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Jack Linthicum wrote:

snip
Both of these UAVs seem to be on the small side and not capable of much
more than the proported 25 minute flight over an aircraft carrier. The
speed and time indicates a 100 kilometer flight.
I am not that much worried about the UAVs Iran currently has. More
interesting question is how to defend agains what India/China can
field or sell in 7-10 years.

Almost all the arguments one sees here are based on the fact that UAVs
are dumb and if you can take the comms out, you are fine. I am not
sure that will hold for long, especially if the UAVs are used against
ships on open sea, in fair weather, in 'kill every warship you see'
mode - which all makes the autonomous decision making of the UAV so
much easier.

That of course also makes spoofing and the use of decoys much easier
and makes the user rather unpopular with any other seafarers. It'd
be something of a pity if your UAV's decided to attack the local
fishing fleet instead of the USN battle group. Given the number of offshore
rigs and support ships as well as tankers in the Persian Gulf such
indiscriminate weapons would seem rather unattractive to the Iranians
as an example.

Design for minimal communication and bandwidth needs
(just for higher level commands/coordination) - much tougher to detect
and jam.


It is easy to imagine a swarm of UAVs used as very sheap relatively
slow (200km/h) flying cruise missiles with small warheads, designed to
attack radars and similar on-ship targets that can be seriously damaged
with a small warhead (spray a shotgun of darts with wavy aluminium
tails into that phased array and see what it can do afterwards).


200 km/hr UAV's are going to be rather vulnerable to all forms
of active defence including point defence missiles like RAM
and to CIWS.

Keith



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