Isegoria

David Hambling explains why U.S. Gatling guns are not stopping Iran’s Shahed drones:

The Centurion C-RAM (“Counter Rocket, Artillery and Mortar”) was first deployed in Iraq in 2006 and is a land-based variant of the original Phalanx CIWS (“Close In Weapon System”) used by the Navy since 1980. It is the last line of defence when urgent action is needed to prevent casualties. The land version is a self-contained unit weighing around 24 tons and costing something over $4 million.

As the name suggests, C-RAM was introduced to protect bases against rocket, artillery and mortar fire. It has an integrated radar which tracks incoming projectiles as well as the stream of rounds fired by the 20mm M61A1 Gatling gun to put them on target.

The cannon is the same as that carried by F-15 and F-16 fighters. Its distinguishing feature is its phenomenal rate of fire, the six electrically-powered spinning barrels selectively firing 3,000 to 4,500 rounds per minute – that is 50 to 75 per second — producing a sound like a buzzsaw, often rendered as “Brrrrt.”

While the Navy version fires solid tungsten projectiles, CRAM uses the M940 Multi-Purpose Tracer – Self-Destruct round. This weighs 3.5-ounces/99 gram and consists of a tungsten cone to punch through the target skin, and a body which explodes in a dense mass of fragments inside the target. “Tracer” means the round produce a visible glow, and in operation the stream of projectiles appears as a bright ribbon reaching out towards the target. Automated tracking shifts aim until that ribbon overlaps the target.

The “Self-Destruct” part means that the rounds automatically explode at a range of around 2,300 meters if they miss the target, an effect also highly visible on videos of CRAM engagements. CRAM is a point defense system placed to protect high-value assets. If a drone strikes just couple of miles away the operators can only watch.

CRAM has a magazine of 1,500 rounds. This sounds like a lot, supplying 30 one-second bursts of 50 rounds each. But it is only enough for 10 two-second bursts at the higher rate of fire. It reportedly takes some 30 minutes to reload CRAM manually with 15 boxes of ammunition each weighing around 60 pounds.

Each M940 round costs $168, so a 150-round burst costs around $25k, comparable to the price of a Shahed.

Because of the way that CRAM lights up the night sky and how much noise it makes, it is hard to keep its operation secret.

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What we do know is that the reported success rate against rockets and mortar shells in Iraq was reportedly 70-80% with an average of 300 rounds per engagement. These are relatively convenient targets because, although they are moving fast, they come in on a very predictable trajectory and they descend from high in the sky making them easy to pick out on radar.

Tackling drones may be more difficult. Being made of composite material rather than metal, they may have a small radar reflection. And Shaheds can fly at extremely low level, sometimes at under 100 feet with a flight path that takes them between buildings. The level of background clutter will make radar tracking challenging.

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Unlike rockets and artillery, Shaheds do not need to fly on a predictable path. Some of the Russian versions automatically carry out evasive maneuvers when they sense a threat. As the videos show the stream of rounds can be seen and potentially evaded. This dodging would at the least increase the number of rounds needed for a kill. Russian Shaheds are also accompanied by numbers of low-cost Gerbera decoys to distract and deplete defenses. Iran does not yet seem to have either capability.

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The U.S. Army only acquired about 20,000 rounds of M940 this year, which one weapon could burn through in five minutes of firing.

Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations explains the trends and constants of technology:

DePuy, in unpublished papers, accumulated evidence that in ground combat the impact of a new weapon upon the outcome of a war usually has been local and almost always has been transitory. He believed that a technological surprise by itself never has won a war on land, but that technology accompanied by a tactical revolution has. Napoleon’s tactical use of mobile artillery was revolutionary; the field artillery itself was not new. It is ironic that the Germans exploited tanks so effectively with their Blitzkrieg, for one of their victims, the French, possessed more and better tanks, and another, the British, had invented them. In these instances the new tools, artillery and armor, were no secret at all. In contrast, when tanks were a surprise, first used in substantial numbers by the British at Cambrai in World War I, the British forces achieved local successes but could not exploit their new weapons. Some argue that the British prematurely squandered tank technology before the accompanying tactics had matured.

