Drones / UAV

Rappel du premier message :

Drone Kamikaze Israélien, d'une portée de 500Km..
Il vole en territoire ennemie, et cherche constamment les émissions radar une fois un signal reçu le compare a sa base de donnée, et s'en occupe selon l'ordre de priorité..en fonçant vers elle à la vertical et explosant juste au dessus pour faire le plus de dégât possible.





http://www.israeli-weapons.com/weapons/aircraft/uav/harpy/HARPY.html

Citation :

New largest Chinese-made HALE combat drone WZ-7 Soar Dragon enters into service

According to information published by the Chinese Ministry of Defense on November 11, 2021, the new Chinese-made WZ-7 nicknamed Soar Dragon, High-Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) drone type was deployed for the first time by the Chinese armed forces to conduct live combat training. The WZ-7 is considered as one of the largest reconnaissance drones in the world.

The WZ-7 Soar Dragon was unveiled at Zhuhai AirShow 2021. (Picture source Twitter Madhi K)

During a recent exercise involving multi-type aircraft, by giving full play to its advantages of high-altitude and long-endurance capability, the WZ-7 High-Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) drone quickly captured target traces based on battlefield situation and uploaded the acquired information to the command post, thus providing strong support for the airborne fighter groups to carry out penetration and assault operations.

As a new type of unmanned combat equipment, the WZ-7 drone has been deeply integrated into the Chinese armed forces' realistic combat training system, demonstrating that the PLAAF has made significant progress in using advanced combat means to accelerate the improvement of its systematic combat capability.

The WZ-7 HALE drone was unveiled for the first time to the public during the edition 2021 of Zhuhai Airshow. The drone was designed by the Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group and constructed by the Guizhou Aircraft Industry Corporation. It features a unique design using a tandem wing with one in the middle of the fuselage and one at the rear. The tandem wing allows a more rigid, less flexible wing than other configurations, with benefits said to include an increased lift-to-drag ratio and less complex flight controls than a HALE UAV with a conventional wing would require.

The WZ-7 will be used by the Chinese armed forces to conduct reconnaissance missions but according to Chinese military sources, it could be equipped with sensors suitable for designating naval vessels for targeting by anti-ship ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. The drone can provide data for ballistic missile launcher units such as the DF-21D. In addition, it is equipped with advanced battlefield communication and electronic jamming equipment, which can be used as a high-altitude communication transfer class, and it can also fly to the opponent’s fleet to turn on electronic jamming equipment.

The WZ-7 is powered by a Guizhou WP-13 turbojet engine mounted at the rear of the drone while the air intake for the engine is mounted on the upper part of the fuselage. The drone will be able to reach a cruise speed of 750 km/h with a maximum range of 7,000 km. It has a length of 14.33 m, a wingspan of 24.86 m, and a height of 5.41m. The WZ-7 has a flight of endurance of 10 hours and a payload capacity of 650 kg.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.armyrecognition.com/defense_news_november_2021_global_security_army_industry/new_largest_chinese-made_hale_combat_drone_wz-7_soar_dragon_enters_into_service.amp.html

Un concept de l utilisation de MUM-T avec comme platform un helico léger

KAI a signé un MoU ,cette année, avec Elbit Systems et IAI pour développer ce concept.
https://www.flightglobal.com/military-uavs/kai-signs-uav-pacts-with-israels-elbit-and-iai/142912.article

Très intéressant merci. Ça confirme qu'on est train de vivre l'âge d'or du drone de reconnaissance, d'attaque et suicide.

Il faut penser à ce concept pour les FRA et MRM, permettre à nos différents aéronefs de pouvoir lancer des drones suicides, ça peut aller des Panther au T-6/Alphajet pour ne citer que ceux-là, Uvision propose déjà des Pod de ce type... si ont peut les produire sur place c'est l'idéal. C'est autant de menace, surtout que certains tapent à 150 km, tu fais du SEAD avec un T-6, changement de doctrine radical.

C'est révolutionnaire, un drone suicide lancé par un hélicoptère ou un avion léger qui n'est même pas forcément armé, fait son travail ISR dans une zone donnée, trouve sa cible, et lui plonge dessus pour la détruire.

