Tongdao Think Tank 2024-02-16 11:12 Beijing
According to US media reports a few days ago, Ukraine is using a network of thousands of acoustic sensors to detect and track incoming Russian kamikaze drones, alert traditional air defense systems in advance, and send drone hunting teams to shoot them down.
The U.S. is now looking to test this capability to see if it could help meet U.S. demand for other ways to continuously monitor and respond to drone threats, the U.S. Air Force senior in Europe said.
General James Hecker, commander of the U.S. Air Force in Europe (USAFE), the African Air Force (AFAFRICA) and NATO's Allied Air Force Command, provided detailed information about Ukraine's acoustic sensor network and related air defense and missile defense issues.
"Ukraine has done something quite complicated to acquire sustained ISR low-altitude objects," Hecker explained. He added that it now includes an acoustic sensor system that utilizes microphones designed to pick up and amplify ambient noise.
Think about if you have a series of sensors, think about your phone, okay, there's power, so it doesn't freeze, right? And then you put a microphone and make the one-way drone louder, these are all overheads," Heck explained, "and there are 6,000 of these things all over the country." They managed to capture one-way UAVs such as Shahed136 and something like that. ”
Kamikaze drones like the Shahed-136 may have relatively small engines, but they still make frightening noises.
"What it does is it will give us a continuous imagery, an ISR image, all the way down to low altitudes, where a lot of one-way drones and cruise missiles are operating," Hecker said of the E-7A. The Air Force and NATO are procuring wedge-tail airborne early warning and control aircraft. It has quite an excellent ability to detect such threats. ”
Acoustic sensors like the ones that Ukraine is using now are a temporary solution, and the cost of their implementation is also much cheaper than options such as those of the E-7 fleet.
Hecker also mentions tethered aerostats that "have payloads on them capable of detecting these one-way drones." He wants to be "delivered" in six months to a year.
The United States has just recently approved an aerostat-based air surveillance system to Poland.
Regardless of how it's done, "if we can get a sustained aerial image, if we can get it, then we can ** their flight speed as well as their heading," Hecker noted.
"I'm working hard with the industry to ......Come up with a solution that puts us on the right side of the cost curve. So we're not going to shoot down a $5,000 drone with a $700,000 missile. ”
In particular, Hecker cited examples of the use of drones against U.S. troops by Yemen's Houthi rebels in recent weeks as an example of how the scale and scale of this threat has grown.
Heck even pointed out that the increasing use of kamikaze drones has attracted the attention of the US side. Perhaps Ukraine's "Back to the Future" acoustic sensor system could become a new way for the U.S. to respond to drone threats and provide a more persistent picture of intelligence surveillance for the overall air defense force, especially when it involves small and low-flying targets.
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