Satellite imaging found eight crafts parked at the PLA airport. It looks like the J-20, but much narrower with single engine. There were speculation of what that is for. It is too big and expensive for loyal wingman or target drone. It could be a man aircraft, but we have never heard of a development of this type.
Chinese UAV/UCAV development
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WTC UAV Regiment based at Hotan AB
GJ-2 53237
Ground contral container belongs to either the 3rd(三) Dadui or the 5th(五) Dadui
Hangar looks like can hold 3 or 4 GJ-2s
East end of the Hotan AB, there are two large and four even larger hangars, the one in the picture is the first one from the left(west)
Group photo in front of one of the hangars, could be the second hangar from the left(west) judging by those containers from the latest GE image
GJ-2 53237
Ground contral container belongs to either the 3rd(三) Dadui or the 5th(五) Dadui
Hangar looks like can hold 3 or 4 GJ-2s
East end of the Hotan AB, there are two large and four even larger hangars, the one in the picture is the first one from the left(west)
Group photo in front of one of the hangars, could be the second hangar from the left(west) judging by those containers from the latest GE image
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Would it ever be economical to defend against drone swarms using kinetic measures? Short of laser area defense, even gun-based AAA will get overwhelmed unless mass deployed. It is much easier to concentrate an attacking UAV force then spread enough AAA within every army group to defend against large sized swarms.
Jamming is probably the way to go.
They like guns, a lot. I like them too. You just can’t go wrong, their economics are totally different from yours. lots and lots of guns, everywhere, then add smart ammo.
gun based AA is super cheap. A German Gepard costs 2 million EUR each including ammo and spare barrels.
India paid 100 million USD for 10 Harop drones.
Let's say that in typical Indian fashion they overpaid by a factor of 50. I don't think even Indians would overpay by a factor of 100 so 50 is a good number as an "extreme" number. So each Harop is worth $200k.
A Gepard only has to shoot down 10 drones to make its own money back. But we know that it can probably shoot down way more than 10 drones over a lifetime.
That would be true for irregular and small strikes, once you have say 50+ drone swarms flying a single AAA platform would be insufficient. Across an entire front hundreds of kilometres long how can you guarantee that every route is covered with sufficient AAA?
Defense will always be more expensive to implement than offense and once overwhelmed and out of ammo, everything in the area is under threat of a second wave which would have a miniscule time to target compared to bringing up new AAA to the front.
I'm not talking about autonomous loitering drones like harop/shehad-126, it can be a long ranged ISR/AWACS UAV cueing in hundreds of disposable switchblade esq suicide drones doing ground hugging flying, almost impossible to deal with using gun systems.
escobar
Brigadier
Nigerian Navy has acquired at least 4x AR-500B shipborne Unmanned Aerial Vehicles from the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC).
seems like Switchblade has been an utter failure though. They have the firepower of a single hand grenade. Relatively heavy loitering munitions like Shehad are doing the heavy lifting right now, while conventional UCAV like TB-2 were doing the heavy lifting early on. Those can be taken out with gun AA relatively cost effectively as they have the flight characteristics and sizes of WW2 planes.
But yes, if it existed, a Switchblade type drone that flew very low to the ground yet had the explosive power like something closer to an ATGM than a hand grenade would be impossible to deal with using a gun system. Such a drone does not yet exist due to the limitations on how rotorcraft work and the hard limits on the energy density of batteries vs. say an ATGM which has the much higher energy density of chemical fuel and how rocket flight works.
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