Posted on 09/26/2025 1:50:25 PM PDT by Mariner
Laser-guided 70mm Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II (APKWS II) rockets have become the U.S. Air Force’s principal air-to-air weapon against drone threats in the Middle East. Air Force F-16 Vipers in the region first began using the rockets operationally in the anti-role last year, which TWZ was first to report, and that capability has now been extended to the F-15E Strike Eagle and A-10 Warthog.
“It’s our primary weapon against a drone,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Derek France, head of Air Forces Central (AFCENT), the service’s top command in the Middle East, told TWZ‘s Howard Altman on the sidelines of the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2025 Air, Space, and Cyber Conference yesterday. “We’ve had multiple shoot-downs with it.”
When asked for further details, an AFCENT spokesperson could not provide a hard figure for the total number of drones downed to date in the region using APKWS II rockets, but described it as “scores” of them.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
Any solution should cost less than the threat.
I propose the solution is a modern remake of the P-51 Mustang with .50cal machine guns. They carry 1,800 rounds each.
And 20 of them could easily take out 200 drones given how slow and predictably they fly.
Then they could do it again tomorrow, and the next day...and next week, dozens and dozens of times.
The math sucks, but the profits will be F A N T A S T I C.
𝘐 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘴 𝘢 𝘮𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘯 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘗-51 𝘔𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 .50𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘮𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘨𝘶𝘯𝘴. 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘺 1,800 𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩.
Look up the Air Tractor AT-802U. It’s already in production. American made. The the UAE has been flying them since at least 2013; I caught a glimpse of them when I was at Al Dhafra and fell in love with the design.
“Let’s spend millions and billions of dollars in weapons to fight against hundreds and thousands of dollars of weapons.”
**************
Recent contract award for $1.7B.
bkmk
It costs them $100K in program management time to write the $25K check and there is another $50K in audit time. So the weapons themselves sound cheap to me. Remember, the real cost is the standing army of bureaucrats and the most expensive thing they do is nothing at all.
A flying drone fisher might drag a net through the air to capture drones.
It could drop the net in a lake and after a few days the drones could be salvaged for remanufacture.
This is somewhat reminiscent of the Gulf War, in which we had million dollar Patriot missiles shooting down thousand dollar Scud missiles.
Not a good plan for the long term.
WIKI
Shrapnel’s innovation was to combine the multi-projectile shotgun effect of canister shot, with a time fuze to open the canister and disperse the shot it contained at some distance along the canister’s trajectory from the gun. His shell was a hollow cast-iron sphere filled with a mixture of balls (“shot”) and powder, with a crude time fuze. If the fuze was set correctly then the shell would break open, either in front of or above the intended human objective, releasing its contents (of musket balls). The shrapnel balls would carry on with the “remaining velocity” of the shell. In addition to a denser pattern of musket balls, the retained velocity could be higher as well, since the shrapnel shell as a whole would likely have a higher ballistic coefficient than the individual musket balls (see external ballistics).
The explosive charge in the shell was to be just enough to break the casing rather than scatter the shot in all directions. As such his invention increased the effective range of canister shot from 300 metres (980 ft) to about 1,100 metres (3,600 ft).
