Fighter drones have arrived in Ukraine.
Screw asymmetric weapons--fight fire with fire:
In the contested skies above Ukraine, a new kind of warfare is rapidly emerging as drones are increasingly sent on new attack missions. Their targets aren't armored vehicles or fighting positions — they are other drones.
I won't claim to be a prophet. But I did recognize the growing problem. To counter that problem, in 2018 in Army magazine I called for fighter drones--unmanned aerial systems (UASs) to protect our forward troops from enemy drone swarms in the "brown skies" just above them:
Clearly, units at the company level and below need a better means of controlling their own brown skies airspace. Yet rather than burdening lower-level units with additional ground-based air defense gun and missile systems, air-to-air combat UASs would provide better air defense than either high-flying advanced fighter aircraft or distant higher-echelon air defense weapons that will have difficulty identifying and tracking small aerial threats--let alone engaging them--before the threats strike and return to enemy positions. ...
Much as Army units carry out their operations unaware of the battles taking place in the blue skies that keep enemy aircraft away from the battlefield, units maneuvering and engaging in direct fire can't afford to be distracted by fighting for the brown skies above them.
I thought that forcing the bleeding edge to lug around and use anti-drone weapons sufficient to protect themselves would fatally distract them from their primary mission of closing with and destroying the enemy. Perhaps the Replicator phase 2 addressing counter-drone technology will see a role for this type of weapon. Maybe phase 2 is what we're seeing in the skies over New Jersey, eh?
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
NOTE: I'm adding updates on the Last Hamas War, including the revived Syria multi-war, in this post.
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NOTE: I made the image with Bing.
