Russian Military Base Attacked By Drones (bellingcat.com) 183
A Russian military base in Syria was recently attacked -- 20 miles from the frontline. The only video of the attack is from a Facebook group for a nearby town, which identifies the noises as an "anti-aircraft response to a remote-controlled aircraft," while the Russian Ministry of Defence claims at least 13 drones were involved in the attack, displaying pictures of drones with a wingspan around 13 feet (four meters).
Long-time Slashdot reader 0x2A shares a report from a former British Army officer who calls drones "the poor man's Air Force," who writes that the attack shows "a strategic grasp of the use of drones, as well as a high level of planning." The lack of cameras on the drones suggest that they are likely pre-loaded with a flight plan and then flown autonomously to their target, where they dropped their payload en masse on a given GPS coordinate... The lack of any kind of claim, or even rumours from the rebels, indicates that whoever is producing these drone and launching these attacks has a high level of discipline and an understanding of operational and personal security...
Although some regard the threat from commerical off-the-shelf and improvised drones as negligible, they have the power to inflict losses at both a tactical and strategic level... Although the plastic sheeting, tape and simple design may belie the illusion of sophistication, it seems that the use of drones, whether military, commerical off-the-shelf or improvised, is taking another step to becoming the future of conflict.
The article notes there's already been four weaponized drone attacks in Syria over the last two weeks, which according to CNBC may be part of a growing trend. "Experts said swarm-like attacks using weaponized drones is a growing threat and likely to only get worse. They also said the possibility exists of terrorists using these drones in urban areas against civilians."
Long-time Slashdot reader 0x2A shares a report from a former British Army officer who calls drones "the poor man's Air Force," who writes that the attack shows "a strategic grasp of the use of drones, as well as a high level of planning." The lack of cameras on the drones suggest that they are likely pre-loaded with a flight plan and then flown autonomously to their target, where they dropped their payload en masse on a given GPS coordinate... The lack of any kind of claim, or even rumours from the rebels, indicates that whoever is producing these drone and launching these attacks has a high level of discipline and an understanding of operational and personal security...
Although some regard the threat from commerical off-the-shelf and improvised drones as negligible, they have the power to inflict losses at both a tactical and strategic level... Although the plastic sheeting, tape and simple design may belie the illusion of sophistication, it seems that the use of drones, whether military, commerical off-the-shelf or improvised, is taking another step to becoming the future of conflict.
The article notes there's already been four weaponized drone attacks in Syria over the last two weeks, which according to CNBC may be part of a growing trend. "Experts said swarm-like attacks using weaponized drones is a growing threat and likely to only get worse. They also said the possibility exists of terrorists using these drones in urban areas against civilians."
4 meter wing spans? (Score:3)
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Carbon fiber and balsa wood have low radar returns.
About the only metal would be the engines, electronics and bomb casings. All of which should be well under a radar wavelength in size.
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Except, these drones were detected on radar and shot down by radar guided missiles and radar guided AAA.
The myth of the "wooden plane" having no radar signature is stupid enough that people with any sort of technical background shouldn't fall for it. The An-2 is not only not stealth, it is a giant obvious beacon to AAA. Carbon fiber, metal struts, propellers, wing skin, wooden beams - all of this reflects radar.
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A "swarm" of a dozen of these big beasts, as reported, should be pretty easy for modern radar systems to spot, no?
If they are low, slow, and mostly made out of plastic, then no, they would not be easy to pick out of ground clutter.
How are you going to use doppler radar to differentiate between a drone going 80 km/hr at 3 meters AGL, and a truck?
The attack was coordinated with a rocket attack, so your radar would be dealing with shrapnel, smoke, and debris which would add to ground clutter. If the attackers were smart, they would have loaded the rockets with some chaff.
TFS says they were "swarm-like", but TFA does not
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Catch is by playing at amateur build, they end up being very low performance and all they will do now is antagonise reciprocal returns, except others might not choose the amateur game and on their side, well, nobody likes the Americans any more and it wouldn't take much of a bounty to get them all sorts of criminals to act that the Americans foolishly trained, it tends to be the regions hobby, so picking up a quick buck for turning Americans into sitting ducks, well.
