I've wondered many times why a radar-directed machine gun isn't used to protect against drone attacks. The drones the terrorists used are rather slow moving, so the gun doesn't have to be that sophisticated. And it should be relatively cheap.
That space is currently littered with all kinds of new projects given the urgency. One that has stuck with me is the German Rheinmetall Skynex which works the way you are describing. It’s like a really high tech flak cannon. There are neat videos of it on youtube.
One issue of radar-directed machine guns in the context of the Red Sea is that machine gun range is limited, so they can only provide point defense. This means that a warship can only protect itself, and any commercial ships that are -very- nearby.
Yes, you could probably figure out a way to rig up a lot of these onto smaller ships to escort individual ships/convoys through, but hey you go to war with the navy you have.
Unironically, the LCS's might be useful in this role.
More generally, you see stuff like the army's new M-SHORAD having missiles (Stinger+Hellfire) and 30mm + 7.62mm guns.
There is such a system, it's called C-RAM and is basically a Phallanx mounted on a trailer. You can find videos of them working at bases in Iraq recently. There's also smaller systems in development like M-SHORAD and MADIS (Army and Marines respectively if I remember right).
Whether stuff like that is deployed to a particular base is a question of them being available and the particular location being well supplied enough to use them. The M-SHORAD and MADIS systems are designed to mount on light vehicles so they can be deployed more readily and to smaller forward positions.
Oh. Yeah, I mean there's nothing preventing such a system - land based Phalanx is a thing. We also don't know what air defenses were even at the base (maybe they already had land based Phalanx...).
Isn't it the same problem - you need complete sensor and shooter coverage of the entire perimeter. Bases are pretty large - much larger than ships.
Also, as Hamas did, an attacker can try to overwhelm one point of defense, which means your sensors, targeting computers, and shooters need lots of extra availability (extra equipment and soldiers) everywhere.
I don't think you'd want the perimeter of a base covered with auto-targeting/firing guns. And also, on what does all that metal (bullets) land?
That's an interesting technology. Could it be used by everyone, in civilian guns? It might prevent a lot of bystander casualties from stray bullets, richochets, etc. OTOH, perhaps for bullets that hit, explosions occur on the target? That would not be good.
(Tracers would be useful for bystanders and law enforcement. Self-detonating or not, maybe all ammunition should be tracers?)
Careless recreational shooters[] regularly start fires when using tracer ammunition. There would definitely be downsides to mandating that all ammunition be tracer rounds.
[]Also routine training exercises on military ranges.
In that specific attack there was a problem where it coincidentally happened at the same time a US drone was landing, so there was some confusion over the threat.
I suspect it has to do with western military industry shifting towards premium low volume products since the end of the last war, perhaps because making weapons of war had been weird to some people lately. They don't make hand portable or vehicle mountable 7.62mm or .50cal or 14.5mm mini-CIWS, only the multi-trailer ship-sized versions that are total overkill for drones.
If a target is moving slow enough it can be difficult to track. Similar to how you can defend against radar missiles by 'notching' aka flying perpendicular so the relative velocity of the target is near zero. Radar typically relies on the dopplar shift caused by the target moving to eliminate clutter.
> Why not just send a wall of metal at the drone from one of these things? If not that, why not traditional anti-aircraft fire, with projectiles that explode in shrapnel clouds?
If this had been the 1950s or early 60s, every advanced military on the planet would have been able to do exactly that.
However, both aircraft (MiG-19+) and missiles were speeding up.
At some speed, it becomes impractical to solve a high-speed aircraft or missile problem with a gun. [0]
Consequently, development from the 70s on turned to missiles capable of dealing with these threats.
Which left the only remaining systems mostly consequences of failure to upgrade (e.g. the German Gepard).
As the saying goes, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes...
There were still helicopters and slower ground attack aircraft to do gun defense against, and self propelled anti aircraft guns (SPAAG) like Tunguska, Marksman, Pantsir.
New advanced anti-drone guns like Skynex seem to be expensive and have expensive shells. Yet the range is quite small. Could work for high value targets, not to defend a country against large amounts of inexpensive drones?
>There were still helicopters and slower ground attack aircraft to do gun defense against
The biggest reason why gun systems are avoided nowadays is simply range. You are mostly unable to fling slugs out beyond 10 miles, while a Patriot and friends can reach out and ruin a day at 100 miles. The helicopter itself likely has a weapon that will ruin YOUR day out to about 12 miles. That means the helicopter safely murders you, and you cannot defend against it.
Also MANPADS take up the 10 mile air defense slack nowadays, which is why nobody developed anything further into SPAAGs, right up until everyone had the same "oh god time to re-learn how to skeet shoot against small drones" idea
But those weren't the primary threat military defense of ~1965-2020 was designed against. (Higher then) Lower, faster, and/or stealthier were the worries.