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Because there are fewer big battles at sea, the potential for decision by technological surprise is greater. At least one weapon is comparable in decisiveness to cryptanalysis, which wrought the great increase in Allied scouting effectiveness: it is the kwi-suns, or turtle boats, of Korean Admiral Yi Sun-Sin, which in 1592 helped win two decisive battles against the Japanese at Pusan and in the Yellow Sea.

Another secret weapon sprung long after its prewar invention was the Japanese Long Lance torpedo. As late as the summer of 1943, the U.S. Navy did not know exactly what the Japanese weapon was or why it had been so effective. The Long Lance had been developed in the early 1930s, and Japanese cruiser and destroyer men had trained extensively with it. American scorn for Japanese technology takes much of the blame for the U.S. Navy’s overconfidence at the start of the Pacific war, which was almost as foolhardy as German and Japanese overconfidence in the immunity of their own ciphers.

Then there is the atomic bomb. Although it was not specifically a naval weapon and not numerous enough to be regarded as tactical, the bomb was the shocking weapon that administered the coup de grace to Japan in 1945. The science and technology took four years to develop, and only two bombs were built.

Is it possible to keep the development of an “ultimate weapon” a secret in peacetime? Evidence suggests that it is not possible, at least not in the United States. Many people in this country believe secret weapons are proper public news.

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Here are some examples of weapons, mostly naval, that brought disappointment in World War II:

• Magnetic influence mines. Germany introduced them against shipping in the estuaries of the British Isles. They were effective, but they were used prematurely. As a result, they turned out to be vulnerable to countermeasures.
• Magnetic exploders in American torpedoes. Developed before the war, they worked badly and were a great setback to U.S. operations. In a short war, American torpedoes would have been an unmitigated disaster. The British and Germans also experienced early problems with their sophisticated torpedoes.
• Proximity fuzes. For much of the war they were restricted to use over water out of fear that the Germans would recover one and adopt the technology against U.S. strategic bombers.
• Night fighters. These were highly effective, but there were too few of them to be decisive.
• Submarines. They had a powerful impact, but their role against warships was well recognized before World War I.
• Sonar. This was a crucial response to the submarine, developed in secrecy. It was not enough to neutralize the threat.
• “Window,” the strips of aluminum foil used to jam enemy fighter-direction radars. The Germans had window early in World War II, but they delayed its application until the Allies used it in the bombing of Hamburg in July 1943. Both sides appreciated the fact that window was a doubled-edged tool of war—of value to both sides.
• Jet aircraft, V-1 and V-2 missiles, and snorkeling submarines. All arrived too late in the war to have much effect.

Here are some reasons that new weapons, whether secret or known, do not always deliver what they promise:

• Production limitations, as with magnetic mines
• Testing limitations, as with torpedo exploders
• Great complexity, requiring skilled operators and integration into fleet tactics, as with radar and night fighters
• Great simplicity, threatening adoption and exploitation by the enemy, as with window
• The risk of failure after introduction, as with the U.S. magnetic torpedo
• Exaggerated expectations, as with sonar
• The penalty for maintaining secrecy during a lengthy period of development, as with Nazi Germany’s secret weapons

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There are many examples in which important improvements in combat capability have been hidden. One is the rifling of gun barrels. Another is the improved fire-control systems in dreadnoughts. New engines barely can be detected from an aircraft’s appearance, but they can vastly change the plane’s performance. Changes in computer reliability or cryptology or in scouting systems in outer space are invisible, at least to an amateur observer.

Karl Lautenschlaeger asserts that the most important characteristic of the Soviet Oscar-class submarine was not its great size, but the likelihood that its missiles were guided by space-based sensors.

Submarines that depend on acoustic stealth are in a continuing competition to operate more quietly than the enemy; the quieter they become, the more “invisible” they are.