Expect high performance military drones
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That defensive weapons systems would need a reload time and so the nations backing the terrorists would get to see what the timing and what defensive systems could do.
Russia would be looking for any other nations electronic intelligence collection in the area at that time.
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stop being a faggot
Well, it is hard to argue with someone who relies on reason and solid information to make their point, that's for sure.
you've never had to shoot down one incoming anything
Interestingly, you don't know anything at all about what I've shot at what, nor how many times. Regardless, a Phalanx or the like could possibly be a less appropriate defense in a place near civilian housing and the like. And we're not talking about taking out incoming ship-killer missiles, we're talking about overgrown, lumbering model airplanes at prop speeds. More importantly, we're ta
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Sounds like the only difference between these and a cruise missile is the speed, and maybe the height. I should think they are easy to down if you prepare for them with radar controlled Gatling guns.
In WW2 Germany used V1 "cruise missiles" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] against Allied territory, particularly London. While they were an initial shock, they became easy targets to AA guns equiped with a mechanical computer called a "Predictor" - the gunner optically tracked their path for a few seconds than
Re: 4 meter wing spans: lasers. (Score:2)
No, an air-superiority 'droner'. To launch and use drone and counter drones
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enough to damage planes on the tarmac to make them unable to fly. That's all you need.
Re: 4 meter wing spans? (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed, an ammo dump at Slinfah was hit by one of them as well - it was first assumed to be an Israeli airstrike, and only later determined to be a drone attack. The drones are perfectly designed for hitting soft targets - rather than single powerful charges, they use 8-20 PETN bomblets [twitter.com], packed full of ball bearings.
Concerning tracking them... these are not that large, and made of wood [twimg.com]. I imagine they're pretty hard to track and home in on. Plus, having to waste an antiaircraft missile on someone people glued together with bargain basement parts is asymmetric to the benefit of the rebels. Russia's Hmeimim base is packed full of their most advanced antiaircraft systems, yet they still lost planes (ironically, as usual, they spent the next several days both simultaneously confirming and denying that they got hit ;) ). Locals described the sky as lit up by antiaircraft fire.
The US should take a lesson from this and seriously up their efforts toward anti-drone defenses. For now, I expect Russian/Iranian/Assad/Hezbollah/etc forces to put more effort toward hardening depots, airfields, etc against attacks from the air. The drones have a 100km range, which lets them reach from well behind the frontlines.
I would expect GPS to have been jammed at Hmeimim. If not, Russia is incompetent. If so, the drones would appear to be prepared to deal with the loss of GPS signal. Russia was apparently caught off guard with the sophistication of the drones and is now trying to claim that they couldn't have figured out how to make them on their own. I don't buy this at all; both anti-ISIS rebels and ISIS have long been working on drone technology, as well as other "advanced" technology (such as remote-controlled robotic guns).
Re: 4 meter wing spans? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and another thing: this article says that there was no claim of responsibility. Nonsense. FSA Free Alawite Movement [twitter.com] claimed responsibility for it, and promised more attacks.
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A lot of people are criticising how cheaply made these drones were, but simplicity is genius...
The amount spent by the Russians to shoot these drones down must have vastly exceeded the cost to build and launch the drones, not to mention the cost of repairing/replacing anything that the drones managed to hit. If you can spend $50 and cause your enemy to waste $500 repelling your attack then you've achieved a successful result.
The drones didn't have cameras, but assuming they did - how would the footage have
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A lot of people are criticising how cheaply made these drones were, but simplicity is genius...
The amount spent by the Russians to shoot these drones down must have vastly exceeded the cost to build and launch the drones, not to mention the cost of repairing/replacing anything that the drones managed to hit. If you can spend $50 and cause your enemy to waste $500 repelling your attack then you've achieved a successful result.