Même le Harop Naval serait très intéressant, pour des patrouilleurs sans aucun armement, ou même les Floreal. Moi je suis pour la multiplication des plateformes de lancement de drones suicides, j'en suis sur ça va donner à l'ennemi une migraine pour contrer ces menaces.

Les Sud-Coréens l'ont compris, eux qui en face se trouvent face aux chinois et nord-coréen. Il faut dés maintenant prendre le train.

Pour le Naval utilisant la version naval du KUH-1 Surion comme plate-forme
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2021/10/kai-unveils-new-mum-t-uav-at-adex-2021/

FAR SOLDIER a écrit:

Très intéressant merci. Ça confirme qu'on est train de vivre l'âge d'or du drone de reconnaissance, d'attaque et suicide.

Il faut penser à ce concept pour les FRA et MRM, permettre à nos différents aéronefs de pouvoir lancer des drones suicides, ça peut aller des Panther au T-6/Alphajet pour ne citer que ceux-là, Uvision propose déjà des Pod de ce type... si ont peut les produire sur place c'est l'idéal. C'est autant de menace, surtout que certains tapent à 150 km, tu fais du SEAD avec un T-6, changement de doctrine radical.

C'est révolutionnaire, un drone suicide lancé par un hélicoptère ou un avion léger qui n'est même pas forcément armé, fait son travail ISR dans une zone donnée, trouve sa cible, et lui plonge dessus pour la détruire.

Même le Harop Naval serait très intéressant, pour des patrouilleurs sans aucun armement, ou même les Floreal. Moi je suis pour la multiplication des plateformes de lancement de drones suicides, j'en suis sur ça va donner à l'ennemi une migraine pour contrer ces menaces.

Les Sud-Coréens l'ont compris, eux qui en face se trouvent face aux chinois et nord-coréen. Il faut dés maintenant prendre le train.

Le concept est intéressant,en première intégration doctrinal, pour démultiplier la force de frappe et la couverture de nos futurs AH-64, et en meme temps limiter les missions reconnaissances de l Apache donc moins de risque.

Fuselage du Gray Eagle avec une plus grande voilure, avionique du Reaper et 16 Hellfire embarqués..
Le nouveau 'Mojave' dévoilé par General Atomics.

https://www.defensenews.com/land/2021/12/09/general-atomics-unveils-new-unmanned-aircraft-named-for-harsh-american-desert/

Citation :

https://mwi.usma.edu/swarm-talk-understanding-drone-typology/

Swarm Talk: Understanding Drone Typology - Modern War Institute

10 - 13 minutes

In May 2021, during its conflict with Hamas, the Israel Defense Forces became the first military to use a drone swarm in combat. Not much is known about the event, other than that Israel used the drone swarm to strike “dozens” of targets in concert with other missiles and munitions. Often media outlets use the phrase “drone swarm” to just mean many drones used at once. But this was a true drone swarm, meaning the drones communicated and collaborated in making collective decisions.

The event is just the beginning. Numerous states from South Africa to South Korea are developing or acquiring drone swarms intended to operate across land, sea, air, and potentially even space. Drone swarms may operate in multiple domains at once, incorporating different types of weapons payloads and sensors. To manage this complexity, militaries need a basic typology for sorting different types of drones.

The most intuitive—and useful—such typology would categorize drones within a drone swarm based on the role they play within the swarm. These categories would not necessarily be discrete, because a single drone could play multiple roles in theory. Likewise, drone swarms may have different combinations of drone types based on the mission. A swarm of undersea drones meant to create a distributed sensor network for submarine searches will look very different than an aerial swarm to suppress enemy air defenses. Ideally, a drone swarm should also be flexible to allow mission commanders to adjust the swarm composition based on mission parameters, perhaps incorporating different types of attack or sensor drones. With those facts in mind, a set of five categories takes shape: attack, sensor, communication, decoy, and mothership drones.