Although not strictly shrapnel, a 1960s weapons project produced splintex[clarification needed] shells for 90 and 106 mm recoilless rifles and 105 mm howitzers, where it was called a “beehive” round. Unlike the shrapnel shells’ balls, the splintex shells contained flechettes. The result was the 105 mm M546 APERS-T (anti-personnel-tracer) round, first used in the Vietnam War in 1966. The shell consisted of approximately 8,000 one-half-gram flechettes arranged in five tiers, a time fuse, body-shearing detonators, a central flash tube, a smokeless propellant charge with a dye marker contained in the base and a tracer element. The shell functioned as follows: the time fuse fired, the flash traveled down the flash tube, the shearing detonators fired, and the forward body split into four pieces. The body and first four tiers were dispersed by the projectile’s spin, the last tier and visual marker by the powder charge itself. The flechettes spread, mainly due to spin, from the point of burst in an ever-widening cone along the projectile’s previous trajectory prior to bursting. The round was complex to make, but is a highly effective anti-personnel weapon – soldiers reported that after beehive rounds were fired during an overrun attack, many enemy dead had their hands nailed to the wooden stocks of their rifles, and these dead could be dragged to mass graves by the rifle. It is said that the name beehive was given to the munition type due to the noise of the flechettes moving through the air resembling that of a swarm of bees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrapnel_shell
That could be combined with this:
WIKI
A tracer projectile is constructed with a hollow base filled with a pyrotechnic flare material, made of a mixture of a very finely ground metallic fuel, oxidizer, and a small amount of organic fuel. Metallic fuels include magnesium, aluminum, and occasionally zirconium. The oxidizer is a salt molecule that contains oxygen combined with a specific atom responsible for the desired color output. Upon ignition, the heated salt releases its oxygen to sustain the combustion of the fuel in the mixture. The color-emitting atom in the salt is also released and reacts chemically with excess oxygen providing the source of the colored flame. In NATO standard ammunition (including US), the oxidizer salt is usually a mixture of strontium compounds (nitrate, peroxide, etc.) and the metallic fuel is magnesium. Burning strontium yields a bright red light. Russian and Chinese tracer ammunition generates green light using barium salts. An oxidizer and metallic fuel alone, however, do not make a practical pyrotechnic for the purpose of producing colored light. The reaction is too energetic, consuming all materials in one big flash of white light – white light being the characteristic output of magnesium-oxide (MgO), for example. Therefore, in the case of using strontium nitrate and magnesium, to produce a red-colored flame that is not over-powered by the white light from the burning fuel, a chlorine donor is provided in the pyrotechnic mixture, so that strontium chloride can also form in the flame, cooling it so that the white light of MgO is greatly reduced. Cooling the flame in this manner also lengthens the reaction rate so that the mixture has an appreciable burn time. Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) is a typical organic fuel in colored light for this purpose. Some modern designs use compositions that produce little to no visible light and radiate mainly in infrared, being visible only on night vision equipment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracer_ammunition
The disadvantage of blowing up the drone’s explosive is that the drone would be beyond salvage.
Auntie Drone is doing very well for herself.
Reading through the link you kindly provided, one finds an interesting phrase....
"... indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract ...."So a fixed price but indefinite delivery and indefinite quantity, though the contract runs through 2031, six years from now. Were I a congressscritter, I'd be asking some questions....
"What's my cut?" - typical con-gre$$critter
🤡
I think these are Iranian Shahed missiles, what have been shot at navy ships. These are much larger cruise missiles alternatives, NOT small quadcopter drones. Lots of things count as “drones” from those quadcopters to million dollar jet fighters but it is still kinda bad journalism. A hack in to Iranian/Russian info show they are $50K-200K. $25K missiles aren’t too bad.
For quadcopters, there are Large weapons on the back of trucks that have projectile microwaves and (I love this idea) automatic, 3d imaging/auto-aiming, 30mm cannons.
Army’s way ahead of you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_A9WgeNh1A&t=1s
Or they could just use a jamming system to make the drones drop out of the sky.
It would be very nice to have a source for the above. Thanks in advance.
If those guns on the Mustang could be precision aimed at angles separate from the air frame’s flight path, maybe it might work.
The YouTube channel is interesting. One finds from this YouTube channel that it is also associated with sandboxx.us, the whois.com info on Sandbox is:
Domain: sandboxx.us
Registered On: 2012-12-20
Registrar: Gandi SAS
Registrant Contact Name: Swamy R
Organization: Sandboxx
Street: 4200 Wilson Blvd Suite 500
City: Arlington
State: VA
The YouTube info for this channel states "The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement."
Yes. Patriotic sharks with frikkin lasers on their heads.
No need to reinvent the wheel here.
Any solution should cost less than the asset to be protected. If you had the resources, how much would you spend to defend your spouse and kids?
That said, of course it’s always good to seek less costly alternatives, and, hopefully we can find something that costs less than the threat. Still, the defended asset — whether military or civilian — should be used in the comparison.
Just my humble opinion.
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