The entire network costs less than a pair of Patriot air-defense missiles

Wednesday, July 24th, 2024

Ukraine has a network of almost 10,000 acoustic sensors scattered around the country that locate Russian drones and send targeting information to soldiers in the field who gun them down:

Dubbed “Sky Fortress,” the concept was developed by two Ukrainian engineers in a garage who put a microphone and a cell phone on a six-foot pole to listen for one-way UAVs, said Gen. James Hecker, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Africa.

“They put about 9,500 of these within their nation and now they get very accurate information that is synthesized in a central computer and sent out to mobile fire teams. And on an iPad, they get a route of flight of these one-way UAVs coming in, and they have a triple-A [anti-aircraft] gun and a person with six hours of training can shoot these down,” Hecker told reporters at the Royal International Air Tattoo on Saturday.

About three months ago, Russia sent a salvo of 84 UAVs into Ukraine, and the system helped the defending troops shoot down all but four, Hecker said.

The system was so effective that the engineers behind the system were invited to demo it at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, Hecker said. Other countries are looking at acoustic sensors, he added, noting that Romania recently did a demo with the system.

Each sensor costs about $400 to $500, he said, which suggests that the entire network costs less than a pair of Patriot air-defense missiles.

Comments

  1. Roo_ster says:

    UGS Unattended Ground Sensors were developed for the old, defunct FCS program. Bet the UGS cost more than $500/ea. OTOH, I do not believe the claim of 80/84 interceptions for one minute.

  2. Handle says:

    Roo_ster, UGS! A long time ago, my unit placed a number of them near the Syrian border. Lots of false positives from driven herds of sheep, but occasionally they would help detect an incursion attempt under cover of darkness. The things were pricy in part because of the need for long battery life and the ability to phone home data via secure satellite comms. The Syrians found one and dug it up, and while this is no big deal today, at the time it was not cheap for it to be able to send it’s location history on its journey to Damascus and then to somewhere in Russia before it went dead. Dasvidaniya little buddy.

  3. David Foster says:

    Is the antiaircraft gun aimed by the system, or does a human need to aim it? If the latter, it’s hard to imagine that 6 hours of training would be sufficient.

  4. Isegoria says:

    Janes explains a bit more:

    Speaking at SAE Media Group’s Air and Missile Defence conference in London, the representatives said the Skyfortress detection and tracking system combines cheap and domestically designed passive sensors to detect, track, and classify airborne threats. It consists of an array of acoustic sensors that gather information and feed this into Ukraine’s national air-defence command-and-control network, known as ‘Virazh’.

    The deployment of thousands of sensors in areas close to the front lines in Ukraine began in the winter of 2022. Each sensor is housed in an approximately 30×30×5 cm box that includes a commercially available Android smartphone, which enables access to the internet via local mobile networks. The phone is switched on continuously and is used to record the surrounding environment in order to detect the sounds of incoming aerial targets.

  5. Jim says:

    Ukrainian resilience is genuinely impressive. It’s amazing what a helping of Jew-organized neo-Nazism can do to advance long-term goy operational effectiveness.

  6. McChuck says:

    The Brits invented acoustic targeting during The Troubles. They hooked up an automated quad-.50 to their sensor system in Bosnia for counter-sniper purposes. It worked a treat!

    There is no reason a similar (but improved by 30 years) system couldn’t be hooked up to something like a 40mm Bofors with proximity fused shells.

  7. T. Beholder says:

    The reason why this sort of early warning systems cannot become a game-changer is that a strong counter is no-brainer: churn out UAV that are good gliders. The longer they can move with props off, the deeper they can penetrate in complete silence. This would not cost much more, seeing how much can be done (and was done by the hobbyists for decades) with thin plastic film over plastic or wood.
    The return of tarp & wood, yes. :]

    UGS Unattended Ground Sensors were developed for the old, defunct FCS program. Bet the UGS cost more than $500/ea.

    With good old Pentagon Pricing? No bet. Seeing how a toilet seat was purchased for $640. “Anyone who buys this paperback for $4.95 gets a $2,043 nut free.”© Christopher Cerf & Henry Beard.

    OTOH, I do not believe the claim of 80/84 interceptions for one minute.

    As usual, yes.

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