Only if you have at least 10% of the resources of your enemy available... otherwise you will run out of steam before the enemy, which is not a successful result.
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Well needing 10% of their resources is better than needing 100%, you have to be frugal in war especially when fighting a superior enemy.
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In the real world, antiaircraft missiles are a couple million dollars each.
I seriously doubt it costs a tenth as much to build these. More like 1/100th, if that much. Possibly as little as 1/1000th.
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If you're thinking of the V-1, they didn't "just run out of fuel and crash onto london." See "Guidance system" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb [wikipedia.org].
The V-2 didn't "just run out of fuel and crash onto london." See "Technical details" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket [wikipedia.org].
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The drones didn't have cameras, but assuming they did - how would the footage have got back to the drone operators? Chances are the Russians would be jamming any transmissions, and if the drone was programmed to fly back with recorded footage the Russians could follow it and attack whoever came to collect the footage.
Jamming does not work like that. You jam a receiver so it cannot distinguish the transmitter and this is much easier when you have proximity to the receiver instead of the transmitter. In this case, if the jamming transmitter is on the ground, it may not even have line of sight to the receiver further reducing its effectiveness compared to the transmitter which is airborne.
Jamming GPS is made easier, it is actually trivial unless the receiver is built to be jam resistant, by the transmitters being far awa
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As for a lack of GPS, there are plenty of other ways to navigate especially if you know where the target is, the nazis had flying bombs which were built to just run out of fuel and crash onto london.
I looked into this a couple years ago and concluded that dead reckoning, magnetic compass, and radio direction finding of broadcast transmitters like FM , TV, and cellular would be suitable for gross navigation until GPS jamming stopped however I do not think this would be sufficient for precision bombing unless the broadcast transmitters were close and radio direction finding could also be jammed.
Re: 4 meter wing spans? (Score:1)
Wood might've fooled primitive radar systems like the Funkmessgerat, (and even then it wasn't guaranteed you could fool the radar), but nowadays that doesn't really work anymore. It's more likely Ivan the Radar Officer was too busy getting drunk and didn't bother to verify the returns as a threat, and Russia is just covering for their military's incompetence.
This is basically the same case with IEDs in the Iraq War. At first our humvees were getting blown up by these things, but eventually MRAPs and radio j
Re: 4 meter wing spans? (Score:4, Informative)
It's pretty comical that despite all the facts already being shared by RuMoD like 5 days ago, many people still don't know them. There was a mortar attack on December 31, when several planes were *damaged* by shrapnel and 2 servicemen were killed. In the recent drone attack nothing was damaged and nobody got hurt, as all 13 of them were intercepted before getting to the bases (3 went for Tartus, 10 for Khmeimim). Of these 7 were shot down by Pantsirs and 6 were intercepted by EW hardware, most likely directed microwave emitters which fried their electronics. They fell down, 3 were destroyed by explosions of their bomblets, 3 remained largely intact. There's ton of material about it out there already...
"Plus, having to waste an antiaircraft missile on someone people glued together with bargain basement parts is asymmetric to the benefit of the rebels."
Nobody knows whether any missiles were fired, it's only that some western reports added the missiles to the original Russian report, which does not mention them. From other signs it's more likely that the Pantsirs' IR tracking and 30mm cannons were used to destroy the drones.
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Mortar attack on December 31 - oh really? [wsj.com]
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If they were smart, they would be using an electric, while also using a much larger drone that is up at say 5K' and about 1-2 miles away, to launch a number of these drones at night time. By launching from height, they can glide in mostly and then use electricity to leave the area.
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They seemed to be carrying about 20 bomblets apiece. Each bomblet seemed to be a small charge + ball-bearings + contact detonation at around 6" above ground. So, in total, a primitive & cheap anti-personnel and unarmored target system.
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While bombs like this would likely be totally ineffective against tanks or other armored equipment, aircraft which are parked on the ground could easily be damaged by such weapons as they are generally much less armored (due to weight concerns).