And aside from the economically-mobilized war that Ukraine is fighting (and Russia is gradually shifting to), it's unclear if capability or cost need to be optimized. For every conflict economically less than that, capability wins.
I expect the FPV quadcopter grenade-on-a-drone solution will be looked back on like the Toyota Hilux tactical -- effective when introduced, but superceded and dominated by specialized systems produced by military industry.
Locating the target isn't the problem, you don't need a Doppler shift to calculate range by time of flight. The problem is detecting the target at all. Radar in these sorts of defense environments will pick up an enormous number of returns off of the carrying vessel and sea surf, which is actually a rather difficult problem for radar because it reflects in myriad directions, it moves, etc. By far the easiest way to select an "interesting" radar return is to use Doppler shift to find something that is moving very quickly. That can't be just a wave, it has to be a missile.
The problem is that rotary wing drones are very slow (compared to missiles) and so they don't present an obviously different shift from the background. A lot of R&D is going on right now into better ways to select slow-moving, low-cross-section objects like drones from the background.
This sort of thing is much more difficult for missile defense than the more conventional radar application of airspace surveillance, because for several reasons (including the fact that this makes radar detection hard) missiles tend to come at you from close to or below the horizon. This means you're getting a huge amount of clutter (radar returns from the environment) around them.
Not to minimize the challenges, but I think it's worth pointing out that a lot of the drones of topical interest are -not- quadcopters.
The Houthis (for example) have been using UAVs (Samad and Qasef) are prop driven fixed wing drones with total mass in the 50kg+ class (and warheads in the ~20kg class). They have max speeds of 200+ kph, wingspans in the 2-5m range. The Samad has ranges in the 1000km+ range. Obviously, they could slow down in terminal stages of attack, and I have no idea what their stall speed would be like.
These are more akin to the Shahed class drones that Russia has been deploying in Ukraine (though still much smaller), than the FPV drones we see attacking tanks/trenches.
The US Navy used radar guided artillery to knock down wave after wave of Japanese kamikazes, which flew at similar speeds. They were still sometimes overwhelmed by saturation attacks.
Modern US surface warships still have the same capability but most mount only a single large cannon (separate from the shorter ranged CIWS). There's no space for more. Research is underway to supplement those with lasers but those aren't operational yet and can only work with a clear line of sight.
Really? I had heard that sometimes pilots would nudge them off course or shoot them down but nothing about artillery, I thought radar came along a bit too late to use it for targeting with regard to the V1
> Automatic gunlaying (using, among others, the SCR-584 radar) and the proximity fuze played an important part in Operation Diver, (the British operation to counter the V1 flying bombs). Both of these had been requested by AA Command and arrived in numbers, starting in June 1944, just as the guns reached their free-firing positions on the south eastern coast of England. Seventeen per cent of all flying bombs entering the coastal 'gun belt' were destroyed by guns in the first week on the coast. This rose to 60 per cent by 23 August and 74 per cent in the last week of the month, when on one extraordinary day 82 per cent were shot down. The rate increased from one V-1 for every 2,500 shells fired to one for every hundred.
> 90mm anti-aircraft guns were normally operated in groups of four, utilizing the SCR-584 microwave computer and being controlled by the M9 Director. The SCR-584 was accurate to about 0.06 degrees (1 mil) and also provided automatic tracking. Direction and range information was sent directly to the M3 Gun Data Computer, and M9 Director, which directed and laid the guns automatically. All the crews had to do was load the guns.
Wow. I honestly find it amazing what they accomplished back then.
I spent like 6 hours reading the history of AEGIS when someone posted it here last year
"The answer to Pile's problems of directing the guns was the American S.C.R. 584 radar, the one used on the American 90mm anti aircraft gun, which had power elevation and traverse and an automatic fuse setter. The S.C.R. 584 was a gun-laying radar and "the most successful single application of the micro-wave ten-centimeter technique to ground fighting in World War IL It could automatically track an unseen target at night or in cloud or fog, supplying range,
azimuth and elevation data to a gun director." The S.C.R. 684 had a range of 90,000 yards for early warning, and as a target got within 32,000 yards the set acted as a gun layer. It had no blind spots and could detect low-flying targets like the Fi 103. Unlike the British radar sets, it was also immune to Window. However, it was a complex piece of electronic equipment and required a number of scarce materials like tantalum, molybdenum and tungsten, as well as 140 vacuum tubes
which were then in short supply in the United States. The fielded version weighed several tons and cost $100,000."
