Defense against UAV's

wrote:
Jeb wrote:
wrote:

The problem here is that it could be a kind of 'asymmetric warfare', in
that the costs and problems of the defence are potentially far more
costly than those of the attackers.

It would seem to me to be likely that a simple software code
modification would allow an Aegis system to detect smaller, slower
returns (I would expect that right now, those get filtered out so that
seabirds don't cause spurious readings on the radar scopes). If you
pick up a weak signal that doesn't belong there, just have AEGIS dump
all of its radiating power down a relatively tight beam and zorch a
little lightweight unshielded UAV right out of its electronic mind.

Shielding agains nuclear EMP might be tough (especially because it is
so non-trivial to check whether it works).

Shielding against a radar with known properties should not be a
problem. If you go to the pains of designing and building the UAVs, you
don't leave them vulnerable against such an obvious way to deal with
them.

If you say so. But how much weight do you think you'll have to add
to that "cheap and simple" UAV to keep a CG or DDG's AN/SPY-1 from
burning out the electronics from sheer power output alone? Suddenly
the cost and complexity aspect of those UAVs is going to go way up and
result in either a smaller unit buy or the buyers spending a lot more
on those UAVs than they'd planned.

For that matter, if you can locate the UAV by radar, then just direct a
blinding laser against the system so that either it can't target or
can't feed useful info back to its controller. Takes it out of the
mission and still doesn't require expenditure of any ordnance, if the
targeted ship doesn't want to kill it.