Drone-Proof City

[DicedT]

As you can see, I'm not planning to move here. http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2013/02/08/the-city-designed-to-keep-drones-out/

Michael

[LongBlade]

I need a drone to monitor all the drones.

[Longdan]

Al Quaeda's 42nd number 2 guy's last words...."Hey Ali!  What's that droning noise outside?"
[opens door. drone is there.] "Shit." [drone blows up.]

[bayonetbrant]

At NTC, one of the the visual cues for the OPFOR when hunting BLUFOR leadership are the antennas on the HMMWVs.  When you see a 4-post HMMWV, you know it's someone important with a lot of radios on board.

Back in 1997, there was a tank battalion from Ft Riley that came out there supporting the 101st guys that were training at NTC (don't ask why a light unit was training at Ft Irwin... long, dumb story).  This tank battalion took all their spare antennas and bolted them on to every HMMWV, so that they all had 3-4 antennas - many of them not wired into a damn thing.

I always come back to that story whenever people talk about trying to hide/disguise themselves in an environment to avoid detection.  Maybe you need to look at ways to manipulate the environment to avoid detection.  There are plenty of ways to flood the 'sensors' with information that they may have a hard time filtering through:
Coded phrases broadcast to Nazi-occupied Europe ("John has a long moustache")
Zebras
The guys in bowler hats in the final gallery scene in the Pierce Brosnan "Thomas Crown Affair"

Overwhelm the detectors with noise and you force them to work that much harder parsing out the meaningful signals.  Much of the same could be done with drones, if you understand their surveillance processes.

[bayonetbrant]

the article also doesn't discuss at all how to retrofit existing cities to be drone-proof.  No one is abandoning Kirkuk for some brand new build somewhere just to avoid drones.

[DicedT]

Good point, Brant. Hadn't thought about rebuilding existing cities to be drone-proof. I figure the chances of that are about as great as Shura City being built.

As for the antennae, wasn't there a story that a Vietnam platoon commander got tired of the VC always shooting his radioman first? So he had every guy in the platoon wear a fake antenna. The VC wiped out the entire platoon.

Michael

[LongBlade]

I still want a UAV to watch the UAVs watching me.

[DicedT]

I still want a UAV to watch the UAVs watching me.

That should be a Latin phrase. "Who watches the drones?" Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Michael

[Longdan]

Quis custodiet ipsos drones?  Quis drones custodiet ipsos drones?  How about  Quis automata fellator custodeit ipsos drones!
I have no Latin.

[bob48]

^Looks just like my doctors prescriptions  ;)

[MikeGER]

hmmm, let me think ... arab low-tech drone defence?

give every kid in the city - that are 50% of the city population-  an Muhamad favored colored (green) laserpointer and let them play catch that strange bird in the sky which makes those unnerving low humming sounds   ;)

German drone defence
track the 'warm' exhaust fumes with an IR telescope and slave an 30 (60; 100; x) kW laser to the optical tracking resolution    8)

[pawelj]

Still would not be carpet bombing proof.

[GDS_Starfury]

I wasnt aware of any other country, other then the US, that had bombers capable of carpet bombing.

[undercovergeek]

I wasnt aware of any other country, other then the US, that had bombers capable of carpet bombing.

only the US can carpet bomb?

did not know that - is that because of the number of munitions, or airplanes required, or tech?

[Staggerwing]

He is probably referring to the number and type of aircraft required. The US has a number (80, 90?)of B-52s (carrying up to 70,000 pounds of iron bombs) and roughly 15-20 B-2 Spirits (carrying up to 50,000 pounds) which could be used to saturate a large area with ordinence. The only other country with operational heavy bombers that comes to mind is Russia with it's Tu-160 (80,000lbs), of which it has about a dozen and are probably configured for cruise missiles at the moment.


I suppose you could try to carpet bomb with tactical bombers but that would require an awful lot of sorties. Precision bombing is a better use of their abilities.