Attack (and other Effects)

Attack drones carry weapons payloads to strike enemy targets. This can be any sort of weapons payload from guns and bombs to missiles, electronic attack, and chemical weapons. Drones may also have other types of effects, such as chemical weapons disinfectants or mine countermeasures. The type of payload will, of course, be limited by the carry-weight of the drone. A tiny quadcopter is not carrying a Hellfire missile. But a large unmanned surface vessel might carry a Tomahawk missile.

Different types of attack drones may be used for combined arms tactics. They could also mix conventional weapons with other effects—for states flouting legal bans, this could even mean chemical weapons—within a swarm to create dilemmas for defenders: Do they don protective gear or dodge the hail of bullets? Of course, such a drone swarm would violate the Chemical Weapons Convention; however, the United States and others may face it on the battlefield. Likewise, multiple payloads create options for responding to different types of defenders and targets. One drone may carry an antitank missile, while others carry bombs or guns.

Sensor

Sensor drones capture information about the environment. That information can be used for the swarm to identify targets and to avoid defenders and hazards. Information collected may be shared with the broader swarm to help guide movement, carry out strikes, or make simple decisions on swarm behavior. Typical sensors include electro-optical, infrared, and LIDAR (light detection and ranging). Specialized sensors for chemical, biological, or radiological material may be incorporated as well. Sensors may be on the drone itself, or the drone may distribute the sensors throughout a real or potential battlefield.

Sensor drones enable a particularly useful behavior of drone swarms: the ability to create dispersed sensor networks. Drones with different sensor types can spread broadly over an area to collect intelligence, identify targets, or watch for incoming attacks. When a drone identifies an object of interest, it can share that with the broader swarm, perhaps drawing in more sensor drones to search the area for similar objects or confirmation. That is especially useful for identifying mobile targets that are often more difficult to find and fix.

Sensor drones may be integrated with other drone types. For example, Russia claims to be testing a swarm with integrated aerial sensor and ground attack drones in which the aerial drones feed information to the ground drones to guide its fires. Likewise, sensor drones may recognize the presence of a defender system and share that information with decoy drones to confound and disrupt that system.

Communication

Electronic warfare is a crucial vulnerability for drone swarms. The key characteristic of a drone swarm is communication between the drones. So disrupting or manipulating that communication is an obvious way to disrupt or manipulate the entire drone swarm. Electronic attack could target either the communication between the drones or the signals from any ground control station and the drones. This approach is quite common for drones generally, as a strong majority of counterdrone systems are some form of signal jammer.

Communication drones help ensure the drone swarm maintains its integrity. The drones may serve as relay nodes for communications from external sources, provide an alternative route for interswarm communication, serve as a signal boost in the event of adversary jamming, or provide emergency retreat orders on unjammed frequencies. The design and behavior of such a drone also would need to accommodate the role. As primarily a support or backup function, the communication drone would need to avoid being caught in enemy fire. Likely, it would also need to devote more power output to ensuring any broadcasted signal stays strong.

Decoy

Decoys do not do all that much. Mostly they get in the way. But that can be useful. Mass is one major advantage of drone swarms. More and more drones can be thrown at a target until it is overwhelmed and destroyed. The swarm may lose a few drones in the process, but if enough get through, there can still be victory at relatively low cost. Decoy drones increase that mass at low cost, because they do not require any integrated weapons, sensors, or other payloads. They are mostly there to absorb defender fires and protect the more valuable drones.

Of course, decoys can be made more sophisticated. They may be designed to give off signatures to trick defenders into believing they are actually manned aircraft. For example, during the 1973 October War, Israel used drones to trick Egyptian air defenses into turning on their radar and firing against the wrong targets. This wasted Egyptian ammunition, but more significantly it helped Israel identify the location of the defenses. Israel did the same during the 1983 conflict with Syria over the Bekaa valley. Alternatively, decoy drones may be used to convince defenders that the bulk of the swarm is in another location, which would complicate response to an already omnidirectional attack.

