Seeing the recent developments in the mass production of drones used in warfare it has me wondering. How does one protect themselves against a drone attack?
Seeing the recent developments in the mass production of drones used in warfare it has me wondering. How does one protect themselves against a drone attack?
r/AskMen
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ECM.
You can use nets to trap them, or you can hide from them and find their fiber optic cable and cut it. These are both tactics used in the Ukraine war.
Obviously with less gun laws. /s
12 gauge
Militaries and some defense contractors use RF jammers that scramble drone signals, causing them to lose control or crash. Civilians don’t have legal access to this tech, but governments and secure facilities do.
There’s a few early phase defenses out there but your best bet is to avoid being targeted entirely by not being found.
Americans would learn what the real problem with tiktok is really fast for example.
It’s theater warfare.
They are very, very easy to bring down for the super powers.
Only useful in proxy/money printing conflicts.
Old school microwaves can be re-maned into a signal jammer/EMP that would likely hinder drones.
High cancer risk tho
Find cover
Mirrors?
There’s a multitude of strategies. Some depend on the type or number of drones while others depend on the location you are defending. You don’t want to use a surface to air missile over the super bowl for example. What goes up must come down.
The most common are:
Electronic attack / warfare
Kinetic impactor
Gun from drone to drone or net from drone to drone
And more traditional attacks like missiles or CIWS
There is also geofencing and regulation at the most pedestrian level.
Because they’re considered aircraft, there’s only so many things you can do without running into legal problems. which seems silly but gives the govt an excuse to shut down whatever anti drone projects you’re working on before it becomes a problem.
EMP
Shoot them, use netting to prevent them from flying somewhere, hide from them, or use a jamming device (electronic warfare).
Not go to war.
My double triple barrel ak 57.
Shoot it down before it gets close to you. EMP, hiding under cover, would have to be something low to the ground and sturdy, drones can fly low to the ground but if they have some sort of pay load they won’t fly it low enough to be messed with before it gets to its intended target. I’m sure there are other ways but this is just off the top.
I guess for the average person this would be a decent kit.
Net gun, tshirt launcher. (Easy to use/aim)
Bow and Arrow (silent, reusable ammo, difficult to use)
Homemade flame thrower, strap a lighter to a febreeze can, bam. Good flame detterent. (Got this from resident evil)
Hi-power flashlight. Think thoose LED headlights we all hate. Now flash that directly into the drone. Hopefully it buys time.
My flashlight also has a built in taser as a last resort.
A Bat or a golf club.
Noisemakers (for distraction and evasion)
Reflective tarps. Doubles as shade and blocks surveillance inside of buildings. Use on windows & balconies.
Low power laser & LED strobe lights are a gold idea to confuse sensors.
Bird wire, thin wire, and motion activated sprinklers will all deter close movement.
Anyone that can spoof wifi can create fake signals to disrupt tracking.
Any one with speakers and whistles can use sound as a deterrent. That is one less channel of information they have. If you are hard to hear you are hard to find.
Please chime in with ideas while we prepare to welcome our robot overlords.
P.s I would weaponize and army of room as and Alexis just to be cheeky
OMG HOW DID I FORGET WATER. Buckets of it or even a hi pressure hose could do some work. Also using honey or some sticky substance.
You can find videos about anti drone tactics based on experience in Ukraine on youtube
Why do you need protection against a drone attack? The number of things that are more likely to happen is incomprehensible.
Shoot down their drones with your drones.
Thermal tarp
There are many kinds of drones out there.
If you’re talking about a Predator or Bayraktar TB2-type drone, you’re fucked. These long endurance, high altitude drones can carry precision guided munitions that can launch from miles away, all while controlled by someone in another time zone. It’ll see you before you ever see it. As a normal civilian, you have neither sufficient radar, air defense, nor armor to survive. Frankly, if it wants you dead, you’ll be dead.
There are also kamikaze/suicide-type drones, like the Iran-produced Ababil, Shahed 131, or Shahed 136. Russia is using a bunch of these in Ukraine. These seem to travel according to a preprogrammed flightpath with GPS and an onboard intertial guidance system. They’re not perfect, but they’re fast and they have excellent range. The 136 can travel 1600 miles at speeds up to 115 mph. Again, you lack radar, air defense, and armor sufficient to withstand the blast. Just hope that someone spots it coming from far off (so you can vacate the premises), or that it hits a part of your house that you currently do not occupy.