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Vannevar Bush once said that the unity of decision under a totalitarian regime was a recipe for making colossal technological mistakes, whereas the prevalent confusion of decision-making in a democracy was more efficient. He could not have anticipated the tortuous system of procrastination that characterizes modern American defense procurement.

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Usually more than one piece of technology is required to create a revolution. Sail and cannon together replaced the oared galley. Steam power alone was not enough to replace the ship of the line; it took the steam engine, the screw propeller, and the metal hull all together, which in turn made possible the big gun and the marriage of rifling, breech-loading, and an effective fire-control system. Big aircraft carriers were nothing without powerful aircraft engines to lift bomb-loads worthy of the name, and big aircraft required powered elevators, catapults, arresting gear, and the science of long-range navigation over water.

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Even the Polaris submarine, the embodiment of a naval revolution as neat and swift as we are apt to see, would not have arrived without the inspired marriage of two technologies, nuclear propulsion and solid-fuel rocketry; and the work of two great technical leaders, ADM Hyman Rickover, USN, and VADM William F. “Red” Raborn, along with Arleigh Burke, a Chief of Naval Operations who understood warfare, politics, and the value of swift action.

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It is impossible to design the perfect weapon for large-scale production and employment without practicing with it; even then, it takes three or four generations of hardware before a weapon realizes its full potential.

The development of Germany’s V-1 and V-2 and the US’s atom bomb led the Navy, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations explains, to develop missiles — first Regulus and then Polaris — that could deliver warheads at very long ranges with reasonable accuracy.:

The new missiles were called “strategic” weapons because, much like strategic bombers, their purpose was to destroy an enemy’s means of waging war.

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This led to a bitter rivalry between the newly created U.S. Air Force, which claimed the mission as its own, and a recalcitrant Navy, which saw difficulties with intercontinental bombing at the time and balked at the hidden costs of maintaining bombers at fixed bases far forward in host countries.

The Navy proposed delivering nuclear bombs from carrier-based aircraft, arguing that the mobility that ships offered would enable the bombers to fly shorter distances and would be less vulnerable than land-based airfields.

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In the 1950s, with remarkable energy and technological acumen, the Navy developed and deployed Polaris missiles—and long-range submarines to carry and fire them—arguing that the undersea craft constituted a more stable and survivable deterrent than bombers and land bases because they could not be pinpointed for attack.

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Some of the early Soviet missiles were cruise missiles, fitted with nuclear warheads and designed to be fired by Russian warships—submarines, surface ships, and long-range land-based aircraft.

Their targets were to be American surface ships, particularly aircraft carriers. Since detonating even one nuclear weapon in the vicinity of a ship was certain to destroy it, staying power derived from armor, compartmentation, damage-control techniques, and large displacement would have little value.

Using antiaircraft guns in an effort to shoot down an attacker would be useless if a nuclear weapon were designed to detonate when the warhead was hit.

The U.S. Navy developed surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) to destroy a bomber or missile far enough away for the ships to be able to survive. Indeed, Talos, Terrier, and Tartar SAMs—all defensive weapons—were the Navy’s first substantial venture into guided-missile technology.

The tight defensive formations of World War II no longer were appropriate; adjacent ships would be incapacitated by the massive explosion and poisonous radiation.

Designers initially intended that SAMs would cover several ships at the same time, employing the World War II tactic of defending your neighbor while defending yourself. SAMs were expensive, however, and any one ship could only carry so many. They had to be delivered accurately because commanders could not fill the sky with them by the hundreds the way 40-mm and 20-mm shells were expended in World War II. If anything, SAM distribution against incoming aircraft or missiles had to be coordinated so that commanders could rely on an efficient system of assigning targets to individual ships.

In time the formations were loosened even more and spread out in dispersed configurations. One such was a “haystack” disposition, developed so that enemy bombers could not easily locate the vital ship—the carrier—especially where commercial shipping resulted in the generation of many radar contacts. The fleet’s prime targets were supposed to disappear like needles in a haystack.