You may still not be able to destroy a plane with a weapon like this, but you can damage it which then requires time and money to repair. Chances are the cost of repairing even minor damage to a modern military aircraft will far exceed the cost of these drones.
Re: 4 meter wing spans? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've always wondered what would happen if you dropped a bunch of tank seeking drones with a shaped charge warhead. Shaped charge warheads are small and light [youtube.com] and you could imagine building a drone which is just large enough to carry one which could knock out an MBT.
Something like a B-52 could carry hundreds of them. A dedicated launch platform could carry thousands. And each one could be told which GPS coordinates to head to and use image recognition like the sensor fuzed weapon [wikipedia.org] to find military targets - tanks, anti aircraft systems, APCs etc.
And they could fly low enough to hard to track with radar. And fast and erratic enough that they'd be hard to knock out with ZSU [wikipedia.org] type guns.
So you'd unload them outside the country's airspace and they'd fly to their targets and nail anything which was on the target list.
Some would get shot down of course but if you kept unloading B-52 loads of them programmed to destroy anti aircraft systems they'd eventually destroy the air defence systems of a country. And a lot of other stuff too - all the tanks and fuel dumps for example.
And then of course more valuable aircraft could be sent in to destroy everything else.
If an air defence system is an immune system, these things would be like HIV viruses. You could probably make them really cheap too - somewhere between the price of a civilian drones and a JDAM.
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I've always wondered what would happen if you dropped a bunch of tank seeking drones with a shaped charge warhead.
Likely the GPS and comms would immediately be jammed and they'd be entirely dependent on local processing which is not a good thing. First off, this kind of image recognition is very processor intensive, the hardware alone needed to run this would be 4-5 KG on its own... possibly not even including sensors. Also tanks are real easy to make them look like they're not tanks. Both the allies and the Germans did a lot of this during the war you know. False positives are going to be a huge nightmare, a drone m
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Likely the GPS and comms would immediately be jammed and they'd be entirely dependent on local processing which is not a good thing
From what I can understand the US has GPS dependent weapons and GPS independent ones.
The GPS independent weapons are for fighting a technologically capable opponents - Russia or China.
The GPS dependent ones are for fighting a non technologically capable opponent. However the thing is there are a lot of non capable opponents - Iraq for example. Serbia wasn't really technologically capable either - they had one radar operator who was competent and bagged a F-117, but that competence was not the norm. Obviousl
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I linked to the SFW [wikipedia.org]. The difference between what I'm proposing and in the CBU-97 dispenses BLU-108s which then dispense the skeets. The limitation is that the skeets are not powered - they travel for a short distance and then either find a target or self destruct. A CBU-97 is designed to be dropped on top of an armoured convoy which it then devastates.
In my scheme I basically want to put a warhead on something the size of remote controlled aircraft. That would fly around until it found a target, ram the tar
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One could imagine the North Koreans disguising a bus full of senior citizens as a military vehicle and then publishing the horrific attack on civilians. Just one possible fly in the honey.
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There's usually an effective counter strategy for anything... You need the element of surprise to pull something like this off, and once you did it once it couldn't be done again so it might not be worth the investment not only to develop the system, but also keep it secret for long enough so you could use it against a single enemy...
Payload around 6kg (13 pounds) (Score:5, Informative)
I just designed and built a similar, though smaller plane from scratch. Based on the reported wingspan of three to four meters, we estimate the payload capacity at around 6kg.
Based on my experience with people professional pyro, I'd say that a 6kg weapon using a simple explosive like black powder would be a dangerous item to have laying around the house, but not particularly effective as a military weapon. (Remember most of the weight is the casing, it would be less than a kg of explosive composition.). Modern military explosives are significantly more powerful, and much harder to make, if the people launching these have access to a good supply of military explosives.
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Based on my experience with people professional pyro, I'd say that a 6kg weapon using a simple explosive like black powder would be a dangerous item to have laying around the house, but not particularly effective as a military weapon.
2 kg of C4 and 1 kg of non-explosives like radioactive materials, mercury or anthrax could be very effective, depending on what the target and strategic goals were.
