I'd say more like Vietnam and the Air Mobile/air assault development, close air support doctrine with fast movers and Guided weapons/smart bombs creation.
But if things go tits up in a ditch yes the Spanish Civil war for real. Sometimes quantity and cheap beats quality and expensive.
The is an engineering axiom that goes something like:
1. good engineering is not figuring out additional features and functions can be added to the product.
2. great engineering is figuring out all the unnecessary, functions, cost, weight and material that can be removed while still achieving the underlying function.
Its supposed to be waxed to be somewhat water resistant. Therefore it depends on the mission and the amount of rain I think. Heavily loaded max range in torrential thunderstorm obviously not. Scotch mist amounts of drizzle, not a problem for a shorter range mission etc.
This blog went a totally different direction than I had suspected, based on the title. My concern is that yes, the Ukraine War may very well be a weapons testing ground for the major powers, who may then decide to run that whole thing out. There is a sardonic curse that goes "May you live in interesting times." The other day I pulled the little slip of paper out of a fortune cookie that said "You will always live in interesting times." Sorry, guys.
Return of the Bofors 40 mm or Oerlikon 20 mm mounts. Of course, EW against control links is a problem. In this case, a recon configured cardboard drone could be set up to fly a preset course, and record the whole way to get home. Electronics are there, and while not real time, any recon is better than none.
I'd suspect that if it's in shotgun range it's too late. In my uneducated opinion you'd probably need to kill it as soon as you could see or hear it. Maybe 200-300 yards? I dunno. We have more knowledgeable people on the porch.
This. We're likely to see the return of light AAA systems.
FWIW, the old Vietnam-era recon Firebees used inertial navigation and preprogrammed missions. Modern inertial systems are cheaper...I dare say you could get an iPhone to do a decent job of it.
On the one hand, these are wonderful opportunities. On the other, significant threats. I presume an 11 pound payload could include something like the old SADARM munitions, which were designed to knock out tanks and other vehicles, or a large fragmentation bomb for troops in the open, light trucks, etc. One has to anticipate how to detect and defend against these. Cardboard construction means 0.5 machine guns or lasers can shoot them down IF they can be detected, tracked, identified and targeted in time. OTOH, drones like these are very, very easy to produce in truly massive numbers.
Israel is working on a "drone dome" system which will combine radars and other sensors, probably networked, computers to process the data and provide targeting solutions and the necessary weapons. Its worked well against larger Iranian drones, but these expendable small swarm-bots might prove a more difficult threat.
And how (or even can) you suppress a threat like this when any building, ship or pickup truck can be a drone launching site? Its not as if you have big, fixed identifyable infrastructure like V2 sites. In any event, lessons from Ukraine should (but probably will not) be given a higher priority than the wokism choking the armed forces.
If you really want to get tricky, try drone swarms. Take a bunch of drones, of different types. Some drones carry a reflector, some carry IR, some carry thermal emitters and others. Fly them at your enemy's defense system. Route them in separately and then have them form up just out of range. Depending on how you configure it, you can create almost any type of aircraft, ship or ground target that you want. Call it smart chaff. When the enemy fires, change the formation and the target goes away. I remember our helicopters using RBOC chaff pods to imitate a ship in the event we were ever attacked by Exocet or other ASM's. This would blow that away. A really good system would be recoverable and refurbish able.
I hate to tell you this, but FliteTest has been designing and building these things for a decade. I am amazed that it took the UKRs this long to discover "waterproof" cardboard. https://store.flitetest.com/airplanes/
I used to work for a company that made point of purchase advertising displays. We had a CNC cutter creaser. You placed a sheet of corrugate on it, pressed a button and it would cut out the shape and put in creases for folding. Add some two sided tape and depending on the design maybe a hot glue gun for assembly. The one shown in the picture would be a piece of cake for me to design. I've got a solid RC aircraft background. You can buy the guidance and power systems premade. In some of the videos they carry an impressive payload. I know that theirs are RC controlled, but, it wouldn't take much to change that. If you take a look at the different types of corrugate out there, rain wouldn't be an issue if the right material was used.
Aug 28, 2023·edited Aug 28, 2023Liked by CDR Salamander
and here I am, for years offering that modern, fully rigid hulled, amphibious AIRSHIPS (not blimps or dirigible types) can bring enormous advantages to the fleet......cheaply, quick to field. stealthy, survivable, capable.
this brought a smile. I am literally sitting six feet away from materials used to build a living-room sized RC model of my airship........made with foamboard and corrugated plastic sheet.
there is a whole world of non "tech" out there that can be used well, to great advantage. warfare doesn't have to mean umpty-ump hundred million dollar aircraft. A nice little P-51, cheap, slow and dumb as it is............can deliver a super smart missile into range. the missile kills, not the delivery platform, or the pilot, necessarily.
