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What I wonder is if a radar is watching drones, what is it missing? Could a drone swarm be used to draw attention away from another incursion or are radar syst

What I wonder is if a radar is watching drones, what is it missing? Could a drone swarm be used to draw attention away from another incursion or are radar systems able to handle slow and low things at the same time as higher and faster objects?

greedo 3y ago
Normally radars are configured to detect aircraft faster than a small drone. They just filter that out as noise. Now the military could obviously afford multiple radars to fill this gap, but they haven't focused enough attention on this.
- bushbaba 3y ago
  A bird and a drone are pretty similar. Heck you could make a drone look and fly similar to a bird. Slow small object detection brings its own challenges. The realistic aspect though is a small drone by itself can’t do huge damage. And a swarm would surely be detected.
  - greedo 3y ago
    Well, considering FPV drones in Ukraine are destroying aircraft, tanks, IFVs etc, that could be an issue. Langley houses F-22s that are basically priceless.
    - dghlsakjg 3y ago
      A battlefield front line in Eastern Europe is a far cry from a USAF base surrounded by 3 letter agencies. I would bet that the people who invented drone warfare have some awareness of the risks.
      - llm_trw 3y ago
        Sounds like the perfect place to drop some biological weapons. >Crazy that Covid 2025 was first detected in Langley isn't it? What's worse is that this won't take more than a garage bio lab to do. Makes me want to move to Antarctica.
        transcriptase 3y ago
        I wouldn’t worry about theoretical garage bio labs. It’s hard enough doing microbiology, molecular genetics, and bioinformatics even with a real lab full of experienced scientists and technicians. The idea of one or two people doing anything threatening even with millions of dollars ignores the fact that nobody has the requisite expertise to not only perform all the experiments and analyses, but somehow keep the equipment running without service contracts. Good luck getting an Illumina or Agilent tech to your clandestine garage operation to set up and calibrate your gear.
        llm_trw 3y ago
        You sound exactly like the old sysadmins who were saying why mysql is a toy that you should never use for your website. Open source science is real and has a barrier to entry that's just your time. Anyone with a biology degree can set up a garage lab today that would have been state of the art in 2010 for under $20k.
        transcriptase 3y ago
        With all due respect, you sound like someone with little to no experience with the topic at hand. Having set up a state of the art labs in 2011 and 2015 and having what you’re imagining is the required education, I can assure you there’s nothing myself or anyone else can do with 20k today that’s even in the same arena as the former. And if you’re basing this solely on marketing claims for nanopore… I was a beta tester.
        bloatedGoat 3y ago
        The fentanyl crisis should serve as a warning here. Precursors can be made in labs elsewhere and smuggled in and assembled in a lab of nearly arbitrary quality if a hostile nation state was motivated. Perhaps $20k isn't enough but $20M is tiny for a government sponsored program and more than enough to cause catastrophic damage.
      - littlestymaar 3y ago
        Because the US definitively do not have prior experience of being hit by surprise from the air on their own soil…
      - AYBABTME 3y ago
        Drone warfare isn't invented though. Warfare tactics are ever evolving, the same as an MMA fighter can do whatever it takes to win. So it's not like there's an inventor of drone warfare, who wrote the rules and derived the consequences, and could predict the outcomes. Especially when warfare economics starts to go back to individuals/small entities having asymmetrical advantages over state actors. And when development in this space is incredibly rapid, accelerating and available to anyone with a laptop, a DIY CNC cutter and some off the shelf chemicals. Defending against these types of threats isn't something the traditional military orgs are equipped for. They are slow to move, react, plan. They have established doctrine to counteract a simulated opponent's doctrine.