Impact, pg 174-175
"Aside from the redeployment, one of the reasons for the gunners' success was that new equipment had arrived. Anti-Aircraft Command received 135 of the long-awaited S.C.R. 584 radar sets and Pile was able to "borrow" an additional 165. Adapting these to the static British 3.7-inch gun required 200 modifications to the gun. Along with the radar sets came proximity fuses and 20 American batteries armed with the radar-controlled 90mm gun."
Impact, pg 207
"When controlled by the S.C.R. 584 radar set, the U.S. 90mm Ml Antiaircraft Gun was the finest antiaircraft gun of World War II. During the campaign they were operated 22 hours a day with two hours a day for maintenance."
Near the end of the blitz, the Brits claimed they were getting one kill per 100 rounds fired. That's an insane number, possible only with VT (proximity) fuses and radar directed gunnery.
The numbers from before those two advancements were closer to 100k rounds per kill
I've read opinions that radar was the single most effective innovation in WW2. It essentially doubled the effectiveness of anti-aircraft gunnery.
For example, the Bismarck battleship was loaded up with anti-aircraft guns. But it was unable to stop a handful of slow moving stringbags that attacked it, and one torpedo from one of them crippled the ship, leading to its destruction.
In contrast, radar directed anti-aircraft guns proved extremely effective against Kamikaze attacks.
The proximity fuse also used radar. Me, I would never have developed such a shell because I couldn't believe such a mechanism could survive being fired out of a cannon.
Pilots chasing down V-1s who shot at them from directly behind would risk immediately flying at high speed into the wall of shrapnel created by blowing up essentially a large powered bomb, often destroying or damaging their own aircraft in the process, which was very dangerous.
To avoid this, some pilots developed the tactic of flying along side the V1 then using their wingtip against the V-1 wingtip they would then flip it over and off course disrupting the primitive autopilot system so it would then spiral out of the control and hit the ground and explode hopefully in relatively harmless field.
I thought so too, but lately I have heard and read accounts akin to a lot of what happened in late WW2 with regards to radar technology was highly classified and much didn't enter the history books.
Pilots shooting and nudging definitely happened but likely other, more advanced stuff happened too. The germans had fully automatic radar controlled flak guns.
They used both (and barrage balloons as well). The space between the ~middle of the English channel and London was divided into "belts", with one type of defense operating in each belt to prevent interference (like flak shooting down your own fighters).
At first the flak guns were located near London (as that was the same flak guns that were protecting London against aircraft). It didn't work so well because it was very hard to hit a fast moving target like the V1, as crews not used to it tended to use too little lead. And even if the V1 was hit, chances were that the wreck would fall down on London anyway. So eventually the flak batteries were moved to the coast, and they got gun-laying radars and proximity fuses which dramatically improved the effectiveness of them.
The Shaheds fly much lower. You aren't likely to be able to shoot at them until they're close, unlike V1s where you could just send wave after wave of flak and destroy most of them.
Also, the drones are getting faster and faster, with the latest ones having turbojet engines.
Totally. I just guess the US didn't procure/deploy/use/turn-on the appropriate systems. Plenty of other posts in the comments identifying potential modern (and modern-ish) solutions that match your parameters.
Radar is essentially a searchlight shining up into the night sky. If you have a radar-directed machine gun pointing into the sky, it's relatively easy to triangulate where the emitter is and direct artillery to take it out.
They have been widely deployed for decades. But also, for decades (since WW2 ?) they seem to have been effectively useless (so far ??) : in all cases that I've been able to find (please correct me if I'm wrong), either the ship (and/or nearby friendlies) were on alert and the guided bomb never even made it into machine gun range, or the ship was caught unaware and that defense system was never even turned on.
(Not counting cases where radar would have been useless because the guided bomb moved under water.)
The US has Mk38 canon on lots of ships. The Mod3 added radar. Its primary focus is against small boats and could probably work against USV that Ukraine has been using against Russia. I hope the Navy is working in modifying to work against small and medium drones.
The other thing that might help against drones are the automated weapons stations hat are on lots of vehicles. I think I read about project to add radar and automated targeting of drones.
I'd think the primary defense against drones on a naval vessel would be that the ship's made of metal, and doesn't have squishy humans wandering around (unless it's a carrier).
IOW a very small drone also means a very small payload.
The size of the payload is still a significant problem if your enemy is close with many drones. This video [0] shows a Russian missile cruiser being sunk by Ukrainian drones recently in the Black Sea. The problem these boats have with drones is that they are slow all around compared to a rather nimble drone which can react to its operations. As can be seen in the video multiple drones are used to sink the large ship.
Edit: A better article around the situation and effectiveness of the drones is at [1].
[0] Video Russian missile cruiser "Ivanovets" destroyed by sea drones at January 31/February 1 in Black Sea - https://v.redd.it/hevs3v05hyfc1
