[DBrow]

Right up there with using two million-dollar Tomahawks to flatten some empty tents!

Who knew Patriot could see and track something that small?

[Psalm 73]

A few rounds from a .50 cal would have had the same effect for just a few lousy dollars.

[Sacajaweau]

Probably shouldn’t be in the news.

[bigbob]

A) “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”

B) Someone hates quadcopter drones.

[Pollster1]

I approve in the sense that it was worth demonstrating this capability in the field. Once. Now let’s be thrifty and use bullets for future targets of this kind . . . except for special circumstances.

[donozark]

Where are they getting drones for $200? I pay $450. at Sam’s Club for mine!

[PistolPaknMama]

Maybe they should have used a $2 flyswatter.

[dasboot]

A fifth grader has already develped the concept: anti-drone drone.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I hear that the Army is developing a laser weapon to take out drones. It makes sense. The problem with laser weapons against manned aircraft is that the mass of the airframe is so great that to achieve a damaging temperature rise with a distant laser is extremely difficult. With the much lower mass of the drone, not so much.

If I’m the enemy, I might try to put corner reflectors on the drone, but I think all that does is stress the dynamic range of the tracking sensor and reduce the payload of the drone. I can switch in attenuators (sun glasses) and keep on burning.

[grey_whiskers]

Time to buy stock in Raytheon, eh?

[JoeFromSidney]

It's often argued that the weapon used against a target should cost less than the target. I used to have a Russian Military Operations Research manual (it was lost when the river overflowed into my basement). The manual described this argument as a "capitalist fallacy." I don't know that there's anything capitalist about it, but it is a fallacy.

It should be obvious that the proper comparison is between the cost of the weapon used against the target, and the cost that the target will impose on you if you don't destroy it. That is, the cost of destroying a target should be less than the cost of not destroying it.

The story gives us no information on what the cost of not destroying that quadcopter would have been. Was it locating a critical installation that would be destroyed by artillery if found? Or did it in some way endanger a critical/expensive target of some kind? We don't know. All we know is the relative cost of the quadcopter and the missile used to destroy it.

Now clearly you can go broke using expensive weapons to destroy cheap and plentiful targets. The cost of your defensive weapon ultimately does matter. All that means is that you'd better find some other way of protecting your critical/expensive targets, so that they're not vulnerable to cheap and plentiful weapons. A more effective approach might be to cut off the supply, or destroy the source, of the cheap and plentiful weapons used against you.

My point is that it's not sufficient to look only at the comparative cost of your weapon and the enemy's target that you're defending against. You also have to look at the cost of not defending against it.

[marron]

I watched a special the other night... In Mosul, the baddies were stalking and trying to assassinate an Iraqi general using cheap drones armed with hand grenades. He had to be careful about exposing himself, they were looking for him.

And of course, the drones are relaying video of troop movements and locations. So the important thing isn’t the cost of the drone, but the cost of the target, or the value of the information they are surveilling.

[PLMerite]

"A Country Just Used a Patriot Missile to Take Down a $200 Drone "

I bet the look on the drone pilot's face was priceless, though!