Greetings and Salutations!
OK… Drone Defense.
MANY problems exist in the Drone Arena of Warfare. FAR too many for but a single Infantryman who got MedRet in 1999 to go over, but I do have some ideas. It helps that I think outside of the box on so many things, as my time as a Contractor in Iraq it was damned near a full time gig of “Adapt, Improvise and Overcome” lest you be caught with your britches around your ankles and your pud in yer fist.
There’s a LOT of different ideas being put out there.
First and foremost are from the GIANT Defense Contractors who never met a problem that they couldn’t find an answer to via throwing HUUUUUGE gobs of dinero at it…
Bloom County did a couple or so strips about the Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI under Reagan that mentioned this exact issue:

Opus et. al. ‘jumped on the DotGov Gravy Train’ and then were unexpectedly expected to produce results… queue mayhem after the fact…
The “Space Defense Gizmo” that Opus is referring to ends up being a ‘belt’ of woven together $100 bills three feet thick in a 100 foot high wall that both encircles and orbits the Earth, thereby stopping any Rooskie Missiles from getting thru to ‘Murica!!!
So yeah, High Tech?
So far, not so mucho.
Not that I can actually see
So Far.
All the shytte I’m seeing so far positively reeks of a “Bloom County” level of stoopid-expenditure with very little actual return… Go figure Aye?
‘Stuff’ so far that DotBigMilCon (rather appropriate as it stands for Dot Big Military Contractors, “Con” being the functional definition) are man-portable ‘weapons’ like these:

Uhhhh
Yeeeeeah….
I sure as Fuck don’t want to be “That Guy” humping that… and IF they were to go that route, well “That Guy” would have to be one in every. single. Infantry. Squad. which would designate him a number one priority target. That particular one is called a Droneshield DroneGun Mk111. A 40+ pound ‘gun’ of dubious use and funtionality…
Considering something like that being carried by a troop on the Front Line is going to positively scream “SHOOT ME FIRST!!!!”
I can’t even imagine the weight of it, never mind the battery pack to power that monstrosity. BTW, ZERO mention of that in ANY article about it…. Jes’ Sayin’
And let me tell you this’s the Dot Big Mil Con’s best idea!!!! THIS is what they’re planning on running with with each unit expected to be just under $100k per ‘gun’… which IRL means about a quarter million per unit, plus cost plus and maintenance expenses…
I mean how in the fuck do they actually expect a Grunt to fire and maneuver with such a heavy and probably useless piece of ElephantGear? It’s pure vaporware. It has an expected range of 2.5 kilometers, which sounds great on paper. However when you take into account that some of the larger drones in the Krain, on both sides, the ones that take out tanks and Infantry are about at maximum are at absolute most no larger than two square feet in height and diameter, and are only audible up until the last minute or so… So… that means that roughly Visually if you’re lucky as fuck you might see a ‘speck’ in the distance…. HOWEVER: by the time you actually visually identify a drone???
If you see a drone, you’re already beans on toast Fren.
Drone Warfare is literally “The Quick and The Dead”
And all the high end Boutique Wunderwaffen?
Like the SmartRounds Inc., who makes the SAVAGE (Smart Anti-Vehicle Aerial Guided Engagement) anti-drone rocket???
At $200k a pop???
Yeah… tell me again how great the Patriot PAC 3 is again?
2.5 million a round
We knew the Iranian Strike on Al U-Deide was coming. We evacc’d everyone so as to NOT have casualties. We shot off, with the Qataris OVER 65 Patriot Block 3 production missiles at $2.5 million a shot (+/-)
And MISSED the SINGLE Iranian Ballistic Missile ANYWAYS!!!
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Tell me again how awesome our DotMil tech is again?
See, Ivan ‘went back to basics’
They went and asked for, and got volunteers from ALL the Russian Summer Olympic Trap/Skeet Shooting Teams and set them up to train common Grunts in ‘how to kill drones’. It’s been an exceptionally successful program from what intel I’ve gathered. The former positively jumped at the idea…
They started off training the troops to become efficient in shooting skeet with semiautomatic 12 gauge shotguns. 26 inch barrels to start, as that’s the optimal length. Then they worked them up so it becomes damned near reflexive. Once they passed the skeet/trap part of the course, THEN they introduced drones.
They started off with slow, man-guided drones… none of which have any real capacity (outside of getting close enough to cause a ‘fail’ on the testing) to do harm, and then in the next evolution, they eventually worked up to real-life Mavic Drones carrying simulated deadly charges that have a significantly reduced charge…
One that ‘marks the fail’ so to speak with colored powder when it ‘blows up’ thereby showing that the individual in question failed in their mission to stop the drone by ‘coloring them’ with the powder… pink being one of the more popular ‘marks of shame.’ gets recycled from my understanding. Because they’re a wee bit more expensive, (a DJI Mavic runs/retails for about $600) the charge doesn’t ‘kill’ the drone necessarily during training UNLESS the student ‘wins’ and takes out the drone so to speak.
The point is they’re willing to lose a drone via the student’s live fire, but NOT if they fail. IF the student successfully blows the drone away, then it’s money well spent… if they fail, then the drone can be reutilized on another student/trainee.
And as and Aside: Shame is a great motivator in the DotMil, no matter what nationality you are… coming off the range, covered in pink powder proving you failed? Yeah…. IF they think you can do better and recycle you, well I bet you’ll make it the second time around rather than embarrass yourself….
Another thing the Russians have been finally utilizing is what -I- told them they needed to be using back many months ago, and that was the KS23 Shotgun:

