SinoDefence Forum

vesicles

This is a topic that I brought up in another post. I thought it would be an interesting thing to discuss in general.

We know that China has a large population of unmanned drones as well as many J-5, J-6 and J-7 that they can easily convert to drones. What if they decided to send out a swarm of these drone armed with AA missiles/dumb bombs/precision munitions as the first wave during an offensive? How do you deal with it? I see two options, none of which is a good one for me. 1) Take them down! You then expose all your strategic sites, including command and control, missile sites as well as radar sites. The piloted fighters/attack aircraft/bombers that closely follow the drones can bomb the heck out you. On top of all that, you waste your ammunition. 2) Ignore them. Well, you get to keep your strategic sites secret and preserve ammo, but these drones of inferior technology also pack a punch and can cause some serious damage.

This also applies in a dogfight. They send out drones armed with AA missiles at you. Your fighters are much superior, but what do you do? You get out of the way? They might have piloted advanced fighters behind the drones locking on you immediately and you won't have time to recover and totally lose initiative in the fight. YOu take them head-on and shoot down? After couple of minutes, you used up all your missiles and becomes a toothless tiger. Their piloted fighters lock you on and the only thing you can do is to run away, which is not a glorious way of fighting (if you can call it a fight).

So what do you do? One solution would be to jam their communication since these drones are pilotless and only loyal to the commanding signals given to them. If you can figure out a way to cut the signals and even manipulate the signals to possibly gain control of the drones. I think they would definitely freak out when they see their drones flying back and start attacking them. But what if these drones are controlled by pilots sitting in fighters colsely following the drones. Would the jamming be strong enough to jam signlas so close by?

jwangyue

Israel did it in Middle East against Egypt (I think) and it was hugely effective. I think the biggest problem is the fact that you can't really tell a drone from a manned aircraft with your radar (correct me if I am wrong), especially with early warming radars.

cmb=1968

I believe that the Israel used the drones to trike the Egyptian early warning RADAR to trigger the tracking RADAR to lock on to the drones allowing a small force of Wild Weasel to hit them with anti-radiation missiles. This Blinded the SAM batteries making a opening in the Egyptian defenses allowing attack aircraft to attack unopposed.

I believe that this is a established tactical for all air forces that have the ability to build large numbers of drones they plan for this tactic.

vesicles

It sounds like this is a very well adopted tactic. So someone surely has thought of a way to counter it for anyone could be the target of drone attack.

PanAsian

When I first saw the topic of this thread I was thinking this referred to playing defense against an all-drone offensive.

Going with that interpretation of the topic I would think this is definitely a case where the best defense is a good offense.

The strategic implication of an all-drone offensive is that the attacker faces only financial costs and no human costs. And likely the equivalent industrial costs as a manned offensive would require. Meanwhile the defender still faces costs in all forms, financial, industrial, and human.

This is exacerbated if combat takes place on the defender's home turf, and all costs will be both military and civilian.

Therefore an effective defense must cost the attacking side as much as the offense costs the defending side, including consequences for the attackers' home turf.

Drone vs drone combat is likely to be worse for the territory and people where the fight is compared to manned vs manned combat as there is probably even less concern amongst the attackers for 'collateral damage' (already minimal even when it is a manned vs manned fight).

Escalation to a nuclear exchange would not be out of the question and may well be the best bet a defender against drones would have.

pla101prc

i dont think drone war is viable option for PLAAF at the moment. its way too costly, and the PLAAF doesnt have a lot of drones to waste anyways.

panzerkom

To set the record straight, I believe you guys were referring to the Bekaa Valley engagement during Operation Peace for the Galilee in 1982, in which the Israeli air force was able to destroy a large Syrian air defense network and shot down 90 or so MiGs in subsequent air-to-air engagements with no loss of their own. The Israelis utilized UAVs, ARMs, AWACS and electronic warfare aircraft in a well-planned and well-coordinated manner.

While it is conceivable that the PLAAF can launch a large number of unmanned drones and try to overwhelm an opponents air defense system, one must keep in mind that there is a limit to how many aircraft a particular air space can hold.

rhino123

I have a very simple and somewhat kind of stupid way of deterring such an attack. Taking China as a context and looking at the type of drones they have. Most shouldn't be very high altitude... so I believe a highly effective way is to release thousands upon thousands of balloons.

Not the balloons that you would see in a party though, these balloons are bigger. These should filled up the atmosphere in which enemy drones would be flying straight into.

Their air intake system will suck in some of the balloons thus causing jams and stuff like that to their system and caused them to crash.

If possible, each balloons might even carry a few kilograms of explosives and upon impact would explode.

Couple with lots of small explosions and the huge amount of relatively cheap and easy to manufactured balloons, it would cause a great mess to enemy's radar system on the drones and so whatever they related back to base are rubbish. and perhaps some of the explosions might even bring down some of the drones.

Might be stupid to look at, but should be quite effective against unmanned drones with no brains to being with.

cmb=1968

I believe the US military has developed a low cost Air launched target decoy to take the place of a drone in anti SAM operations.

Pointblank

You are talking about the ADM-141 TALD and the ADM-160 MALD.

bladerunner

Remember the 1000 plane bomber raids over Germany in WW2 and if one was to take in the number of German fighters as well, that's a mighty amount of planes coming and going , in a defined airspaceand with a fairly primitive guidance system.
If a hot situation was to occur somewhere in Pacific/Asia which involved USA, how many land based and carrier planes can Amercia put up?

vesicles

I don't know how feasible this is, but it sounds like a great idea to me. A low cost solution to a low cost problem. I can imagine what kind of nightmare all the balloons would be to the drones. This is almost equvalent to the anti-air artillery, except these explosives can stay in the air for much longer and can travel. If you can put some guidance systems and a motor in and turn them into blimps, that would probably even increase the effectiveness.

vesicles

But it is a lot less costly than to fly J-10's, J-11B's and Su-30's into enemy air defense, especially factoring in the human casualty.

bladerunner

Barrage ballons were used during WW2, with mixed effectiveness

Ambivalent

If you look at the sortie rates in Desert Storm, upwards of 2000 missions per day were flown. This is as high as the daily sortie rates over Europe in WWII. Today the aircraft fly much faster so one plane can complete three sorties a day by rotating the crews. The planes themselves are turned around quickly. This was not possible with those old B-24's. Keep in mind that with modern precision munitions and the huge payloads of something like an F-15E, one such plane can do the mission of several WWII bombers. Today it is one bomb per target, and as accuracy increases we use smaller and smaller bombs ( think the USAF's small diameter bomb ) allowing more bombs per airplane. In 2000, one USN CVN air wing could hit 150 targets per day using the munitions of the day. With the use of higher precision munitions ( JDAM II for example ) the same air wing today can hit almost 1000 targets in the same 24 hour period.