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The modern U.S. Navy is a victim of outmoded nuclear war thinking. To this day, most warships have little staying power. One or two hits with modern missiles such as an Exocet or Harpoon will put most warships out of action.

To survive an attack and continue to perform a task, a modern American warship depends heavily on reduced susceptibility—avoiding detection and carrying the kind of technology that will enable it to prevent incoming missiles from hitting at all.

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The Vietnam War contributed to loosening up American formations because warships were able to stand off at sea to deliver ordnance while they themselves were relatively safe from attacks.

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History’s most profuse application of cruise missiles has been against tankers and other commercial ships in the Persian Gulf. The attacks started in May of 1981 and continued for seven years, until mid-1988, ending a year after U.S. intervention that provided protective escorts for ship traffic.

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French arms sales equipped Iraq well to carry out air-launched Exocet missile attacks.

Seemingly, missiles had been used between 257 and 261 times, or in about 80 percent of all Iraqi attacks on commercial ships.

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Only a quarter of the ships hit were destroyed; large tankers proved to be the sturdiest and most resilient.

The so-called Tanker War constitutes by far the biggest campaign against shipping since World War II.

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Estimates show that by 1986 the tonnage damaged beyond economic repair already had reached some 20 percent of all Allied merchant ships sunk during World War II.

Navias and Hooton estimate that less than 1 percent of the 800 to 1,000 ships that entered the Gulf each month were hit—about the same overall total as the fraction of sailings lost in the Battle of the Atlantic, although not as bad as the worst of that period, when up to 20 percent of merchant traffic was lost. 4 Also reminiscent of the Battle of the Atlantic, there was a remorseless buildup of shipping losses in the Gulf until the United States responded to pressure from the neutral states there and started to convoy reflagged Kuwaiti tankers.

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Like torpedoes, tactical missiles were conceived and developed to attack warships.

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Broadly, the carrier battle groups of the U.S. fighting fleet could not offer direct protection for tankers sailing up the Persian Gulf; only individual convoy escorts could fend off attacks by the Iranian threat, which in this instance comprised land-based aircraft and a flotilla of assorted small coastal combatants. But the security of the escorts depended upon air cover, present or prospective, from the American carriers standing outside the Strait of Hormuz.

Safe transit through the Gulf waters also depended on mine-clearance operations, carried out largely by European countries, which had joined the effort by the mid-1980s.

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The axiom that “a ship’s a fool to fight a fort” is tempered by the caveat that in order to influence events on land, navies must either circumvent or destroy the enemy’s ability to send land-based aircraft and missiles over the coastal seas.

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In the first cruise-missile attack on a ship, during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, an Egyptian salvo of four Soviet-made Styx missiles sank the Israeli picket-destroyer Eilat. In 1970 the Egyptians conducted what was in effect a live-target test of the ability of the Styx to home on targets smaller than a destroyer; they fired four missiles and sank an Israeli fishing boat, the Orit. In the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971, India successfully employed nine Styx missiles against Pakistani warships and merchant vessels, some of which were in port.

Next came the best wartime laboratory for study of missile combat—the Arab-Israeli War of 1973. The two sides exchanged 101 Styx and Gabriel missiles in five separate battles with devastating effects on the Syrian and Egyptian flotillas and no harm whatsoever to the Israelis.

After that came the South Atlantic War of 1982, in which Argentina achieved well-publicized results with air-launched Exocets and, for the first time in combat, with land-launched missiles as well. In the same war, but less well-known, Royal Navy helicopters launched Sea Skua air-to-surface missiles at two Argentine patrol boats, sinking one and severely damaging the other.

In February 1991, during the Persian Gulf War, two Silkworm antiship cruise missiles (ASCMs) were launched from a land site in Kuwait, aimed at the USS Missouri (BB 63), which was bombarding Iraqi positions with 16-inch shells. Although the Silkworms malfunctioned and did not inflict any damage, the incident is noteworthy as the first and only time in a war that a ship-fired surface-to-air missile has shot down an ASCM, the honor going to a Sea Dart fired by HMS Gloucester.