And remember the V bombs used against Britain. The major object was to instil fear; if they blew up something of strategic value, that was just a bonus.
It seems like better defences against drones might be prudent.
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We are so GOOD at fucking up eachother's shit.
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Mercury on its own won't do much, because it won't react with the sapphire dust that covers all exposed aluminium.
But add some gallium and a tiny bit of lye, and the story is different.
I forgot to subtract fuel weight (Score:2)
In my payload estimate I forgot to account for how far they are going. If they take off from the front line, 20 miles away, they'll burn very roughly a kilogram of fuel (could be half that, or twice that). So figure 5kg of payload.
The fuel burn over such long distance for a craft that small will significantly affect CG unless it's carefully designed to have the tank right at the CG. That makes design and flight harder.
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I don't think you grasp why so much weight is in the casing... which is to produce shrapnel. The low percentage of explosive filler isn't a bug, it's a feature - because a higher percentage of explosive means a lower weight of fra
What in the world would make you think that? Wrong (Score:2)
> I don't think you grasp why so much weight is in the casing... which is to produce shrapnel.
First, what in the world would make you think I don't know why I build my casings the way I do? Second, you are mistaken about the reason. With a low explosive such as black powder, flash, etc casing thickness is all about the pressure developed. Unconfined, these explosives don't so much as explode as burn quickly. The explosion comes from what's essentially a pressure vessel explosion. The burning composit
Don't make me laugh. (Score:2)
I don't give a rats ass about why you build your casings the way do you. Your casings aren't the topic of discussion here. Military weapons are the topic of discussion.
Nobody with an IQ over the freezing point o
You forgot what you just said? (Score:2)
Nobody with an IQ over the freezing point of water is talking about low explosives
Go back and read your own post that I replied to. Maybe read this part:
Black powder is a low explosive, btw. You're ranting maniacly without even reading, even your OWN posts.
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I'd say that a 6kg weapon using a simple explosive like black powder would be a dangerous item to have laying around the house, but not particularly effective as a military weapon. (Remember most of the weight is the casing, it would be less than a kg of explosive composition.).
From my reading, professionally made HE munitions of all sizes from grenades to 1000kg bombs all seem to have around 45% explosive content by weight, with the rest being casing.
godel_56 with mod points
HE yes. Which is why I said LE "like black powder" (Score:2)
Yes, high explosives don't require confinement to explode, or much confinement. As I said, they are also much more difficult to make or acquire especially to make safely.
Which is why I discussed the two separately, saying "simple explosives like black powder", flash comp, etc ... ...
If they have ready access to modern high explosives
I can make LE at Walmart or Home Depot, using items readily available in those stores. HE is a different animal. If I tried to make HE from readily available ingredient
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Even the hamas monkeys manage to work with HE just fine.
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You don't need a huge amount of casing for a few kg of black powder, and these groups do generally have access to far more powerful explosives too.
Depending what the target is, you don't need a hugely powerful explosive anyway.. A small one capable of launching ball bearings at high speed (which seems to be what they used) is enough to kill or injure soldiers, and enough to damage equipment like planes. Soldiers are also less likely to be wearing body armor if you take them by surprise at their base.
A small
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> 20m is well outside the kill zone for either. You're talking 5-10 at most.
So if we got ourselves a standard issue frag grenade you wouldn't flinch if we detonated it 20m from you then?
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So hard to tell sometimes.
It's easy to tell. Our guys are praised. Their guys are terrorists.
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Or are they freedom fighters? So hard to tell sometimes.
Their guys cut off people's heads for fun and prophet.
Re: Payload around 6kg (13 pounds) (Score:1)
1km is actually a generous figure when talking about "strategic bombing" in wwii
Drone review is already on Yelp (Score:5, Funny)
"Build quality terrible! Would not bomb again!" ;)
Only a matter of (short) time (Score:2)
it's only a matter of time when drones will be used in Western cities for terrorist attacks. And I doubt it'll be a long wait, because we have no real deterrent or countermesure. It's about as efective as a suicide bomber, without having to use up a suicider.