Motherships

Mothership drones contain other drones. In some cases—what has been evocatively described as a “turducken of lethality”—one mothership drone contains another mothership drone. Mothership drones help transport the drone swarm to and from the battlefield, and may also provide support for recharging, rearming, or general maintenance. Because mothership drones must necessarily be significantly larger than all the drones they contain (and consequently, require significantly more power), motherships drones may also support broader swarm communication and integration. Of course, mothership drones also create vulnerabilities, because they can be targeted to destroy the whole swarm in a single strike.

Implications

When it comes to drone swarms, complexity is the name of the game. A drone swarm may contain all sorts of drones of different shapes, sizes, and roles. Preparing to use and defend against a drone swarm requires simplifying that complexity to figure out what really works and what does not. That’s where a properly defined typology proves its worth.

Militaries should experiment with different combinations of drones. What combination of attack, sensor, communication, decoy, and mothership drones are most effective in various circumstances? That should include not only ratios of the different types of drone, but the combinations within specific classes. For example, should a counterswarm swarm include more electronic or kinetic attack drones? The answer will also likely vary based on the domain(s) of use and the other types of deployed weapon systems and platforms. Figuring that out may require modeling and simulation, exercises, and wargaming using both real and synthetic environments.

Battlefield commanders should also consider how drone swarm characteristics mesh up with operational details. A commander may flex the number and type of drones based on collected intelligence about likely threats. The commander may want to add more communication drones to prepare for possible electronic attack, or add specific types of attack drones designed to target, say, tanks or infantry formations.

The era of the drone swarm has just begun. Israel’s use of a drone swarm in combat earlier this year might have been the first such instance, but it will not be the last. That means that militaries need to make a concentrated effort to think carefully about how to design and build optimal drone swarms to achieve mission objectives.

Zachary Kallenborn is a policy fellow at the Schar School of Policy and Government, a research affiliate with the Unconventional Weapons and Technology Division of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, an officially proclaimed US Army “Mad Scientist,” and national security consultant. His research on autonomous weapons, drone swarms, and weapons of mass destruction has been published in a wide range of peer-reviewed, wonky, and popular outlets, including the Brookings Institution, Foreign Policy, Slate, War on the Rocks, and the Nonproliferation Review. Journalists have written about and shared that research in the New York Times, NPR, Forbes, the New Scientist, and Newsweek, among dozens of others.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image: A swarm of drones scans the Cassidy Range Complex at Fort Campbell in a scenario conducted November 16 during the final field experiment for DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm Enabled Tactics, or OFFSET, program. (Credit: Jerry Woller, US Army / Fort Campbell Public Affairs Office)

Citation :

MAKS 2021: Foreign customers interested in Russian UCAV Orion-E drone

Kronshtadt Company said foreign customers had displayed interest in its unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) Orion-E drone displayed at MAKS-2021 airshow: "Kronshtadt and Rosoboronexport negotiated the deliveries of Orion-E drones with delegations from 13 countries, including the CIS, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa," it said.

Orion-E unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) (Picture source : Vitaly Kuzmin)

Also known as Helios, the Orion-2 is a larger version of the original Orion, with a bigger payload. It is classified as a high-altitude long-endurance (HALE) UAV, instead of the medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) classification of the original Orion. It weighs 5-tonne (11,000-pound) with a wingspan of 30 meters (98.42 feet).[9] A first full-scale mock-up was unveiled on August 27, 2020, at the Kronstadt pilot plant.[10] The first flight is planned for 2023.

The static display of the company at MAKS featured a reconnaissance-strike helicopter with long flight duration Orion-E of a new modification with a satellite channel of data transmission, as well as Gelios-RLD radar surveillance drone. "Foreign countries displayed big interest in new capabilities of Orion-E and expressed the wish to begin cooperation in bigger Kronshtadt complexes - Gelios-RLD and Grom drones," it said.

CEO Sergey Bogatikov said the company for the first time had negotiated at the airshow with a record-high number of foreign representatives, including traditional and new customers.

