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” and “navel gazing” 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 curious about the claim of “a wide variety of shielding types”. Did they test, or did they test? Please share specifics about the results, of course with the cost breakdown:
Real: “sounds like it costs X to survive Y”.
Fake: “sounds like nothing 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 money was wasted will not 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 I must see the data to believe.
It would be like you claiming the world experts at Dyson want us to know how they don’t suck. Show me the loss of money.
Anyone selling war machinery with PR about being the only capable vendor and “100% effective” demos, immediately can be mocked by definition, right? They don’t seem to have nuance or balance internally, so surely they are begging for external assessment. Better now than to end up a… Leonidas.
How are you gonna fly a drone wrapped in tin foil?
@Anon
It’s not a potato. You’re thinking backwards. Fly it the same way you use a microwave oven.
As you will have spotted, I have been writing about HPM versus drones for some years for a variety pf publications, and talked about in in my book on drones in 2015. There is very little open source material available on this, but I have talked to Leonidas and others, and seen some of their material. Shielding will certainly be an issue, but it is certainly not a case of putting a tinfoil hat on your drone.
@David
Your initial shot fired was “nothing has survived the HPM”. Now you raise up the flagpole “shielding will certainly be an issue.” That’s quite a retreat.
At the same time you also shifted to an appeal to your own authority – “I’ve been writing about this for years” – the exact same logical problem as before when you appealed to Epirus’s authority. The question isn’t who makes the claim, when we can instead focus on whether a claim can be verified.
It’s great you have “talked to Leonidas and seen some of their material.” Maybe they even bought you steak dinner and valet parked your car. What did their material show about shielding effectiveness? What were the specific test parameters? What types of shielding failed and why?
I tossed out specific numbers: 27 g/m² aluminum, 85+ dB attenuation, 0.15 m² coverage, ~4g weight. You want us to believe, between those juicy delicious steak bites, that this is “not a case of putting a tinfoil hat on your drone”. But that’s another logical error, a strawman.
I proposed standard EMI shielding calculations. You said they aren’t “hats”. They also aren’t potatoes. Can you point to technical errors in those calculations? Or are we just trading credentials and vendor connections instead of physics?
Because “I’m an expert and I talked to the vendor” isn’t actually a rebuttal to basic electromagnetic shielding principles kids should be learning. I think we all know why the vendor isn’t openly talking about them. What is your reason?