The US Army Wants To Microwave Drones in Midair (popularmechanics.com) 191
"The U.S. Army, as part of a broad counter-unmanned aerial systems strategy, is pushing forward with the U.S. Air Force to develop a high-powered microwave weapon," reports Popular Mechanics:
Microwave radiation can disrupt or destroy electronic equipment exposed to them, "cooking" internal circuits much in the same way a fork or other metal objects placed in a microwave oven will cause the oven's electronics to melt down. Here's 2018 footage of a Raytheon HPM system tested at Fort Sill in 2018.
The Pentagon has researched high powered microwave weapons for years, but the threat of drone swarms may have presented it with the perfect threat. The military is preparing for the eventuality of facing swarms of suicide drones on the battlefield, each carrying an explosive payloads or prepared to make a suicide attack. Current anti-drone weapons include jammers, shotguns, nets, and even birds, but many of these weapons are only effective against one or a small number of drones at once, and not the dozens or more drones envisioned in the worst drone swarm scenarios....
Microwave radiation doesn't care about rain and other inclement weather, it doesn't rely on individual shots of ammunition, and as long as the electrical generator powering is powered on, it will continue to "fire"... The weapon's broad firing arc means it could take out many drones at once, defeating enemy drone swarms.
The joint Army/Air Force microwave weapon prototype "should be operational by 2022."
The Pentagon has researched high powered microwave weapons for years, but the threat of drone swarms may have presented it with the perfect threat. The military is preparing for the eventuality of facing swarms of suicide drones on the battlefield, each carrying an explosive payloads or prepared to make a suicide attack. Current anti-drone weapons include jammers, shotguns, nets, and even birds, but many of these weapons are only effective against one or a small number of drones at once, and not the dozens or more drones envisioned in the worst drone swarm scenarios....
Microwave radiation doesn't care about rain and other inclement weather, it doesn't rely on individual shots of ammunition, and as long as the electrical generator powering is powered on, it will continue to "fire"... The weapon's broad firing arc means it could take out many drones at once, defeating enemy drone swarms.
The joint Army/Air Force microwave weapon prototype "should be operational by 2022."
Can also disrupt and destroy organic tissue (Score:5, Insightful)
"Oops, I misfired again! Seems all our political opponents are unable to function!"
Re:Can also disrupt and destroy organic tissue (Score:5, Insightful)
And how is that any different than "Oops, I misfired my rifle, corporal Cohen's brain got splattered all over the inside of his helmet!"
"Oops, I misfired again! Seems all our political opponents were hit by a hellfire missile!"
This isn't exactly the first weapon the military will have that can be used to kill people.
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Yeah... other weapons NEVER misfire.
You may be working with a very wrong understanding of that particular word. Misfire. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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Ooops... Misfired the illustrative link there...
https://www.wired.com/2007/10/... [wired.com]
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And how is that any different than "Oops, I misfired my rifle, corporal Cohen's brain got splattered all over the inside of his helmet!"
1) Confusion as to what caused the effects
2) Plausible deniability
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Why yes indeed...
Maybe he was browsing internet porn and it was THAT which caused his eyeballs to boil up and explode.
There's some porn out there one really shouldn't peruse without a proper welding helmet.
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It's less portable than a rifle too. Microwave weapons do become interesting if their effective range can go out more than a kilometer. I assume the precision to hit a drone is much less with a beam than with a rifle. Think of microwaves as the future's equivalent to a shotgun.
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Isn't the whole point of war to end political opponents?
Re:Can also disrupt and destroy organic tissue (Score:4, Interesting)
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Pillaging is for peasants.
A law or a decree is much cleaner and more efficient.
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Once the war is over everyone gets together to discuss how to divide up the spoils. And a new batch of opponents is created on that day.
War is perhaps the most ineffective foreign policy tool we have. But it's extremely effective domestically, giving ultranationalist supporters a rock hard boner.
Re:Can also disrupt and destroy organic tissue (Score:5, Interesting)
There are a lot of misconceptions about microwaves.
1. Microwaves do not cook a person from the inside out. It will cook from the outside in... corporal Cohen, would probably get burned.