Kronshtadt is the leader of the Russian industry in the creation of high-tech heavy drones. It has been designing, producing and operating them for over ten years.

https://www.airrecognition.com/index.php/news/airshow/air-show-2021/maks-2021-news/7472-maks-2021-foreign-customers-interested-in-russian-ucav-orion-e-drone.html

Une solution drone pour les apaches

Citation :

Low-cost warfare: US military battles with ‘Costco drones’

https://www.ft.com/content/aef5901e-4b9c-4561-a559-a6b7197bafe1?segmentID=4cc83cbd-00b2-0eef-d1f7-f57621fd8a1e&fbclid=IwAR07oG1nnNZsOhzt-B6degCoDF2hbTiWbAR6GIsQ6ftevKkgC2T9B_G-nws

Ssi Youssef ,pouvez vous poster le texte de l article? C est payant.

Voilà. Désolé pour la mise en forme je ne suis pas doué pour faire ce genre de chose avec un téléphone.

Citation :

Low-cost warfare: US military battles with ‘Costco drones’
For all the hype about hypersonic missiles, small, cheap drones are one of the most significant threats to American forces

Late in 2019, American military equipment detected an incoming enemy drone over an Iraqi base hosting US forces. The troops were jumpy; their base was vulnerable and exposed.

The detection system gave a grainy picture but indicated the object was getting closer, according to people familiar with events. US forces launched an expensive counter drone missile, which circled the target, missing twice, before being detonated mid-air to avoid a ground explosion. On closer inspection, defence officials later determined the incoming threat was not, after all, a lethally armed drone designed to kill US troops. It was a balloon.

The US has been the pioneer in the use of large killer drones for its global war on terror. Today, much of the conversation about warfare is dominated by extremely sophisticated weapons such as hypersonic, lasers or missile defences that push at the boundaries of the possible.

But the balloon episode illustrated the inadequacy of US capabilities to defend against, or even identify, smaller weaponised drones. It is these cheap, small, low-tech enemy drones that are fast becoming one of the most significant threats facing America’s military.

Frank McKenzie, the four-star Marine Corps general who commands US troops in the Middle East, says that despite a big push the US still remains under equipped for the drone threat, which first emerged as a serious concern in 2016.

“Right now, generally, the advantage lies with the attackers,” McKenzie told the Financial Times in an interview in December, saying cheap, small drones were easy to modify into lethal weapons and hard to distinguish from other airborne objects.

McKenzie says incidents such as the errant missile attack on the balloon are rare but that “they do happen”, adding that US forces sometimes err on the side of caution. “We would like to find a cheaper way to solve that problem than by having to fire a missile at it,” he adds.

Like other senior US defence officials, McKenzie sees drone warfare as America’s new “IED moment”. Homemade roadside bombs known as improvised explosive devices have killed more than 2,000 US personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq, accounting for 45 per cent of all US deaths in warzones since 2006.

So serious is the impact of weapons that can cost as little as $1,000 and which McKenzie dubs “Costco drones” after the discount store, that he argues that the US has lost the “complete” upper hand in the skies for the first time since the Korean war in the 1950s.

In October, lethal drones attacked al-Tanf base in Syria where about 200 US personnel are stationed in an offensive McKenzie says was carried out by entities associated with Iran and “was a deliberate attempt to kill Americans”. The US received advance warning and moved the troops. In November, drones dropped explosives on the home of Iraqi prime minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, wounding his bodyguards. On Tuesday, US military officials said that in recent days two attacks by armed drones on bases in Iraq hosting US troops had been foiled.

“Air superiority is something that we no longer have all the time in the theatre [military area of operations],” he says. “If you have a drone overfly your base and you’re not able to bring it down, you don’t have air superiority. That doesn’t happen often. But it does happen more than I would like it to happen, and it’s very worrying.”

Flying under the radar
US military commanders first woke up to the threat cheap drones represent to their troops in late 2016. In an incident that later became known as “the day of the drones”, Isis flew more than 70 small, $1,000 drones — each affixed with explosives — in an attack on Iraqi troops.

“They released them almost like a game, except that [it] was a 40mm grenade that was coming down on top of you,” says Tony Thomas, the four-star retired army general who was at the time commander of America’s special operations forces.

