How to deal with a drones war?

panzerkom said:

While it is conceivable that the PLAAF can launch a large number of unmanned drones and try to overwhelm an opponents air defense system, one must keep in mind that there is a limit to how many aircraft a particular air space can hold.

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Remember the 1000 plane bomber raids over Germany in WW2 and if one was to take in the number of German fighters as well, that's a mighty amount of planes coming and going , in a defined airspaceand with a fairly primitive guidance system.
If a hot situation was to occur somewhere in Pacific/Asia which involved USA, how many land based and carrier planes can Amercia put up?

rhino123 said:

I have a very simple and somewhat kind of stupid way of deterring such an attack. Taking China as a context and looking at the type of drones they have. Most shouldn't be very high altitude... so I believe a highly effective way is to release thousands upon thousands of balloons.

Not the balloons that you would see in a party though, these balloons are bigger. These should filled up the atmosphere in which enemy drones would be flying straight into.

Their air intake system will suck in some of the balloons thus causing jams and stuff like that to their system and caused them to crash.

If possible, each balloons might even carry a few kilograms of explosives and upon impact would explode.

Couple with lots of small explosions and the huge amount of relatively cheap and easy to manufactured balloons, it would cause a great mess to enemy's radar system on the drones and so whatever they related back to base are rubbish. and perhaps some of the explosions might even bring down some of the drones.

Might be stupid to look at, but should be quite effective against unmanned drones with no brains to being with.

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I don't know how feasible this is, but it sounds like a great idea to me. A low cost solution to a low cost problem. I can imagine what kind of nightmare all the balloons would be to the drones. This is almost equvalent to the anti-air artillery, except these explosives can stay in the air for much longer and can travel. If you can put some guidance systems and a motor in and turn them into blimps, that would probably even increase the effectiveness.

pla101prc said:

i dont think drone war is viable option for PLAAF at the moment. its way too costly, and the PLAAF doesnt have a lot of drones to waste anyways.

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But it is a lot less costly than to fly J-10's, J-11B's and Su-30's into enemy air defense, especially factoring in the human casualty.

vesicles said:

I don't know how feasible this is, but it sounds like a great idea to me. A low cost solution to a low cost problem. I can imagine what kind of nightmare all the balloons would be to the drones. This is almost equvalent to the anti-air artillery, except these explosives can stay in the air for much longer and can travel. If you can put some guidance systems and a motor in and turn them into blimps, that would probably even increase the effectiveness.

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Barrage ballons were used during WW2, with mixed effectiveness

bladerunner said:

Remember the 1000 plane bomber raids over Germany in WW2 and if one was to take in the number of German fighters as well, that's a mighty amount of planes coming and going , in a defined airspaceand with a fairly primitive guidance system.
If a hot situation was to occur somewhere in Pacific/Asia which involved USA, how many land based and carrier planes can Amercia put up?

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If you look at the sortie rates in Desert Storm, upwards of 2000 missions per day were flown. This is as high as the daily sortie rates over Europe in WWII. Today the aircraft fly much faster so one plane can complete three sorties a day by rotating the crews. The planes themselves are turned around quickly. This was not possible with those old B-24's. Keep in mind that with modern precision munitions and the huge payloads of something like an F-15E, one such plane can do the mission of several WWII bombers. Today it is one bomb per target, and as accuracy increases we use smaller and smaller bombs ( think the USAF's small diameter bomb ) allowing more bombs per airplane. In 2000, one USN CVN air wing could hit 150 targets per day using the munitions of the day. With the use of higher precision munitions ( JDAM II for example ) the same air wing today can hit almost 1000 targets in the same 24 hour period.

Pointblank said:

You are talking about the ADM-141 TALD and the ADM-160 MALD.

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Those are Israeli made systems, as is the Popeye cruise missile the USAF uses. In Desert Storm the USAF used a large number of inexpensive BQM-74 target drones as decoys to saturate Iraqi airspace and force them to light off their air defense radars for the Rivet Joint. In the invasion of Iraq there was quite a laugh when the Iraqi military showed video footage of a crashed BQM-34 target/recce drone and were quoted as saying they had downed and American fighter and were searching for the body of the pilot nearby.

Ambivalent said:

If you look at the sortie rates in Desert Storm, upwards of 2000 missions per day were flown. This is as high as the daily sortie rates over Europe in WWII. Today the aircraft fly much faster so one plane can complete three sorties a day by rotating the crews. The planes themselves are turned around quickly. This was not possible with those old B-24's. Keep in mind that with modern precision munitions and the huge payloads of something like an F-15E, one such plane can do the mission of several WWII bombers. Today it is one bomb per target, and as accuracy increases we use smaller and smaller bombs ( think the USAF's small diameter bomb ) allowing more bombs per airplane. In 2000, one USN CVN air wing could hit 150 targets per day using the munitions of the day. With the use of higher precision munitions ( JDAM II for example ) the same air wing today can hit almost 1000 targets in the same 24 hour period.

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while i agree with most of what you are saying, i highly doubt that today's precision bomb technology has enabled "one bomb per target". that's just what they show on TV. in real life even precision munitions miss all the time. (reference to Serbia). but yea its still a heck of a lot more effecient than the old WWII bombers.

Ambivalent said:

If you look at the sortie rates in Desert Storm, upwards of 2000 missions per day were flown. This is as high as the daily sortie rates over Europe in WWII. Today the aircraft fly much faster so one plane can complete three sorties a day by rotating the crews. The planes themselves are turned around quickly. This was not possible with those old B-24's. Keep in mind that with modern precision munitions and the huge payloads of something like an F-15E, one such plane can do the mission of several WWII bombers. Today it is one bomb per target, and as accuracy increases we use smaller and smaller bombs ( think the USAF's small diameter bomb ) allowing more bombs per airplane. In 2000, one USN CVN air wing could hit 150 targets per day using the munitions of the day. With the use of higher precision munitions ( JDAM II for example ) the same air wing today can hit almost 1000 targets in the same 24 hour period.

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With such effective weaponry, there wouldn't be the need to have vast amounts of aircraft in the air at any one time then.

bladerunner said:

With such effective weaponry, there wouldn't be the need to have vast amounts of aircraft in the air at any one time then.

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We can't afford vast amounts of modern aircraft when they cost as much as the F-22 does and F-35 probably will. Each bomb has to count.
As for the precision of precision munitions, JDAM II is nothing like the original JDAM, but JDAM can hit a one meter target and does so in any weather. JDAM II has both GPS and laser guidance and can hit moving targets like trucks in the desert. The Air Force is pursuing something called the Small Diameter Bomb, very accurate three way seeker but way expensive, maybe $80K each if they are good at managing their program. Part of the idea is to allow the F-22 to carry more bombs per sortie, but part is also to minimize collateral damage in urban combat. If you can be really accurate you don't need a big boom to do the job.
The US Navy naturally has taken the opposite tack. Rather than use a really small explosive package ( they saw the Air Force price tag for SDB and blanched ), they take a normal 2000 pounder and replace the explosives with concrete. No explosion at all, no collateral damage from the blast and shrapnel, but the thing carries so much kinetic energy it flattens whatever it hits. Cheap too, the most expensive part is the JDAM seeker at $22 grand. The bomb itself costs hundreds of dollars.