2. Microwaves cook by heating the water in an object. It disrupts and destroys cell, but having it water in them get really hot. So still after corporal Cohen gets burned from the misfire, his brain, behind a skull and skin, is probably safe, assuming that he actually moves out of the way when he feels pain
3. Microwaves can be blocked rather effectively. A metal mesh will be good enough to protect such drones.
Low frequency radiation for the most part is harmless to organic life. High doses like from your microwave oven, will heat things, but not irradiate them. Like with Gamma rays.
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More to the point, microwaves cook by exciting the water molecules to vibrate...your food cooks by friction. Hmmm....look Sargent, a Peking Duck...that's not a Peking Duck, Corporal...(Corporal pushes button) it is now...wow, aerial delivery, what'll they think of next....
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Chain-mail as a defense. Those Medieval people were ahead of their time.
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Oops, I misfired again! Seems all our political opponents are unable to function!
Given Donald Trump is your president I think this has already happened.
Payload (Score:4)
Great. So instead of an actual explosive payload the drones just need some metal reflector to randomly microwave anything close to the microwave gun.
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But speaking of metal reflectors, how easy would it be to harden a drone against microwave energy? You'll need an exposed antenna for remote control, but not when flying autonomously, and drones are getting better at that.
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For a single drone, yes.
I don't know if the ability of the microwave blaster to target a whole swarm of drones is an actual feature or the lack of a more focused microwave beam... imagine a Beowulf cluster swarm of drones with plane reflectors, in a formation to form a parabolic reflector.....
And for shielding - it probably wouldn't be too hard, but the weight of the shielding material (metal) would decrease the amount of actual payload (explosive or not) so it may be worth it to put some energy into a shie
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Aaah, flashback to my teenage years.
My friend wanted to microwave an egg, but I was a relative expert at thinking about consequences so I convinced him to put it in a mug wrapped with cling film just in case. I saved his ass that day. It stank, but the mess was contained within the mug. Just poured that out and were done with it.
That said, stick the egg in water and you can microwave it just fine. The water absorbs much more heat than the egg does, and cooks the egg.
Re:Payload (Score:5, Insightful)
My concern was more for where the drone will land with said payload...
In the video featured, the drone just drops from the sky, I'm assuming with whatever explosive payload with it.
With this defensive technology in the public, a terrorist sees this as a win-win.
Create an autonomous drone that can deliver an explosive payload, triggered by whatever, but the key being to also be triggered by impact.
Fly said drone to a local base, with a flight path directly over civilians, key infrastructure, something where the military has to decide what's worse. A blown up civilian by the drone falling from the sky from the base defending themselves or possible causalities in said base from letting the drone get even closer.
I don't think this technology will be very useful over land operations. Maybe sea-born operations won't mind explosives falling from the sky, but urban encounters definitely will.
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The threat of this happening on US soil is extremely low. If this were to happen to an overseas US military base... they'd shoot them down and blame the terrorists.
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Most bases just don't sit in the middle of a densely populated area. And the bases that do typically have dozen of acres of uninhabited land surrounding the base core.
Bases generally aren't, but soldiers often operate in urban environments and around civilians. Explosive laden drones are a perfect weapon for urban combat, especially by guerrilla or irregular forces who may lack airpower or indirect weapons. With rooftops being used as fighting positions even a drone armed with a hand grenade can cause significant damage.
Of course, if you look at the article this thing is the size of a small shipping container and mounted on a flatbed trailer, so it's really only useful
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With rooftops being used as fighting positions even a drone armed with a hand grenade can cause significant damage.
Traditional defenses can deal with "a drone". This is intended to defend against a swarm attacking a high value target like a ship or an air base.
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But speaking of metal reflectors, how easy would it be to harden a drone against microwave energy?
That's a great question. It might be possible to do by covering a singlecopter with some kind of sheet of corner reflectors. Singlecopters have the advantage that you can run them on a liquid fuel motor cost-effectively, because they only require one. That means they can have much greater runtime than electrics. You put the engine and prop at the top and a couple of control surfaces at the bottom to direct the thrust and bob's your uncle. Wrap it in a cylindrical reflector sheet and not only will it reflect
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how easy would it be to harden a drone against microwave energy?
Very very easy. Tinfoil should do the job nicely. It makes a great Faraday cage.
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Great. So instead of an actual explosive payload the drones just need some metal reflector to randomly microwave anything close to the microwave gun.
