An American vendor has demonstrated that its microwave system easily can stop certain drone swarms.
…an Epirus Leonidas directed energy, high-power microwave (HPM) anti-drone weapon has knocked 49 Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAV) out of the air with one shot.
They are demonstrating an expensive, large and heavy piece of defense equipment. I hope I’m not surprising anyone by saying this sounds unrealistic.
So, let’s run the numbers.
A roll of aluminum foil at standard thickness is about 27 g/m² and provides 85+ dB of attenuation from 30-100 MHz.
A small drone needs only about 0.15 m² of coverage, which means cost less than 50 cents per drone, for about 4 grams. The DJI Mini, for example, weighs under 249g, meaning 4g is a 1.6% weight penaly for shielding.
So back-of-napkin math says 50 cents neutralizes a $66 million-dollar microwave weapon system? Right?
Take a 1000-drone swarm, total shielding still would be under $300, meaning the “one-to-many” advantage of microwave attack… is easy “foiled”.
American defense contracting seems so stuck into “lemonomics” lately, that it begs what outcomes will look like measured against any real world adversary with the most basic grasp of physics. While big energy concepts in theory could still defeat little unshielded drones, how many public schools with kids coming up with far better ideas were defunded to release this thing?
Except Saud shielding would make the drone unresponsive to control signals as well….disabling the drone . Please do your homework before posting back of the napkin science that is totally irrelevant
Yeah not true. Not if the drone is ai autonomous or fly by wire.
@Jack
Welcome to the discussion and thanks for the revealing feedback! Are you familiar with drones in actual warfare operation? They routinely function in heavily jammed environments with minimal or no control signals by pre-programmed waypoints, autonomous target recognition, and mesh networking… need I go on? Combat communication isn’t reliable because… wait for it… it’s contested. Energy pulse? Get in line, buddy.
Military units operating without reliable communication isn’t exactly new when you read Orde Wingate’s take on radio silence for deep penetration missions in Burma 80+ years ago. Churchill’s “long line” was poetic irony. Autonomous operation under communication blackout has been fundamental to military doctrine since, well, forever.
Here’s an introduction from 1988: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA195513.pdf
So a bit of cheap shielding while maintaining mission capability isn’t the contradiction you seem to believe. We’re talking bog standard design philosophy. These aren’t old hobby drones of constant piloting.
Always happy to refine technical details when someone brings something valuable to the discussion! What else have you got?
Epirus have tested this against drones with a wide variety of shielding types. In fact they claim to be world experts in this field. So far, nothing has survived the HPM. If you have evidence rather than speculation it would be good to see.
@David
Says you? I’m genuinely curious about strange smelling fog surrounding your claim of “a wide variety of shielding types”. Did they test, or did they test? Please share specifics about what the results showed, of course with a cost breakdown. Your non-argument deserves better. Real sounds like it costs X to survive Y. Fake sounds like nothing has survived.
Leonidas was the Spartan king who failed and died at Thermopylae, which seems like an odd choice for a system claiming nothing gets through it. What am I missing here, like Leonidas?
Defense contractors don’t publicly discuss their vulnerabilities, which is very well known. You have thus stepped into contrarian land. Can you share any examples of countermeasures disclosed by any vendors at all, who highlight their own gaps?
Whistleblowers don’t count.
Eisenhower warned us about self-perpetuating incentives of private profit that drive public policy. Epirus landed serious money riding on Congress believing in technological solutions to political problems. Do you think being open about how the money was wasted is not going to be flagged by corporate officers as suicide? The mathematical market reality is that admitting weakness risks contract cancellation. So… when you claim a vendor is driving disclosure and discussion that’s opposite of normal, and we must see such data to believe.
It’s like if you were arguing that the world experts at Dyson want us to know how they don’t suck.
Anyone selling war machinery as the only capable vendor with “100% effective” demos can immediately be mocked by definition, right? They don’t seem to have any nuance or balance internally so they surely are begging for external assessments. Better now than to end up like Leonidas.