Posted on 03/23/2018 8:11:32 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Raytheon Technology recently participated in a Maneuver Fires Integrated Experiment (MFIX) at the U.S. Army Fires Center of Excellence, in which its advanced high-power microwave and laser dune buggy engaged and destroyed 45 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
Raytheon’s high-power microwave system engaged multiple UAV swarms, downing 33 drones, two and three at a time.
“The speed and low cost per engagement of directed energy is revolutionary in protecting our troops against drones,” Dr. Thomas Bussing, Raytheon Advanced Missile Systems vice president, said. “We have spent decades perfecting the high-power microwave system, which may soon give our military a significant advantage against this proliferating threat.”
Also at MFIX, Raytheon’s high energy laser, or HEL, system identified, tracked, engaged and downed 12 airborne, maneuvering Class I and II UAVs. HEL also destroyed six stationary mortar projectiles.
“Our customer needed a solution, and they needed it fast,” Dr. Ben Allison, director of Raytheon’s HEL product line, said. “So, we took what we’ve learned and combined it with combat-proven components to rapidly deliver a small, self-contained and easily deployed counter-UAV system.”
Raytheon worked with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory under a $2 million contract to test and demonstrate high-power microwave counter-UAV technologies.
Yup. Like the discovery of penicillin.
How many other accidents have happened but were overlooked because people weren’t paying attention.
Science is too complicated sometimes for us to figure things out linearly. Sometimes we have to stumble upon things.
No question, the Israelis were supposed to have land based generators that fry home made bombs driving by. But the strength of the signal drops off as one over the square of the distance. Hard to fry things at a distance unless you can see it and use your energy in a directed beam.
But if your have time to tune, then you can be frequency specific.
We once had a study of a system we were designing where a team brought their jamming equipment and set it up a few hundred yards away and tuned it until, you guessed it, our system went down. It was amazing, but we were not moving,just a station on the ground but they found the frequency that we could not stand. No, we did not fry, just stopped working.
Bring ‘em down and they’re ready-to-eat!
A twofer!
Not real useful if they are not moving? Lasers are cool, but all but the most monster sized have that awkward issue of needing to dwell on the target for longer than might be practical.
And so, the makers of drones will begin hardening the drones to EMP and other microwave energy through the use of shielding, which likely have been incorporated within state developed drones (i.e. China, Russia, etc). In designing circuitry for complex electronics, it is electrical engineering 101 to provide for the proper shielding one would expect in the environment in which the circuit is supposed to be exposed. A longer term approach might be to cause the sensors within such a drone to be “blinded” to navigation. GPS jamming, RF jamming techniques, IR and laser scattering/jamming. It’s going to be a long slog in developing electronic jamming/counter-jamming for these drones, for many years to come. Directed energy would certainly be an arrow in the quiver of a variety of systems that will need to be developed/fielded.
We need charged particle beams.
Any shielding on a drone will block the communications signals they need for control. If they are a self-contained robot, like a cruise missile, I am not sure a light-weight Faraday cage can be designed to protect them. Don’t Faraday cages need to have an earth ground?
For a look at the new world of microwave EMP, go here:
https://www.popsci.com/china-microwave-weapon-electronic-warfare
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