Just apply some adhesive-backed copper foil to cover the inside of the electronics compartment. I do that to shield the electronics in my electric guitars. It's very thin and light and readily available.
There's also this thing called the Inverse Square Law. You'd need a freaking *huge* power source and a staggeringly powerful microwave transmitter to produce enough energy at the target if it's at any distance. Maybe a nuclear powered aircraft carrier could produce enough power to make it an effective weapon
Re:Payload (Score:4, Interesting)
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The inverse square law applies to omnidirectional radiation. Directional antennas are pretty easy to make. When Slashdot was actually a geek site people here used to make them out of bolts, washers and Pringles cans.
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The inverse square law applies to omnidirectional radiation. Directional antennas are pretty easy to make. When Slashdot was actually a geek site people here used to make them out of bolts, washers and Pringles cans.
The inverse square law applies to all EM radiation regardless of what type of radiator is employed. The gain of a directional antenna only focuses the power present, it does not magically create more power.
Even with a directional antenna it will still take enormous amounts of transmitter power and be severely limited in portability and effective range, particularly if even very basic and simple EM shielding is used such as I described in my OP and the drone is a pre-launch-programmed type without radio dir
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You're wrong. Search for non-isotropic radiators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
You can still use the inverse square law for directional sources if you postulate a virtual source. For highly directional real sources, the virtual source is *way* behind the actual source, so even using this mathematical
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Re:Payload (Score:4, Insightful)
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Every toy drone has a "follow-me" mode where it will track a target without being radio controlled or a "waypoint" mode that doesn't need constant control either. The fact that current toy drones perform a safety landing if they lose connection to the human pilot is more due to toy safety regulations than out of necessity.
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And how well does that follow-me mode work when you've covered the camera with foil to prevent the camera from being burned out by microwaves?
Any sensor you expose is a path for microwave energy to enter the system and burn out the sensor and associated electronics. It doesn't matter if it's a camera, an antenna, a GPS chip or even a microphone.
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Dead reckoning using an acceleration sensor as soon as the GPS chip gets fried (that should be a cue that you are close to your target). Microphone and barometric sensor could probably work as you only need to transfer mechanical pressure differences. Camera.. well, you'd probably need transparent aluminium for that. ask Scotty.
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You're explaining away issues using fancy science words. The reality is dead reckoning is incredibly bloody inaccurate at best with many working sensors and external input to help.
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That is making the problem overly complex. Just put a metal mesh around the component to keep it flying. And use cheap and effective explosive payloads that have a better chance on hitting a target.
After the threat of nuclear weapons, warfare has changed its tactics to focus on small accurate strikes on targets, on targets designed to prevent the other side from waging war on you. Having a drone reflect a beam in random directions, just will harm areas which are not targets, and could hit areas it doesn't
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Having a drone reflect a beam in random directions, just will harm areas which are not targets
If you are a terrorist, everything is a target.
Microwave radiation doesn't care about rain (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't it? I thought it was because of the water contained in food that a microwave oven can function: because water absorbs microwave radiation.
Are drones disabled when they pass by functioning radars?
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Put some tinfoil in a microwave and watch the sparks fly. It's fun... the microwave might burn out though.
True- the water content causes most of the heating in food. But using microwaves to bring down a drone is a function of induction and the damage that can be done to the electronics or control link to the drone.
Best case... the drone becomes non-operational since it's radio receiver is swamped with dirty RF. Or.. the RF is so strong it causes induction of high currents in the drone's electronics. Or both
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Except the rain absorbs those microwaves, before having a chance to reach the target, so it'll completely fail in rain.
Of course, that is only true for a certain band of microwaves. If a lower frequency below the water vibrating band is used then it mostly doesn't interact with water. The lower the better. After all that's why VHF/UHF still works in wet weather.
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Yes, but you could include fail-armed explosives on the drone to detonate on impact. Might not be precise, but can still inflict damage.
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put in a smooth curved piece of metal with no sharp edges in the microwave and watch it spin in its platter.
Microwaves are easy to protect against.
Re:Microwave radiation doesn't care about rain (Score:4, Informative)
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Sigh. Not this shit again. There's nothing magical about the frequency of a microwave oven. It has nothing to do with water.