Let us not forget that the lowly wood and fabric Polikarpov Po-2 flew all the way through the Korean war. It's also credited with a, F-94 Starfire kill in Korea.
So to echo my comment over on Insty in a more relevant forum: Everyone is watching this show, so from the other side of the waterproof cardboard, what is the US or allied military’s answer to the simultaneous arrival of any large number (hundreds? thousands?) of cardboard UAV delivered 5kg warheads over name-any-military-asset?
Actually tangle netting that deploys from a round, if it spreads out wide enough when they pop, would do nicely - tangle the prop, down it goes.
But so would one of the area affect munitions that expel a bunch of BBs.
Still need to sense them far enough away to generate a target track, though, which is I think the greater challenge. If they can be sensed there’s lots of stuff that could be used against them. Maybe loitering drone with staring IR that sits there and does pattern matching to look for things that are not the static background from the last frame - sort of MTI for staring IR?
I actually thought of "Stand by to repel cardboard! All hands draw shotguns and man the rails port and starboard!" but would you really want your folks out playing skeet with flying claymores?
NATO has been pushing the Ukrainians to use combined arms maneuver warfare methods in attempting to drive towards Maripol and split Russian forces in the south.
But what the Ukrainians don't have is an air force capable of supporting combined arms maneuver warfare. Nor do they have sufficient training in combined arms operations and force coordination, nor do they have the sufficient mass of forces needed to carry through to Maripol should an initial breakthrough occur.
An army which cannot take casualties cannot keep up the fight. The Ukrainians have taken horrific casualties in the last few months with little to show of real value for the casualties they've taken in that short period of time.
The Russians are in the process of methodically rearming and rebuilding their own forces. It is quite clear at this point that the only option now open to Ukraine is to establish its own series of defensive lines which would be extremely expensive for the Russians to attack.
This means accepting the difficult reality that the Russians will not be giving up the ground they've already taken. The issue now is how to keep the Russians from taking even more territory inside Ukraine.
As has been seen with the Russian Lancet, thousands of drones can be exceptionally useful against armored vehicles and against other maneuvering battlefield targets. Smaller cheaper drones deployed in huge numbers could be highly effective against infantry and against lines of logisitics, especially if combined with cluster munitions.
So here is the big question .... will NATO and the Ukrainians face the harsh reality of current circumstances and build a line of defense similar to what the Russians have built in the south? Or will they instead continue attempting to use a combined arms approach which is not, and will not, be properly supported by a sufficient mass of ground forces, or by sufficient air power?
E.V. ain't green and neither is wind or solar. I'm a mech eng with some decent electronics understanding so I'm talking hybrid solutions here where engine for distance and DC motor when stealth called for. I believe in the warfare principle of the honey badger... honey badger don't give a <blank>, he just a mean, determined nasty bastard that doesn't back down... and he ain't pretty about how he goes about things.
I'd say more like Vietnam and the Air Mobile/air assault development, close air support doctrine with fast movers and Guided weapons/smart bombs creation.
But if things go tits up in a ditch yes the Spanish Civil war for real. Sometimes quantity and cheap beats quality and expensive.
The is an engineering axiom that goes something like:
1. good engineering is not figuring out additional features and functions can be added to the product.
2. great engineering is figuring out all the unnecessary, functions, cost, weight and material that can be removed while still achieving the underlying function.
DOD tends down path 1
This drone is on path 2
“An engineer has achieved perfection not when there’s nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away.”
"Civilization" ??
I can’t not hear it in Leonard Nemoy’s voice 😉
Good breakdown of 1. and 2. I agree.
Until it rains.
Don't forget the 8th AF used cardboard drop tanks. If you need to use it in the rain? Maybe the waxed cardboard will last long enough.
In the meantime, if drones are dropping multiple anti-personnel mines, are they a CBU or something else?
spray coat the cardboard with wax or something oily. Still wouldn't be complicated. Think about the fancy box your phone came with.
Fome core with a coat of clear polyurethane works well. I build models with the stuff. It will take quite a bit of splashing but not immersion.
The cardboard's waxed.