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Yeah, a drone popping a bag of flour over a packed sports stadium could easily cause hundreds of deaths.
The best way to prevent terrorism is to not piss of people so much that they become terrorists. For each preventative measure that can be put in place, two new approaches to killing people can be found. That is simply not a war that can be won.
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These groups were both very "pissed off', the nazis for instance got a lot of public support because of the punitive terms imposed on them after their defeat during WW1.
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So surrender to their demands instead then?
Things are not black and white. It's not either/or.
Taking off our own blinders and engaging in dialogue is a good start.
Wave of the future (Score:3)
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What do you think they can ban? GPS receivers? Small computers? Model airplane engines? Programming?
These weren't off the shelf drones to begin with, it's hopeless.
They will end up with parameter defensive drone swarms, perhaps seaking on non-linear junctions or electronic noise, like a bug detector. Will have limited effectiveness.
I expect there will come a time where anytime winds are under 10mph, bases goes on 'slow fly' drone alert. All aircraft parked in small bomb resistant hangers.
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If there's no easy way to procure them, people will find a difficult way. Drugs have been illegal for years, and yet there are many black market sources of them and many users.
Also there are so many otherwise legal items that can easily be repurposed into weapons, you will end up banning so many things that you massively inconvenience law abiding citizens.
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And that project was launched after a general watched this movie [wikipedia.org].
This is just the start (Score:2)
Wait until somebody catches on to modding a large Styrofoam model into a UAV. Fly it nice and high and it might look like a bird on radar if it shows up at all. Fly a bunch of them like a flock of birds, maybe even paint them to look vaguely like something indigenous to the area just in case... then let them drop on their GPS target.
Military bases putting up walls of lead are going to be VERY unpopular with the surround area where said lead walls will eventually drop.
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That's okay, they've got lasers now.
And if you mistake an actual flock of birds for drones, you've got dinner.
Followed a mortar attack (Score:5, Informative)
These drone attacks came not long after a mortar barrage at the same base in Hmeimim, Syria. In that attack, two Russian soldiers were killed and seven Russian jets were either damaged or destroyed [bbc.com], with another report saying up to ten planes were hit. Of those confirmed damaged, only two returned to operational service.
Whoever is behind these attacks has a high level of sophistication and operational awareness. With the ease of making and using drones, expect to see more such attacks and in even greater numbers.
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greater numbers.
Sand People! I knew it.
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Football stadiums, open air concerts, Times Square on New Years Eve...
I'm surprised it's taken this long.
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The range is the tell that another nations security services helped the terrorists plan their actions.
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If we make them illegal then it will be a whole lot harder for these terrorists to get them, which will make everyone much safer.
You can have my drone when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
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You can have my drone when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
[MiB 'Bug' or US Gov]
"Your proposal is acceptable."
[/MiB 'Bug' or US Gov]
Strat
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Talk about not having a clue. Iran is supporting the Syrian regime and considers Russia as an ally. It's either Turkey (although Putin said it wasn't them), Saudi Arabia, Israel or the US.
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If you can build a GPS controlled Drone.... (Score:1)
Who cares? (Score:2)
" Although the plastic sheeting, tape and simple design may belie the illusion of sophistication, "
The only people who care about that are the Drone Design Fashion Police.
The rest just doesn't want bombs to fall from the sky or worse, fly into building via doors and windows.
Obref (Score:1)
Begun This Drone War Has
Skynet has a beginning (Score:2)
Old style "flak" useful again (Score:1)
If 10 drones are coming and need to shoot 10 patriot missiles, it gets a little expensive. Especially if it happens every other day. Also, it's not really sure current defenses work really well against a swarm.
Maybe the old-style anti-aircraft weapons can be brought back into action.
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That was my first thought too. Put a bunch of 20mm machine guns on proper mounts and the drones will have a hard time getting through, especially when you consider that unlike WW II bombers, drones don't try to take evasive action.