Re:Microwave radiation doesn't care about rain (Score:5, Informative)
This Isn't About Water
Microwave heating actually has nothing to do with the moisture content of items. It has everything to do with the amount of electric dipoles (polar molecules) in the item of concern. Water molecules (with many other organic molecules) happen to be electric dipoles. (That is, one side of the molecule has a positive charge and the other side has a negative charge.)
When the oven uses a microwave to make an electric field, all electric dipoles move to align with that field. If the direction of that field quickly flips, you give these dipoles kinetic energy. As you increase a group of molecules' kinetic energy, you increase the temperature of that group.
Any material containing significant amounts of electric dipoles will heat in a microwave. Also, resonance of water molecules have nothing to do with heating food in microwave ovens. The oscillations of the waves in microwave ovens is too slow for resonance to play a role.
For further reading, check out wikipedia's articles on Microwave Ovens and Dielectric Heating, which should answer your questions more throughly.
-PipperChip
Which nicely reinforces the questioning (Score:2)
of the articles statement that "Microwave radiation doesn't care about rain and other inclement weather". Which, as a broad statement of the whole microwave band, is clearly wrong.
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First sentence is kind of silly. The vast majority of polar molecules in the things you generally put in a microwave are water. Microwave (the machine) heating has everything to do with water. It doesn't have anything to do with the resonance frequency of water.
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Water absorbs like two microwave wavelengths.
This is very wrong. If you look at the graph showing how strongly water absorbs radio waves you’ll see it steadily increasing with frequency in the microwave region with no noticeable features around the ISM bands used for ovens and WiFi.
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Are drones disabled when they pass by functioning radars?
These have a tendency to be in places where flying a drone brings a host of nasty people with guns down on you. Hence nobody knows. Remote-control disruption is likely though if flown close enough.
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Are drones disabled when they pass by functioning radars?
Yes. Next question?
Okay a bit more to this: Yeah drones suffer greatly in the presence of magnetic and electric fields that are of sufficient strength. They don't even need to be remotely similar in frequency to the control / GPS frequencies in order to cause the receiver to desensitise to the point of failure.
Can we micrwave popcorn in the air? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Can we micrwave popcorn in the air? (Score:2)
Important question
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So sad... (Score:2, Offtopic)
Because of the global warming that we ourselves initiated, as a species we're facing a future that ranges anywhere from radically poorer, harder, and shorter lives, all the way to extinction. Yet with all the power and ingenuity we have at our disposal, we seem unable to get much beyond using then to create better, faster, more efficient ways to enslave and kill each other, or to protect ourselves from same.
We could be forging a common good for all of humanity, saving our eco-system, and giving our descenda
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So in your world, expression of sadness about how we treat each other equals "pitch to recruit vegan cucks"? That's quite a leap - I'd love to see the reasoning that (mis)led you to that conclusion.
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It's because of morons like him, driven by his testosterone instead of his brain, that we're in the situation we're in.
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The reasoning is that it is war and conflict that leads humanity forward. Also, you can't "explore the universe". The laws of Physics prevent that from ever happening. But you are probably a Space Nutter, so I cannot argue with that.
silly people (Score:4, Funny)
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We're introducing a new variable: Swarms.
It's a good idea (Score:2)
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I'm glad someone is thinking about this. Mass drone attacks are the largest threat to the US military strategy.
Are they? Has anyone worked the numbers? How about the downsides once an enemy has shot their load? Drones may be one of the more inefficient weapons of war. Great though for scaring people prone to security theater. Or surgical strikes.
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Those are called missiles. Mass missile attacks against carrier groups was a Soviet strategy.
Carrier groups don't (usually) just sit a convenient few kilometres off shore. You're not going to be attacking them with massed $100 quadcopters. Your drone would need to have significant range, okay speed, and it would have to carry a decent payload all that way. You could make something like a stripped down Cessna maybe. Of course, you'll need an actual runway to launch the things. If a carrier group sees you la
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What I'm talking about is overwhelming the sensors and defensive capabilities of the defender through massive numbers, and intelligent weapons. More intelligent than you are thinking, likely, but also more basic.
You assume that the payload wi
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[quote]Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, adopted an asymmetric strategy, in particular, using old methods to evade Blue's sophisticated electronic surveillance network. Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World-War-II-style light signals to launch airplanes without radio communicatio
suicide (Score:3)
Yes, it does care about rain (Score:2)
As does all electromagnetic radiation. Just means a shorter effective range. Rain will affect targeting, so that's another thing.
