Posted on 05/08/2018 7:51:35 AM PDT by C19fan
The U.S. Army has taken note of the explosion of cheap, unmanned drones on the modern battlefield and is working to field a variant of the Stryker armored vehicle to shoot them down. The new variant will go to brigade combat teams fielding the Stryker vehicle, including an armored cavalry regiment in Europe.
The Stryker interim armored vehicle (IAV) is an eight wheeled armored fighting vehicle that carries up to nine infantrymen into battle. The Stryker is equipped with a .50 caliber machine gun, TOW anti-tank missiles, or a 105-millimeter gun system. At 18 tons the Stryker is on the lighter side of the Army’s combat vehicle inventory, capable of being sent anywhere in the world on short notice.
(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
I’d think a Ma Deuce solution might be the answer here. Perhaps a radar-directed updated quadmount?
Would hate to be in the collateral damage impact zone.
I think the idea would be a Stinger mount. All you would need to do to avoid a gun is stay at altitude. Given modern optics you could stay out of a gun’s range.
I have to think this s—t is just for show. The kinds of countermeasures a drone swarm can develop would easily defeat those systems.
I would be designing ways of attacking those drone swarms which are completely different and would just require WWII technology.
Well I seem to remember the reason SAM were developed was because the aircraft were staying out of ground gun range.
Maybe a layered defense. Something. I don’t know hunter/kill drones with a 50 cal quad back up for close in targets?
After all the quad 50 set up has been around since WW2
“...I would be designing ways of attacking those drone swarms which are completely different and would just require WWII technology.”
Posters’ knowledge of air defense and anti-air systems is incomplete when it isn’t dated.
There is no anti-aircraft system dating to 1945 or earlier that would do any good.
Gun systems were the only ground-to-air defense systems to see use in combat during World War Two. They enjoyed some success against mass bomber formations arriving at high altitudes, but had to be fielded in very large numbers for that tactic to work. They were almost useless against maneuvering targets, and targets at low altitude. Range to target was always the key parameter and no human can judge range accurately enough (not even fighter pilots, despite what they tell you).
Human eyes, hands, and minds have only limited abilities to aim a machine gun to hit an airborne target; the 50 cal quad mount (M45 through M51 nomenclature), manually trained and fired, was a last-ditch system with very low probability of hit.
http://www.radartutorial.eu/06.antennas/Conical%20Scan.en.html
Anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) hit probabilities began to climb during WW2 when conical-scan tracking radar was married to gunlaying computers (all analog): the gunlayer system took tracking information from the radar, developed tracking data on the target, predicted where it would be at the end of the shell’s time of flight, then sent commands to the gun mount, to aim it so the shell would go to that predicted location. Some set fuzes too. If the target made a turn or other sudden maneuver after the gun was fired, the shell would miss.
No one uses conical-scan now, and most gun systems have become obsolete. Too easy to defeat. Better radar and target-track systems have been fielded, but all AAA is inescapably limited, because once the shell leaves the gun tube, its trajectory cannot be corrected.
Ground-to-air missiles were developed because it was possible to correct their flight path after launch: they could be guided. Either by radar, or by passive homing on emissions from the target (”heat seeker”). Electronic advances were necessary, and many missiles (especially air-launched ones) still exhibited remarkably poor probability of hit well into the 1970s.
Manned fighter aircraft have been almost useless since before 1937: throughout WW2, they carried almost no payload (P-51D Mustang had less than 15 seconds’ worth of ammunition: that’s not even five three-second bursts, for those unfamiliar with math), and the speed and range involved in air combat outstripped the human ability so see and react before 1940, and require a command-and-control net to do anything at all. The equipment for the net is large and heavy, so the Army cannot take much of it with them into the field. The capabilities of manned fighters against drones have not yet been demonstrated; bioqubit is right to be skeptical about swarming.
CWIS like in the image posted by ro_dreaming, in post 8, will not be of any use. It cannot be mounted on a vehicle: too big, too heavy, too much power required. It works OK over water but when trying to track and hit targets over land, it is very limited.
Anti-armor missiles like BGM-71 TOW and AGM-114 Hellfire will not work: too short-range, too slow. Anti-armor missiles are designed specifically to function in ground combat; parameters for aerial use are different.
The US Army did develop and field field-mobile air defense systems including M48 Chaparral and M163 Vulcan, but both were withdrawn from service decades ago.
Would like to see a GAU-19 version of the old razorback quad 50.......
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAU-19
.... mix in with a modern version as suggested with this story of the old Chaparral using AIM 120’s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-72_Chaparral
Sad that a record of air dominance by USAF, USN and Army Aviation is threatened ...
.http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Documents/2011/June%202011/0611april.pdf
My thoughts on the matter .....
“... mix in with a modern version as suggested with this story of the old Chaparral using AIM 120’s. ...” [Squantos, post 10]
AIM-120 wouldn’t work with the Chaparral transport and launch platform. The original launch system was designed for passive homing missiles; AIM-120 is an active-homing radar guided missile, capable of hitting targets much farther out in range. The launch system would have to be completely redone.
Russian Tunguska 2K22 air defense vehicle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2K22_Tunguska
Chinese LD-2000 air defense vehicle - http://defenceasian.blogspot.com/2011/08/ld-2000-tr47-type-730-hpj12-lr66.htmla>
We don't have anything similar at the current time.
Actually, the US Army disagrees with the usefulness of the CIWS system on land. Let me introduce you to the Centurion C-RAM system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS#Centurion_C-RAM
“Actually, the US Army disagrees with the usefulness of the CIWS system on land. Let me introduce you to the Centurion C-RAM system.”
My information is dated, then. Occupational hazard in this line of work.
Nice to know Raytheon has been up to the rework job. Though I do not imagine we’ll be getting any details on field performance; that stuff is usually held closely. There are certain technical limitations that had to be overcome. Most pleasing to see the modified version has been able to negate incoming mortar rounds.
CWIS is not a precise duplicate of either CIS’s Tunguska nor PRC’s LD-2000, so a direct comparison isn’t possible on the merits.
The Israelis went the other way and used a pair of 20mm Hispano-Suiza 404 20mm cannon on the quad fifty mount, usually fitted on former US halftracks or ex-Egyptian BTR-152 armored cars helpfully donated to the Israelis during the 1956 and 1967 wars. The Israelis very much wanted any rounds that impacted a hostile aircraft to be explosive ones, doubly so on helicopters, and considered nighttime attacks on supply, fuel and ammunition supply columns to be the most considerable threat from above at the time the guns and their obsolete vehicles remained in service.
The late Mike Dillon had an M16 halftrack mount for a quad fifty retrofitted with an M134 minigun. Just think if he'd tacked on a pair, running one at a time, so that the second could let fly once the first had been emptied and was reloading....
Or four M134s, one in each of all four gun positions, if you want to be really promiscuous about it.
But there are other possibilities....
TARGET! Cease fire.
“Or four M134s, one in each of all four gun positions, if you want to be really promiscuous about it.“
Nothing exceeds like excess.
L
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