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Whether in terms of incidents, damage achieved, weapons fired at a target, or cost of ordnance expended, missiles and missile warfare dominate modern combat at sea.

Briefly, large, defenseless commercial ships showed very high hit-probabilities, but the damage by no means has been uniformly fatal. Hit-probabilities against warships that defended themselves were far lower, yet substantial and usually with devastating effect. Perhaps the most interesting and alarming statistic is the number of successful attacks on defendable ships, such as HMS Sheffield, that failed to protect themselves.

Disconcerting in its tactical implications is the case of the Atlantic Conveyer, hit and destroyed in the South Atlantic War. Two Exocets, launched by a pair of Argentine Super Étendard jet fighters, homed on HMS Ambuscade, one of the screen ships in the Royal Navy formation stationed east of the Falklands. The Ambuscade launched chaff, which distracted the ASCMs and saved her from harm. But once the Exocets had flown through the chaff cloud they searched for another target and found the SS Atlantic Conveyor, destroying the ship and the important cargo on board. By saving herself, Ambuscade failed in her mission to protect the other ships in the formation.

A further irony is that the Argentine pilots actually had hoped to hit the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes, which was also in the formation and had a flight-deck full of Harrier jets.

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If there is a new lesson from the South Atlantic War, it is not that warships are vulnerable to missiles, but that aircraft armed with bombs cannot compete against warships that are equipped with modern defenses.

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Large, protected ships such as battleships are valuable partly because they can take hits and continue fighting.

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Ships must have warning in order to deal successfully with missile attacks. In modern sea warfare the outcome between two forces armed with missiles will often be decided by scouting and screening effectiveness before any missiles actually are launched.

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In World War II it took a lot more punishment to sink a warship than to incapacitate it. Comparing tables 7-1 and 7-2, the average was five times as many 1,000-pound bombs and two or three times as many torpedoes.

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Beall’s conclusion is that vulnerability is proportional to the cube root of displacement. Since displacement is roughly proportional to the three dimensions of length, beam, and draft, the cube root reduces the measurement to one dimension. The Brookings study concluded that a hit by one large warhead would incapacitate a modern warship up to 300 feet long, and another similar warhead is required for every additional 100 feet. By that measure, the Proceedings article concluded that to kill (not sink) an aircraft carrier would require seven missile hits, three missile hits would kill an Aegis cruiser, one or two were required for a frigate, and one would be enough for a patrol craft.

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The results are disconcerting to the tactician because all of them show the flatness of the kill curve. In fact, the BuShips data indicate that only a few more hits were required to sink a battleship or carrier than to sink a heavy cruiser. Can modern designs be effective against cruise or theater ballistic missiles to keep a modern combatant in action? The classified 1990 study by NSWC Carderock asserted that a great deal can be done; moreover, the toughening will come at only a modest increase in cost. Whether this is so, the Navy’s current inventory is mainly in large warships that are potent offensively but depend almost entirely for survival on reducing susceptibility by a layered defense of combat air patrols, SAMs, and hard-kill and soft-kill point defenses. Even more important, American warships depend for survival on out-scouting the enemy and attacking him not only effectively, but decisively first. These are tactics suitable for a fleet in the open ocean. The tactics will lose their efficacy in littoral waters.

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Since a large ship enjoys economies of scale, it will carry more fuel, ordnance, aircraft, or Marines than several smaller ships of the same total cost. The analytical conclusion is, therefore, “bigger is better.” The important disadvantage of a large, supposedly efficient ship is the hazard of putting many eggs in one basket. Indeed, the Beall, Humphrey, Schulte, and BuShips studies all reflect a diseconomy of scale. If a 60,000-ton ship carries twenty times the payload of a three-thousand-ton ship but can only take three or four times as many missile or torpedo hits as a small one before it is out of action, then that is a substantial disadvantage offsetting its greater payload.

