroyed, and the total number of destroyed drones was more than 100” which isn’t the same thing.

An interesting video [from the MoD](https://nitter.poast.org/DefenceHQ/status/1912793324563349875#m) which shows a shot taking effect – you can see that there are drones in view but outside the reticule of the aiming system which survive, and I think that that demonstrates that the energy is really very directional, so for this to be able to deal with a fast moving swarm would probably necessitate the ability to “sweep” the beam quite quickly.

To put this into layman terms: These kinds of weapons are basically a microwave oven. One can in fact use a microwave oven and build their own anti-drone weapon with it.

Down side of all these weapon types is the limited usage for an attack, that has to cover several directions at a time. They are useful against a swarm heading from the same direction, but are a bad choice if that swarm disperses over a greater area.

Drones solely using optical fibre might be a new challenge though, as we have seen Russia changing their drones to it as well.

edit spelling

Lovely! I’ll take two. Is the truck included?

Why not a large auto shotgun mounted in a turret with a tracking system. Obviously self defence only and in combination with other assets to handle threats at longer ranges.

Most of those highend systems are expensive and would be relatively sparse in numbers. Plus they look fragile. Can they handle an artillery shell going off nearby?

I channel the power of 5G🗣🔥🔥🔥