Check Out The Anti-Drone Weapons Carried By Security At Biden's Meeting In Brussels
www.thedrive.com - Brett Tingley
OpenWorks states that the Skywall is a more effective solution to bring down drones than other kinetic solutions because “Conventional weapons often fail to incapacitate a drone and do not offer a proportionate response to the drone threat.” Further, the company writes, conventional weapons “can also escalate a situation when used in the vicinity of large crowds.” In a defense urban environment outside of an actual conflict environment, using any sort of traditional firearms or munitions presents significant hazards to bystanders. In addition, jammers such as the DroneGun Tactical or other anti-drone systems that use high-power microwaves have limitations when used in urban environments, as they could potentially disrupt civilian communications networks or other electronics.
The net and net/parachute rounds fired by Skywall are claimed to be reusable, but it's unclear how many rounds each unit can carry or how quickly it can be reloaded, making it unknown how well the system would be against multiple drones or a drone swarm.
Drones have previously been used in the past in assassination attempts on world leaders, as was the case in 2018 when a drone exploded in the air above disputed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as he gave a speech in front of a large crowd. A stampede ensued, leaving seven Venezuelan National Guardsmen injured. It's possible that this kind of panic could very well be as destructive or more destructive than an initial drone attack itself. In addition, small, off-the shelf drones are already being armed with small explosives and used to assassinate enemies of drug cartels in Central America.
Multi-layered drone defenses have been tested by DARPA recently, who recently demonstrated a vehicle-mounted system that can rapidly deploy a combination of high-power microwave and kinetic capture weapons designed to disable drones without destroying them outright. By bringing these drones to the ground intact, these systems allow investigators to forensically examine hostile drones and potentially identify their origin or better assess the risks they pose, enabling the development of more precise countermeasures to defeat them.
It's important to note that the particular mix of net projectiles and jammers seen in Brussels are really only useful against low-density, very low-end threats, such as a single quadcopter, and would not be highly effective against a drone swarm or against more advanced types of unmanned aerial vehicles, including small fixed wing types that travel at greater speeds and can be autonomous in nature. It's also worth mentioning we don't know what other anti-drone systems may have been providing cover for the meeting.
Nevertheless, the combination of the two weapons seen carried by Belgian Federal Police in Brussels makes for something of a very low-end layered drone defense of sorts, one that could quickly respond to simple threats while remaining portable enough to be used by roving security details. In the future, far more advanced defenses—likely including RF jamming, kinetic systems, and directed energy weapons—will need to be layered into the equation to adequately defend against rapidly proliferating far more capable drones that would be employed en-masse during an attack.
Contact the author: Brett@TheDrive.com
Source www.thedrive.com