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Coastal navies use land installations to scout and attack from as safer, cheaper, and more resilient than large warships. Their fighting ships are small and heavily armed. They depend for success on stealthy attack and surprise by out-scouting the enemy. Their ships are short-legged with austere habitability, because they can sortie to perform brief, stressful tasks.

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Borrensen puts the operational aim of a competent coastal defense in full strategic context: a coastal state will not attempt to defeat the navy of a maritime state, but instead will endeavor to inflict sufficient pain on that navy in an extended campaign so that the enemy will not think the game worth the candle.

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Joergensen offers a pointed warning that the U.S. Navy is not sufficiently configured or practiced to defeat a coastal power without severe losses. The implication of both articles is that it will not take a high-technology coastal defense to inflict pain and suffering on a high-technology, blue-water navy.

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The U.S. Navy’s principal responsibility is to safeguard the oceans almost anywhere, though not everywhere at once. The other side of the coin is to deny movement of enemy shipping and the means of war—an easier mission that usually comes with the territory when the first mission is achieved.

Weakness that comes from disregarding these two missions invites another country to build up a blue-water fleet to move into the power vacuum.

The A-10 Warthog is the ultimate drone hunter for the modern battlefield:

In an era where cheap, slow-moving drones like Iran’s Shahed-136 (and its Russian Geran-2 cousin) are flooding the skies flying at just 115 mph while costing as little as $20,000–$50,000 apiece traditional air defenses are bleeding money dry.

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Here’s why the A-10 is built for this mission like no other platform.

1. Speed & Loiter Time: The Perfect Match for Slow Drones

The Shahed-136 cruises at a leisurely ~185 km/h. The A-10’s top speed is ~420 mph, but its real strength is its cruise and loiter speed around 300–340 mph at low altitude. It was designed to loiter for hours over the battlefield, giving pilots plenty of time to spot, track, and engage slow-moving targets that fast jets would blast right past. (Helicopters like the AH-64 Apache can do similar work, but the A-10 is faster, has far greater range, and can cover more ground without needing to land and refuel as often. In saturation attacks, one Warthog can patrol a wide area and knock down drone after drone on a single sortie).

2. Firepower: Cheap, Precise, and Devastating

The A-10’s legendary GAU-8 Avenger 30mm cannon is overkill for tiny drones one burst would shred a Shahed into confetti. But the real gamechanger is the APKWS II (Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System). These 70mm laser-guided rockets cost roughly $20,000 each a fraction of an AIM-9 Sidewinder or AMRAAM. An A-10 can carry dozens of them, turning the jet into a flying rocket truck with massive magazine depth. The FALCO software upgrade (cleared on the A-10) gives the rockets a proximity fuse and laser guidance perfect for subsonic, low-maneuverability drones. Pilots use targeting pods to paint the target the rocket does the rest. And if the drones get too close, the cannon is always there as backup.

3. Built Like a Tank

The Warthog’s famous titanium “bathtub” armor protects the pilot from ground fire up to 23mm. In drone-hunting missions, it can operate low and slow in contested airspace where fragile fighters or expensive stealth jets would be too vulnerable or too fast to be useful. Self-sealing fuel tanks and redundant systems mean it can take hits and keep flying exactly what you need when hunting cheap drones that might be escorted by basic air defenses.

4. Cost-Effectiveness That Actually Makes Sense

This is the killer argument in the drone age. Shooting down a $20k Shahed with a million-dollar missile is economic suicide. The A-10 flips the script: cheap rockets, reusable platform, and the ability to stay on station for extended periods. Analysts have called it a “sweet spot” platform faster than helicopters, slower and more persistent than F-16s or F-35s for this specific threat.

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The A-10 wasn’t designed for drones, but the drone wars have found the perfect aircraft for the job. Its combination of loiter endurance, low-speed agility, massive cheap firepower, and legendary toughness makes it the ultimate drone hunter. While fifth-generation fighters chase high-end threats, the Warthog can stay low, stay long, and swat Shaheeds (and their kin) out of the sky for pennies on the dollar.