wrote:
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. 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).

A swarm of UAVs requires a swarm of controllers and a swarm of secure
frequencies to accomplish that control. I wonder if a follow-on to a
Shrike or ALARM would bother to hit the transmitting antennas and
instead have a large enough warhead to take out the whole controlling
facility.