      - bevekspldnw 3y ago
        One would also bet that some discarded “allies” from the Cold War operating from a cave in Afghanistan couldn’t pull off a surprise attack on American soil, killing thousands. And yet they did. For the record, that attack did include an aircraft slamming into the pentagon itself. Bloated intel agencies aren’t run by gods, they’re run by bureaucrats. They have, and will, fail.
        tw04 3y ago
        > One would also bet that some discarded “allies” from the Cold War operating from a cave in Afghanistan couldn’t pull off a surprise attack on American soil, killing thousands. And yet they did. One would have to have been pretty ignorant then. It’s not like 9/11 was an isolated event. The same target was hit 8 years prior. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bomb...
        bevekspldnw 3y ago
        Totally. Multiple agencies were aware of the plot in full or in part, and it was utterly down to mismanagement of national defense. The “inside job” has always really been distraction from the mundane truth it was a massive fuckup by the people in charge. So I’m very open to the possibility there are a lot of adversaries walking around the permitters of US bases with little drone kits having a blast.
        NegativeLatency 3y ago
        And the very near miss of the White House or other nearby target https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93
      - greedo 3y ago
        Considering how poor the DoD response outlined in this article has been, they may have awareness, but that doesn't mean they're appropriately addressing the risk.
  - dhosek 3y ago
    There’s a good reason why birds and drones are so similar. https://birdsarentreal.com https://birdsarentreal.com
dghlsakjg 3y ago
There’s search radars, which is the ones you see in movies that spin in a circle or arc and continuously scan the whole area with updates for all returns every second or so. These are also what all ATC towers have. Then there’s tracking radars which point at one thing and track it continuously. This is a simplification, and some radars can switch between track and scan. In other words, a scan radar can and does track many objects at once, but at lower update frequencies. The other thing to keep in mind is that every plane on that air force base has its own radar, in addition to multiple ground units and most can be interlinked for a more complete picture.
icegreentea2 3y ago
Modern radar systems (note, not all of the radar systems currently being used even by the US military would be considered 'the most modern') should be able to handle a wide variety of targets at a variety of sizes, altitudes, ranges and speeds all at the same time. That being said, radars still fundamentally work by spewing radiation into specific regions of the sky - the more things that a radar needs to track, the more it needs to spread its power around. Aside from the hard hardware limitations of the radar, what is more likely to be overwhelmed is either the attention and focus of human operators, or whatever software is being used to support the human operator.
littlestymaar 3y ago
It's exactly what happen to the Moskva as far as we can tell: use a Bayraktar TB2 at max range to draw attention of the crew and sneak an anti-ship missile in the mean time (that's what the Ukrainians said they did, at least, there's always fog of war…)
verdverm 3y ago
> Could a drone swarm be used to draw attention away from another incursion or are radar systems able to handle slow and low things at the same time as higher and faster objects? Ukraine has been running this playbook the last 6 months or so. Drones in one area or direction to distract, scalp/Taurus on a high value target elsewhere. Sometimes this plays out over days. Current air defense systems are insufficient for the new drone paradigms. They won't scale to meet the needs. We need lasers and microwave based systems.