On another occasion, he says members of a US Ranger mortar platoon in Syria were wounded in a drone-launched grenade attack. US officials discovered some drones had been booby-trapped, so that if someone attempted to remove the SIM card it would explode. “It’s not like it’s sci-fi, it’s actual,” says Thomas.

“We flooded the zone. We started bringing in all sorts of technical responses to the challenge — mostly electronic and cyber-related efforts to knock down or disrupt these quadcopters,” he adds. “There was a big flurry to try and get something in the field that was better than what we had.”

There are several parts to the drone problem. While America’s well-established integrated air missile defences can, if necessary, tackle the largest drones, the US has struggled to stop smaller categories. These smaller, “group one” drones weigh under 20 pounds and often fly too low and slow for traditional detection and response methods.

Although radar picks up most objects, sophisticated filters are needed to positively identify and distinguish an enemy drone.

Stopping attack drones once correctly identified is also hard. Countermeasures developed to tackle smaller drones over the past five years range from jamming or taking over signals, targeting drones with directed energy such as microwaves and lasers, shooting them down with rifle bullets or missile fire, colliding into them with kamikaze drone attacks, and even netting them or otherwise physically interfering with their propellers. But more than two years on from the mistaken missile attack on the balloon, the drone threat is only growing.

By 2026 the global commercial drone market is expected to reach $41bn — up 57 per cent from today — and surpass 1.4m sales a year, according to an annual report from Research and Markets, a source of industry data. Shenzhen-based drone maker DJI — which makes a range of small quadcopters — has three-quarters of the world market, according to Skylogic Research. Before Christmas, US president Joe Biden added DJI to an investment blacklist over its alleged involvement in the surveillance of China’s Uyghur ethnic minority.

Russia, Iran, Israel and Turkey are also mass producing cheap drones, including for sale abroad. Non-state actors including Isis jihadis in Iraq and Syria have also turned to arming commercial drones as weapons of choice.

Armed drones helped Azerbaijan emerge victorious in its conflict with Armenia in 2020; Ukraine and Russia have used them in their dispute over Donbas; and they have become a mainstay of attacks in the Middle East, including a September 2019 drone and missile attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities that wiped out more than half its supplies — equivalent to 5 per cent of global supply — which some US officials blamed at the time on Iran.

Very small drones can also play a key role in larger lethal attacks. In late December 2019, multiple people on the K1 air base in Kirkuk in Iraq saw a small quadcopter drone going directly over the flight refuelling point on the helicopter air strip, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The base was armed with five different types of drone detect-and-defeat equipment but “not a single one of them picked it up”, says one of the people.

“They saw it, but nothing they could do; just report it,” says the second person.

A few days later, the base was attacked by more than 30 rockets, leading some military officials to conclude the initial flyover had come from a small spy drone used as surveillance for target “bracketing” — to determine how to land a rocket at the base from afar. A small drone was again spotted over the damage-hit areas, as if surveying its success.

One US contractor, a linguist, was killed in the attack, leading to a series of dramatic developments in Washington that culminated in then president Donald Trump’s decision to target and kill Iran’s top military commander, Qassem Soleimani, at the start of 2020. The incident brought Washington and Tehran the closest they have been to outright conflict in decades.


‘Constantly bombarded’
At the start of 2020, then defence secretary Mark Esper convened a meeting with senior officials to discuss an urgent solution to the drone crisis. And put Major General Sean Gainey in charge of 60 people at the top of a new department-wide effort known as the JCO to fix America’s drone defences with what the Pentagon calls “layered” defence — multiple overlapping solutions.

Over several months Gainey, a career air and missile defence officer, whittled more than 40 counter-drone systems — that were already deployed — down by three-quarters. He now intends to build the country’s first counter-drone academy in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, by 2024.

“Shooting a high-dollar-figure missile at a relatively cheap [drone] is not where we want to be on the cost curve,” he said.

The US Department of Defense has invested billions of dollars in counter-drone equipment in the years since drones emerged as a significant threat on the battlefield. Yet, fewer than 40 per cent of drones are successfully detected, according to people familiar with internal Pentagon reporting. Before Gainey’s team was established, operators and officials with first-hand knowledge of drones had become exasperated by expensive systems that did not work. Some machines simply would not turn on, they say; others failed to detect or stop a drone.