Its supposed to be waxed to be somewhat water resistant. Therefore it depends on the mission and the amount of rain I think. Heavily loaded max range in torrential thunderstorm obviously not. Scotch mist amounts of drizzle, not a problem for a shorter range mission etc.
“Heck, give it to the Marines for their next exercise in WESTPAC and see what use they can come up with.” This instead of DARPA
Hand a credit kid to the smart people in a unit when you are telling them their plane ships out in 18 hours.
This blog went a totally different direction than I had suspected, based on the title. My concern is that yes, the Ukraine War may very well be a weapons testing ground for the major powers, who may then decide to run that whole thing out. There is a sardonic curse that goes "May you live in interesting times." The other day I pulled the little slip of paper out of a fortune cookie that said "You will always live in interesting times." Sorry, guys.
Return of the Bofors 40 mm or Oerlikon 20 mm mounts. Of course, EW against control links is a problem. In this case, a recon configured cardboard drone could be set up to fly a preset course, and record the whole way to get home. Electronics are there, and while not real time, any recon is better than none.
Something fully auto shooting a buckshot like warhead at 200-300 RPM might work. (Once you can spot it and target it.)
(What altitude do these things fly at.)
The USAS-12 makes a great deal more sense.
I'd suspect that if it's in shotgun range it's too late. In my uneducated opinion you'd probably need to kill it as soon as you could see or hear it. Maybe 200-300 yards? I dunno. We have more knowledgeable people on the porch.
Good point. I’m not sure how traditional VT rounds would work, as those are radar fuses. Maybe times bursting charges?
The Dutch gave the Ukrainians 35 of the old Bofors L70 IIRC.
This. We're likely to see the return of light AAA systems.
FWIW, the old Vietnam-era recon Firebees used inertial navigation and preprogrammed missions. Modern inertial systems are cheaper...I dare say you could get an iPhone to do a decent job of it.
Who knows. Maybe drone sized barrage balloons will make a comeback.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfSIdEH0Jbw
On the one hand, these are wonderful opportunities. On the other, significant threats. I presume an 11 pound payload could include something like the old SADARM munitions, which were designed to knock out tanks and other vehicles, or a large fragmentation bomb for troops in the open, light trucks, etc. One has to anticipate how to detect and defend against these. Cardboard construction means 0.5 machine guns or lasers can shoot them down IF they can be detected, tracked, identified and targeted in time. OTOH, drones like these are very, very easy to produce in truly massive numbers.
Israel is working on a "drone dome" system which will combine radars and other sensors, probably networked, computers to process the data and provide targeting solutions and the necessary weapons. Its worked well against larger Iranian drones, but these expendable small swarm-bots might prove a more difficult threat.
And how (or even can) you suppress a threat like this when any building, ship or pickup truck can be a drone launching site? Its not as if you have big, fixed identifyable infrastructure like V2 sites. In any event, lessons from Ukraine should (but probably will not) be given a higher priority than the wokism choking the armed forces.
If you really want to get tricky, try drone swarms. Take a bunch of drones, of different types. Some drones carry a reflector, some carry IR, some carry thermal emitters and others. Fly them at your enemy's defense system. Route them in separately and then have them form up just out of range. Depending on how you configure it, you can create almost any type of aircraft, ship or ground target that you want. Call it smart chaff. When the enemy fires, change the formation and the target goes away. I remember our helicopters using RBOC chaff pods to imitate a ship in the event we were ever attacked by Exocet or other ASM's. This would blow that away. A really good system would be recoverable and refurbish able.
This would be a really good application of swarming technology. It's not too terribly demanding, you could keep the costs low enough to make it work.
A-Team, MacGyver, and the Force.
I ain’t getting on no cardboard plane Hannibal! Fool!
Excellent little 40mm grenade carrier.
I hate to tell you this, but FliteTest has been designing and building these things for a decade. I am amazed that it took the UKRs this long to discover "waterproof" cardboard. https://store.flitetest.com/airplanes/
Sorry Todd,
I didn't see your comment before I posted.
Give these guys a look. https://www.flitetest.com/
I used to work for a company that made point of purchase advertising displays. We had a CNC cutter creaser. You placed a sheet of corrugate on it, pressed a button and it would cut out the shape and put in creases for folding. Add some two sided tape and depending on the design maybe a hot glue gun for assembly. The one shown in the picture would be a piece of cake for me to design. I've got a solid RC aircraft background. You can buy the guidance and power systems premade. In some of the videos they carry an impressive payload. I know that theirs are RC controlled, but, it wouldn't take much to change that. If you take a look at the different types of corrugate out there, rain wouldn't be an issue if the right material was used.
