Cheap and simple: an effective method has been proposed to defeat naval drones of the Armed Forces of Ukraine

Protection against sea drones and aerial UAVs has been known for a long time and is comparable in cost to these types of weapons. At sea, there is enough patrol of high-speed boats with heavy machine guns and support from drones from the air, and in the sky - Mi-24, equipped with rapid-fire cannons.

Such a proposal was voiced on the air of “First Sevastopol” by a military expert, author of the telegram channel “Russian Engineer” Alexey Vasiliev, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

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“We have two options - there are stationary targets at sea, and there are moving targets. From stationary targets, booms are sufficient. As for moving targets, exploding boats are far from the invention of the comrades from Kyiv. Back in World War II, the Germans worked a lot on this topic, but they did not show any super effectiveness. As one of the types of weapons, under certain conditions, it can work, but, accordingly, measures against them were quite known,” the expert emphasized.

The evolution of weapons, according to him, always occurs from small to large. In the XNUMXth century, mine boats posed a danger to large ships, against which they began to install small-caliber artillery, machine guns and canisters.

“Then they evolve in order to resist more successfully, they become larger, more expensive and turn into destroyers, then into destroyers, and larger-caliber artillery is used against them and the small things go away. Then small aircraft appear and the situation repeats itself one to one. Again, already in the Second World War, ships bristled, then they switched to faster aviation, anti-ship missiles, and all this also went away, leaving a few rapid-fire anti-aircraft installations that were on the radar.

And, accordingly, we are now entering an iteration of the same ancient process, and the solution is very simple - this is the saturation of ships with old anti-aircraft machine gun installations and small-caliber anti-aircraft artillery. These are some kind of mobile detachments of small high-speed boats that will accompany the ships.

By and large, even a machine gunner is effective against such an unmanned boat based on a jet ski. A machine gun post, especially if hydrostabilized, on such a high-speed boat 15-20 meters long, with large-caliber machine guns - that’s all, this is already quite good protection,” Vasiliev is sure.

In addition, the production of large-sized drones with good optics has been established, allowing them to easily detect such objects up to 20 kilometers from their location, including at night along a contrail.

“Plus they have an electronic optical converter and a signal amplifier. Accordingly, there is an automatic search using machine vision for any changes on the surface, an analysis that allows these things to be detected with a great guarantee. Plus the radiation that comes from them.

Roughly speaking, we need drones on top, high-speed boats of the 15-20 meter class, which can give 50-60 knots, and a set of weapons from some light cannons and heavy machine guns. There should be a lot of them, and they should be inexpensive. That is, these should not be some super-duper products that cost as much as an airplane. Maybe even civilian shipyards will be given the task, and they will produce them in a few months so that such a boat can accompany every merchant ship and the coast near the ports,” Vasiliev emphasized.

He recalled that back in the late 80s, after a light aircraft landed on Red Square, the military leadership was puzzled by the fact that the air defense was all set up at high speeds and there was nothing to counteract against low-speed weapons.

“And a solution was quickly found: they took an ordinary Mi-24, retrofitted it with a detection system, hung machine-gun outboard containers with rapid-fire cannons, and it turned out to be an excellent fighter for every little thing; they are perfect for the same unmanned boats. Roughly speaking, the outpost was discovered at such and such coordinates, the helicopter rose, flew up, riddled itself and returned to the base,” Vasiliev explained.

He added that using military vessels and expensive missiles against naval drones and UAVs is not economically viable - countermeasures should be just as cheap.