The other type is the quad-copter, made famous in the war in Ukraine. At the beginning of the war, most were radio controlled, but now some are fiberoptic-controlled with spools that can reach 20km. They carry a much smaller payload, but they’re still quite deadly, since they’re typically equipped with a camera for the drone operator to actively target the enemy. Videos on social media show soldiers shooting these drones with shotguns, or lying in wait for one to pass, then cutting the fiberoptic cable. It’s your best bet for survival, but it’s probably not easy.
If you’re worried about the mass produced, quadcopter type, buy a shotgun and hope you see it coming.
Rifle when it’s far away, shotgun when it’s close.
Someone needs to invent kevelar party poppers with gas and ignition source combined.
Netting is almost certainly the only effective defence that you’ll have access to, assuming smaller quadcoptor types.
Be righteous. Be virtuous. Be chaste. Then a holy aura will envelop you and protect you from drones.
By using the original attack drone! Start honing your boomerang skills mate!
It’s the onion of survival.
Avoidance: “Don’t be there”
Concealment: “If you are there, don’t be seen”
Evasion: “If you are seen, don’t be targeted”
Defense: “If you are targeted, don’t be hit”
Integrity: “If you are hit, don’t be penetrated”
Protection: “If you are penetrated, don’t be killed”
Most of the responses on here are missing the other layers of the onion.
A phased-plasma rifle in the 40 watt range and Holtzman personal shield.
Air supremacy. The only reason the Russia/Ukraine conflict degraded into essentially trench warfare is because neither side controls the skies.
With air superiority/supremacy, your enemy can take pot shots with drones all day and you’re wiping out major infrastructure in one go.
Also there’s a bit of mutually assured destruction in there too.
Realistically, I doubt any individual will be able to. For the foreseeable future, the technological balance is radically in favor of the police state.
The only defence is a bigger drone that shoots drones with tiny drones.
A spear
You don’t.
https://youtu.be/Z3N58QwhRtg?si=R-e7vaRrkFSppebR
Mossberg 590 shockwave… bird shot…practice skeet shooting… you’ll be alright.
Nets, shotguns, EMP’s, hide.
Take over a country that makes drone countermeasures
As others have said from an infantry standpoint it’s a shotgun.
How best to defend something large from potential swarms of drones? I expect traditional flak anti air emplacements and munitions to make a come back before people begin discussing phyrric victories.
Shotgun, #4 buckshot.
For a single drone, a shotgun or eagle will do. For a swarm of drones, not much you can do other than having some large EMP device go off and knock them all out of the sky at the same time. A drone swarm is about the scariest non-nuclear weapon in existence right now. Imagine thousands of drones each packed with enough explosives to blow you to pieces. Now imagine them all going after you.
Get good aim or get lucky
meat spin.
In reality nobody really knows how to effectively defend against drone threats in scale. The development currently is too rapid.
At the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine many tried soft-kill methods, i.e. jamming. But jamming was made somewhat obsolete by fibre optics (which can’t really be jammed) and AI image recognition (so even a drone that has lost connection to the operator can find a target autonomosly and engage that target. Jamming can still help reduce the drone threat as it forces the opponent to use more sophisticated methods, but it will not protect you effectively.
This leaves you with hard-kill systems that are meant to directly destroy the drone. The idea is rather simple, but has some practical limitations.
The main issue is range. Putting a gun (or a laser) on the ground will give you an effective range of no more than about 2km (about 2200 yards) against low-flying drones under ideal circumstances. That’s just a fact due to the curvature of the planet. And that’s for quasi-automatic systems with advanced sensors. If you’re relying on “dudes with shotguns” the effective range is around 50 to 100 metres/yards. Maybe 200 under ideal circumstances. Drones are small and move fast. They’re hard to see with the naked eye. For this reason drones are also really hard to shoot down with shotguns. It’s a bit more easy with fibre optic drones as they are a bit less agile. But the “dude with a shotgun” really only is a last resort and not an effective counter to drones.
The problem with more sophisticated systems is the expense to deploy them in scale. Stuff like Rheinmetall’s “skynex” currently costs around 70 million € per system. You can’t really afford this in a war of attrition to shoot down 1000€ drones. To cover the whole 2000km frontline the price of such systems would need to come down to below 1 million € per. Until then they’ll only be deployed to protect high-value assets. Frontline infantry is no such asset.
Another avenue that is being tested is anti-drone drones. Those however come with the drawback that you need more drones to defend than there are deployed offensively against you. Which also means that you have less drones to use offensively as well, as drone production would be focused on defensive drones.
Passive protection like anti-drone nets can be effective when the only threat is drones, but they also restrict your mobility and telegraph the places you intent to be.
You don’t.
Best strategy is don’t be an asshole to you neighboring country.