The KS23 was/is a four round capacity pump action Anti-Riot Riot Shotgun designed and built in the early 70s. It is well known for its utterly INSANE caliber, firing essentially what is a 23 mm round… which makes it roughly a 4 gauge using European standards. That makes it the making it the largest-bore shotgun in modern use.
Fuck My/Your Shoulder Aye?
Or in the case of having no stock, your palm.
FFS they made it using failed 23mm Anti-Aircraft Machine gun barrels in the whole nature of Ivan’s “Waste Not, Want Not” proclivities… Ivan throws NOTHING away if he can help it… hence the size/name/caliber of this beast. It fires non-lethal (why bother?), buckshot (oh that must suck) and fucking slugs although what sort of target needs a 23mm Deer-Slug?!?!?!
That’s one fucking deer I never want to meet up with…
Armed or Unarmed…
A Siberian/Mongolian Man Eating Death Deer maybe?
Jes’ Sayin’
No fuckin’ thanks brohiem.
Now, as far as (and I know this’s going to go over like the proverbial lead balloon,) but I have a COTS idea that could be implemented right here, and right now… As I discussed with Herschel last evening or the night before…
My Idea utilizes pre-existing stuff… In this case it’d be the M7/M243 LVOSS or Light Vehicle Obscuration Smoke System to dispense an anti-drone package. The anti-drone rounds would be new, but easily and cheaply made/manufatured.
I make my own ‘timed/fused’ fireworks legally here for holidays for my 37mm Launcher… If -I- can make them here, utilizing a glue gun, some black powder, and learning how to time my visco?
So easy, even an Airborne Infantryman can do it LOL.
As it is, currently, the LVOSS is/was used to ‘throw mad amounts of smoke’ in Iraq and Afghanistan during ‘negative crowd issues’ i.e. protests and/or riots. The launchers themselves individually look like this:

A lot of you probably remember them. I saw them very frequently in Iraq on the roof(s) of primarily MP (Mil Police) vehicles and the like, in clusters:

Usually 2x launchers, like that, facing outward. They generally were on all four corners of the roof(s) of the Gun Trucks with 2x per, with a total of 8 launchers available… They usually looked like this:

(In this case there’s only one launcher per corner… hey, it’s a websearch man… I do what I can w/what I got…)
Now the round used in those launchers? They’re the L8 Smoke Round that has a makeup like this (cutaway pic so you know of what I speak):

Each tube on a M7 launch tube is 66mm in diameter wide round, and about 5.75 inches (the round itself) in the pic above long… meaning the overall length is about 7.28 inches long, but the Boomy-Boom part of the round itself is about 5.75 inches by 66mm which is 2.6 inches wide. The round has the capacity in that picture of having a 19oz payload…
Remove that Red Phosphorous/Butyl Rubber Smoke Composition?
Replace that and Load the shell with #4 Turkey Shot?
Well the payload for the above-stated round is 19 ounces.
The math said a comparable 19-ounce load of #4 lead shot would contain approximately 2,584 pellets. #4 lead shot contains about 136 pellets per ounce. Therefore, 19 ounces * 136 pellets/ounce equals roughly 2584 pellets.
THAT is a LOT of pellets IMO.
Each M7 launcher holds 4 rounds.
That’d put about a little less that 10000 #4 Turkey Shot Pellets out there
ALL at once.
LITERALLY A CLOUD of #4 shot out to about 100 yards +/-
ALLLLL it takes is ONE PELLET to hit a rotor
Game Over at that point.
Multiply Times ‘however many’ drones may be coming in? I mean c’mon…. 10,000 #4 shot? In ONE ‘shewtin’ match’ so to speak? That’s all she wrote. As I said, All it takes is ONE pellet on a rotor or whatnot to bring down a drone…
This’s the best route to go IMO, because they’re PRE-EXISTING tech means just re-ramping the loadout for the rounds themselves. Add on that they cane be reloaded BY THE GUYS DRIVING THE TRUCKS instead of needing some aftermarket Contractor Contact Team???
Driver: “Hey, we shot down another drone, launcher #3 is dry”
TC looks up to the Gunner: “Yo man… When we stop, reload #3… I think the reloads are under my porn-stash-ammo can…”
Gunner: “Roger.. got it.”
Win-Win I think to myself.
Of course watch this happen exactly as I describe it, and I get fucked out of the idea, as it ALWAYS happens…. The Penta-gram has bounty payments for ‘stuff’ like this, but you never hear about guys like, the real ‘thinkers’ getting paid nor credit for stuff like this…
So that’s episode for tonight.
Your Thoughts?
More Later
BCE