Counter-drone systems are tested at Arizona’s Yuma Proving Ground, a US military installation, before deploying them to the field, and Gainey wants counter-drone training to become part of basic training for the Army, Air Force and US Marine Corps.

The effort to ramp up the US counter-drone response has continued under the Biden administration. This year, the Department of Defense plans to spend $636m on counter-drone research and development plus $75m on procurement, up a total of $134m in 2021. But the effort is still moving too slowly for some elements of the US defence system.

Katie Olson, acting director of the Defense Digital Service (DDS), a group of engineers and scientists within the Pentagon that works on near-term technology issues, says more immediate solutions are needed than the JCO can offer, adding that it is “operating at the speed of a bureaucracy and going down this very slow path”.

“That doesn’t work because we’re getting just constantly bombarded [with new drones],” says Olson, whose team reports to the office of the secretary of defence. “We can’t afford that kind of timeline . . . We are being attacked right now; we need solutions for now.”

Olson says her team — working with the JCO — has developed sensors that can detect new drones as soon as they are launched.

Jamming the electronic signal between the drone and the controller can be too slow because it takes months and sometimes years to determine the communication signal used by new drones in order to disrupt them, and risks interrupting allied communications. Observers say that has made direct “kinetic” attacks — inflicting physical damage — on enemy drones increasingly preferable.

At a counter-drone conference held last month in Virginia, a host of companies advertised their wares. Ohio-based Fortem Technologies has developed the DroneHunter, which relies on automation to detect drones and capture them in a net jettisoned from its own drone mid-air. D-Fend Solutions, a company started by Israeli cyber experts, executes a cyber takeover of the target drone and then safely lands it. The technology, which is fielded in the Middle East, has been used at the G7 summit and to protect Pope Francis during open-air mass.

For its part, DDS has developed a way of defeating individual drones using another drone that the team likens to fighting fire with fire. Another part of the Pentagon, the Defense Innovation Unit, is working with commercial companies such as Fortem and defence tech start-up Anduril, to fix detection problems in particular.

Darpa, a US military research agency, has recently developed a more eye-catching solution: shooting pink stringy spray at drones to entangle their propellers.

“The most threatening thing that should happen is that the threat drone falls out of the sky,” says Darpa’s Gregory Avicola of his team’s invention, which he says was intended to deliver a “soft kinetic” response that avoided collateral damage.

A new class of weapon
The future may look far less “soft”, however. Military futurists worry leaps in artificial intelligence will help create drone “swarms” — not just multiple numbers of armed drones operated by a single person at any one time, but drones that work together as collaborative teams run by a computer and which make targeting decisions powered by machine learning.

Alexander Kott, chief scientist for the Army Research Laboratory, which develops new combat technologies, says drones amount to a “whole new class of weapons” which can fly in “very unusual ways that no other military munitions can fly”, such as hiding in trees or in grass close to the ground and changing speed and direction at will. He adds: “This is kind of a new military technology that, I would say, almost compares in its novelty with the appearance of the first aeroplanes or first tanks.”

For Kott, the answer to overcoming swarms of intelligent, automated, armed drones is a head-on match. “The best defence against a tank is another tank,” he says.

Merci pour le partage

Et voila la stratégie que le Maroc devrait prendre, au lieu d'acheter des hélico a 4 milliards, 4 drones a 1 milliards etc, des drones kamikazes plus drones légérs d'attaque et en prime des roquettes de longue portée (50km+) à guidage GPS. 5 milliards aurait été largement suffisant pour lancer l'industrie drone + roquettes guidées.

https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2021/12/performance-check-tb2s-in-ukraine.html

.



https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/armement-le-maroc-combien-de-divisions-de-drones

C'est intéressant sa..

Si compte démarrer une production locale des drones, il faut commencer de suite, car les choses s'accélèrent. Et un avantage que tu possède aujourd'hui risque d'être unitile après 15 jours...