Aviation

BMPs for Killing Hostile UAVs By Lance Winslow

We need to set up Best Management Practices for shooting down enemy unmanned aerial vehicles. There are many reasons for this directive for instance; we must make sure what we are shooting is really an enemy UAV and not one of our own; that it is not a friendly force craft; that it is not a civilian aircraft which happened into our net-centric security grid or kill box.

Additionally an enemy UAV will generally have a mission, whether it is a single mission as a flying bomb or a surveillance mission and will return to base. If it is surveillance unmanned aerial vehicles then by the time you see it, it may have already recorded your assets and their locations and killing it serves no purpose as the cat it now out of the bag. However if we track and follow it via satellite, radar or other flying vehicle, we can learn a lot. Such as where did it come from and if you kill it straight away, then you will never know where it came from. If you follow it, you now have a very valuable target of your enemy’s command and control. If you shoot it down with a missile, it will sense the missile coming at it and attempt to evade while simultaneously registering the launch point of the surface to air missile and can transmit that information prior to being hit. However if you do decide to kill a territory crossing or border violating UAV it is best to kill it from the air rather than give away anti aircraft battery points on the ground which are fixed and will become a future target for your enemy. Where as if you shoot it down from the air via Airborne High Energy Laser then the UAV is killed at the speed of light, cannot know where it came from, even if it figures it out, it cannot transmit while under that level of high energy as the signal will be broken. Additionally if it is hit from above it may not have visual acuity or situational awareness from above.

These are just a few of the many things we must be thinking of to come up with strategic best management practices for killing enemy UAVs. We need to be thinking here, as soon our enemy’s will be considering sending in robotic weapons to kill us.