greedo 3y ago

Normally radars are configured to detect aircraft faster than a small drone. They just filter that out as noise. Now the military could obviously afford multiple radars to fill this gap, but they haven't focused enough attention on this.

bushbaba 3y ago
A bird and a drone are pretty similar. Heck you could make a drone look and fly similar to a bird. Slow small object detection brings its own challenges. The realistic aspect though is a small drone by itself can’t do huge damage. And a swarm would surely be detected.
- greedo 3y ago
  Well, considering FPV drones in Ukraine are destroying aircraft, tanks, IFVs etc, that could be an issue. Langley houses F-22s that are basically priceless.
  - dghlsakjg 3y ago
    A battlefield front line in Eastern Europe is a far cry from a USAF base surrounded by 3 letter agencies. I would bet that the people who invented drone warfare have some awareness of the risks.
    - llm_trw 3y ago
      Sounds like the perfect place to drop some biological weapons. >Crazy that Covid 2025 was first detected in Langley isn't it? What's worse is that this won't take more than a garage bio lab to do. Makes me want to move to Antarctica.
      - transcriptase 3y ago
        I wouldn’t worry about theoretical garage bio labs. It’s hard enough doing microbiology, molecular genetics, and bioinformatics even with a real lab full of experienced scientists and technicians. The idea of one or two people doing anything threatening even with millions of dollars ignores the fact that nobody has the requisite expertise to not only perform all the experiments and analyses, but somehow keep the equipment running without service contracts. Good luck getting an Illumina or Agilent tech to your clandestine garage operation to set up and calibrate your gear.
        llm_trw 3y ago
        You sound exactly like the old sysadmins who were saying why mysql is a toy that you should never use for your website. Open source science is real and has a barrier to entry that's just your time. Anyone with a biology degree can set up a garage lab today that would have been state of the art in 2010 for under $20k.
        transcriptase 3y ago
        With all due respect, you sound like someone with little to no experience with the topic at hand. Having set up a state of the art labs in 2011 and 2015 and having what you’re imagining is the required education, I can assure you there’s nothing myself or anyone else can do with 20k today that’s even in the same arena as the former. And if you’re basing this solely on marketing claims for nanopore… I was a beta tester.
        bloatedGoat 3y ago
        The fentanyl crisis should serve as a warning here. Precursors can be made in labs elsewhere and smuggled in and assembled in a lab of nearly arbitrary quality if a hostile nation state was motivated. Perhaps $20k isn't enough but $20M is tiny for a government sponsored program and more than enough to cause catastrophic damage.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      Because the US definitively do not have prior experience of being hit by surprise from the air on their own soil…
    - AYBABTME 3y ago
      Drone warfare isn't invented though. Warfare tactics are ever evolving, the same as an MMA fighter can do whatever it takes to win. So it's not like there's an inventor of drone warfare, who wrote the rules and derived the consequences, and could predict the outcomes. Especially when warfare economics starts to go back to individuals/small entities having asymmetrical advantages over state actors. And when development in this space is incredibly rapid, accelerating and available to anyone with a laptop, a DIY CNC cutter and some off the shelf chemicals. Defending against these types of threats isn't something the traditional military orgs are equipped for. They are slow to move, react, plan. They have established doctrine to counteract a simulated opponent's doctrine.
    - bevekspldnw 3y ago
      One would also bet that some discarded “allies” from the Cold War operating from a cave in Afghanistan couldn’t pull off a surprise attack on American soil, killing thousands. And yet they did. For the record, that attack did include an aircraft slamming into the pentagon itself. Bloated intel agencies aren’t run by gods, they’re run by bureaucrats. They have, and will, fail.
      - tw04 3y ago
        > One would also bet that some discarded “allies” from the Cold War operating from a cave in Afghanistan couldn’t pull off a surprise attack on American soil, killing thousands. And yet they did. One would have to have been pretty ignorant then. It’s not like 9/11 was an isolated event. The same target was hit 8 years prior. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bomb...
        bevekspldnw 3y ago
        Totally. Multiple agencies were aware of the plot in full or in part, and it was utterly down to mismanagement of national defense. The “inside job” has always really been distraction from the mundane truth it was a massive fuckup by the people in charge. So I’m very open to the possibility there are a lot of adversaries walking around the permitters of US bases with little drone kits having a blast.
      - NegativeLatency 3y ago
        And the very near miss of the White House or other nearby target https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93
    - greedo 3y ago
      Considering how poor the DoD response outlined in this article has been, they may have awareness, but that doesn't mean they're appropriately addressing the risk.
- dhosek 3y ago
  There’s a good reason why birds and drones are so similar. https://birdsarentreal.com https://birdsarentreal.com

dghlsakjg 3y ago

There’s search radars, which is the ones you see in movies that spin in a circle or arc and continuously scan the whole area with updates for all returns every second or so. These are also what all ATC towers have. Then there’s tracking radars which point at one thing and track it continuously. This is a simplification, and some radars can switch between track and scan. In other words, a scan radar can and does track many objects at once, but at lower update frequencies. The other thing to keep in mind is that every plane on that air force base has its own radar, in addition to multiple ground units and most can be interlinked for a more complete picture.

icegreentea2 3y ago

Modern radar systems (note, not all of the radar systems currently being used even by the US military would be considered 'the most modern') should be able to handle a wide variety of targets at a variety of sizes, altitudes, ranges and speeds all at the same time. That being said, radars still fundamentally work by spewing radiation into specific regions of the sky - the more things that a radar needs to track, the more it needs to spread its power around. Aside from the hard hardware limitations of the radar, what is more likely to be overwhelmed is either the attention and focus of human operators, or whatever software is being used to support the human operator.

littlestymaar 3y ago

It's exactly what happen to the Moskva as far as we can tell: use a Bayraktar TB2 at max range to draw attention of the crew and sneak an anti-ship missile in the mean time (that's what the Ukrainians said they did, at least, there's always fog of war…)

verdverm 3y ago

> Could a drone swarm be used to draw attention away from another incursion or are radar systems able to handle slow and low things at the same time as higher and faster objects? Ukraine has been running this playbook the last 6 months or so. Drones in one area or direction to distract, scalp/Taurus on a high value target elsewhere. Sometimes this plays out over days. Current air defense systems are insufficient for the new drone paradigms. They won't scale to meet the needs. We need lasers and microwave based systems.