With cheap drones appearing to be critical to the future of warfare, is there a chance that the US will develop a domestic drone industry that rivals China's, or has that ship sailed?
There's plenty of military drones companies, the US military has the budget for them. But now I'm wondering, who would win, 1,000 military drones or 1,000,000 consumer DJI ones?
"Quantity has a quality of its own". Consumer DJI Drones are useless in a fight (good only for reconnaissance or maybe crashing into military drones to disrupt them), but Russia is showing that drones can be made on the cheap (e.g. there was footage of a drone of theirs using a plastic soda bottle as the fuel reservoir) and still be disruptive.
DJI drones are ubiquitous on both sides in the Ukraine conflict. They have excellent cameras and long flight durations, which make them an ideal aerial observation platform. The battlefield is a very different place if you can't hide behind terrain and have to assume that if you can see the sky, then you can be seen by the enemy. These drones have drastically improved the effectiveness of conventional artillery, because you can seek out targets and get real-time reports on exactly where you shells are landing. Consumer/prosumer drones are vulnerable to jamming or being shot down, but they're also cheap enough to be essentially expendable. Ukraine are reportedly losing 10,000 drones a month, but that's a bargain for what they achieve on the battlefield.
DJI drones fitted with grenade-dropping mechanisms have been used extensively and still see some use, but DIY FPV drones are now the preferred offensive weapon, used in a kamikaze role as a kind of cheap guided missile. They're cheaper, faster and more agile than the DJI drones. A good FPV pilot can hit the weak spots on a moving tank, or fly through a narrow opening to hit troops sheltering in a bunker. They're invariably used with DJI drones in hunter-killer teams, with a DJI drone acting as a spotter for an FPV pilot.
The sound of a DJI drone is known to everyone on the front line and it means exactly one thing - that you need to find hard cover now. If you can hear it, then chances are that it has spotted you, the pilot has passed on your coordinates and a kamikaze drone or an artillery shell is already flying towards you. If you ignore it or take pot shots at it, then you're gambling with your life.
UKR also has limited access to latest PRC drones, DJI T60 is $8000 consumer agriculture drone with 60kg payload and AESA radar. That's enough to start swarming and engaging almost any ground vehicles.
Getting signal through a hostile radio environment comes to mind. But as it stands now it looks like this might be a field were a hundred "macguyvers on typewriters" adapting consumer drones are more effective than a Shakespeare trapped in the bowels of the military industrial complex.
Even basic consumer drones use frequency hopping and have relatively complex signal integrity logic - necessary even for using ‘free’ frequencies like 2.4 and 5.4 ghz in typical urban environments. And they’re pretty good, frankly.
"Frequency hopping" does nothing when your adversary can blow out the entire 2.4 and 5.4GHz bands, even before getting into sophisticated radio-specific attacks.
Urban radio environments are crowded, not actively hostile.
And yet, plenty of field success right now with consumer (even basic amateur level) drones.
The issue with high energy jamming (broad frequency band denial) is it makes your jammer a super tempting (and easy) target for a HARM or equivalent, and consumes quite a bit of power. If someone is actively denying such a wide frequency band, any high school level electronics student can design a pretty effective seeker.
And the whole 'radio power drops off as a cube of the distance' thing means the equipment needs to be pretty close to operations, so it's going to get attacked pretty often.
The noise level in a typical urban environment from wifi is already pretty terrible, 'hostile' or not. Way more terrible than a typical remote environment, which is where these drones are being used, unless there are active countermeasures pretty close.
Counter measures, counter-counter measures, etc. But I'm not seeing much mention of effective jamming happening in-theatre right now.
They do. In fact they graduated from simply dropping grenades on soldiers and IFVs to suicide roles taking out actual tanks. I'm not sure actual DJIs are being used in suicide missions or custom, still inexpensive, drones.
The video footage of suicide drones you can find on r/combatfootage is nearly always from custom drones, the giveaway is the analog video transmission. As the poster before said, DJI drones are only used for reconnaisance (for example DJI Matrice), where high-quality digital video transmission (and thermal image cameras) are very useful.
There's a coalition to supply Ukraine with a million drones (although that figure might be exaggerated) I'm guessing they'll be slightly cheaper than the Black Hornet ($100K+)
In what volume of space? You don't want them to be packed densely enough that the enemy can fire a buckshot in a random direction and shoot down two dozen drones.
> Next thing will be assassinating people with their own phone by causing it to blow up next to their head
I don't know if this was an intentional reference or not, but that has definitely already been done (with a rigged phone). Plus the widespread use of phone position data for targeting.
> the problem is that "we" still think killing each other is some sort of solution
The problem is that violence works against everything except more violence.