The drone swarm is the future and the future of air defense is defending against drone swarms.
The modern CBU
And it appears Ukraine just completed a strike with a swarm on a Russian airport.
and here I am, for years offering that modern, fully rigid hulled, amphibious AIRSHIPS (not blimps or dirigible types) can bring enormous advantages to the fleet......cheaply, quick to field. stealthy, survivable, capable.
this brought a smile. I am literally sitting six feet away from materials used to build a living-room sized RC model of my airship........made with foamboard and corrugated plastic sheet.
there is a whole world of non "tech" out there that can be used well, to great advantage. warfare doesn't have to mean umpty-ump hundred million dollar aircraft. A nice little P-51, cheap, slow and dumb as it is............can deliver a super smart missile into range. the missile kills, not the delivery platform, or the pilot, necessarily.
Let us not forget that the lowly wood and fabric Polikarpov Po-2 flew all the way through the Korean war. It's also credited with a, F-94 Starfire kill in Korea.
Get it to young guys, E5 and below during excercises. Most of us dinosaurs will not have enough imagination to utilizes it effectively.
So to echo my comment over on Insty in a more relevant forum: Everyone is watching this show, so from the other side of the waterproof cardboard, what is the US or allied military’s answer to the simultaneous arrival of any large number (hundreds? thousands?) of cardboard UAV delivered 5kg warheads over name-any-military-asset?
BOHICA. No military yet has an answer.
A swarm of these would be a nightmare
Cast nets from above. Like mullet fishing.
Actually tangle netting that deploys from a round, if it spreads out wide enough when they pop, would do nicely - tangle the prop, down it goes.
But so would one of the area affect munitions that expel a bunch of BBs.
Still need to sense them far enough away to generate a target track, though, which is I think the greater challenge. If they can be sensed there’s lots of stuff that could be used against them. Maybe loitering drone with staring IR that sits there and does pattern matching to look for things that are not the static background from the last frame - sort of MTI for staring IR?
Shotguns. A truckload of shotguns.
I actually thought of "Stand by to repel cardboard! All hands draw shotguns and man the rails port and starboard!" but would you really want your folks out playing skeet with flying claymores?
“Von Neumann’s War” by Travis Taylor had a good concept. High power laser that doesn’t bother to aim, just scans the sky like a laser show.
NATO has been pushing the Ukrainians to use combined arms maneuver warfare methods in attempting to drive towards Maripol and split Russian forces in the south.
But what the Ukrainians don't have is an air force capable of supporting combined arms maneuver warfare. Nor do they have sufficient training in combined arms operations and force coordination, nor do they have the sufficient mass of forces needed to carry through to Maripol should an initial breakthrough occur.
An army which cannot take casualties cannot keep up the fight. The Ukrainians have taken horrific casualties in the last few months with little to show of real value for the casualties they've taken in that short period of time.
The Russians are in the process of methodically rearming and rebuilding their own forces. It is quite clear at this point that the only option now open to Ukraine is to establish its own series of defensive lines which would be extremely expensive for the Russians to attack.
This means accepting the difficult reality that the Russians will not be giving up the ground they've already taken. The issue now is how to keep the Russians from taking even more territory inside Ukraine.
As has been seen with the Russian Lancet, thousands of drones can be exceptionally useful against armored vehicles and against other maneuvering battlefield targets. Smaller cheaper drones deployed in huge numbers could be highly effective against infantry and against lines of logisitics, especially if combined with cluster munitions.
So here is the big question .... will NATO and the Ukrainians face the harsh reality of current circumstances and build a line of defense similar to what the Russians have built in the south? Or will they instead continue attempting to use a combined arms approach which is not, and will not, be properly supported by a sufficient mass of ground forces, or by sufficient air power?
Summer isn't over yet.
I imagine Field Marshall Haig was saying the same thing during the Battle of the Somme. "Just one more push and we will break through".
One might imagine a bunch of EV-powered Polaris MZRs tooling about the country side with a stack of these in the back.
If you use EV and 'green' enough in the proposal it doesn't matter how useful it is, the admin will go for it.
E.V. ain't green and neither is wind or solar. I'm a mech eng with some decent electronics understanding so I'm talking hybrid solutions here where engine for distance and DC motor when stealth called for. I believe in the warfare principle of the honey badger... honey badger don't give a <blank>, he just a mean, determined nasty bastard that doesn't back down... and he ain't pretty about how he goes about things.