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Maybe the old-style anti-aircraft weapons can be brought back into action.
If a Bofors and a half can shoot down a drone and a half at a klick and a half, how many do you need to defend yourself with?
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It's like in Ukraine (Score:2)
These drones literally grown on trees, which is how the Russian separatists were able to get hold of so many of them without needing to get them from the regular Russian army.
I guess it must be the same in Syria too.
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These drones literally grown on trees, which is how the Russian separatists were able to get hold of so many of them without needing to get them from the regular Russian army.
I guess it must be the same in Syria too.
Sure. And they smell good. Made out of cedar of Lebanon.
CIA (Score:2)
They should check carefully if they have 'property of CIA' inscribed anywhere.
Actually, on a side note: Some of the chips that are needed for drones (ARM controllers, IMUs) have serial numbers (such as mac addresses). Could track the supply chain!
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The real finding will be in the command and control, the range and level of accuracy given the range.
Another nation helped with that.
Any other nations electronic intelligence platform in the area watching Russia respond.
What radar first spotted the drones, what was the next system to be turned on. What defensive systems got used at what range to stop the terrorist drone attack.
Reload times, ra
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They should check carefully if they have 'property of CIA' inscribed anywhere.
Just look for the FAA drone registration number. This is a solved problem in the US at least.
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Fly away, troll.
wtf, of course there was a US resource lingering off the coast. There's *always* a US resource lingering off coast. Call it recon, intel, E3, C&C, whatever. It's what they do.
To give them the benefit of the doubt, we have a nation-state that is apparently flummoxed about the "high technical challenges" of making wood drones.
I imagine that their imaginations fly free.
Not hard to go from kids toy to lethal weapon (Score:1)
In world war 2, aircraft could only fly to altitudes at about 30,000 feet. This was considered 'high altitude'. The USAAF (US Army Air Force) would drop bombs using the "Norton Bomb Sight" which was considered a high precision instrument, and top secret. Its accuracy: about 3/4 of a mile. 3/4 of a mile was considered "right on the pickle barrel". Up to about 1970, accuracy didn't improve that much, until GPS and "steerable tail kits". Then you could take a "dumb" world war 2 style bomb, and stick a G
Campaign to Stop Killer Robots (Score:2)
Several NGO's have been working at the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots [stopkillerrobots.org].
Isnâ(TM)t this how WWII got started? (Score:2)
I seem to remember reading Hitler claimed that Poland attacked some German border posts and as proof displayed the bodies of the dead German defenders. Based on that he declared war on Poland, thus starting WWII.
Of course the dead bodies were those of executed convicts and the attacks were just set up to give him an excuse to invade.
So now Putin (I presume) is claiming an attack on Russian forces. So letâ(TM)s see who the prime mover behind all the âoeFake Newsâ in the world will decide to bl
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Is it supposed to be 'here here' or 'hear hear'?
There, there.
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You fly into my territory with your $200 million a pop super jets and you'll fly into a swarm of cheap-ass drones, use up your bullets and then it's easy pick'ins - and body bags going home.
Rinse and repeat.
Guess who's gonna win in the long run. The F-22 and F-35 are already obsolete.
Jet fighters and fighter/bombers fly at a quite different altitude and speed than drones do. Blocking jet planes with drones is as effective as blocking drones with Czech hedgehogs.
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True, but you could build drones that fly faster than jet fighters. You could make them so they home in on the fighter too. They'd have limited dwell time, so you'd probably want to only launch them when you saw some planes you want to destroy. Maybe have a few of them and a radar together in one place. Scatter units like those along your border and around your strategic locations like bases and cities.
Wait, this sounds familiar....
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Well I did sound the alarm bells about this back in 2002
The danger of the low-cost cruise missile [aardvark.co.nz]
Hello... anyone home???
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The thread already has 38 posts and not a single "In Soviet Russia" joke?
And now we know why.
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Is that a real poncho or is that a Sears poncho?
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Hey, how's the cointelpro biz going nowadays? Still paying the rent?