It WILL Be Used on People at some point! (Score:2)
It's only a matter of time before some unscrupulous government (or terrorist organization) "tries" it out on human targets.
A country like China, that is facing great uprisings for terrible treatment of their own people, and well known for their "unfiltered" use of crowd control, is the most likely culprit.
And it looks like I am not alone in the prediction.
Drone bombs are a real danger (Score:2)
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Imagine getting on an airliner with your family for vacation. Onboard is a controversial figure someone doesn’t like. Here comes 50 drones carrying grenades, when all it takes is one to set off the full fuel tanks and turn your plane into an inferno. We need some kind of technology to counter this.
All the controversial people I dislike fly in private planes. Your list must be pretty different if they fly with the masses.
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We need some kind of technology to counter this.
We do not. A commercial airliner is pretty much defenseless against quite conventional anti-aircraft weaponry. Despite that, it is extremely rare for one to get hit, simply because very few people with access to this weaponry are so morally challenged as to do something this evil. Most hits are because of identification as a military plane.
Talk to ... (Score:2)
... Serena Williams [xkcd.com].
Serena Versus the Drones
I feel like they can already do this (Score:4, Informative)
Phased array radars are very very precise things able to create very focused beams of microwaves to track a target. The larger arrays like those on AEGIS warships and Patriot missile batteries also have very high power output. Seems to me they should be more than capable of zapping a drone with pinpoint accuracy as they currently are. Simply get a target lock and ramp up the transmitter power.
I've seen commercial microwave dishes kill birds that were unlucky enough to fly in front of them. Powerful microwave transmitters are very dangerous and it shouldn't take much to weaponize them into directed energy weapons. Anyone who has ever put metal in a microwave knows what I am talking about. Most military radars output over 100 times what a kitchen microwave oven does, and they do so in a far more focused manner.
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You forget one factor: Distance. Microwaves are not easy to focus over long distances. You also cannot "simply ramp up the power" on a radar system.
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Of course you can, at its bare essentials a radar system is a radio transceiver. Cavity magentrons usually are only on off but modern military radars are solid state and phased array use multiple transmit-receive elements. They do indeed have variable power.
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you can focus microwaves... but the issue here is that shielding will be trivial, unlike the case for high power lasers which can burn through ordinary mirrors, reflective materials and ordinary glass (people who haven't worked with high power lasers don't get this)
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You probably aren't going to get that. The main limitation is power draw and batteries would simply be too bulky at this point for a man portable solution. Vehicle mounted will be easy though.
Now it's a microwave ... (Score:2)
... arms race. War technology is not protected by patents and copyright.
Odd (Score:3)
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That's just an high powered radar. I've seen commercial microwave transmitters do that same and they are in the same ballpark power wise.
Probably simple to defeat (Score:3)
The amount of energy they can bring to bear is probably pretty small. Hence shield the electronics, cabling and motors and you have a nice arms-race that the drone should win handily. I would also expect that targeting is pretty difficult if the drone tries to make it so. The whole thing probably only works now because there are zero countermeasures on the drone side.
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Tilt (Score:2)
Just what we need, battlefield microwaves that can be tilted down.
Shielding? (Score:2)
I'll put microwavable pop tarts around my drones as a shield.
Thank you US army! (Score:2)
So the next time that the restaurant delivers my take-away food by drone, it will be really great that the US army ensures that the food is still hot when I get it.
Well, seems like we got a deadline... (Score:3)
Yoda Williams (Score:3)
If microwaves fail, Plan B is to clone Serena. [slashdot.org]
"Begun, the Serena Wars, has."
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If the drone holds still, a standard shotgun works fine. If it evades, you can pretty much forget anything we have.
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Perhaps, but all that lead you fling out there has to land someplace
Apparently some land-based CIWS (close in weapons systems) use explosive tracer rounds that either explode on contact with the target or when the tracer burns out, preventing them from falling back to ground. I would assume Israel uses something similar for their Iron Dome anti rocket/mortar system.
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This microwave thing would be a lot harder to locate.
You are thinking like a human and not a HARM missile [wikipedia.org].